The baleful influence of Massive Change

Reading books on urban agriculture for a paper I'm writing, I noticed in one of them what I would call the Massive Change strategy. I'm unsure if Bruce Mau pioneered this or merely exploited it, but its hallmark is to jam the pages with short contributions around the nominal theme in the hope that something will stick or that their sheer quantity will distract the reader from their actual content and, more to the point, their real value as a collection. Less than the sum is my take. I felt this a bit reading through four recent issues of Arcade on "waste," that in some cases the content felt "obligatory" and therefore perfunctory, repetitious, needless.