Lab Report #15: Waste is in the Eye of the Beholder
Findings from playing with waste
Dear Ludic Liberators,
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Perhaps ironically, Thursday’s Ludic Liberation Lab on WASTE generated so much data it’ll be impossible for me to honor all of it in this little report. Was our research wasted then? Since learning about the surprisingly large carbon footprint of undeleted emails and casual google searches, it terrifies me to think about the invisible digital landfills that store terabytes on terabytes of “academic research data” and lazily snapped personal photo libraries. Is this email even worth the energy it uses, especially if it sits unopened in your mailbox for days, week, or potentially years? Please promise me to delete it after you read it! The backup will still be available right here, on our substack home.
During the lab, we played with honoring our waste – temporarily resurrecting it from our trash bins to give our used q-tips and soymilk cartons a proper eulogy before putting the items “to rest.” We also played with gleefully imagining ways we could squander and ruin the things we are most terrified to waste: love, money, time, opportunities, potential. And we played with putting our greatest wastes on a trial of peer jurors, from cat litter to amazon packages to long indulgent showers.
From our explorations, some themes emerged. What we deemed as wasteful was not just the unproductive remains of some productive activity, but any kind of excess, such as excess of competitiveness, comparison, obsession or even productivity itself. For example, we decided that the greatest way to waste meeting the “true love of your life” would be to get hung up on “their bald spot,” obsessing over a small physical detail of a complex and mysterious living being. Meanwhile, the most wasteful approach to the chance to do over your day would be spend it organizing one’s trash by color and smell and stage of decomposition, just to throw it all in the dumpster anyway – an image that made me feel all too seen in my endless pursuit of various “sorting” projects.
Yet another form of waste that kept surfacing had to do with avoidance, denial, and resistance to life’s invitations. In a thought experiment about finding a genie lamp in a thrift store, the winning waste strategy was to wish the genie back to the thrift store, realizing that you have nowhere to keep the lamp (asking the genie to do the dishes was a close second)! We contemplated wasting life and youth by over-valuing the very qualities they lack – “the afterlife” or “professional experience” and thought the greatest waste of a unique talent would be to never use it because of fear of uncertain consequences (specifically: alien abductions).
At the same time, we noticed that waste often brought us pleasure, precisely through its logics of inefficiency and irrationality. Elaborate waste fantasies made us laugh, delighted us through their absurdity. Doing things that had nothing to do with efficiency, survival, or ideal ways to “seize the day” could become pure gleeful play. Aren’t art-making, entertainment, and games all certain forms of waste? And if they bring us any enjoyment, thrill, and satisfaction – does calling them waste still make sense?
Just like our investigations, “waste”’s etymological roots fork into two directions: one points to emptiness and unusability and the other to ruin and destruction. It makes sense then that our own Waste-o-Meter vacillated between the poles of spoiling and avoiding. While opposite, these extremes inevitably connect: damaging something may make it unusable, while not using something might eventually lead it to disintegrate altogether.
As we probed into this phenomenon by putting our various personal wastes – such as nitpicking relatives or time spent arguing on the internet – on trial, two other variables emerged: learning and pleasure. Despite numerous exhibits in favor of wastefulness, we struggled to declare something unilaterally wasted if someone really enjoyed it, if it made someone’s hardships easier, or if helped us clarify something important about life or even our own values in the process.
To me, these criteria felt a lot more liberating to play with than the guilt created by the maximizing our productivity or minimizing our carbon footprint. So after the lab, I started developing a theory for an alternative conception of waste: What if we defined waste as anything that is not enjoyed? When I think of waste through the lens of enjoyment, I feel more relaxed about spending my money and other resources that alternative visions of waste want me to either invest or hoard. I want to remind myself to tune into the enjoyable aspects of each activity, whether it’s sorting emails (it COULD be interesting!) or actually loving my lover, rather than stressing out about optimizing my ROI or getting trapped in ego comparisons and idealizations. I wouldn’t use this definition to determine corporate responsibility (if a shareholder really enjoys their dividend, does it make the company justified in polluting watersheds? um no.) but at the level of relating to your own life, an enjoyment-oriented compass might guide you toward not wasting the present moment, which is, really, the most important resource we ever have. . .
