Capitalism is when maintenance is Somebody Else’s Problem.
People owning a lot more stuff than renting makes maintenance much more inefficient. We appreciate economies of manufacturing scale but not efficiencies of maintenance scale.
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Outlier DIY hackers may do better than the industrial mean of service standards for say car repairs, but the average human never will. Learning data gets spread too thin. A repair org gets both concentration of learning data and institutional capacity for inductive generalization
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There’s other incentives driving aggregated capitalist maintenance towards things like disposability and replacement over repair, but that’s a different problem. When maintenance is in fact the right answer aggregating it is more efficient from a knowledge and quality perspective
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I’m also increasingly wary of people fetishizing maintenance as some sort of noble behavior. It’s just another behavior like manufacturing 🧐
Maintenance virtue signaling is annoying. Kintsugiwashing.
I don’t want a damn sacred golden seam in my cracked bowl.
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I suspect once we learn to internalize full-lifecycle circular economy environmental costs we’ll get a less distorted view of repair/replace/dispose tradeoffs. Right now it’s a religious war between the Church of Efficiency and the Temple of Repairability.
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Kintsugiwashing is the primary ritual behavior of Waldenponders.
I could do a whole insult-comic standup routine around this.
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“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.” - Kurt Vonnegut
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In the physical asset space Government regulation tends to be the backstop for maintenance duties but the "public servant" motifs of most gov work render it unsavvy.
For a peek into what marketplaces of maintenance look like, see the cleaner wrasse
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Ownership and economies of maintenance scale are not mutually exclusive. AppleCare for phones, long term bumper-to-bumper warrantees for cars, service contracts for home appliances and systems, and pool boys.
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