CONCEPT
Junkspace
Rem Koolhaas's 2001 name for the placeless, authorless, endlessly accreting residue of modernization — and, two decades before anyone built a large language model, an exact description of what machine-generated content is by category.
Junkspace is what
Rem Koolhaas wrote in 2001 to name the thing that modernization leaves behind. 'Junkspace is what remains after modernization has run its course or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout.' He was describing the airport, the shopping mall, the hotel lobby, the convention center — the seamless, placeless, air-conditioned interior that has spread across the planet, the same everywhere, belonging nowhere, accreting endlessly without plan or end. 'Junkspace is the product of the encounter between escalator and air-conditioning, conceived in an incubator of sheetrock.' The field has its own word for what the machines produce: 'slop.' But Junkspace is the more precise concept. It is not a quality judgment but a category: Junkspace is not bad in any dramatic way, it is smooth, frictionless, often pleasant, and that is exactly its danger. Machine-generated content belongs to this category not because individual pieces are terrible but because the mode of production is the same — generation