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What if obsolescence marks the beginning? When our usefulness and utility is often contextualized by how profitable it is for capitalism, maybe once its labeled as useless is when its life can really begin.

When our everyday life is littered with interactions and encounters with the products of extraction and exploitation, there is a question of what does it mean to create in an ethical, generative fashion. Global capitalism is both far-reaching and all-encompassing in the process of production, making it hard to imagine a process otherwise.

One way is to look at the old. Maybe new can be made from from the past, something generative can be molded out of rot. When a whale dies, they sink to the bottom of the ocean and create a whale fall, an ephemeral ecosystem in the deep sea, where nutrients are usually hard to come by. Worms, crabs, fish, and more crowd the carcass, a rare moment of flourish. The death of a whale feeds a community.

The premise of modern technology is predicated on an unrelenting and constant churn of new. This can be explicit—with the case of marked obsolescence, but it can come in other ways too, a company dropping support of a file format or the never-ending marketing bombardment advocating for higher resolutions. What does it mean to oppose that process, to offer a re-contextualization, the same way fungi question the linear assumption of life and death?

Free from the rigid framework of work life, a technological object can spend its time playing. Old objects that are deemed inferior, whether they are printers, cell phones, or cameras can be restored and used. An item being slower or more bulky are only deemed a problem under a very narrow scope of success. There are plenty of artists that exclusively shoot on toy cameras, super low resolution gadgets that distort as much as they capture. They understand that precision or consistency are not the only metrics that matter.

But even if the object is restored only to serve the same function, that too is useful. Cherishing the old is a way to redistribute the wealth. As we reconfigure the relationship of decay and bloom, it's worth asking if the death given was premature or even necessary. A projector that is thrown out as junk by a school can still be useful in a classroom elsewhere.

Maybe a TV is really broken beyond repair, then the innards can be hollowed out, a new fish tank or interesting picture frame. Or a refrigerator just can't keep cool anymore, maybe it becomes the site of a small gallery. A totally busted camcorder, it too

There's the notion that capitalism is a death cult, in which case, it is obsessed with the end. So there is an urgency in not only preventing that replication of short-sighted extraction when it comes to our creating, but valuable work in reframing the objects and products around us, to refuse capitalism to dictate a cycle's end.