APOCALYPSE, May
2000

Flor Micz, Boyadjiev Luchezar

Trash, Junk and other Editorial Digestives
Crash Media (crashmedia@yourserver.co.uk)
www.yourserver.co.uk/crashmedia


Underground, overground, wombeling free
The wombles of Wimbeldon Common are we
Making good use of the things that we find
The things that the everyday folks leave behind...

The middle field of consumerism is getting extinct in the Western market. Whereas there was a large base of consumers who would go for mediocre products, simply because the cheap stuff was to trashy and the expensive range of gadget, well, too expensive. Those were the times when designer products were in high demand of cheap imitations. And flea markets not only would deliver the odd antique and the square artefact, but instead would be the base of mediocre imitations: in tools, clothing, entertainment equipment, everywhere.Those days are over. Instead the market shift towards a bipolar structure, with customers either not spending anything and only buying junk, or saving the money for the odd status symbol or quality item. And here we are not looking at two distinct groups of customers, but the behaviour of one and the same set of subjects. The days of useless gadgets are over. Wireless infrared earphones, movement detectors switching on toilet lights, electronic mouth showers, obscure massage devices, multifunctional cork screws with in-built FM radio capacities - all of those 'things' were desirable junk a few years ago. Today they are trash.

In the case of approaches towards new media economies, we have long thought that the gift economy is actually an alternative system, a challenge to hundreds of years of capitalism. Instead we now come to realize that it constitutes little more than precisely the shift indicated by the development of the average market in the West.
At some point along the line of this development, we have been made to rethink our work in terms of the attention economy, meaning that the more attention you can attract to your existence, the more likely you are to be able to live of it. Needless to say, nobody specified how this could be established. We need to make a mental note nevertheless: the concept of attention econ omy worked for those who invented it. So there seems to be some potential within it.

From an economical (and admittedly short term) point of view, you might as well throw your work in a trash can. Because that is what you are doing. And some people manage to exploit those whose cultural currency can be easily hijacked for supposedly 'good reasons'. Take Crash Media as an example. We can not any contributors. We simply can not afford to. But people are still willing to give us their work, sometimes because they can not sell it anywhere else, sometimes they even generate new work for us.

On a more economically viable note of course, there is a kind of post-investigative journalism which works along similar lines and actually turns out to be an economic and even efficient source of income. It has recently been named 'digestive journalism' and by its nature could also be named skip journalism, synonymous to skip art, making good use of the things you find. In some cases this madness has system, as no student worth his online salt would not have come across the graveyards of university essays on line. Once handmade by a student or scholar in the networked world, such text works are to precious to just be applied once. Instead it seems better to throw them onto the online junk pile and have other people picking through the skip to assemble their piece of work.

This is what is seen today as a redefinition of 'underground' and the concept of 'counter-culture'. The wombles were the first once to realize the potential of trash in the field of cultural production. With their clever and handy skills of building 'things', their little universe in Wimbledon Park not only helped them to remain entirely free from the funding system of the real world, but also to eventually market their own existence into the production of a BBC series. Full respect.

The site has been created with the assistance of the "Open Society Institute" (Soros Foundation). Russia