As I was working on the next piece in the surplus series, I found the following quote in an article by Michael Pollan:
“But even with more than half of the 10 billion bushels of corn produced annually being fed to animals, there is plenty left over. So companies like A.D.M., Cargill and ConAgra have figured ingenious new ways to dispose of it, turning it into everything from ethanol to Vitamin C and biodegradable plastics.”
I’m highlighting other aspects of the quote in my next post, but in this one, the word I want to point out is dispose.
If you are a hungry person, corn has intrinsic value. It has nutrition, and your hunger is telling you that you need nutrition. Corn doesn’t lose value and become something that a society needs to “dispose of” until there is far more supply than demand.
Faith -- by The Cure
I was recently going through old records (the musical kind, not the financial statement-kind) that I have in storage, thinking about selling some of them. The Cure’s “Faith” came out in 1981, and though it is still one of my favorite records, I don’t necessarily need the physical object in my house anymore.
It’s old enough that I figured a collector might be interested in it, until my thumb felt something at the lower right corner of the sleeve: a precise cut, about 1 cm into the cardboard.
It had been remaindered before I bought it.
You’ve probably encountered cassettes or CDs or DVDs that have a cut in the plastic container, or books that have ink from a marker across the bottom of the pages, and are selling for a third of the original price.
Remaindered Books
At some moment in the past, there were 20,000 too many units sitting in someone’s warehouse. Their solution? Mark it down, and sell it off as cultural scrap. It was an inventory management decision, a change in accounting status at a particular time in the life of that physical expression of an idea.
Such intentional damage is a minor humiliation compared to the common practice in the book publishing world of pulping unsold copies.
Price and Value
Physical surplus makes culture seem cheap. It creates an illusion of valuelessness.
The price of a particular cultural product is only a comment on that product at a specific moment, and not an indicator of the real value of the ideas the product conveys.
Not long after the vibrations caused by vinyl grooves have been dutifully transcribed by iTunes and saved on my phone, I won’t remember that the sleeve of that Cure album was cut — that someone somewhere years ago thought it was only worth half of what it was the day before.
As I listen, I’ll remember what it has always meant to me, regardless of scarcity or surplus.
Price is often a false or ephemeral indicator of true, long-term value.
Want a more corporeal example?
Paper is relatively cheap. Paper masks are relatively cheap. What is the value of a paper mask that keeps someone from getting sick?
Related: This article is part of a series on creative surplus.
