category: kipple

Possessions turn money into problems

Brian Eno: “possessions are a way of turning money into problems.” From a New York Times editorial, Five Scenes, One Theme: A True if Unlikely Story, by Bono, November 14, 2009.

Rental cottage interior, Malibu

Minimal, but highly effective, kipple.

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Kipplepedia

From the Wikipedia entry for Kipple:

In a deleted scene featured on the DVD of the 2000 documentary The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick, Miriam Llord, a friend of Dick’s, said kipple originated as a phrase she used for clutter around her house.

Kipple goes to war

From the front page of today’s New York Times comes this story about the kipple infiltration among our troops in Iraq, G.I.’s Deployed in Iraq Desert With Lots of American Stuff, centered ironically on “Camp Liberty”:

…wherever possible, the current generation of young soldiers – like its predecessors in Vietnam and other conflicts – has sought the succor of the familiar, and resourceful soldiers in this war have taken this quest to astonishing levels, accumulating all the accouterments of home: personal electronics, bed linens, furniture, household appliances and beauty products.

Gadgetry, in particular, proliferates among the 138,000 troops stationed in Iraq: laptop computers, MP3 and DVD players, digital cameras, televisions and video game consoles. On bases in greater Baghdad, many soldiers have cellphones and some have satellite dishes that pull in scores of stations. Personal DVD collections numbering several hundred are not uncommon; the legendary ones top 1,000.

Never in the field of human conflict has so much stuff been acquired by so many soldiers in so little time.

Emphasis mine. Natch.

Kipple drives out nonkipple

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 invented by the science fiction author Philip K. Dick for a concept similar to entropy. 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.

The novel’s philosopher of kipple, J. R. Isidore (who became J. F. Sebastian in Blade Runner), explains:

…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 )