Maroš Krivý, “The Smart and the Ruined: Notes on the New Social Factory,” Thresholds 47 (2019), 75–90.
Decontextualized from history and renaturalized by images of corrosion and exposed walls, the environments and atmospheres of former factories and other industrial infrastructures are convenient backdrops to the new social factory—the utopian epitome of which, today, is the smartness mandate and its pattern forms of intelligence. Industrial ruins, or rather exposed instances of ruination, are retroactive monuments to the fancied heroism of the digital age, whose infrastructural components are devoid of Herculean symbolism, and it is unlikely they could be monumentalized in any collectively meaningful way.
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Decontextualized from history and renaturalized by images of corrosion and exposed walls, the environments and atmospheres of former factories and other industrial infrastructures are convenient backdrops to the new social factory—the utopian epitome of which, today, is the smartness mandate and its pattern forms of intelligence. Industrial ruins, or rather exposed instances of ruination, are retroactive monuments to the fancied heroism of the digital age, whose infrastructural components are devoid of Herculean symbolism, and it is unlikely they could be monumentalized in any collectively meaningful way.
