Ry Cooder, quoted in the June 27, 2005 New Yorker “Talk of the Town” piece, “Stadia Mania”, in which touches on the quintessential L.A. phenomenon whereby kipple architecture is built, torn down, and replaced by new buildings with an even higher kipple quotient:
“What do you need another mall for?” he went on. “In L.A., that’s all they ever have built. They cut up the Brown Derby. They cut up all those restaurants that looked like funny things, like pigs or hot dogs. They tear down every coffee shop they can find. You talk about heritage, man, it was there. They find a bowling alley, chop it down. Interesting old apartment house, chop it down. Then they give back stuff with zero content, buildings with no past, a useless present, and no future at all. Where nobody is going to get together, where no memories will be created or associations made, or good times. They will simply be directing you into the act of taking your credit card out of your wallet, with that glazed look on your face. So, you see, I’m not a fan of that. ”
It’s kipplization toward sameness and blandness, toward unification of experience (pulling the credit card from the wallet). The unique experiences of the past may have been kipple (theme restaurants, for instance), but what’s replaced them is a new and greater kipple disguised as a false sense of order: strip malls that all have a liquor store, a donut shop, a laundrymat and video store, all with the same regulation plastic signage in the same generic font, with the same beige stucco walls and the same parking places in front.
What such environments do is devaluate the urban experience, and when meaning has been reduced from each specific encounter, what’s left in its place is kipple. It’s like a zombie movie, in which living, breathing humans, once bitten by a zombie, become zombies too. It’s kipple as mass zombiefication of the planet.
From the great, great Portuguese author Jose Saramago’s amazing novel All The Names comes this passage that echoes very closely Philip K. Dick’s formulation of kipple mentioned before:
There are people like Senhor Jose everywhere, who fill their time, or what they believe to be their spare time, by collecting stamps, coins, medals, vases, postcards, matchboxes, books, clocks, sport shirts, autographs, stones, clay figurines, empty beverage cans, little angels, cacti, opera programmes, lighters, pens, owls, music boxes, bottles, bonsai trees, paintings, mugs, pipes, glass obelisks, ceramic ducks, old toys, carnival masks, and they probably do so out of something that we might call metaphysical angst, perhaps because they cannot bear the idea of chaos being the one ruler of the universe, which is why, using their limited powers and with no divine help, they attempt to impose some order on the world, and for a short while they manage it, but only as long as they are there to defend their collection, because when the day comes when it must be dispersed, and that day always comes, either with their death or when the collector grows weary, everything goes back to its beginnings, everything returns to chaos. [page 11]
That’s a brilliant critique of the “collector impulse” and how most of what is collected and passed off as “valuable” or “interesting” is really just more kipple. Collectors, Saramago points out, may delude themselves that they are creating a sense of order, as opposed to chaos, but what they are really doing is just creating organized kipple, and organized kipple is still just as kipply as disorganized or non-organized kipple. In other words, the byproducts of the collecting impulse are merely an arbitrarily “organized” manifestation of, in Technovelgy’s words quoted previously, “available resources transformed into objects that cannot be used for anything (kipple).”
As kipple is unavoidable and increasingly a part of my interactions with reality, actual or virtual, I thought it high time to add a Kipple category to this blog to at least document this disease, this dis-ease.
Kipple is a word for entropy invented by the science fiction author Philip K. Dick. Here is the passage explaining kipple from Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which was made into the film Blade Runner:
Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday’s home page. When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you to go bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up there is twice as much of it. It always gets more and more.
Says the novel’s philosopher of kipple, J. R. Isidore (who became J. F. Sebastian in Blade Runner):
…the First Law of Kipple (is that) ‘Kipple drives out nonkipple’… (one) can roll the kipple-factor back… 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 take over. It’s a universal principal operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving towards a final state of total, absolute kippleization.
Says the technovelgy.com entry on kipple:
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.
…Physicists will note the similarity to the concept of entropy, which is most usually taken to refer to the tendency of closed systems toward increasing disorder.
I like the definition taken from classical thermodynamics, that entropy is a quantitative measure of the amount of thermal energy not available to do work. In the 21st century, we seem to be working as hard as we can to take available resources and transform them into objects that cannot be used for anything (kipple).
Kipple is the perfect word to describe the entropic clutter filling our houses, our cities, our computers and our minds. It’s very sweet, gentle and disarming, just like most kipple, but it sneaks up on you until you finally realize that it has colonized your life, again, just like the thing it describes.
Here are a couple of the comments posted to the Technovelgy page devoted to kipple:
“Is there a relationship or correlation between kipple and noise? Audible kipple? Does noise somehow accumulate the way kipple does? If so, what does it leave behind? ”
( 4/28/2004 4:41:22 PM )
“Interesting thought. Urban environments have a lot of “waste noise” (as opposed to useful noise, like the sound a garbage truck makes when it backs up!). However, noise tends to dissipate; it is absorbed by objects and is attenuated by its passage through the atmosphere. Unlike kipple, which never seems to go away.
On the other hand, Frederick Brown wrote a stunningly original story called The Waveries in 1945, in which sounds had a life of their own. (Philip K. Dick called that story one of the best he ever read.)”
(Chief Technovelgist 4/28/2004 5:45:03 PM )
Terrorists have struck again, this time in downtown London. This particular picture that was just on cnn.com seems to capture the claustrophobic horror of what those poor people on one of the bombed subway trains must have gone through in the aftermath:
