microplastics and planned obsolescence (and other side effects of proprietary black box capitalist supply chains [1]) aren't real problems?
from the article:
> “Every single thing you see is future trash,” says Robin Nagle
> “If the corporate goal is to build a supply chain so seamless that its existence barely registers with consumers, such researchers seek to turn this process inside out, exposing the human and environmental costs obscured by slick design and packaging,” writes Jackie Brown
> Hold them and hold onto them until they become sacred, accruing value through ritual and nostalgia and thought exercises that send me back in time and up the supply chain past supermarket cashiers and drill press operators and industrial designers and miners to the sedimentary layer on the ocean floor.
[1] yes, there are alternatives! http://valueflo.ws: "Purpose: to enable internetworking among many different software projects for resource planning and accounting within fractal networks of people and groups. The vocabulary will work for any kind of economic activity, but the focus is to facilitate groups experimenting with solidarity / cooperative / collaborative / small business ecosystem / commons based peer production / any transitional economies.
Or, with less buzzwords, "let's help a lot of alternative economic software projects that are solving different pieces of the same puzzle be able to work together"."
When I think of the benefactors of the race, whom we have apotheosized as messengers from heaven, bearers of divine gifts to man, I do not see in my mind any retinue at their heels, any car-load of fashionable furniture. […]
At present our houses are cluttered and defiled with it, and a good housewife would sweep out the greater part into the dust hole, and not leave her morning’s work undone. Morning work! By the blushes of Aurora and the music of Memnon, what should be man’s morning work in this world? I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and I threw them out the window in disgust. How, then, could I have a furnished house? I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the grass, unless where man has broken ground.
Although it isn’t part of the main thrust of the essay, this jumped out at me:
> “Every single thing you see is future trash,” says Robin Nagle, anthropologist of material cultures and anthropologist-in-residence at the New York Department of Sanitation. This system that “not only generates so much trash, but relies upon the accelerating production of waste for its own perpetuation”…
I think the comment by Nagle, which indeed seems to include "everything you see" [0], is a bit too extreme. Is water future trash? A piece of rock? Also, how is "future" defined here? I don't think that a piece of gold will be considered "trash" even in 1,000 years. I think what he means is this: the added manufactured value of any object will degrade over time.
> I think the comment by Nagle, which indeed seems to include "everything you see" [0], is a bit too extreme.
i think Pendergrast used the quote to highlight the capitalist dynamic that incentivizes the profit-seeking economy towards creating low-quality single-use industrially-produced products, due to the parasitic economic rents from intellectual property making proper products overly expensive. in other words: the propertied class makes the working class pay double/triple.
do you mean 'the subscription model' where giant profit-seeking firms retain full ownership of tech, and who can therefore jack up the price of 'service'/usage at any time?
yeah fuck that. i live in an apartment block where i pay €3 for every wash. that's a fucking ripoff.
the solution is modular open source hardware and software.
seriously, why are you so people to give up all their power?
we need to start thinking outside the boundaries of the capitalist profit-motive.
to see the devastating impacts of planned obsolescence (e.g. the disgusting amount of e-waste shipped to African countries) and then think we should give more power to corporations is a bit of a mindfuck to me.
> Stripped of the class jargon
easy to frame or dismiss something as jargon if you're benefitting from the status quo, eh?
In the human environment water certainly is: after use, or after becoming runoff, it needs to be cleaned before being disposed of. And that rock in your backyard is unlikely to be reused in the next owners’ landscaping but rather scraped away with everything else and sent to the landfill.
I think the statement is sufficiently applicable that it’s easier to list what is a proportionately small number of exceptions rather than listing the things that match.
Donate unused or lightly used gifts so that they may find use with someone else, and don't spend a moment more on them. You do the gift giver no favors by merely warehousing their gifts.
Boxes and paper grocery bags pile up along the hallway, full of things to be gotten rid of. But the thrift stores and donation drop-offs are still closed, or have limited hours. And you know that most of those things don’t get sold.
The flaw is in the object. The original gift didn't improve your life. Passing it on doesn't improve anyone else's life. Once upon a time thrift stores might have made sense, and for a very specific class of durable yet useful objects they might still, but the corkpull (and most similar gifts) is not in that class.
You (and the article) have made an error in generalization. Take the time to go into your local thrift store and observe what people buy. Better yet, ask your elderly wine drinking family their opinions on wine opening devices.
I've been to thrift stores. They no longer allow after-hours drop-off. They are quite selective about which items they will take. They certainly wouldn't waste their time and shelf-space with the "corkpull" mentioned in TFA. I have installed an under-cabinet jar-opening vise for my mother, which I only ordered because she specifically asked for it. No one in the family would dream of foisting it off on Goodwill if for some reason she didn't need it anymore. Admitting that trash is actually trash and throwing it away is the first step in living a life that produces less trash.
