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Dick on Kipple

Quote:
There's the First Law of Kipple... 'Kipple drives out nonkipple.'

...Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday's homeopape. 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.

No one can win against kipple, except temporarily and maybe in one spot.
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick, 1968

I think kipple is the main problem with my computers. It’s not just adware (on the Windows box), but the weird little things that wind up in the nooks and crannies. Installers for demoware. Photographs of children. Zipfiles loaded with mp3s… of songs that I already have in other directories, or on other machines, or on CDs on the shelves on my walls.

It spills into my inbox - newsletters I should read, old notes to myself - and my bookmarks - links to sites I need to read sometime, or specific blog entries about things I need to know.

But it seems to be far worse physically. Notes, magazines, review copies of (fascinating) paperbacks, paper clips, address labels.

It's useful to me to think of this stuff not in an atomized way, as a million things to process, but as constituent parts of one thing: kipple. That way, I can actually start to act on it.

About grant

grant's picture

Bio

grant lives in a palatial suburban estate in West Palm Beach, Florida, surrounded by chickens, dogs, cats, children and semi-animate piles of clutter. Older, irregular writings on various topics can be found at Flying Fists, although lately he spends more time trying to get people to join him recording songs of discovery (and reading the latest weird science headlines) at The Guild of Scientific Troubadours.

He is an Aquarius, a vayu/kapha body type with a tendency to stagnant liver heat, and remembers when the internet was just a bunch of UFO enthusiasts and HAM radio nuts dialing up to local BBSes to post on something called FIDOnet.

His day job is writing about unexplained phenomena for Sun, a magazine that has yet to catch up with FIDOnet's amazing technological breakthrough, but can be found on dead trees in supermarkets nationwide.

 
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