ideas within widely accessible popular culture can be more effective because it is harder for subversive content to be stamped out by authoritarians. These activist ideas are therefore more likely to reach the masses. Similarly Metahaven observe that digital platforms facilitate jokes potential for activism due to their durability and capacity to reach a mass audience: ‘To achieve scale, it is deploying new strategies with viral properties and Darwinian survival skills.’⁵⁹ The book is a call to arms, largely to designers, to fight “nonsense with nonsense” as ‘jokes easily pass through the walls of the fortress. The joke is an open source weapon of the public’. This highlights how laughter is the best medicine; it is contagious even if the intention is very serious. Jacques Rancière commented that ‘It’s this circulation of stereotypes that critique stereotypes, giant stuffed animals that denounce the media, spectacular installations that denounce the spectacle etc’.⁶⁰ By engaging with the ideas proposed by Zuckerman, Metahaven and Rancière, can the stereotypes of slick corporate renders be used to expose the masked threat at the heart of the corporatism of UK property branding. Architect Jack Self refers to these visual stereotypes as the ‘ironic corporate’ proposing that ‘broadly this type of art seeks to raise agency in the subject through parody and proposes activism founded in the subversion of established aesthetic tropes’⁶¹. The ‘established aesthetic tropes’ in reference are the sterile stock landscapes featuring ethnically non-descript people who just cant stop smiling. These tropes are a pastiche of power and luxury representing a form of corporatism that is relentless and brutal.
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