Dust, Cracks, Corruption
Why "broken world thinking" is more important than fetishized innovation
I’ve been posting here recently about the care economy, a large subject. But it’s part of an even larger subject, that of maintenance and repair of the world generally. (Which now has its own growing Maintenance Movement.)
This all got started back in 2014, when technology theorist Steven Jackson published an article called “Rethinking Repair”, his exercise in “broken world thinking.” Jackson was asking what happens when we take erosion, breakdown, and decay, rather than novelty, growth and progress, as our starting points in thinking about tech and media.
As a starting point, Jackson chose the shipbreaking industry of Bangladesh, as documented by photographer Edward Burtynsky in a series of striking photos capturing the process by which aging ocean vessels (i.e., the physical operating system of globalization) are beached, stripped, and dismantled as their fragments are dispersed through local offshore “back lots”. These are landscapes of the most abject maintenance work, found mainly in the global South’s “repair ecologies” where the gaps are filled by illegal water taps, grafted cables, pirate radio stations, and backyard boreholes.
In 2020, Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel, both historians of technology, published their Innovation Delusion, a reflection on why our fetishized focus on innovation, tilted toward economists and engineers, must be replaced by a culture which can address disruption and breakdown. Drawing on the work of the Maintainers research network, which Russell and Vinsel founded in 2016, the book argues for a cultural shift toward “how the world gets put back together”—i.e., the important but mostly devalued labor that keeps us healthy, safe, and productive.
The Maintainers even hosted a Festival of Maintenance in 2018 at which the topics discussed included social housing, facilities management, self-care, tool libraries, and the emotional labor of volunteer work. (Their work coincides with the rise of repair cafes in North America and Europe.)
This kind of repair-thinking means that the world’s fixers see things differently from designers or users. Fixing a broken system always involves elements of adaptation and improvisation.
To study maintenance is itself an act of maintenance. (Shannon Mattern)
It’s helpful to think of systems of maintenance working on different scales, which anthropologist Shannon Mattern offers in a brilliant 2018 article on Maintenance and Care.
The first scale is that of Rust, urban repair and improvisation. While the press may focus occasionally on the infrastructure report card (from the American Society of Civil Engineers) with its most recent D+ grade for the poor condition of our public works, this macro view obscures what Mattern calls “the phenomenal reality that the world is being fixed all around, every day,” amidst a continuous hum of repair and maintenance from the chatter of pneumatic drills, the drone of street sweepers, the clang of auto repair and garbage being collected. On this view, noisy sites of infill construction are a form of mending the urban fabric.
An important question Mattern asks us to consider in each case is, What exactly is being maintained? Is it the objects (the rusty bridges, the broken pipes, the irrigation ditch in the Nile Valley)? Or is it the negotiated order that surrounds it, the social and political relationships in which the objects are embedded. (She concludes it is both.)
The second scale in Mattern’s typology is Dust: Spaces of Labor and Care. This is the zone of social infrastructure created by librarians, domestic workers, building custodians, data managers, and the “global care chains” transferring maintenance labor from the global South to the north. This is labor to maintain life itself—buying household items, preparing and serving food, laundering and repairing clothing, socializing children, providing care and emotional support for adults.
It also includes “the rehearsed, compulsory care” performed by female workers—stewardesses, receptionists, nurses, waitresses, customer service reps.
Next in her scales of maintenance come Cracks: Fixing Objects. In this section Mattern takes up the themes of the right-to-repair movement (see the iFixit wiki for an example) and the world’s flows of electronic waste and other scrap. Here are the “frugal engineering” landscapes of the world’s shanzai (knockoff), jugaad (hack or kluge), and gambiarra (work-around) cultures—the often favela-based bricolage from bricoleurs.
They include the open-air shops and even public operating theaters (in the cities of Zambia, for example) where repairmen demonstrate their technical and creation social interaction as they “perform repair.”
Similarly, the internet cafes of Accra, Ghana are places where teenagers chat and play games on old computers discarded by school and offices in North America and Europe. They are part of Ghana’s contribution to the tech world today which is not in designing new machines but in finding opportunities for agency and innovation in their provisioning, repair and distribution.
Finally, the scale of Corruption: Cleaning Code and Data, in which Mattern reminds us that for all the talk about innovation and disruption in tech, most coders are busy “fixing stuff.” The world contains probably millions of systems administrators today, a job which could be described as “part plumber, part groundskeeper, and part ninja,” charged with fixing problems, maintaining the system, and fending off cyber attacks.
Mattern’s article concludes with “three enduring truths”: 1) maintainers require care; 2) caregiving requires maintenance; and 3) the distinctions between these practices are shaped by race, gender, class and other forces.
Maintenance, in sum, encompasses a world of standards, tools, practices, and wisdom, “sometimes deploying machine learning, at other times, a mop.”
See you next time—peace.
Fascinating...
Reminds me of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's work re: salvage accumulation and her book the Mushroom At the end of the World and the sorts of economies that spring up amidst ruins.
What a beautiful ode to fixers!