The Greenpoint Shredder: Destroyers of Information

There are a lot of ways to get rid of your demons, your secrets, your dirty laundry here in Greenpoint/Williamsburg. If you’ve got something sneaky on paper, send it off to CitiStorage, where they’ll box it up and store it in their warehouse for the foreseeable future. Or, you can throw it into Newtown Creek, where it’s bound to all but disappear into the sludge. Or, as of two weeks ago, you can take yourself down to the Greenpoint Shredder and put your mind at ease.

The Greenpoint Shredder is a group of 3-4 anonymous Greenpointers who offer time slots to individuals interested in scheduling a fifteen minute vent session in which to talk to a stranger. Once their time is up, whatever was discussed “goes to the shredder,” and is, figuratively speaking, disposed of.

“We figured, we wanted to have a confession-style talk, but have it be completely detached from religious and psychiatric norms,” said Leon, one of the organizers of the Greenpoint Shredder. Just two weeks ago, the Greenpoint Shredder was listed for the first time on an events list-serve offering time slots to the general public. Anyone interested was required to send a request via email, to be met with the address of the Shredder headquarters. The Shredder meets with three or four people each week, and plans to sustain a routine of weekly meetings, generally falling on a Friday, depending on which one of them decides to host.

“Some people think it sounds strange, or that it’s out of left field, but other people really get it,” Leon said. “You can say it’s about crisis, the recession, loneliness—we just figured this was something that needed to happen.”

“It’s a little contribution to the overall destruction of information,” Leon explained—or rather, didn’t explain. “You either get it or you don’t. Things bother people, and we get rid of it. We listen, and after fifteen minutes they forget what they’ve said. They send it through a shredder.”

But is the Greenpoint Shredder an art project? Is it a sociological experiment? Is it a “project” at all? Leon insisted that the Greenpoint Shredder is none of the above—if anything, it’s an exercise in existentialism, or maybe even nihilism.

“It’s a business transaction,” he said. “We are offering people a service. I don’t want it to be meaningful, or to have a point. We destroy information, that’s what we do. We aren’t trying to do anything, we’re just there, removed from other social norms.”

Though, by referring to themselves as the Greenpoint Shredder, one would assume that all conversations that take place are, well, in need of shredding; all information dispensed during these meetings is of a delicate nature.

“Oh that’s five levels above my thinking,” Leon said. “This isn’t some fight club situation. I don’t assume anything, I just let things happen. We’re just some people, doing this thing.”