Ending is better than mending “We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending, ending is better…” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World noveltyrepairtrashwastemelancholyending
Cyberspace as a global dump If we think that cyberspace is a public space, then let's think of the oceans. They used to be as much of a world resource as anybody could think of but didn't belong to anybody. So everybody put their garbage into them. The potential of cyberspace as a global dump is quite substantial. Ursula M. Franklin, Every Tool Shapes the Task naturetrash
The Poop Press Project (In the run-up to the law, I myself had undertaken the “Poop Press Project,” which had entailed fixing a star-shaped cookie mold to the end of a stick to transform the noisome waste into street art, an attempt only intermittently effective.) Michael Sorkin, 20 Minutes in Manhattan trash
The mirror-image economy When we enter the world of refuse and waste, we cross over into a mirror-image economy. In the "normal" world, we pay to acquire things; on the other side of the looking glass, we pay to get rid of them. Junk isn't merely worthless; it has negative value. A chemical engineer once told me about a recent improvement in a manufacturing process; by fine-tuning a chemical synthesis he had increased the yield of a certain commodity from 98 percent to 99 percent. I congratulated him, but I couldn't help remarking that this seemed like a rather paltry improvement. "Ah, you miss the important point," he said. "The amount of waste goes from 2 percent down to 1 percent. It's cut in half. We save tremendously on disposal costs." Brian Hayes, Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape wasterecyclingtrashefficiencyeconomics
NIMBY, BANANA, NOPE Waste-disposal facilities of all kinds—landfills, incinerators, even transfer stations—are sure bets for generating the NIMBY response: not in my backyard. In its most cynical form, NIMBY is the attitude of citizens who acknowledge the need for a facility, somewhere, but who oppose a plan for building it simply because the selected site is too close to their own property. But opposition to landfills and many other kinds of development goes well beyond cynical NIMBY. Another catch phrase for this phenomenon is BANANA: build absolutely nothing anywhere near anybody. Or else it's NOPE: not on planet earth. Brian Hayes, Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape urbanismcommunitytrash
Design Systems, Agile, and Industrialization An Article by Brad Frost bradfrost.com I’ve come to the conclusion that “enterprise web development” is just regular web development, only stripped of any joy or creativity or autonomy. It’s plugging a bunch of smart people into the matrix and forcing them to crank out widgets and move the little cards to the right. In these structures, people are stripped of their humanity as they’re fed into the machine. It becomes “a developer resource is needed” rather than “Oh, Samantha would be a great fit for this project.” And the effect of all this on individuals is depressing. When people’s primary motivation is to move tickets over a column, their ability to be creative or serve a higher purpose are almost completely quashed. Interaction with other humans seems to be relegated to yelling at others to tell them they’re blocked. Reading “AS PER THE REQUIREMENTS” in tickets makes me dry heave. How did such sterile, shitty language seep into my everyday work? Beware SAFe, an Unholy Incarnation of Darkness wwwagilesystemscreativity