There are many local grassroots neighborhood groups now from which you can easily find people to take a lot of your items. Look on Freecycle.org, or look for "Buy Nothing <your town name>" on FB, or just post things for free on Nextdoor.
I've used these gotten rid of so many random doodads through these venues, and each time it feels great knowing that whoever picking up actually will likely use it. My impression of charity donations is that they dump a lot of their donations if they don't immediately see things as being high enough quality to resell.
Well, I think I can relate to the corkpull problem but at least it is fully functional. There's a decent amount of objects that are poorly designed but I have to live with because I don't want to be responsible for more waste.
Well off people I know generally tend to buy new stuff just to have new stuff, because it feels good, creating wawes of abandonware. I just wish they had other outlets to feel better in their lives.
Please stop offering me stuff. A bottle of nice wine/beer/whiskey or flowers will do.
And here I am, trying to stave off that inevitability and figure out how to shepherd a motley array of kitchen implements and old extension cords through an uncaring world. As Steven Phillips-Horst tweeted, on the aesthetic and moral wretchedness of a Container Store paper towel holder: “I’m meant to be this heinous dildo’s nanny between a Chinese factory and a Jersey landfill?? I’d rather die.”
Somewhat ironic. I actually like the Container Store because it's a curated selection of items their merchandising team prepared and ostensibly deemed "the best".
You want a real hyper-consumerist hellscape? Go onto Amazon, search for "spatula", and sit in devastating awe at the thousands upon thousands of results all coming from the same Chinese factory, but under a hundred different cringy brand names. Fuck online shopping; I'll drive to Williams Sonoma and have what they're having.
To me OXO is exactly what the poster is looking for, well-built-to-last utilitarian gadgets that are universally easy to use, and decent looking, though perhaps not fashionable. What's not to like? Is it because they're not produced by a bearded artisanal blacksmith within cycling distance? The article seems to be searching for a problem.
> What's not to like? Is it because they're not produced by a bearded artisanal blacksmith within cycling distance? The article seems to be searching for a problem.
Really? That's what you get after reading this?
> "This kind of vertiginous horror in the face of a seemingly cruel and infinite supply chain is reflected on a larger and more academic scale in the recent rise of critical logistics and supply chain studies. “If the corporate goal is to build a supply chain so seamless that its existence barely registers with consumers, such researchers seek to turn this process inside out, exposing the human and environmental costs obscured by slick design and packaging,” writes Jackie Brown in her recent essay surveying the field of supply studies. From mapping projects that follow the chemical, digital, material and labor inputs used in an Amazon Echo device upstream to their points of origin to genealogies of logistics that trace out the links between globalized production to militarization and collective violence, these projects seek to chart out small parts of a system so complex and flexible that it’s impossible for any individual to grasp.
> [...] people are driven to distraction trying to reverse-engineer a system that is purposely obscured, piecing together clues to see who’s behind the curtain and how we’re being screwed. This mode of paranoid reading, the “highly compelling tracing-and-exposure project” as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes in her famous essay, is a “position of terrible alertness,” of trying to uncover hidden connections and cruelty whose existence are assumed, if unseen. Emily Apter describes this paranoid orientation to logistics and globalization as “oneworldness,” referring to “a delirious aesthetics of systematicity; to the match between cognition and globalism that is held in place by the paranoid premise that ‘everything is connected.’”"
In summary: today's obscured global capitalist production system mangles many of the working class' minds and bodies (in the global south especially: hence the focus on supply chains, since they go on past the borders of our daily lives and the communities in which we live; into the horizon), creating an extremely uncomfortable, fear-inducing unavoidable sense of culpability (even though of course as working class people we're all stuck inside this capitalist hellhole) in the minds of global north knowledge workers.
I'm relieved to know that others share this feeling.
Oh, the supreme irony of cargo cult self awareness.
The author visits the entire pantheon of collective condemnations of consumerism, while never reconciling their own situation. The only things they don't like about their cork pull is its appearance and brand - by their own admission it works really well. These are relativistic social constructs that are pushed by marketers to get us to buy endless shit. You can't remain in their framework while trying to go against it! If one truly cares about the various social condemnations of consumerism, then one needs to wholly reject the foundational consumerist propaganda - a cork pull is a tool, it exists to facilitate a job, not to become part of your identity.
When you focus on functionality, the a similar core problem does still exist - items that are adequate, but somehow suboptimal. But the utilitarian metric at least gives you a framework that can converge, rather than endlessly floating in the doldrums of fashion. You can ask questions like "which of these options is most similar to items that I have used that worked well?" and "will the functionality gain be worth it", rather than falling for marketing. It also enables you to perform judgements soon after buying an item, and simply return it to the store if they've really made a piece of junk, as many things are these days.
