Ruins in Reverse

Abandoned Redbox kiosks are tears in the fabric of reality

Following Redbox’s bankruptcy liquidation this summer, the company abandoned its 24,000 DVD rental kiosks, stranding their derelict shells across the American big box retail landscape—relics of the awkward late-‘00s transition phase between Blockbuster and Netflix that somehow coasted into the current decade on fumes. Going forward, the kiosks will cling like parasites to their host businesses: Walgreens says “it has spent $184,000 a month at roughly 3,800 stores to power nearly 5,400 machines belonging to a failed business.” These chains are also responsible for removing the kiosks (which are often bolted into the building’s concrete foundations), shuttling them onward to their afterlives as scrap metal or collectors’ items (“I wanted a Redbox machine because I felt like Redbox is important in the history of American media”). There was always something striking about the brand’s straightforwardness: the name, the logo, and the product itself were all neatly consolidated in that red box. In abandonment, the self-contained kiosks achieve a monumental purity. Freed from the duty to dispense DVDs, they are now only red boxes, and nothing more.

Disposability is a prominent theme of 21st-century culture, but it is usually invisible in a way that lets us pretend it’s less prevalent—the final leg of the supply chain that we’d rather know as little as possible about. The online purchases we return and the deteriorating IKEA furniture we leave out on the street will end up being useful somewhere, we may tell ourselves, but we also know it’s probably becoming trash, incinerated or piled up somewhere safely out of sight. Redbox represents the opposite case, in which the discarded parts are the parts that remain visible, like a brand acquired by private equity and hollowed out but left to publicly sputter, or a shipwreck but more mundane—lingering reminders of accidental or designed failure. I’ve written about how analog media has a decorative function that digital media doesn’t perform, at least not in the same way; this is the negative version of that. Physical media leave visible ruins that remind us what we’ve left behind. In digital space, every void is quickly filled by something else, and everything broken vanishes quickly.

The suburban big box landscape that Redbox populated is an environment where such voids and ruins proliferate, at least briefly. Kazys Varnelis recently republished his 2007 essay commemorating the fortieth anniversary of Robert Smithson’s Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey. Smithson’s piece, a response to mid-20th century deindustrialization, surveyed the landscape of the artist’s hometown in 1967, a moment when much of its infrastructure—pipes, oil derricks, old bridges—was becoming obsolete. “This was urban residue,” Varnelis writes, “deliberately left behind in a process of what economist Joseph Schumpeter had called ‘creative destruction.’” That residual space, he writes, is “a different kind of surplus, a waste product, that, in lying abandoned, performs no function except to contain sheer potential…such a site contains the trace heat of the past occupation, like a seat on a train vacated at the previous stop.” Smithson called these “ruins in reverse,” soon to vanish once layered over by something new and ahistorical—“not so much pregnant with possibility as filled with plans for development.” Dead and dying shopping malls may be the clearest contemporary examples of such space today, capturing our imagination as momentary tears in the late capitalist fabric, vaporwave portals, space that serves no purpose until it suddenly does again. Every dead Redbox kiosk, although otherwise useless, is at least a small monument to that.

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Here’s an essay I wrote for the design agency Modem Works about the design of autonomous vehicles and which components might become unnecessary if humans never need to do the driving.

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