Joyschtick

Fear not, for you live in the best of all possible worlds, aesthetically speaking. I’m sure this will come as a relief to some of you; to others, it will induce surprise, disbelief, even, in my case, confusion. (This? This is our brave new world?) Such claims and provocations form the core of Joyspace, architect Adam Rolston’s new manifesto, which aims to recalibrate our understanding of how power and culture flow in architectural and design economies revolutionized by digital technologies. Invoking the wisdom of the demos, he declares that we have finally broken free of the old tyrannies of consumption, the grizzled powerbrokers and patricians, and stand on the cusp of personal liberation.

I’ll have what he’s having. Joyspace never pretends to be impartial, measured, or restrained. In its structure and its style, the book vibrates at a feverish pitch of maximalism. Indeed, drawing from his background as an AIDS activist in ACT UP, Rolston describes it in the preface as a work in “manifesto drag,” its camp suggesting both a knowing disavowal of and a heartfelt identification with its more baroque declamations. He drenches the text in cheeky asides—parodies of Blade Runner (1982) and the Futurist Manifesto (1909) or bon mots pinched from Andy Warhol—as if to dampen the shock of sentences like “Creative selfhood is the vaccine for the ubiquity of the techno-capital pandemic of sameness.” The prose, which oscillates between the crypto-academic and the slam-poetic, is punctuated by AI-generated “hallucinations,” extending Rolston’s belief that the technology has “changed the game.” Evidently, AI’s revolutionary benefits are too obvious to require elucidation.

For Rolston, playfulness and hopemongering are to be embraced for their destabilizing potential. Even the title is a waggish riff on Rem Koolhaas’s 2001 essay “Junkspace,” a landmark polemic that argues that the imperatives of late capitalism, having denied the architect political agency, enshrine a provisional, infinitely iterative aesthetic order that hypostasizes the global flow of goods and capital. “Change has been divorced from the idea of improvement,” Koolhaas writes. “There is no progress; like a crab on LSD, culture staggers endlessly sideways.”

Good! Joyspace replies. Progress is the work of megalomaniacs in thrall to totalizing designs for living. Rolston associates modernism’s unwillingness to die with Peter Zumthor and Valerio Olgiati, gnomic Swiss practitioners who have utterly devoted themselves to an abstract architecture capable of producing meaning in and through itself, without reference to the preexisting symbolic world. In Joyspace, hubris is tantamount to contempt: Singling out Olgiati, Rolston writes that he faces up “to a new world without aesthetic borders” and responds with “fearful, xenophobic anxiety around the disorder and moral decay associated with the loss of standards and unfettered access.” The movement tearing down those borders is a movement from below, enabled by the technological developments in communication that have emerged since “Junkspace” made its debut. Having concentrated the creative tools of meaning-making in their thumbs, autonomous online cohorts can collectively take the fight to what Rolston calls “neo-conservative Modernism.” His use of the past tense situates this as an indisputable fact, not mere conjecture.

The terms here are confusing, verging on intellectual sloppiness. Rolston’s woolly formulations threaten to betray the weakness of his argument. The platforms of decentralized cultural production to which he refers—Instagram, Pinterest, Midjourney, and Bluebeam, for example—are far from open source. Their constituent operations are proprietary secrets, and the creative platforms they sustain are deeply proscriptive at the point of the end user. Anyone who has exposed themselves to the brain rot of the endless scroll knows this.

Rolston contends that the neocon neomods are doomed to failure, because social media is an unstoppable phenomenon that chews up even the most haughty ideology and recuperates it for its own ends. It is within these junkspace ruins that a truly responsive, human-scale design order can be constructed. Having “self-sorted into cul-de-sacs of aesthetic affinity,” engagement farmers will embrace “radical empathy” and triumph over “modernist fragility.” Détournement for all on your for-you page! As startling proof of this, Rolston fingers Kanye West, who in 2020 commissioned Olgiati to design his Wyoming compound for reasons having apparently to do with “enfranchisement.” In Rolston’s read, “Olgiati’s Neo-modernist abstraction supports West’s desire to free himself from oppressive histories and the cultural boundaries of the African American experience.”

