2024 Year in Review
I have been writing “Years in Review” for some time. I often wonder if it’s worth it. I don’t get as much feedback as on my other posts and they take time away from other work. Still, these are useful for me to look at over the years, so for this year at least, I decided to write another.
It’s deep into February now, indeed nearly March, but years, like centuries, have periods of overlap and drift, in which various loose ends are tied up even as other themes emerge that define the next year.
First, my own year. Many of my readers know that I am passionate about the importance of native plants. In 2024, I found myself elected President of the Native Plant Society of New Jersey. Back in 2016 or so, when I left architecture and academia behind, it felt that somehow things were unwinding in those realms. In retrospect, I couldn’t have been more right. Architecture, which was revitalized with the modernist revival of the 1990s, now seems exhausted again—caught between spectacle, greenwashing, and the banality of developer-led projects. Academia has fared no better, suffocated by bureaucratization, infighting, and a slavish devotion to pseudo-leftist political commentary that left little room for real inquiry. My friends in academia have either quit or don’t enjoy teaching anymore. Meanwhile, landscape, long dismissed as secondary to architecture, has become a key site of innovation. But rather than innovative research taking place in the university, it is happening with individuals outside academia working with native plants. In academia, landscape still suffers from architecture envy and advocates reshaping the land violently using earth-moving machines before burying it under concrete. One can graduate virtually any landscape architecture program in this country without any real understanding of botany or plants. It’s as if architects had learned nothing from the reckoning the field faced in the 1960s and 1970s when its social failures and the consequences of object-fixation at the expense of context were laid bare. If native plant design advocacy must come from outside the academy, so be it. A talk I gave in November about designing with woodland plants had over 400 in-person attendees and has generated over 2,600 views in the three months it has been on YouTube. That’s already better than any talk I ever gave on the history of architecture or network culture. I’ll take that as a start.
I continued to write entries in the Florilegium, many of them essay length. Walls in the Landscape examined the cultural and ecological role of dry-stacked stone walls, reflecting on how they shape and structure the land while allowing nature to inhabit them. Vernal Pools at the Great Swamp explored seasonal wetlands in northern New Jersey, their importance for amphibians, and the growing threats posed by habitat destruction and climate change. A Trip to Lithuania and the Baltics documented my travels in the Baltics and engagement with Lithuanian native plant scientists and activists, examining the bizarre global trade in invasive species and the parallels between Eastern European and Northeastern American forest ecologies. We Went for a Walk on Turkey Mountain reflected on a hike through the New Jersey Highlands, using it as a way to think through geology, land use history, and native plant communities while drawing connections to Robert Smithson and conceptual art. A friend asked why I am writing these lengthy essays on landscape. Perhaps I am planning a book? Indeed, that’s the plan. That said, I also realize that essays can be a lot for people to take in all at once. Although I usually fail with these resolutions, I do intend to add more shorter pieces this year.
Beyond landscape, I continued my research with AI and AI image generation. It dismays me to see otherwise intelligent people so swiftly denigrate AI as plagiarism machines or as completely unreliable. AI, as I’ve stated before, is the biggest technological revolution of our lifetime. In my 2023 Year in Review, I suggested that “If potent but wildly hallucinating AIs marked 2022, the rise of GPT-4 as a useful and dependable everyday assistant marked 2023.” This continued in 2024. Although there have been no great new developments in AI—no Singularity, no Skynet, no AGI—and we are still using GPT-4 (GPT-4.5 is reportedly dropping this week), yet steady advances have continued. Setbacks made the news as well. In its usual fashion, Apple utterly mishandled the rollout of the unfortunately-named “Apple Intelligence.” Inappropriate summaries, lack of power, and a Siri that is every bit as dumb as it was when it was released in 2011 led to widespread disappointment. And yet, AI advanced steadily throughout 2024, becoming more deeply integrated into software development and research. Legal battles over training data and copyright raged on, but practical applications marched forward. AI-assisted coding through tools like Cursor and Github Copilot became more commonly used, and AI-powered search engines like Perplexity AI reshaped how we retrieved information. Through ChatGPT, I have an assistant that can do a more-than-serviceable job in translation to Lithuanian at a moment’s notice and can write various forms of code (I wrote a WordPress plugin for my site in AI this year and used it to teach me how to program an Arduino). With “deep research,” ChatGPT can search the Web, cite sources to confirm its accuracy, and produce a coherent research paper—not a full literature search and lacking original insights, but still an impressive overview. I’ve used Google Notebook LLM to generate podcasts about books that I don’t have time to read and even to understand manuals (see this Mylar Melodies video for how and why one might do this). I used Perplexity AI to plan a trip to France in October and it did an excellent job, down to recommending hotels and restaurants. I find it hard to imagine I could have found a travel agent who would have responded to my idiosyncratic requests so well. Specialist apps that use machine learning are everywhere now. Through iNaturalist, I use AI to identify plants in my garden and in the wild and with the Cornell Bird app, I can identify the hooting outside my house as a Great Horned Owl. Machine learning led researchers to decode entire passages from scrolls burned in the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. AI is ubiquitous now, at least for some of us. As William Gibson said, “The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.”
