“What have we here?” Alan said, as he wandered into Kurt’s shop, which had devolved into joyous bedlam. The shelves had been pushed up against the wall, clearing a large open space that was lined with long trestle tables. Crusty-punks, goth kids, hippie kids, geeks with vintage video-game shirts, and even a couple of older, hard-done-by street people crowded around the tables, performing a conglomeration of arcane tasks. The air hummed with conversation and coffee smells, the latter emanating from a catering-sized urn in the corner.He was roundly ignored—and before he could speak again, one of the PCs on the floor started booming out fuzzy, grungy rockabilly music that made him think of Elvis cassettes that had been submerged in salt water. Half of the assembled mass started bobbing their heads and singing along while the other half rolled their eyes and groaned.Kurt came out of the back and hunkered down with the PC, turning down the volume a little. “Howdy!” he said, spreading his arms and taking in the whole of his dominion.“Howdy yourself,” Alan said. “What do we have here?”“We have a glut of volunteers,” Kurt said, watching as an old rummy carefully shot a picture of a flat-panel LCD that was minus its housing. “I can’t figure out if those laptop screens are worth anything,” he said, cocking his head. “But they’ve been taking up space for far too long. Time we moved them.”Alan looked around and realized that the workers he’d taken to be at work building access points were, in the main, shooting digital pictures of junk from Kurt’s diving runs and researching them for eBay listings. It made him feel good—great, even. It was like watching an Inventory being assembled from out of chaos.“Where’d they all come from?”Kurt shrugged. “I dunno. I guess we hit critical mass. You recruit a few people, they recruit a few people. It’s a good way to make a couple bucks, you get to play with boss crap, you get paid in cash, and you have colorful co-workers.” He shrugged again. “I guess they came from wherever the trash came from. The city provides.”The homeless guy they were standing near squinted up at them. “If either of you says something like,Ah, these people were discarded by society, but just as with the junk we rescue from landfills, we have seen the worth of these poor folks and rescued them from the scrapheap of society,I’m gonna puke.”“The thought never crossed my mind,” Alan said solemnly.“Keep it up, Wes,” Kurt said, patting the man on the shoulder. “See you at the Greek’s tonight?”“Every night, so long as he keeps selling the cheapest beer in the Market,” Wes said, winking at Alan.“It’s cash in the door,” Kurt said. “Buying components is a lot more efficient than trying to find just the right parts.” He gave Alan a mildly reproachful look. Ever since they’d gone to strictly controlled designs, Kurt had been heartbroken by the amount of really nice crap that never made its way into an access point.“This is pretty amazing,” Alan said. “You’re splitting the money with them?”“The profit—anything leftover after buying packaging and paying postage.” He walked down the line, greeting people by name, shaking hands, marveling at the gewgaws and gimcracks that he, after all, had found in some nighttime dumpster and brought back to be recycled. “God, I love this. It’s like Napster for dumpsters.”“How’s that?” Alan asked, pouring himself a coffee and adding some UHT cream from a giant, slightly dented box of little creamers.“Most of the music ever recorded isn’t for sale at any price. Like 80 percent of it. And the labels, they’ve made copyright so strong, no one can figure out who all that music belongs to—not even them! Costs a fortune to clear a song. Pal of mine once did a CD of Christmas music remixes, and he tried to figure out who owned the rights to all the songs he wanted to use. He just gave up after a year—and he had only cleared one song!“So along comes Napster. It finds the only possible way of getting all that music back into our hands. It gives millions and millions of people an incentive to rip their old CDs—hell, their old vinyl and tapes, too!—and put them online. No label could have afforded to do that, but the people just did it for free. It was like a barn-raising: a library raising!”Alan nodded. “So what’s your point—that companies’ dumpsters are being napstered by people like you?” A napsterized Inventory. Alan felt therightnessof it.Kurt picked a fragile LCD out of a box of dozens of them and smashed it on the side of the table. “Exactly!” he said. “This is garbage—it’s like the deleted music that you can’t buy today, except at the bottom of bins at Goodwill or at yard sales. Tons of it has accumulated in landfills. No one could afford to pay enough people to go around and rescue it all and figure out the copyrights for it and turn it into digital files and upload it to the net—but if you give people an incentive to tackle a little piece of the problem and a way for my work to help you… ” He went to a shelf and picked up a finished AP and popped its latches and swung it open.“Look at that—I didn’t get its guts out of a dumpster, but someone else did, like as not. I sold the parts I found in my dumpster for money that I exchanged for parts that someone else found inherdumpster—”“Her?”“Trying not to be sexist,” Kurt said.“Are there female dumpster divers?”“Got me,” Kurt said. “In ten years of this, I’ve only run into other divers twice or three times. Remind me to tell you about the cop later. Anyway. We spread out the effort of rescuing this stuff from the landfill, and then we put our findings online, and we move it to where it needs to be. So it’s not cost effective for some big corporation to figure out how to use or sell these—so what? It’s not cost-effective for some big dumb record label to figure out how to keep music by any of my favorite bands in print, either. We’ll figure it out. We’re spookily good at it.”“Spookily?”“Trying to be more poetic.” He grinned and twisted the fuzzy split ends of his newly blue mohawk around his fingers. “Got a new girlfriend, she says there’s not enough poetry in my views on garbage.”
