Unwanted Corkpull

This sounds like a writing deadline in search of a problem…

This is a really insightful essay.

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.

[0] https://believermag.com/an-interview-with-robin-nagle/

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"."

I have a similar view on most gifts. It would be ungrateful to throw them away, but annoying clutter in my life to keep them. What can you do?

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.