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Notes, 2019-03-04.
Hey folks, Hillary Predko here. I’m a Toronto based artist, writer and community organizer who loves supply chains, infrastructure and most of all garbage. These days I am curating a newsletter about climate change and culture, Solastalgia, and looking for stories about reverse logistics, scrap markets and other end of life material culture - like kipple. As Philip K. Dick wrote:
"Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday's homeopape. When nobody's around, kipple reproduces itself...the entire universe is moving towards a final state of total, absolute kippleization."
Kipple is one of those perfect concepts from speculative fiction that captures some fundamental aspect of your own time; disposable and broken objects at the end of their life with nowhere to go. Until we can really integrate industrial ecology and cradle to cradle design, human industry is a vast, planetary Rube Goldberg machine producing kipple in all shapes and sizes.
My work is inspired by a deep awe and love for the complexity, elegance and power of global manufacturing and shipping logistics, along with a belief that the same ingenuity can create products that could move through a reverse supply chain just as smoothly and come apart as elegantly as they go together (Drew shared an article that speculates on how a system like this might work last week). Lately I’ve written about Kipple and material culture and China’s trash ban (which inspired National Sword on 99 Percent Invisible!)
The most clicked link in last week's issue (~15% of opens) was a twitter thread about a digital billboard showing a hovering Windows 98 error message in the sky.
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Junkyard planet.
- Leaked documents reveal there is no waste management strategy for a no-deal Brexit, which is bad news if you’re an island nation who exports your trash. With just weeks to the deadline, the fragility of logistics pipelines in the UK is being exposed and the day to day minutiae of trade regulations will face off against magical thinking.
- I’m a big fan of these three speculative toaster designs exploring circular economy design strategies. They reveal just how far we are from cradle to cradle products - but also cast aluminum appliances would be pretty great.
- NYC has proposed a pneumatic tube systems running along the Highline to shuttle waste through Manhattan and onto rail cars. This report is long but worth scanning because pneumatic tubes are a pretty great retro-future technology. I love the idea of infrastructure that has already been reappropriated serving as scaffolding to a new infrastructure layer.
Beijing Standard Time.
- China’s Belt and Road Initiative is reshaping the world, geographically and politically. This essay explores how these “New Silk Road” policies are playing out in Kazakhstan, with incredible drone footage of a dry port in Khorgos Gateway -- think container port in the middle of a desert with very, very long trains.
- I’m fascinated by these photographs comparing Paris to Tianducheng, a city in Eastern China that features recreations of Parisian architecture. Across China, knock off architecture, or “duplitecture”, fills entire suburbs or cities. This video features Shanghai’s Thames Town where I was lucky enough to spend an afternoon.
- The incredible craft behind Hong Kong’s neon signs which are being replaced all the time by LEDs.
Maintenance, Repair & Operations.
Uncanny Ecommerce.
- This is a bizarre journey through nested LLCs, a Christian cult and a tangled network of unauthorized Amazon resellers. It’s a reminder that the internet is still very weird and an example of the kind of ecommerce stories I am really fascinated by right now.
- I’m really enjoying The Amazon Chronicles, a weekly newsletter by tech writer Tim Carmody covering all things Amazon. With the fallout from HQ2 pulling out of NYC, and Bezos vs. the Nation Enquirer (and many other stories), having aggregated news covering multiple perspectives is super valuable.
Canadian Heists.
- Recently Canadian crypto exchange QuadrigaCX became insolvent after their founder died without anyone knowing his passwords or keys. The company lost roughly $190 million worth of assets (resetting this clock). However, a post-mortem on their 31 Bitcoin addresses reveals they likely never had the money on hand. This raises questions for me about the value of a public ledger -- there are a lot of ways to play a shell game, and the idea of transparency seems to benefit the crypto ecosystem more than transparency itself.
- The Royal Canadian Mounted Police are on the case after someone stole 30,000 litres of iceberg water from a vodka distillery in Newfoundland because Canada is well, Canada.
Tangents.
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Thanks as always to our recurring donors for supporting The Prepared.
Love, Hillary.
p.s. - Do you have stories, thoughts or leads about bizarre or uncanny ecommerce? Send me an email. I’m developing a project with friends exploring unexpected ways that the internet and physical products intersect (like surreal product shots in Chinese factories).
p.p.s. - Whenever possible, we work to encourage inclusivity. Here's how.
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