Decluttering the Pandemic: Marie Kondo, Minimalism, and the “Joy” of Waste
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Born largely from discourses on environmental sustainability, the contemporary minimalist movement has produced a new relationship to consumer objects. Where the accumulation of objects once conferred the status of wealth and prosperity under capitalism, minimalism aims to rethink the object as a spiritual extension of our inner lives. This is nowhere as evident than in the writing of Marie Kondo, whose teachings on “joyous” decluttering has enraptured a new class of consumers. Yet, for as much as contemporary thinking on minimalism figures in the image of eco-conscious neo-spirituality, this essay aims to demonstrate the relationship of minimalism to waste. For as much as the decluttering of our private spaces signals to the values of self-control and discipline, it also inadvertently intensifies a relationship to objects in which things that fail to “spark joy” become consigned to the garbage dumps and landfills that today swell with the abject accumulation of consumer society. For as much as the fashion of minimalism gestures to the aspirations of anti-consumerism, it is concomitantly the positive condition upon which the overflowing possessions of a Western consumer class are fated to become trash.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.050 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".