Conversation

Maintenance is not just boring, it is metaboring Boring is when you change the channel because a dull show on Metaboring is the realization that there’s nothing good on TV and you have to turn it off and do something else for a bit Maintenance is metaboringness for life itself
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There’s a slowly developing high-minded ideology around valorizing maintenance. I’m going to bet it will fail. Humans never step up to the ennobling demands of a high-maintenance world, we tend to blow it up so it’s either more interesting or lower maintenance
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There’s that theory of collapse that says societies collapse when they get too complex. Too complex = demands more maintenance than humans can endure.
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“Modern” epochs begin when there is enough technological surplus to systematically buy present conveniences at the cost of future maintenance debt. They end when we declare maintenance bankruptcy. Not saying this is a good thing. It’s just who we are as a species.
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Maintenance releases, service packs, security updates blah blah blah. Computers live for maintenance. Just wish they didn’t drag us into it.
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Natural evolution tends to either automate maintenance needs or throw a closed fun loop around them. We mostly throw an open bureaucratic loop at them and then try to motivate with extrinsic carrots/sticks. Blech.
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Maybe there’s an alternative conception of AI as SM. Self-maintaining systems. IBM at one point was trying something stuffily named autonomic computing that was sorta this idea. Forget intelligence and recursive self-improvement. You invent self-maintenance and you’re kinda done.
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We already live in the highest maintenance society ever, almost entirely due to one technology: TV. Every day a big chunk of humans watch 2-4 hours of life from a high-interestingness/low-maintenance fictional metaverse, go to bed for a bit, and then do 8h maintenance work
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Replying to
I think you’re wrong on one thing: maintenance load on individuals has not gone up over time. Complexity of an individual’s life hasn’t either. Maintenance in most areas of life is actually easier now, so we just pick up more things to maintain in order to stay competitive
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Replying to
As a maintenance deacon: Celebration of metaboring maintenance is a manufactured beef to counter SV hubris that techsplains "society's biggest problems" The motifs are ~ HighSparrow<>Cersei Lannister. It's the "ok innovator" response to creation<>disruption SV bipolarity.
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Replying to
I’m comfortable being a member of the maintenance priesthood. Fundamentally, people enjoy boring infrastructure; enables them to do fun art stuff. There can be a masochistic glee in it though. Home remodeling is probably 45% evil; just live in a crappier house, people.
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