Like all technologies, it can be misused, but it is also transformative. From Leonardo da Vinci’s embrace of new painting technologies and geometric projection, Albrecht Dürer’s revolutionary use of the printing press to Eadweard Muybridge’s pioneering motion studies, László Moholy-Nagy’s creation of a painting by dictating its appearance over a telephone, Nam June Paik’s work with video, and John Cage’s explorations in electronic sound, artists have continually explored new technologies. The use of these technologies can be naïve, simplistic, or harmful, but it also advances knowledge. Our own time is now different. As a critic, I wrote a bit about this during the last year. My own interest has been in the visual unconscious and the questions it raises about authenticity and reproduction. I started with California Forever, or The Aesthetics of AI Images, in which I critiqued the AI-generated promotional imagery for the new city in Solano County for its failure to imagine the future and the uncanny similarity of not just the Solano images, but much of AI image generation to the paintings of Thomas Kinkade. I followed this with On the Pictures Generation and AI Art, where I explored how AI-generated images raised questions about the visual unconscious, the mechanics of cultural memory and hauntology, and how the boundaries between the authentic and the synthetic have shifted, contrasting AI art to the Pictures Generation of the 1970s and 1980s. Later in the year, I turned toward more art production itself, updating The Witching Cats of New Jersey in terms of both imagery and text, expanding the historical accounts while further analyzing folkloric and occult traditions to explore the intersection of myth and representation. I further examined fakery in the occult, particularly the parallels between spirit photography and AI-generated images—both technologies that blur the line between documentation and invention, creating spectral presences that challenge our perception of authenticity. I ended this year’s work with AI imagery with my essay Speculative Architectures: The Radical Legacy where I drew connections to the radical architecture movements of the 1960s. I find contemporary AI-driven architectural practice so boring, merely accelerating existing tendencies toward formal excess and doing nothing more. Instead, I was interested in how AI and automation intersect with architectural discourse in deeper ways, particularly through the lens of radical architecture movements of the 1960s and how groups like Archizoom and Superstudio used speculative design to exaggerate and expose the contradictions of late modernism—collaborating with AI to produce both images and texts. To push these ideas further, I co-created 7 Fables of Accelerationism with two AIs (ChatGPT 4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet), producing a collection of speculative fiction pieces exploring AI, automation, and the dissolution of human agency in a world shaped by machine intelligence. These fables reflect both the utopian and dystopian possibilities embedded in technological acceleration, tracing the shifting relationship between architecture, labor, and meaning in a post-work society.
The final essay, Oversaturation: On Tourism and the Image came out last month but was really a product of 2024. Here, I examined the effects of overtourism and cultural overproduction, drawing connections between the Bilbao Effect, Instagram-driven travel, the ease of photography today, and the exhaustion of once-iconic destinations. At the heart of the essay is the concept of oversaturation—the point at which an excess of images, experiences, and cultural output dulls their impact, leaving audiences numb and places drained of significance. In an age when images are endlessly replicated and consumed, the relentless circulation of visuals flattens experience, reducing places to mere backdrops devoid of context or meaning. This commodification of place, fueled by social media’s demand for shareable moments, has led to a kind of cultural burnout. Tourism, in its current form, seems to have reached a point of diminishing returns. How long can it be sustained before the spectacle collapses under its own weight?
Oversaturation is the defining mood of 2024. With major cultural institutions competing to churn out new exhibitions and blockbuster shows, the traditional rhythms that once governed artistic production feel sped up as if on amphetamines. Every season brings another round of high-profile openings and all-too-many biennials, fueling a frantic chase for novelty. The obsession with simplistic politics in the art world has burned out, but without any substitute. Institutions have been left rudderless. For too long, writers and curators have defined movements that only last as long as a single show: sound art, tactical urbanism, post-Internet art, zombie formalism, NFTs, the covidean, parametricism, “the new aesthetic”, dimes square/indie sleaze revival, and so on. Nobody cares anymore, except maybe some art school graduates out for bad wine and parties. In architecture, movements have been less prone to such rapid obsolescence, but the energy similarly has been lost. Where “starchitecture” used to captured headlines, such celebrations of elite wealth are ubiquitous in cities now and there is no difference between starchitecture and junkspace. Thomas Heatherwick’s the Vessel is the punctum at the end of starchitecture: a structure whose highest purpose seems to be to overwhelm visitors with despair until they fling themselves over its side. Nor is there room for an alternative: once subversive, blogs, zines, and architecture fiction have faded, abandoned by a generation more concerned with profit.
The same goes for the news. After years of constant crises and hyperbole, the public has reached a point of fatigue and skepticism. The endless drumbeat of dire warnings from all corners no longer commanded them. Where once Americans took to the streets at a moment’s notice, now people who identified with the Resistance of 2016 seem worn out. Instead of galvanizing new mass protests, the news cycle spawns shrugs and eye-rolls. It’s not outright hostility, just exhaustion. Our sensorium simply can’t take constant screaming anymore. In The Week, Justin Klawans calls 2024 “a year of reckoning for the fourth estate.” Indeed it was. While the Right is taking advantage of this in the US at the moment, I have all the confidence that they will experience a similar overload. The endless churn of the news cycle during the Trumpenjahre is going to take its toll. Indeed, Klawans ended with the following sentence “The ‘legacy media is dead. Hollywood is done. Truth-telling is in. No more complaining about the media,’ right-wing activist James O’Keefe said on X. ‘You are the media.'” But social media is equally ill.