Well, I suppose we can all agree that Ye has definitively escaped the traditional cultural boundaries of African American experience in recent years, and we can probably also agree “that formal abstraction is now broadly read as a symbol of privilege.” But claiming, as Rolston does, that Ye adopts such symbols as a way to “disrupt” privilege rather than embrace its trappings is veering dangerously from Pollyannaish toward delulu. Here is Joyspace’s leap from argument to faith: The disruptive influence of the internet may have thrown the old order into chaos, but it simply doesn’t follow that once the chips fall they will do so in a way that liberates or empowers normal people, even one iota. Indeed, we are rapidly amassing evidence to the contrary.

Yet Rolston strenuously declares that in joyspace, this is already happening. He claims that advances in joy production have started to destroy not just the gendered binary of masculine architecture and feminized interior design practice, but of macho abstraction and feminine figuration in toto. Today, he announces, “there is a push toward nonbinary, polymorphous design practices that resist homogenizing market forces, fostering cultural cohesion through diverse and situationally relevant aesthetics.” In the margin, I left three large question marks. Where? Joyspace is frustratingly light on examples, even from Rolston’s own design practice. (He is a founding partner in the New York–based INC Architecture and Design.) Perhaps his description obtains in certain existing trends. To assume, however, that these embody a resistance to market forces, rather than an adaptation of them, seems like wishful thinking, if not whitewashing. As the old authoritative orders of a stable job or a reasonable rent are washed away in favor of the utopia of disrupters and, competition extinguished, the victors hike their prices to recoup their venture capital investments, does any working- or middle-class person—the public—really feel the world is better for it? Rolston is unswerving, writing that “while newness feeds the market parasitically, it can also resist it strategically by piggybacking its distributional capabilities to infect transactions with polyvalent, ever-evolving species of subcultural aesthetic resistance and self-constitution.”

Such notions, integral to left discourse since 1968, are now disgorged in tech-bro homilies. “Consumer choice,” “innovation,” “self-determination,” and “flexibility” have been the cloak under which not resistance but precarity and impoverishment have stalked in every other industry. Why would the culture industry be any different? Rolston would have us forget that all our Walmart and Amazon joyspace orders sit atop the “vast ceiling voids (former canyons of asbestos?), beams, ducting, rope, cable, insulation, fire-proofing, string; tangled arrangements suddenly exposed to daylight” of Koolhaas’s description and of the ununionized, precarious, and often paperless workforce that makes design a reality.

The book’s rhapsodic conclusion is derailed by a bizarre extended metaphor likening joyspace to, of all things, Israel’s missile defense system. “Joyspace,” Rolston writes, “is the libidinal weaponization of habitus against the corporate war on humanness. It is the erotic iron dome that defends against the monetization of desire. It is impossible to bomb Joyspace out of existence.” This gleeful invocation of the Iron Dome, which enables Israel to commit a genocide against Palestinians while intercepting airborne attacks on its own soil, brings with it the attendant implication that Gazans signify corporate avarice while simultaneously existing outside of humanness. It would be shocking if this grotesque little thought figure hadn’t already been trailed in the poem that opens the book. In both instances, the maximalist rhetoric of the manifesto form exhausts its rhetorician’s talents, revealing his invocations against xenophobia to be hollow.

But so long as we’re throwing around damnable case studies, here’s mine: Mar-a-Lago. Its playful indulgence in artifice and fulsome embrace of social media surely meets the definition of joyspace. From there it’s a skip and a hop to the current iteration of the Oval Office, whose baroque golden moldings, crypto-fueled corruption, Kanye-esque disruptions, and Pinchbeck populism offer the most demonstrative proof of Rolston’s concept. If the author finds these metaphors appalling, it is rightly so.

In a probably ironical flourish, Rolston takes as his epigraph Marx’s famous dictum on commodity fetishism from Capital, yet pointedly eschews materialism in favor of a squishy cultural determinism. “The market is neither good nor evil,” Rolston professes, “but rather a delivery system of cultural symbols with the potential to mobilize the equitable or inequitable distribution of cultural capital.” This is diet Debord, a sort of scrollable Situationism delivered through Canva slides with the nasty political economy taken off. It seems hard to marry such a breathless vision with what lies before our own eyes. Take a look at the world around and ask yourself, Does it spark joy?