Why trash?

Daisy Alioto on why having trash taste isn’t the same as having bad taste.

Can there be a unified theory of trash, waste and rot? All three concepts wind through this month’s 🆃🆁🅰🆂🅷 collaboration with digital fashion platform, DRAUP. Our partnership includes newsletter dispatches, a print zine and a custom digital fashion garment modeled by friends from across the dirtyverse. Contributors include Rachelle Toarmino, Michelle Santiago Cortés, Nika Simovich Fisher, Daniella Loftus and more. 

I did a quick search for the word “trash” in my text messages. A few salient phrases came up: trash behavior, “I cna’t even read this trash,” autotuned soundcloud trash. I did the same thing for waste and rot. “I don’t want to waste my energy,” “it feels like a waste of desire, which is a sort of tragedy,” “the inner rot leaks outward.” 

Trash is not a stable category. As much as we want to write off trash, every once in a while it surprises us by gaining status or a cult following. Having trash taste isn’t the same as having bad taste. Rot, on the other hand, is almost always undesirable. It makes itself known through presence—waste feels like an absence. “Rot might be the end, the pause, the road to nothingness and death, but it never stops moving,” writes Michelle Santiago Cortés.

The Instagram account Who Designed This Garbage takes photos of trash around New York City and identifies the original designers of packaging that ends up on the curb. Names like Peter Savile, Massimo Vignelli, and Pentagram. (You’ll see visuals from this Instagram account pop up throughout our series.) This is the highbrow-lowbrow flexibility that you don’t get with waste and rot. Trash may be a state of mind, but it resists being a spiritual condition. 

Trash is glamorous. It is a 150,00€ perfume from Etat Libre d'Orange made with upcycled fruit, flowers and wood. It’s Moschino RTW Fall 2017. It is Paris Hilton’s “stop being desperate” tank top launching a thousand “stop being poor” photoshops.

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Trash is relative. I went to public high school with kids that thought being rich meant having the right Uggs and a nice car. Our school had to nix Western Wednesday during spirit week because too many seniors decided to do White Trash Wednesday instead, dressing up as teen moms and domestic violence victims. Less than a decade later, a female student from my high school would be found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in a case that captured national attention. Trash is the fantasy that bad things only happen to other people.

I went to summer camp with kids that were actually rich. They could sail and water ski on one ski (slalom), not just at camp but throughout the year. I never learned to slalom, my trick was that I could switch bumper tubes with somebody else while the boat was moving. One year, maybe the year my mom sold some of her jewelry to afford camp fees, one of my cabin-mates referred to Applebee’s as “white trash.” She was probably picturing the people I went to high school with. 

Trash is digital. Nika Simovich Fisher traces the history of the desktop trash icon, “Over the years, the Macintosh’s trash icon evolved from a pixelated outdoor receptacle, to a colored garbage bin reminiscent of something Oscar the Grouch might emerge from, to a sleek, netted office bin, and finally, to its current depiction as a flattened, lightweight cylinder…” Our relationship to this icon is as metaphorical as that to our own memories. 

The internet is perfumed with “code smells,” vulnerabilities in source code like duplicates that have the potential to become full-on rot. These cracks in the foundation of a program are not really “smelled” but sensed by the engineer, making code closer to architecture than it is language. On the topic of architecture, I talked with my friend Robin Schmidt about “ruin porn” in the metaverse: “If nothing decays we will never know if it had a reason to endure,” he tells me. Trash shows us where we’ve been. 

Trash is ecological. We need a way to handle all of the physical and digital detritus we create. The human lifestyle is perpetually slouching towards storage, as I’ve said before. “God’s transaction history for thoughts and prayers,” writes poet Rachelle Toarmino. Well, maybe through acknowledging our trash behavior we are that much closer to managing it. — Daisy Alioto

Reprinted from That Ex by Rachelle Toarmino:

WEEK OF WAKING THOUGHTS NO. 2

could you hold my breath for me for just a second

when you’re out in the club don’t think I am

[visual of ravioli food truck]

[visual of mouse cursor dragging my body to Trash]

mark yourself safe

God’s transaction history for thoughts and prayers

is this just how I feel now