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W.a.s.t.e. Not: John Scanlan looks for the future in the dustbins of history
John Scanlan’s “The Idea of Waste” argues that all civilization is an attempt to make waste disappear.
It made the downtown Yippie provocateur Abbie Hoffman, who was organizing a protest at the time against the government’s neglect of his neighborhood, wax apocalyptic: “Future historians would write that America was destroyed by a nuclear attack when in actuality the people just stopped picking up their trash.” The strike was only nine days long, but it forced Mayor John Lindsay and Governor Nelson Rockefeller to offer a new contract to the workers, proving that some vermin will run away from trash rather than toward it. In 1995, Brian Eno poked fun at the Zen ideal of self-storage by packing twenty-six units in a facility of a London suburb with, among other things, a continuously playing recording of Laurie Anderson’s ululations, a woman suspended in a tank of water fed by oxygen tubes, and the Vizier of Memphis(on loan from the British Museum). Everyone sometimes imagines a frenzied algorithm piecing together their identity from their YouTube search history (What’s the perfect product for a woman who watched a clip from Groundhog Day, the execution video of Ceaușescu, Pilates ab blasters, and Lee Ann Womack’s “I Hope You Dance” all in one week?
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