Engadget editor Cheyenne Macdonald writes “It’s never been more exhausting to be online than in 2024. While it’s been clear for some time that monetization has shifted social media into a different beast, this year in particular felt like a tipping point. Faced with the endless streams of content that’s formulated to trap viewers’ gazes, shoppable ads at every turn, AI and the unrelenting opinions of strangers, it struck me recently that despite my habitual use of these apps, I’m not actually having fun on any of them anymore.” Too many ads and badly written algorithms have crushed content. Desperate to wring engagement from already tired users, social media firms compounded this with frantic moves that often backfired. Many people left Twitter when Elon Musk purchased it; many more left in the subsequent months. Meta’s repeated attempts to replace Instagram’s photo sharing with video reels and the addition of new algorithm tweaks there and on Facebook led to further user drift and confusion. Frustration mounted with links being demoted, smaller creators seeing their reach throttled, and online communities splintering all contribute to a general sense of retreat from the clamor. I notice that friends leave for BlueSky, which leans left-wing, containing as much extreme and violent language, if not more, than Twitter has now (calls for the death of someone disliked by leftist radicals are common), and then they fall silent. TikTok was briefly banned in the US, then restored, but there is bipartisan support against it and the platform’s future is in doubt. Group chats are also dying, a decline captured in Tony Tulathimutte’s story “Pics” from his 2024 collection. By now, anyone who has been on Discord for a while sees a total mess, with far too many servers and no coherency. The overall narrative is one of people stepping back rather than diving in. With everyone shouting to be heard, most are simply tuning out. Yet a handful of dedicated readers still seek out independently produced content wherever it can be found, perhaps the last outposts of genuine engagement in a sea of hype and oversaturation.
15 years ago, I suggested that postmodernism was dead and network culture was upon us. Now, it seems that a new era is being born, its outlines as yet unknown. AI is going to be as much a part of this as the Internet was for network culture and the televisual, the photocopier, and the personal computer were for postmodernism. But if postmodernism was, in Fredric Jameson’s famous line, “the culture of late capitalism,” it strikes me that something different is underway in contemporary culture. For the first time, population growth has ceased in the developed world. From China to the US to the EU, population growth is declining faster than experts had predicted even a decade ago. Since 2017’s Year In Review, I have observed the parallels between our world and “the Jackpot,” the slow-motion collapse first introduced by William Gibson in his novel The Peripheral (2014). Instead of the comet strikes or nuclear annihilation imagined by Hollywood, Gibson’s Jackpot is a series of cascading crises: climate change, resource depletion, biodiversity collapse, and social upheaval, exacerbated by the very technologies that sustain modern life. For Gibson, the Jackpot signifies an ongoing collapse punctuated by moments of technological innovation—innovations that serve the privileged few while leaving the vast majority to suffer and scramble for survival. Gibson’s vision is compelling and grim. He portrays a world where survival is a lottery of wealth and sheer luck, with the richest securing their future through technology and the poorest left behind in failure zones. In his fiction, the Jackpot is defined by stark inequality, unrelenting violence, and scientific advances that, while transformative, fail to offset the broader disintegration of society and ecology. Yet, the real Jackpot diverges in key ways.
I see the Jackpot less as a singular dystopia and more as a chronic condition, simultaneously an enduring state of polycrisis and a slow improvement in impact on scarce resources due to declining population growth. Lower birth rates and aging populations are rapidly accelerating worldwide just as artificial intelligence and automation promise to upend labor markets. The Right—from Putin and Xi Jinping to Musk—has raised alarms about declining birth rates, yet even by adding cash payouts for births (a move popular with liberals as well), it has been unable to change matters. But with AI, the global economy seems poised to pivot away from population growth as its primary driver. At the same time, population decline is necessary—we already exceed the carrying capacity of the Earth and with less resource consumption and less pollution, this Jackpot may yet create a significantly better world. This seems like an essential point of our contemporary culture: we are seeing the beginning of an age of population contraction.
And if AI is poised as a potential solution to the end of population growth and the inauguration of an age of limits—assuming much goes well— it also deepens inequalities, concentrating power and productivity in fewer hands. The uneven distribution of this future is already stratifying societies. For those with access to cutting-edge tools and the drive to use them, 2024 was a year of acceleration—a leap in productivity. For others, it was a year of stagnation or retreat, defined by fear of change more than the inability to participate in this transformation. The Jackpot is not just about access, it is also about the growing divide between those who can adapt and those who cannot.
Understanding the Jackpot means grappling with this unevenness. It is not the apocalypse, but it is a reckoning. It demands that we rethink what progress looks like when (population) growth is no longer the default. Breakthroughs, breakdowns—or more likely both—we are all already living in the Jackpot. Whether it is a slow-motion end or a new beginning depends on how we, individually and collectively, choose to play our hand.