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.
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
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
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.
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.
Sounds plausible.
Is there a finite/infinite or fragile/anti-fragile counterpoint to be made here?
Are institutions with T-shaped skill/knowledge/tool distributions more robust than those with more strictly siloed distributions?