From the great, great Portuguese author Jose Saramago’s amazing novel All The Names comes this passage that echoes very closely Philip K. Dick’s formulation of kipple mentioned before: “There are people like Senhor Jose everywhere, who fill their time, or what they believe to be their spare time, by collecting stamps, coins, medals, vases, postcards, matchboxes, books, clocks, sport shirts, autographs…

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Ry Cooder, quoted in the June 27, 2005 New Yorker “Talk of the Town” piece, “Stadia Mania”, in which touches on the quintessential L.A. phenomenon whereby kipple architecture is built, torn down, and replaced by new buildings with an even higher kipple quotient…

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Just as depicted in the animated Pixar film wall-E, now in theaters, kipple is not only covering the earth, but filling up the space around our planet as well. ScienceDaily reports, in Swerve Left To Avoid That Satellite: The Growing Issue Of Space Debris…

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Kipple is a word invented by the science fiction author Philip K. Dick for a concept similar to entropy. Here is the passage explaining kipple from Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which was made into the film Blade Runner:

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

The novel’s philosopher of kipple, J. R. Isidore (who became J. F. Sebastian in Blade Runner), explains…

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