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"I've got this beautiful panoramic three-dimensional painting of Mars based on Martian photos. It's 30 feet wide. You can pick out every pebble on the Martian landscape. And who'd have dreamed you could do that?"
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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.
Don't forget the First Law: "There's the First Law of Kipple…'Kipple drives out nonkipple'."
The word itself can be found in the 1890’s, as a play on Rudyard Kipling’s name. The word found its way into science fiction fandom; Ted Pauls used it as the title of his fanzine first published in 1960.
According to the philosopher of kipple in the novel, J.R. Isadore, "the entire universe is moving toward a state of total, absolute kippleization." 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). We are doing this socially as well; by using welfare, we encourage our human resources not to do work, either. If we can recycle paper, we can recycle people, too.
Are you having a little problem with kipple where you live? Maybe you need the high tech trash can from Islands in the Net, by Bruce Sterling Comment/Join this discussion ( 6 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This | Additional
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