We Run On Junk

19 May 2025 - Nate Hofmann

Our world runs on garbage. Most the things “modern society” seems to require only work because most of what they process amounts to useless. Heaps amounts of time, money, & capital are burned on making output that seek only to steal your time, misinform, or money by immediately falling apart.

Internationally shipped orders are throw away a month later, most physical mail we instantly toss unread, we see unprompted ads for things we don’t (at least at a higher level) want to buy, etc. Stuff is just produced for the slim marginally “positive” value that someone will sign up for something or get two wears out of it.

Advertising

The internet runs on advertising. Unless you’re using an ad-blocker if you’re reading an article, watching a video, or doing a web search you’re going to have ads forced across eyes without your consent.

They gunk up website borders, prolong watch times, and sit atop search results. You’re trying to do one thing & they only serve only to try to (unwillingly) drive your attention elsewhere in the hopes you might click (accidentally or purposely) into buying something you don’t need. Best case lightning strikes and targeted advertising coincides with an actual need - but they’re almost always a net negative to user experience. Yet they’re how a good chunk of sites make most of their money, so we’re stuck in an unhappy necessity with them.

Unfortunately ads infect your non-internet reality as well. Drive down any US highway, take any public transit, or even already be shopping in some store and you’re going to be blasted with calls to buy even more. Existing in any urban or heavily trafficked area, some non-insignificant amount of your attention going to be subconsciously attracted towards attention seeking ads. Unfortunately you can’t use an ad-blocker to opt of physical reality (yet),

International Shipping

Global shipping runs on the back of massive container ships that circumnavigating the globe carrying the latest iPhones to the latest fashion (not as much US with current slate of tariffs). Yet how many of those shipments fall apart after a couples uses then end up in the landfill? From the likes of hot brands like Shein & Temu dominating social media, up to even more expensive goods like the iPhone that begin to “break” after a couple years from software bloat. With how frequent some physical goods break nowadays, it just feels like a physical subscription service.

Countless resources are spent producing things people buy so it does seem “economically productive”. Jobs are made, goods are purchased, & needs “fulfilled”. Yet their true price isn’t captured because externalities of their pollution & unfair labor practices during production aren’t accounted. This easily verges on becoming a critique of over-consumption & planned obsolescence, but can we really not do better than a global economic system that promotes or allows this? All this “productivity” that ends up feeling for naught.

Mail

In the same vein as global shipping, most pieces of mail shipped across the US are pure garbage. Gone are the days of letters from friends or college acceptance letters, now when mailbox is yanked open you’re just met with heaps of advertisements, payment notices, and a weekly coupon pamphlet you don’t remember signing up for. Best case one of those payment notices is for something you didn’t turn on autopay for.

Similar point to the above section, spending so many resources on transporting items for them just to end up in the garbage just feels like pure waste. Granted this might be like the case of advertising where junk subsidizes the service enough so you can get the stuff you actually want - but could the price not be captured in a less wasteful way?

LLMs

A good chunk of the above is just spam. Making the problem worse, LLMs are really good at making spam. How much computation has been wasted to flood social media & shopping sites like Amazon or Etsy with automated, misleading ads to sell more stuff? Either cheaper ads for existing physical crap, or automating the process of digital crap like “books” or “posts” on social medial. That’s not even really touching on automated scam.

The cynic in me finds some compliance in the job of spam creation being automated to some degree. That this is what the “latest & greatest” technology is being used for.

What’s To Be Done?

You’re just a person, you’re not going to change the how everything works with the marginal actions of a single person. Yet opting out of the above systems as much as you also comes with some real quality-of-life improvements, consider trying:

Bottom Line

I just find it somewhat upsetting that so many resources seem to be put towards types of output like the above, just for it not to really do anything at all. It’s mostly just trashed or ignored, never really having ever existed. Yet this “junk” feels somewhat indispensable to our current economic structure either because they’ve upended most other options (shopping) or it’s the only way many stay afloat in the attention economy (websites, artists, etc.). As a business or a consumer, you’re just one part of this machine you don’t have much say in.

This whole post could easily continue into a greater criticism of the aforementioned economic system that incentives or requires the behaviors covered here, but others have done that before better than I could. This post is at most an observation rant trying to leave you with this question of is junk like this a “least worst” way to structure things, or are they bad systems that haven’t been upended due to the sheer weight of their societal momentum?