Conceptual halo of waste Core Post 5

Viney Willam writes in his book Waste “Objects called ‘waste’ can have a peculiarly telescopic effect on our imaginations.

They are things that seem to disclose ways of living, permit certain ways of seeing and give access to wider actions, collectives, and environments.”

The conceptual halo of the word waste is surrounded by words like rubbish, trash, garbage. These are things that have fallen out of use, fallen out of the engineering logic of the usefulness, fallen out from a system. Time can be wasted. People are called white trash. Waste is never a priory existent, it is a state that presupposes a binary opposite. The pressure to become invisible because unwanted is a consequence of becoming waste.

Dirt and noise is waste. It is “matter out of place” (Mary Douglas Purity and Danger) or out of order as disordered and non-functional at the same time. To become waste includes the gesture of becoming obsolete or to be discarded; it involves affects such as abjection and disgust.

“Waste might indeed suggest a sense of temporal disruption, but it is also matter that lingers and remains, it is that category of thing conspicuous for coming to be by having been.” (Viney Willam Waste)

In the context of digital culture, it becomes clear that the materiality of its production, distribution, and final processing as waste hasn’t vanished, rather concealed by euphemisms like ‘cloud’ or very much tied back to material processes like ‘mining’. All readings point at the uneven distribution of the processes (resources, manufacturing labor, including access to, final processing, environmental and personal consequences of toxicity) enabling control and amplifying inequality.

Jussi Parikka point also at a different time scales inherent in the technological fetish objects becoming obsolete in an ever-increasing rate where the object’s “inner time” radically shifts when it becomes waste. Striped from it functions it turns into a material that refuses to die, refuses to decay entering a geological time-scale.

In this context, we can think about data that moves between the material and the digital and ask when and how data becomes waste. If surveillance today means to gather and possess all possible data which for the time being remains in a limbo of possible interest. We have an idea when and how data becomes a target. Is data that is left out of biased algorithmic filtering becoming waste? When does big data become obsolete if at all?