Thursday, June 29, 2006

Kipple, or Packing up Blues

- Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers of yesterday's homeopape. When nobody's around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there's twice as much of it. It always gets more and more.
- I see.
- There's the First Law of Kipple, "Kipple drives out nonkipple." Like Gresham's law about bad money. And in these apartments there's been nobody there to fight the kipple.
- So it has taken over completely. Now I understand.
- Your place, here, this apartment you've picked - it's too kipple-ized to live in. We can roll the kipple-factor back; we can do like I said, raid the other apartments. But -
- But what?
- We can't win.
- Why not?
- No one can win against kipple, except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I've sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I'll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It's a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization. Except of course for the upward climb of Wilber Mercer.

J.R.Isidore explaining kipple to Pris
Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

While moving out of where I've lived for two years, feeling inundated by junk, I realise the truth of this. As another website says,
Kipple seems to be a combination of entropy and capitalism. I don't think past civilizations had the resources to produce so much packaging to hold our stuff until we buy it or consume it.

I feel crippled by my kipple.
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