This book begins by asserting that the earliest known voice recording is that of Walt Whitman reciting his poem "America" ​​in 1890. Before that date, and without any available sound recordings, we have no idea what speech sounded like. If we were to hear a first-century Roman say "rosae" today, we might hear something like the roar of a tiger or the sound of a machine. Everything has its "year zero," the point beyond which we invent everything: that's where fiction begins. And this book concludes by unfolding an entirely alternative theory about what constitutes an artistic product, a machine, and an organism, thus producing new meanings for the concepts of "natural" and "artificial."

In between, and along a path woven with a highly personal network of metaphors that unite the poetic and the scientific, we will encounter things like an aeronautical interpretation of Benjamin's Angel of History, or the reasons behind Western identity—forged in the idea of ​​travel and the construction of "the other"—or pages that will shed new light on contemporary arts—especially appropriation art—or we will learn what fragmentation and noise in communication mean today. From a New Order album to the horse Nietzsche embraced in Turin, from the films of Chris Marker to Lady Gaga, from complex systems theories to the Sleepers of Ephesus, from the mythology of Romanticism to the no less impossible mythology of pop, or from the reasons for the recent global economic collapse to the "Higgs Boson Blues" sung by Nick Cave, everything in this book comes to redefine our everyday lives.

The General Theory of Garbage is based on the principle that we do not create arts and sciences through excellence, but rather by using past garbage, the waste unwittingly left behind by others. This book proposes a highly original ontology and epistemology of our contemporary world: the cultural genes of the near future are found in the waste of our present.