Conversation

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.
8
248
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
4
54
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
1
25
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.
5
46
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.
2
37