“What have we here?” Alan said, as he wandered into Kurt’s shop, which had devolved into joyous bedlam. The shelves had been pushed up against the wall, clearing a large open space that was lined with long trestle tables. Crusty-punks, goth kids, hippie kids, geeks with vintage video-game shirts, and even a couple of older, hard-done-by street people crowded around the tables, performing a conglomeration of arcane tasks. The air hummed with conversation and coffee smells, the latter emanating from a catering-sized urn in the corner.
He was roundly ignored—and before he could speak again, one of the PCs on the floor started booming out fuzzy, grungy rockabilly music that made him think of Elvis cassettes that had been submerged in salt water. Half of the assembled mass started bobbing their heads and singing along while the other half rolled their eyes and groaned.
Kurt came out of the back and hunkered down with the PC, turning down the volume a little. “Howdy!” he said, spreading his arms and taking in the whole of his dominion.
“Howdy yourself,” Alan said. “What do we have here?”
“We have a glut of volunteers,” Kurt said, watching as an old rummy carefully shot a picture of a flat-panel LCD that was minus its housing. “I can’t figure out if those laptop screens are worth anything,” he said, cocking his head. “But they’ve been taking up space for far too long. Time we moved them.”
Alan looked around and realized that the workers he’d taken to be at work building access points were, in the main, shooting digital pictures of junk from Kurt’s diving runs and researching them for eBay listings. It made him feel good—great, even. It was like watching an Inventory being assembled from out of chaos.
“Where’d they all come from?”
Kurt shrugged. “I dunno. I guess we hit critical mass. You recruit a few people, they recruit a few people. It’s a good way to make a couple bucks, you get to play with boss crap, you get paid in cash, and you have colorful co-workers.” He shrugged again. “I guess they came from wherever the trash came from. The city provides.”
The homeless guy they were standing near squinted up at them. “If either of you says something like,Ah, these people were discarded by society, but just as with the junk we rescue from landfills, we have seen the worth of these poor folks and rescued them from the scrapheap of society,I’m gonna puke.”
“The thought never crossed my mind,” Alan said solemnly.
“Keep it up, Wes,” Kurt said, patting the man on the shoulder. “See you at the Greek’s tonight?”
“Every night, so long as he keeps selling the cheapest beer in the Market,” Wes said, winking at Alan.
“It’s cash in the door,” Kurt said. “Buying components is a lot more efficient than trying to find just the right parts.” He gave Alan a mildly reproachful look. Ever since they’d gone to strictly controlled designs, Kurt had been heartbroken by the amount of really nice crap that never made its way into an access point.
“This is pretty amazing,” Alan said. “You’re splitting the money with them?”
“The profit—anything leftover after buying packaging and paying postage.” He walked down the line, greeting people by name, shaking hands, marveling at the gewgaws and gimcracks that he, after all, had found in some nighttime dumpster and brought back to be recycled. “God, I love this. It’s like Napster for dumpsters.”
“How’s that?” Alan asked, pouring himself a coffee and adding some UHT cream from a giant, slightly dented box of little creamers.
“Most of the music ever recorded isn’t for sale at any price. Like 80 percent of it. And the labels, they’ve made copyright so strong, no one can figure out who all that music belongs to—not even them! Costs a fortune to clear a song. Pal of mine once did a CD of Christmas music remixes, and he tried to figure out who owned the rights to all the songs he wanted to use. He just gave up after a year—and he had only cleared one song!
“So along comes Napster. It finds the only possible way of getting all that music back into our hands. It gives millions and millions of people an incentive to rip their old CDs—hell, their old vinyl and tapes, too!—and put them online. No label could have afforded to do that, but the people just did it for free. It was like a barn-raising: a library raising!”
Alan nodded. “So what’s your point—that companies’ dumpsters are being napstered by people like you?” A napsterized Inventory. Alan felt therightnessof it.
Kurt picked a fragile LCD out of a box of dozens of them and smashed it on the side of the table. “Exactly!” he said. “This is garbage—it’s like the deleted music that you can’t buy today, except at the bottom of bins at Goodwill or at yard sales. Tons of it has accumulated in landfills. No one could afford to pay enough people to go around and rescue it all and figure out the copyrights for it and turn it into digital files and upload it to the net—but if you give people an incentive to tackle a little piece of the problem and a way for my work to help you… ” He went to a shelf and picked up a finished AP and popped its latches and swung it open.
“Look at that—I didn’t get its guts out of a dumpster, but someone else did, like as not. I sold the parts I found in my dumpster for money that I exchanged for parts that someone else found inherdumpster—”
“Her?”
“Trying not to be sexist,” Kurt said.
“Are there female dumpster divers?”
“Got me,” Kurt said. “In ten years of this, I’ve only run into other divers twice or three times. Remind me to tell you about the cop later. Anyway. We spread out the effort of rescuing this stuff from the landfill, and then we put our findings online, and we move it to where it needs to be. So it’s not cost effective for some big corporation to figure out how to use or sell these—so what? It’s not cost-effective for some big dumb record label to figure out how to keep music by any of my favorite bands in print, either. We’ll figure it out. We’re spookily good at it.”
“Spookily?”
“Trying to be more poetic.” He grinned and twisted the fuzzy split ends of his newly blue mohawk around his fingers. “Got a new girlfriend, she says there’s not enough poetry in my views on garbage.”