Kipple

Kipple is a concept introduced in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to describe the ubiquitous, self-replicating junk that fills the abandoned apartments and empty spaces of a post-World War Terminus Earth. More than mere clutter, kipple functions as a material manifestation of entropy, a universal principle of decay that threatens to overwhelm all human and nonhuman life. The term is coined and explained by the "chickenhead" John Isidore, who lives in a nearly deserted apartment building and has firsthand experience of kipple's relentless advance.

Definition and First Law

Isidore defines kipple as "useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday's homeopape" . He articulates a "First Law of Kipple": "'Kipple drives out nonkipple'" , a principle he explicitly compares to Gresham's law about bad money driving out good. The law operates autonomously: "When nobody's around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there's twice as much of it. It always gets more and more" . This self-replication is not a physical process but a perceived inevitability, a kind of material will that fills the vacuum left by human absence.

Kippleization as Universal Process

Isidore extends kipple from a domestic nuisance to a cosmic principle. He tells the android Pris Stratton that "the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization" . The only exception he allows is "the upward climb of Wilbur Mercer" , the central figure of the empathy-based religion Mercerism. This contrast positions kipple as the material counterpart to Mercer's spiritual ascent: one represents decay and isolation, the other fusion and meaning. The process of kippleization is visible everywhere in the novel's landscape. The abandoned suburbs of San Francisco have become "completely kipple-ized" , and Isidore's own building is a prime example: "Eventually everything within the building would merge, would be faceless and identical, mere pudding-like kipple piled to the ceiling of each apartment" . The decay is not only physical but temporal; the building itself "would settle into shapelessness, buried under the ubiquity of the dust" .

Kipple and the Post-War World

Kipple is intimately tied to the novel's setting: a world devastated by World War Terminus, where radioactive dust has driven most of humanity to emigrate to Mars. The war's legacy is a planet "begin to disintegrate into junk" , and the garbage-collecting industry has become one of Earth's most important businesses. Buster Friendly, the ubiquitous TV entertainer, jokes that Earth would "die under a layer — not of radioactive dust — but of kipple" . The connection between kipple and the dust is explicit: both are forms of entropic waste that accumulate in the absence of human care. The dust, like kipple, is a "legacy of World War Terminus" that "filtered in and at him, brought him daily, so long as he failed to emigrate, its little load of befouling filth" . Kipple, however, is the domestic, human-scale version of this planetary decay.

Kipple and the Androids

The concept of kipple also resonates with the novel's treatment of androids. The android Rachael Rosen, reflecting on her own existence, describes herself and her kind as "chitinous reflex-machines who aren't really alive" , a description that echoes the inert, proliferating nature of kipple. The bounty hunter Rick Deckard, after retiring the android Luba Luft, feels a profound sense of wrongness, and his superior Harry Bryant's office is described as a place of "documents and papers and kipple" , suggesting that the bureaucratic machinery of bounty hunting is itself a form of kipple. The androids, like kipple, are products of a system that creates and discards without regard for life. The novel's final image of the electric toad, a false animal that Deckard mistakes for a real one, reinforces this connection: the toad, like kipple, is a manufactured object that mimics life but is ultimately inert.

Kipple and the Tomb World

Isidore's experience of kipple is directly linked to his encounters with the "tomb world," a desolate, bone-strewn landscape that he enters through the empathy box. When the androids mutilate a spider he has found, he feels the kipple around him intensify: "the cupboards of the kitchen creaked and split and he felt the floor beneath his feet give" . The kipple becomes a physical manifestation of his despair, a world where "everything in here is old" and "it long ago began to decay and it won't stop" . The tomb world is the ultimate kipple-ized space, a place where "nothing here ever changes; a point comes when it does not even decay" . Kipple, then, is not just a material phenomenon but a psychological and spiritual one, a force that mirrors the inner decay of a world that has lost its capacity for empathy and connection.

Significance

Kipple functions as a central metaphor in the novel for the entropic forces that threaten human meaning and connection. It is the material residue of a world that has been abandoned, both physically and emotionally. The only counterforce to kipple is the empathic fusion of Mercerism, which offers a temporary stasis against the relentless tide of decay. Isidore's ability to create "a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple" in his own apartment is a fragile achievement, one that depends on his continued presence and care. The novel suggests that without such care, the universe will inevitably succumb to kippleization, a fate that is both material and spiritual.