Pile Migration :::: chapter three, page 2

autobiographies), and the most common manifestation of all, goods. Be it stacks of cereal boxes in grocery store isles, lumber at Home Depot, fancy home-entertainment set-ups, or the horizontal clotheslines of department stores – the sought after joys of consumerism frequently position themselves in orderly stacks.

Furthermore, and more further from display, stacks develop as a response to excess. Like the lack of meager minded millionaires suggests, a rise in standards of living correlates highly with increased levels of production and consumption. (We suggest such excessive supply and demand lifestyles might provide a more appropriate meaning to the economic term surplus.) Yet any conventional burdens of excess, like the complexity of housing and transporting greater quantities, are temporarily avoided with the implementation of stacks. So called economies of scale defy conventional logic by suggesting that a family of 12 is more manageable than a family of 4. Or that relocating two tons of water is 'easier' than two gallons. What twisted reasoning justifiably opposes these seemingly obvious instincts? Mostly, basic economic theories and efficient designed stacks.

Take the form in which most products exist, packaged. Packaging is not simply a safety assurance, or even an advertising slate, but more importantly a stack. Like the shoe box transforming a pair of clunky and elongated rubber paws into a uniform straight-edged brick, a wide array of awkward and abnormal shapes are contained within stacks filling stockrooms and warehouses. The majority of which are concealed from the

customers eyes, for the sake of convenience or contained exposure to the dull side of consumerism, one is to wonder. Either way, the business benefits of stacks, cardboard boxes in this case, are obvious. Whereas storing and sorting 50 actual pairs of tennis shoes exceeds the proportional difficulty of storing only 5 actual pairs, shoe-boxes alleviate these discrepancies via stacking – the ordering of a previously chaotic medium. Economics, and the capitalists that prostitute it, relies on the stack to increase order, justify economies of scale, and thus allow for unnecessary excess. (Further attempts for improving management and efficiency include filing cabinets, suitcases, and the 2.4 x 2.6 x 6.1 meters standardization of shipping containers, all of which take the form of a stack.)

We fear these previous paragraphs have complicated the matter at hand; establishing core distinctions between piles and stacks. Therefore the image on the following page has been inserted to clarify. As one can see, all that stacks are, piles are not. Stating the inverse, that is stacks are what piles are not, would be slightly more difficult due to the 'unquantifiableness' or indefiniteness characterizing piles. Rather, piles are inherently more difficult to define than stacks. This section itself, defining piles and stacks, is a rather stack-like quest (an act we ambivalently apologize for). Furthermore:

Definitions and quantification dominate stack-revolving societies, inflicting a prominent psychosis upon any thought producing citizens. Questions like 'how much?', 'how many?', and 'what time is it?' plague mental boundaries and divert attention to more quantifiable and capitalist-like pursuits.

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