The afterlives of discarded digital devices are just a tiny — if shiny — piece of the much larger story of global recycling. Minter reports that story so masterfully that by the book’s end, I was convinced that the best vantage point from which to view the forces of globalization might well be atop a pile of trash.
Read the rest of “The Afterlives of Discarded Objects: Adam Minter’s ‘Junkyard Planet’” here.
Plus, check out the author’s upcoming events in Los Angeles and London.
Riots are the Sphinx of the left. Every soi disant radical intellectual feels compelled, it seems, to answer the riddle they hear posed by the riots of the present, in Bahrain or Asturias, Chile or Britain: Why now? Why here? Why riot? These answers generally come in a few simple varieties. First, if the riot seems to lack focus or present clears demands – that is, if it is illegible as “protest,” as in the case of the London riots of summer 2011 – the intellectual will paint them as a “meaningless outburst” (Slavoj Žižek), undertaken by “mindless rioters” (David Harvey). Invariably, attributions of unmeaning must find support in patronizing sociology, rendering the rioters mere side-effects of an unequal society, symptoms of neoliberalism, capitalist crisis and the ensuing austerity. Frequently, such commentary adheres to the flinching rhetorical structure of “yes, but…”
It’s a terrible irony that we’re running David Mattin’s letter from London — written and scheduled last week, before the riots began — on the main site today. Right now our collective thoughts are with David, all of our other British contributors and friends, and with the people of England.
