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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 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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Guilty as charged:
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An allegory for 2020: A long ways back, I accidentally broke the big old dough-proofing bowl that we use for salad. It made @twigz very sad. For quite a while, we looked for replacements, but they were always too small, or too expensive, or somehow not quite right. 1/
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A wooden salad bowl, broken cleanly in half.
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Replying to
Interesting perspective. I’m all for maintaining things as both an expression of ownership (e.g. “right to repair” arguments) and a venue for learning new transferable skills. A “maintenance first” culture disaggregates knowledge and opens more possibilities for individuals.
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