How quickly the click of a mouse becomes a flick of the wrist.

The ease with which I disposed of misterpr’s handsome offer is the product of long experience with spam, and it affects how I find myself reacting to garbage of all kinds. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, my trash service collects twice a week, making my new habits feasible and creating a weird kind of co-dependence between trash collectors and trash providers (i.e., me).

The vast proliferation of garbage in its many forms is indisputably linked to commercialism and commodification, handmaidens to late capitalism. A philosophy of disposability underlies them all. To my considerable chagrin, I find myself ever more at ease with quick disposals and abrupt decisions that generate garbage. What I once was loath to throw away has become just more flotsam and jetsam that I simply don’t want to look at any more. As my garbage tolerance declines, I notice my trash cans filling.

The idea that it is my lawful right not to be confronted by unwanted garbage (and what other kind is there?) can only reinforce the easy decision to discard what is not immediately useful and foster the illusion that landfills are plentiful, resources infinite, and garbage an inconvenience rather than a daunting social problem.

My own reaction to spam is indicative of the ease with which perceptions of value and discardability move back and forth between material and immaterial and from one part of life to another with breathtaking speed. The insidiousness of this lies in the fact that a permissiveness about declaring something garbage and being willing to immediately discard it grew from a valid concern about garbage in the first place.

Does this mean I should read all the spam I get carefully? Now that’s a frightening thought, but it may be better than the habits of deleting and ignoring…

 

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All Illustrations from www.corbis.com
Photomodified by Oates