John blinked one eye, then the other. The newsfeed started to feed into her retina in a joyful cacophony of ads, algorithm-selected content, and personal video-messages. She hit pause in her temple and jumped to the desk chair on the other side of her 7.5 sqm cubicle in the Newark expanses. Her latest successful IkeaRabbit bid had been confirmed while she slept, tagged with a 12-hour deadline, Hong Kong time. She now had 1 hour and 34 minutes to do the obituary. The HKNYT local editors had thought it would be fun to do arch-obits to keep Manhattan’s memory alive after the great ’29 quakes. Some called it ruin porn, but every day a new tower was revived in 6D from its own rubble, and its 1k-story dully fed into the global newsfeeds. Today was the twenty-fifth anniversary of 432 Park Avenue’s ‘topping out’ (as they used to say). As she called out the building’s name into FountainApp, the left screen started pouring out data into different columns. As most self-appointed art critics, she always went first for AGR ratings. Yet, if she wanted to avoid a blatantly negative yield, she had to balance it with specialist social media and a couple of academic feeds from wisdomquotes.com. Guidelines also determined that she ought to include at least one piece of self-referential archive info from the old nyt.com. Fortunately, most AGR top-rated material came from there. In this case, she realised, most of it came from 425 commentaries on one single piece published at the time of the building’s completion. (...) This was truly the voice of the people as scored by their attention-grab nodes. Since Applefabet had secretly started to record and keep neuronal information from readers’ retinas around the mid-teens, this rating was the most reliable source for juicy, fun stuff. In any case, she had a $9.99 budget for samples, and only from authorised PremiumWiki pages. So, any online vox populi had to be manually twisted and made invisible to piracybots. That was her job. And, with a little help from her apps, she excelled at it.[1]

Any self-respecting piece of writing has many layers, with some obviously unintended by its own author. Someone, who actually read the story above, remembered it as ‘that story about architectural obituaries.’ Far from wanting to invent any new funny categorisation, my intention had rather been to muse if, in the near future, even ‘noble’ activities such as writing or art-making would become a part of an overwhelming, winner-takes-all gig economy. This also pointed to the changing nature of writing processes, already underway due to omnipresent digital aides. Yet, when it comes to platform urbanisms, the relevant message there was that John actually never had to leave her 7.5 sqm cubicle apartment.