Thresholds Revisited: Inertia of an Automated Utopia: Design Commodities and Authorial Agency 40 Years After “The Architecture Machine”

It was over a decade ago that Daniel Cardoso Llach first engaged with the subject of tech no-utopian architects and their use of software as tools of creation in his 2011 essay, “Inertia of an Automated Utopia.” He revisits the essay here to relate and reflect upon technological imaginaries of design both as historically constituted situations and as ongoing discursive and political projects. Farzin Lotfi-Jam works through the same lens to reanimate the piece through new commentary that critically observes the ways in which computation has been made to penetrate even the most intimate aspects of daily life.