To reflect on waste is to think of it beyond cycles of consumption, as an integral element of cultural processes. The essay broadens the analysis of waste to speak of cultural remainders in a more comprehensive sense, including populations that exist (and have to subsist) at the margins of the official city, often through acts of reappropriation generally considered piracy. Such reappropriation is central to the informal economies whose control evades the cybernetic approaches to governance, and whose cultural logic offers a counterrationality to dominant processes of consumption. Piracy is a strong element of informal economies, and its mode of production and distribution operates through fragmentation, occurring in the interstices of the city or in an ephemeral manner in order to escape surveillance. Strategies of evasion and the fluidity of the market of illegal goods, the ephemeral appropriation of space by street peddlers, by garbage collectors and inhabitants of residual spaces offers a broader view of a dynamic of info-technological recodification that is not restricted to groups of tactical media, political activists, or the terrain of digital media such as Internet and mobile telephony.