"The general movement of life is a luxurious squandering of energy in every form, with death as its horizon." — Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share (1949)
The residents of the Wohlstandsgürtel do not merely eat well. They eat with the systematic ambition of people who have confused appetite with ideology. The district's limestone townhouses — Ringstraße-adjacent in their pompous articulation, pilasters shouldering cornices above bay windows that bulge like evidence — contain dining rooms of extraordinary scale, fitted with mechanical serving lifts, double-width sideboards, and, in the grander houses, private pneumatic waste channels connecting directly to the main canal network below Kanalgrund. These private channels were originally marketed by their installers as a discreet convenience. They have become, as the canal system's structural reports make increasingly clear, an existential engineering problem. Odilo Wamst was appointed Gluttony Assessor seventeen years ago, in theory to apply the canal-burden tax: a graduated levy on households whose consumption placed disproportionate hydraulic demand on the shared infrastructure of the lo...
From the lore of Flatulence as Logos: The Pneumatic Language of the Disenfranchised.