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.
Reads:
Ryan Broderick on how viral content is becoming more “porny.” “On an internet without hyperlinks, where every post must be completely digestible in someone’s feed within microseconds of a user seeing it, your face, your physical body, is the last thing left that can connect across platforms.”
This was fun: “The problem I’m sensing is that a culture where people watch some random girl say, ‘Bernie’s is my favorite restaurant in New York City,’ swallow it whole, and pay $16.95 for mozzarella sticks in Greenpoint, begets a culture where a boy who stopped noticing aesthetic changes in popular culture in 2017 throws a meme party in Washington Square Park and people post about it like the meme party was hosted for fun and not for scraps of Internet clout.”
Objects take on a special quality when they become trash. No longer useful and so free to be examined aesthetically, like a readymade. But also an absolute quality: a discarded sofa, Redbox, and cigarette butt are all equally trash. Eerie to think of it existing in such huge quantities, it's no surprise we get it underground as fast as possible.