D I S I N T E G R A T I O N :

In Rubbish Theory, Michael Thompson suggests that rubbish is a dynamic—that waste, in fact, is an operative space through which commodities pass (or remain). To understand the decline of value, "we have to study rubbish.”

While Thompson suggests that economic decay and physical decay often are at a disjuncture, with information-commodities functional breakdown and evacuated value are nearly simultaneous. If it weren't for the enduring but failed hardware, these devices would present an ideal category of rubbish.

A medium that effaces its materiality seems in the end to promote decay and wastage. Indeed, these dynamics inhere within information-commodities, where value is not located in the artifact, but in the information that adapts itself to multiple, rapidly changing carriers.

If rubbish theory proceeds through a mapping of artifacts, then the decay of information-commodities suggests a possible re-mapping through these specific modes of waste.