"Garbage Trucks in the Waste Regime: Software, Hardware, and Neoliberalism"

How do we talk about the waste we create and manage, when it can be so hard to see? This presentation follows the history of the municipal structures for waste management and the people working within them. The material features of these systems are usually obscured, pushed away and compacted: We package up our trash and wheel it to the street; we toss it into a hole in the wall, and a garbage chute makes it disappear. “Garbage men” empty bins at night or early in the morning, and carry our trash out of sight.
These garbage men, and their trucks, are just one node of this network, and my focus in this presentation: By looking at the garbage truck, and the documents produced alongside it (operator’s manuals, brochures, safety handbooks), I mean to show how these trucks are an expression of an ideology of progress, and, as they have developed within the waste management industry, very nearly a neoliberal fetish object.
In an effort to keep pace with consumer good manufacturing, the waste management industry has focused its efforts on mechanization, rationalization, standardization, vertical integration and economies of scale. Automation, fleet management software, and other tools have crept in slowly—I trace the varieties of digital tools that have been developed, and slowly adopted through examining the grey literature of the industry.
Their inclusion in the industry is not without complication. The attention paid to these digital tools is, I posit, a kind of fetishization. The social and material circumstances of the truck, its use, and its place within waste management more broadly, become faded and indistinct in the glare of the gadgets and novelties given time and money instead. This software, the cameras, and so on become a tool for obfuscation: the more flashy, the more modern the truck is or appears, the less we are able to see our relentless cycle of production, consumption, and burgeoning waste, and the truck itself is infused with ideas about modernity and progress.