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 in her dumpster—”
“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.”
They found one of Davey’s old nests in March, on a day when you could almost believe that the spring would really come and the winter would go and the days would lengthen out to more than a few hours of sour greyness huddled around noon. The reference design for the access point had gone through four more iterations, and if you knew where to look in the Market’s second-story apartments, rooftops, and lampposts, you could trace the evolution of the design from the clunky PC-shaped boxen in Alan’s attic on Wales Avenue to the environment-hardened milspec surplus boxes that Kurt had rigged from old circuit boxes he’d found in Bell Canada’s Willowdale switching station dumpster.