Technology is a rather contested field: it embodies, at the same time, our deepest fears and our brightest hopes. 

I’ve recently read with keen interest the latest article by Mario Carpo on Metropolis Magazine (9th December) titled “That ’70s Thing: Why Young Architects Today Are Enthralled by Vintage Technologies”. 
I mostly agree on the argument put forward in the article, however I’d like to read between the lines and highlight an implicit, unspoken point. The article aims at critiquing both the technophobes (those who feel threatened by technology, the luddites, the “negationists”) and the nostalgic technophiles (those fascinated by old technology which, Carpo argues, never really worked in the first place).

While, for obvious reasons, I agree on the point made in the article, I would go a little further. I’d question whether the position of those who theorise the political use technology from a progressive perspective is truly original or, else, it also aligns with neo-reactionary political views.  In fact, I would argue that any discussion on the political implications of the new digital paradigm, encompassing robotics and the automation of our productive and cognitive faculties, carries the revolutionary promise to end the capitalist systems as we know it.  Both technophobes and technophiles (whether nostalgic or progressive) are invariably convergent in their attack against (neo)liberalism (the mother of all evil), free-market economy, etc. For this reason, it doesn’t come as a surprise the widespread (among architects, at least) endorsement for Corbyn, Sanders and Mazzucato, new maitre a penser of the “war on capital” fought under the entrepreneurial wings of the leviathan state. 

One could argue that, if for Lenin communism was “the power of Soviets and electrification”, for a new generation of architects (whether techno-philes or -phobes) the new socialist deal is “the power of robots and solar panels”.

However, here’s my provocation: in last few pages of The Second Digital Turn, Carpo opens up to a vision of the city where automation, economies without scale and the dis-intermediation of services become the engine for new laissez faire policies and “on-demand” services.  The economies without scale challenge the idea of standardised protocols, policies and services which are at the foundation of the Westphalian sovereignty of the nation-state. In this scenario, the city will possibly take the form of a city-state that sits within a globalised network of self-governing world-cities. 

If gauchiste, this vision is rather libertarian, new-labourist of sort, a “third way” between the reactionaries (PoMo, PostDig, etc) and the neo-Marxists (operaists, accelerarionists, etc), which unsurprisingly, when it comes to politics, share the same world-view.

One final note  The 70’s saw the rise of independent figures such as Yona Friedman whose humanist approach transcends categorisation and shines for its enduring belief in architecture as an agent for global democratisation and change. 

The Hungarian born architect, a leading figure in the radical movement of the 60’s and 70’s, was the intellectual father of the do-it-yourself movement that was enabled by the deployment of a resilient technological infrastructure.  In the book Utopies réalisables, Friedman elaborates an axiomatic theory for the realisation of feasible utopias. Friedman declares that an utopia can be realised under three conditions: the existence of a collective dissatisfation, the availability of a known solution to the problem and collective consensus. 

At the core of this theory lies the concept of the critical group, which is described as the largest set of elements (people, objects and connections between them) that can guarantee the functioning of a given social structure and, in turn, the seeking of its utopia. 

Social cohesion and ease of communication are, in fact, essential factors and can only occur within a group that is restricted in size. Alienation, on the contrary, would occur from an information overload - more people than we can communicate with, more objects than we can control.  It derives that only small communities can realise their utopia and the city is its locus. 

On this note, it is worth mentioning the collaboration between Friedman and Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the Architecture Machine Group at the MIT which later transitioned into the MIT Media Lab. Negroponte led seminal researches in the field of human-computer interaction and was among the first to combine computation and participatory design.  In their collaboration for a democratisation of design process through the use of computation, they shared a anti-paternalistic view where the computational medium is advertised as empowering users to directly express their hypothesis in the design of their habitats. 

I could go on but it is not my intention to be nostalgic about the golden age of early computation. What’s important is to turn the spotlight over those figures that, by means of their intellectual freedom, set the path for a political use of technology that is, at the same time, progressive, anti-dogmatic, democratic and libertarian. 
It’s definitively time to move on, to leave behind the ghosts of a bankrupt past and align, at least in spirit, with the most progressive tradition of some of our brightest (past and present) minds.