Maintenance
The ongoing work of keeping things going, as distinct from the work of making them.
The Idea
Maintenance is unglamorous in proportion to its importance. When it works, nothing happens — and nothing happening is invisible. When it fails, everything else fails. The water stops. The server goes down. The relationship dissolves. The harvest fails.
Modern industrial culture has systematically overvalued novelty and undervalued maintenance. “Innovation” is legible — it can be patented, announced, funded. Maintenance is invisible by design: its success looks like the absence of events. A building whose roof never leaks doesn’t make news; the team that checked and replaced flashing every spring doesn’t get credit.
This is not neutral. Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell organized “The Maintainers” (2016) as an explicit counter to Silicon Valley’s disruption narrative. The technologies we actually depend on — electrical grids, water systems, roads, supply chains, code bases — require constant maintenance to keep functioning. The people who do this work are undervalued, underresourced, and largely invisible in the cultural stories we tell about progress.
Broken World Thinking
Media scholar Steven Jackson proposes “broken world thinking” as a reorientation. Start from the premise that the default state of all things is decay. Entropy is constant; maintenance is the work of resisting it. If this is the baseline, then repair and care become primary rather than secondary.
A repaired thing contains the knowledge of what failed and why. A system that’s been maintained through multiple failure modes is understood in ways that a newly installed system isn’t. The maintainer accumulates knowledge that the maker doesn’t have.
This connects directly to embodied-knowledge: maintenance develops a specific kind of understanding — intimate, situated, earned through the work itself. The person who has coaxed a particular machine through ten failure modes knows it in a way the person who designed it may not.
The Tension
Maintenance can become conservatism. The commitment to keeping existing systems running can impede necessary change. Good maintenance knows when to patch and when to rebuild — and “when to rebuild” is a maintenance judgment, not a novelty judgment.
The maintainer’s bias toward the familiar is real. Sometimes the thing worth maintaining isn’t the system but the function it serves — and that function can sometimes be served better by something different.
Connections
- repair-culture — the tradition of knowing how to fix
- embodied-knowledge — the understanding that comes from keeping things going
- appropriate-technology — designed for maintainability
- shadow-work — maintenance is often unwaged, unvalued, invisible
- conviviality — maintained tools stay under user control
- dignity-of-labor — the work of keeping things going is worthy work
Further Reading
- Vinsel, Lee and Russell, Andrew. “Hail the Maintainers.” Aeon (2016)
- Jackson, Steven J. “Rethinking Repair.” Media Technologies (2014)
- Mattern, Shannon. “Maintenance and Care.” Places Journal (2018)