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, stones, clay figurines, empty beverage cans, little angels, cacti, opera programmes, lighters, pens, owls, music boxes, bottles, bonsai trees, paintings, mugs, pipes, glass obelisks, ceramic ducks, old toys, carnival masks, and they probably do so out of something that we might call metaphysical angst, perhaps because they cannot bear the idea of chaos being the one ruler of the universe, which is why, using their limited powers and with no divine help, they attempt to impose some order on the world, and for a short while they manage it, but only as long as they are there to defend their collection, because when the day comes when it must be dispersed, and that day always comes, either with their death or when the collector grows weary, everything goes back to its beginnings, everything returns to chaos. [page 11]

That’s a brilliant critique of the “collector impulse” and how most of what is collected and passed off as “valuable” or “interesting” is really just more kipple. Collectors, Saramago points out, may delude themselves that they are creating a sense of order, as opposed to chaos, but what they are really doing is just creating organized kipple, and organized kipple is still just as kipply as disorganized or non-organized kipple. In other words, the byproducts of the collecting impulse are merely an arbitrarily “organized” manifestation of, in Technovelgy’s words quoted previously, “available resources transformed into objects that cannot be used for anything (kipple).”

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:

…the First Law of Kipple (is that) ‘Kipple drives out nonkipple’… (one) can roll the kipple-factor back… No one can win against kipple, except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I’ve sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I’ll die or go away, and then the kipple will take over. It’s a universal principal operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving towards a final state of total, absolute kippleization.

Says the technovelgy.com entry on kipple:

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.

…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).

Kipple is the perfect word to describe the entropic clutter filling our houses, our cities, our computers and our minds. It’s very sweet, gentle and disarming, just like most kipple, but it sneaks up on you until you finally realize that it has colonized your life, again, just like the thing it describes.

Here are a couple of the comments posted to the Technovelgy page devoted to kipple:

“Is there a relationship or correlation between kipple and noise? Audible kipple? Does noise somehow accumulate the way kipple does? If so, what does it leave behind? ”
( 4/28/2004 4:41:22 PM )

“Interesting thought. Urban environments have a lot of “waste noise” (as opposed to useful noise, like the sound a garbage truck makes when it backs up!). However, noise tends to dissipate; it is absorbed by objects and is attenuated by its passage through the atmosphere. Unlike kipple, which never seems to go away.

On the other hand, Frederick Brown wrote a stunningly original story called The Waveries in 1945, in which sounds had a life of their own. (Philip K. Dick called that story one of the best he ever read.)”
(Chief Technovelgist 4/28/2004 5:45:03 PM )

Originally posted on my personal blog at http://www.jurisich.com/blog/.