All good research only leads to more questions, so here are some questions we ended our investigation with:
How can we skillfully transform wasteful behaviors into constructive ones?
Does pleasure trump waste?
How to take the charge out of waste and make it more malleable?
Is the natural world “wasteful”—does it judge itself for being so?
If something is enjoyable (by anyone) is it not waste?
How easily we can show that the same thing is wasteful or not- where is this being used to hide the truth?
What is the line between waste and indulgence?
If waste is in the eye of the beholder, what are the implications of that?
The way matter can cycle in a productive way, how can the intellectual/creative process mimic that rhythm, like an inhale (consume) and an exhale (create)— or is this more just the Protestant horror of waste?
If the lifespan of the planet is finite, what is worth wasting and what is not?
What is the quality of waste?
Is a choice not made a waste of potential and a whole alternative reality?
What sub-categories of waste exist? like avoidance, distraction, putting effort into low- or negative-value, etc.?
Is there anything ever that I DON’T frame in terms of “is this waste?” So anxious and unanswerable…
Is all “entertainment” (and its industry) just an elaborate waste machine?
In the world of objects and functions, which spaces are wasteful and which are not? Which are exalted and which are not?
Efficiency v.s. waste. Capitalism presents itself as efficient, yes is profoundly wasteful. We often critique it for not living up to its efficiency. Do we, then, value efficiency over waste? Is that the point…?
How we throw the word around and never unpack it so if we did very time...
That David Graeber thing about how we’re way too productive and being productive is creating waste
Is capitalism wasteful in all situations? Or are there situations in which it is the best possible scenario?
How can we use better words than “waste” in our daily lives?
A scientific lens will try to find a reason for all phenomenon in the natural world. Would waste be a useful concept to introduce?
Is waste already a euphemism?
Would we have had the same conversation with garbage?
How much room do we have in this world to debate what is defined as waste?
The reflex to locate wastefulness always in myself, blind to how I express broad tides… which is itself a waste of a wider awareness
Missed the lab but want to play with enjoying your waste? Here’s a little game gift from this lab’s Co-PI John Robb — The Waste Passport Zine 🎁
Get an 8.5x11 / A4 sheet. Anything that has one blank side. And scissors.
Fold the paper into 8 equal parts.
Draw on each rectangle like it appears on the photo below.
Put your own name, feel free to give yourself a waste-based title (like “wasteketeer, garbage guru, trashy content creator”). Do not yet sign the “Certificate of Completion”!!!!
Cut and fold the zine as shown below:
As you go through your week, and you waste something in your life, check if it fills one of the criteria, and draw a small image of that thing you wasted.
Once you complete all 6 categories of waste, sign your name on the final page of the passport.
Send images of your completed Passport to @ludicliberation on Instagram and tag with #playingwithwaste.
🗓 Don't miss any more labs! The Ludic Liberation Lab meets every 2nd Thursday of the month, 6-8:30pm Eastern Time, so add it to your calendar. WE'LL SEE YOU NEXT MONTH ON MAY 13th!
I’m looking for more Ludic Liberation Lab Researchers and Collaborators! 🎲🔬Do you have something you’d like to investigate through experimental play? Would you like to bring some games you’ve created to our growing network of playful liberation researchers or collaborate with me on new game-based methods to explore an intriguing theme? Email me at ludicliberation@gmail.com!!!
a signature is a waste of words, but worth it…
Natalia
Game Maker/Destroyer
That definition is pretty radical, but the more I thought about it the more it worked. You can unpack the term “enjoyed” a lot of different ways. It really fits from every angle I try to come at it.