W.A.S.T.E. Not

“Trash is the hidden foundation of modern civilization,” writes Madeleine Adams. From ancient Rome’s Cloaca Maxima—the first underground sewer—to Eric Adams’s redesigned trash cans in New York City, societies have long invested tremendous effort in making waste disappear. In The Idea of Waste: On the Limits of Human Life, John Scanlan explores trash “as an essential, meaningful, yet often problematic facet of human existence.” In this Baffler review of Scanlan’s book, Adams examines waste not only as physical debris, but also as an ideological construct. If you’re interested in how we relate to both stuff and waste—and their equivalents in the digital world—this thought-provoking read is worth a dive.

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). Self-storage contained hidden treasures too. The now famous photos of the unknown nanny/photographer Vivian Maier were liberated in 2007 from a self-storage unit during a posthumous lot-crying that would have made Oedipa Maas gasp—and Storage Hunters hosts applaud. Whenever I pass a windowless Extra Space storage unit in Brooklyn, I always wonder: From where do they source the Extra? Is there a reservoir of Space that these units are siphoning from? Perhaps the strangest element of self-storage is that they provide emptiness. The Manhattan Mini-Storage billboards window-dress this nihilism quite cleverly: store your stuff until your student loans are paid . . . so forever and the only place where climate is under control. They wink-wink nudge-nudge at the modern need for something as uncanny and apolitical as emptiness.