In general, like always, the answer is to stop buying so much shit. Install adblock, don't let the (social) media tell you what you should want, and be realistic about whether you're actually going to use some item or whether you're falling for the hope of being able to use it. Doing so won't solve the world's problems, but it will minimize your part in them.
There seem to be many separate ideas in this article.
> I want to surround myself with tools that help me perform my daily tasks
That describes the OXO cork-puller, to some extent
> or beautiful objects that are frivolous but nice to look at and touch
This leads to more consumerism and waste, which is one of the other points in the article.
> I want things that last a long time, that are easy to fix, and that didn’t damage the people who made them or the places their materials were extracted from.
This is a reasonable point! Finally. (although it doesn't seem like the cork-puller necessarily doesn't also adhere to these traits...)
The article seems to be a hodgepodge.
Tangent: maybe we need to come up with more clever ways to use a single gadget to fulfill multiple functions, instead of buying one gadget per function. But wait, this is already partially true, at least with respect to kitchen tools - you rarely, if ever, need a large spoon with holes in it - just take your large spoon that doesn't have holes and drain the liquid out by pressing it against the side of the pot. Inconvenient? Sure. But less waste. So maybe the goal is to convince people to put up with some amount of inconvenience in order to save the environment...
Or, go back to expensive, but super-durable, goods that will last decades, and ideally also be made out of recycle-able materials.
32 comments
[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 87.9 ms ] threadfrom the article:
> “Every single thing you see is future trash,” says Robin Nagle
> “If the corporate goal is to build a supply chain so seamless that its existence barely registers with consumers, such researchers seek to turn this process inside out, exposing the human and environmental costs obscured by slick design and packaging,” writes Jackie Brown
> Hold them and hold onto them until they become sacred, accruing value through ritual and nostalgia and thought exercises that send me back in time and up the supply chain past supermarket cashiers and drill press operators and industrial designers and miners to the sedimentary layer on the ocean floor.
[1] yes, there are alternatives! http://valueflo.ws: "Purpose: to enable internetworking among many different software projects for resource planning and accounting within fractal networks of people and groups. The vocabulary will work for any kind of economic activity, but the focus is to facilitate groups experimenting with solidarity / cooperative / collaborative / small business ecosystem / commons based peer production / any transitional economies.
Or, with less buzzwords, "let's help a lot of alternative economic software projects that are solving different pieces of the same puzzle be able to work together"."
At present our houses are cluttered and defiled with it, and a good housewife would sweep out the greater part into the dust hole, and not leave her morning’s work undone. Morning work! By the blushes of Aurora and the music of Memnon, what should be man’s morning work in this world? I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and I threw them out the window in disgust. How, then, could I have a furnished house? I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the grass, unless where man has broken ground.
1854
Although it isn’t part of the main thrust of the essay, this jumped out at me:
> “Every single thing you see is future trash,” says Robin Nagle, anthropologist of material cultures and anthropologist-in-residence at the New York Department of Sanitation. This system that “not only generates so much trash, but relies upon the accelerating production of waste for its own perpetuation”…
[0] https://believermag.com/an-interview-with-robin-nagle/
Of course, it's better to not make or buy useless things rather than recycle them...
i think Pendergrast used the quote to highlight the capitalist dynamic that incentivizes the profit-seeking economy towards creating low-quality single-use industrially-produced products, due to the parasitic economic rents from intellectual property making proper products overly expensive. in other words: the propertied class makes the working class pay double/triple.
that and planned obsolescence.
that's what i read in this article.
yeah fuck that. i live in an apartment block where i pay €3 for every wash. that's a fucking ripoff.
the solution is modular open source hardware and software.
seriously, why are you so people to give up all their power?
we need to start thinking outside the boundaries of the capitalist profit-motive.
to see the devastating impacts of planned obsolescence (e.g. the disgusting amount of e-waste shipped to African countries) and then think we should give more power to corporations is a bit of a mindfuck to me.
> Stripped of the class jargon
easy to frame or dismiss something as jargon if you're benefitting from the status quo, eh?
I think the statement is sufficiently applicable that it’s easier to list what is a proportionately small number of exceptions rather than listing the things that match.
Even when we look up we need to clean the air.
Just download the Corkpull app.
I have started asking for "non-perishable consumables" such as light bulbs, tinned foods, and wine, whenever someone asks me what I want for a gift.
Boxes and paper grocery bags pile up along the hallway, full of things to be gotten rid of. But the thrift stores and donation drop-offs are still closed, or have limited hours. And you know that most of those things don’t get sold.
The flaw is in the object. The original gift didn't improve your life. Passing it on doesn't improve anyone else's life. Once upon a time thrift stores might have made sense, and for a very specific class of durable yet useful objects they might still, but the corkpull (and most similar gifts) is not in that class.
