The Arts, Garbage, and Disposable Culture

One of the most pervasive paradigms that has entered modern consciousness is the idea of garbage, disposability, and the act of throwing something "away." The ease with which most people toss things in the garbage is astounding, as amount of time thinking about the notion of throwing something "away" will reveal that away is always merely somewhere else. For someone or something, away is very much here, and in truth throwing something "away" is more about putting it out of sight and out of mind.

The ease with which we can throw things away, and the lack of consequences for doing so, increases the likelihood that we will do so. In a sense we become alienated or estranged from the repercussions and result of our habits.

Imagine with me if you will, a world where there was no garbage service and we had to deal with the consequences of everything we acquired and consumed. Pretty quickly everyone would begin composting, an activity that mainstream culture currently relegates to the hippies and the ecologically inclined, as a matter of necessity in dealing with food waste.

We'd certainly reuse items more, since the consequences of not doing so would be that we'd have to figure out where to put the "waste." Recycling would become more widespread as people realized that everything is recyclable in some sense.

Even more than that, we'd be become more careful about what we produced, as its production would become inexorably entwined with its eventual demise.

In the digital realm, it's even easier to dispose of something. There's no consequence to collecting and then disposing of massive amounts of digital debris. All you have to do is wipe out those pesky 1s and 0s, and you're back to where you started, with a clean slate.

Just as the notion of disposability in the tangible world leads us to create more waste, the ease with which we can both acquire and dispose of digital material creates an environment where the value of digital material is reduced.

The ease with which I can download and delete a piece of music does not reduce the value of the music contained therein, but it certainly reduces the value of the digital file that I pay for and download. It is immediately replaceable, with the reproduction costs relegated to a petty amount of processing power and bandwidth, as opposed to the physical reproduction cost of a CD or piece of vinyl, which then must be distributed physically.

Interestingly, it is more difficult to archive and maintain digital collections over the long run than it is if you collect most physical media. Backups beget backups, and as the digital mountains pile up there is an associated cost with maintaining their mere existence. When a computer crash can wipe out all of your collected data you have to make duplicates to ensure redundancy, so every time you acquire a digital file, you need to allocate twice its size for storage, one for use and one for backup.

At some point you come to realize that paper is a better backup than all those documents sitting on your computer. Hell, a carved stone tablet is a better backup than paper, given that it can withstand fires and all manner of destructive events.

Ease of disposibility encourages producers of digital debris to churn it out at a greater pace, throw more things against the wall to see what sticks. That's how you end up with 100,000 applications in Apple's "App Store," the majority useless time wasters that contribute little to collective knowledge or productivity.

Meanwhile, you have producers of creative endeavors such as music attempting to participate in this digital rat race which undervalues their production due to the medium of delivery. While it is certainly important and even necessary to throw their hats into the digital ring, it also seems that there's something to be said for in parallel creating some artificial scarcity through the production of limited edition LPs and other items of enduring value that aren't infinitely reproducible.

On the Internet businesses are increasingly turning to the tiered pricing model where they give something or some service away for free, and then have tiered levels of products that give their core constituencies exact, tailored solutions for associated prices. I think there's something to be said for creative producers taking a page out of this playbook and considering ways in which they can release certain work for free digitally and then produce items of enduring value that will appeal to the people most likely to pay for their products in the first place.

While it's also clear that any physical product is increasingly a loss-leader that hopefully begets performance opportunities that might help pay the bills, I believe there's a feedback cycle once true believers and fans exist that can help turn the physical product back into a positive feature of an artistic career.

More and more artists are doing it, and I think others would be wise to consider the same route. Old modes of thinking are not going to become viable again through sheer willpower, so the choice is theirs to either swim upstream or to figure out how to take advantage of the current.