While I was out walking this morning, I noticed the rubbish skip outside a community flat at the university still has "Rise Up and Vote" grafittied on the side. I wonder if the person who painted that there in 2016 realised the artistic implications of broadcasting their message at that particular venue? It sounds like you should rise up against the establishment by voting third-party, in which case your ballot box is essentially equal to a rubbish skip. I figure "Enjoy Capitalism", painted to resemble the Coca-Cola slogan, would be better suited to skip grafitti; since everything from spent napkins to gaming computers will end up in the landfill at some point.
I first noticed that message painted there in 2016—8 years ago from the time of writing. Whoever painted it probably graduated university, went on to an internship, and is now leading a radically bourgeois life in a McMansion, saddled with debt and driving a Tesla. They dutifully voted for Jill Stein in 2016, Howie Hawkins in 2020, and will vote for whatever Unicorns & Free Weed Party candidate is going to show up in 2024. Whatever political views they had at age 18 got gentrified by constant exposure to the "vote purity" messages of Christian unitarianism, proving that the dumpster fire of gentrification will consume anything it touches.
That led me to think about actual dumpsters. Rubbish skips. Whatever. A popular kind of video on Youtube at the moment is skip-salvage (I used to call it "skip sifting", same general concept); someone in a fancy car rolls up on a skip and grabs stuff out of it, then brings it to a friend of theirs with a commercial-grade machine shop or something to have the objects cleaned up and/or repurposed so they can be sold at daylight robbery prices on Poshmark. Up until fairly recently, skip-salvage was seen as a pauper's activity—something you did if you couldn't otherwise afford things and had to go through the skips. There was someone who used to do that with the skip at my flat for a grand long while; basically from the time I moved here up until 2017 or thereabouts. On my way back from my morning stroll, I noticed a great shiny white pickup sitting next to the skip whilst its driver; a man of my approximate age; was loading it up with stuff that the people who moved out of Number 1 threw out yesterday, while his compatriot took a video of him with his phone. I haven't seen the poor guy in a while, but here's this relatively rich guy and his friend.
At first, it seemed kind of odd to me that skip-salvage would get gentrified, but upon reflection, it makes perfect sense. The point of gentrification is to force all but the richest people out of a part of society, and since retail firms have been trying to criminalise salvage for a long time to no meaningful effect, gentrification presented the opportunity to make it difficult to salvage. I'm fairly convinced that a lot of the binners who make Youtube videos of themselves salvaging from retail skips have been invited there by the manager. Not only does this remove items from the skip that would otherwise be salvaged by impoverished people, it also provides the firm an opportunity to recoup some of the profit they couldn't make from the sale of discarded goods.
But, people don't just salvage clothes, electronics, and furnishings, do they? They also salvage food; and usually the first place they go with it is the local food bank. Consider the quality of food that gets discarded, however—things that have passed their expiry dates and contaminated food for which product recalls were issued. The public perception of food recalls is that the merchant packages the food back up and returns it to the manufacturer who destroys it in a furnace or something. However, what actually happens is the merchant simply throws away the recalled items and makes an insurance claim. It doesn't go into any sort of biohazard container, it just goes into the skip. As a result, binners have no way of knowing whether the food that they salvage is just old or it needs to be destroyed because eating it will kill you. Hundreds of pounds of salvaged food makes its way to food banks every single day, where it ends up in the mouths and stomachs of the impoverished, because these so-called "freegans" are more interested in creating charity porn to bring in ad revenue than they are in keeping people safe. "Oh, aren't I such a wonderful person, singlehandedly fighting hunger in my hometown like this? Now I'm going to help you, too; subscribe to Betterhelp today!"
If it hasn't happened already, freeganism is going to get somebody killed.