I've used these gotten rid of so many random doodads through these venues, and each time it feels great knowing that whoever picking up actually will likely use it. My impression of charity donations is that they dump a lot of their donations if they don't immediately see things as being high enough quality to resell.
if this thing is for sale someone will buy it
shades of prancer the chihuahua https://twitter.com/HLMongoose/status/1380505940265463818
Somewhat ironic. I actually like the Container Store because it's a curated selection of items their merchandising team prepared and ostensibly deemed "the best".
You want a real hyper-consumerist hellscape? Go onto Amazon, search for "spatula", and sit in devastating awe at the thousands upon thousands of results all coming from the same Chinese factory, but under a hundred different cringy brand names. Fuck online shopping; I'll drive to Williams Sonoma and have what they're having.
Really? That's what you get after reading this?
> "This kind of vertiginous horror in the face of a seemingly cruel and infinite supply chain is reflected on a larger and more academic scale in the recent rise of critical logistics and supply chain studies. “If the corporate goal is to build a supply chain so seamless that its existence barely registers with consumers, such researchers seek to turn this process inside out, exposing the human and environmental costs obscured by slick design and packaging,” writes Jackie Brown in her recent essay surveying the field of supply studies. From mapping projects that follow the chemical, digital, material and labor inputs used in an Amazon Echo device upstream to their points of origin to genealogies of logistics that trace out the links between globalized production to militarization and collective violence, these projects seek to chart out small parts of a system so complex and flexible that it’s impossible for any individual to grasp.
> [...] people are driven to distraction trying to reverse-engineer a system that is purposely obscured, piecing together clues to see who’s behind the curtain and how we’re being screwed. This mode of paranoid reading, the “highly compelling tracing-and-exposure project” as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes in her famous essay, is a “position of terrible alertness,” of trying to uncover hidden connections and cruelty whose existence are assumed, if unseen. Emily Apter describes this paranoid orientation to logistics and globalization as “oneworldness,” referring to “a delirious aesthetics of systematicity; to the match between cognition and globalism that is held in place by the paranoid premise that ‘everything is connected.’”"
In summary: today's obscured global capitalist production system mangles many of the working class' minds and bodies (in the global south especially: hence the focus on supply chains, since they go on past the borders of our daily lives and the communities in which we live; into the horizon), creating an extremely uncomfortable, fear-inducing unavoidable sense of culpability (even though of course as working class people we're all stuck inside this capitalist hellhole) in the minds of global north knowledge workers.
I'm relieved to know that others share this feeling.
The author visits the entire pantheon of collective condemnations of consumerism, while never reconciling their own situation. The only things they don't like about their cork pull is its appearance and brand - by their own admission it works really well. These are relativistic social constructs that are pushed by marketers to get us to buy endless shit. You can't remain in their framework while trying to go against it! If one truly cares about the various social condemnations of consumerism, then one needs to wholly reject the foundational consumerist propaganda - a cork pull is a tool, it exists to facilitate a job, not to become part of your identity.
When you focus on functionality, the a similar core problem does still exist - items that are adequate, but somehow suboptimal. But the utilitarian metric at least gives you a framework that can converge, rather than endlessly floating in the doldrums of fashion. You can ask questions like "which of these options is most similar to items that I have used that worked well?" and "will the functionality gain be worth it", rather than falling for marketing. It also enables you to perform judgements soon after buying an item, and simply return it to the store if they've really made a piece of junk, as many things are these days.
In general, like always, the answer is to stop buying so much shit. Install adblock, don't let the (social) media tell you what you should want, and be realistic about whether you're actually going to use some item or whether you're falling for the hope of being able to use it. Doing so won't solve the world's problems, but it will minimize your part in them.
> I want to surround myself with tools that help me perform my daily tasks
That describes the OXO cork-puller, to some extent
> or beautiful objects that are frivolous but nice to look at and touch
This leads to more consumerism and waste, which is one of the other points in the article.
> I want things that last a long time, that are easy to fix, and that didn’t damage the people who made them or the places their materials were extracted from.
This is a reasonable point! Finally. (although it doesn't seem like the cork-puller necessarily doesn't also adhere to these traits...)
The article seems to be a hodgepodge.
Tangent: maybe we need to come up with more clever ways to use a single gadget to fulfill multiple functions, instead of buying one gadget per function. But wait, this is already partially true, at least with respect to kitchen tools - you rarely, if ever, need a large spoon with holes in it - just take your large spoon that doesn't have holes and drain the liquid out by pressing it against the side of the pot. Inconvenient? Sure. But less waste. So maybe the goal is to convince people to put up with some amount of inconvenience in order to save the environment...
Or, go back to expensive, but super-durable, goods that will last decades, and ideally also be made out of recycle-able materials.