
Maintenance often matters more than innovation (2016) - libraryofbabel
https://aeon.co/essays/innovation-is-overvalued-maintenance-often-matters-more
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dkural
This expose really opened my eyes to how our political system will spend
billions for a new station but won't fix broken track signals and chewed out
cabling:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-
subway-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-
system-failure-delays.html)

~~~
libraryofbabel
Nice piece of journalism.

Maintenance isn't sexy. It doesn't make for catchy political campaign
promises. It's dirty, it's hard, it never ends, and you've succeed best when
no one notices.

But we live in a world full of old technologies and old systems that need
constant maintenance and repair. Big infrastructure like the NY Subway is a
prime example. 'Innovation' is only of marginal help when dealing with a
system like that. Sure, if we had a spare ~$200 billion and were willing to
completely evacuate New York City for 3 years we could rip everything out and
build a new subway system to rival Singapore or Hong Kong. But this is the
real world, and we have to rebuild the proverbial ship while it's still at
sea. And the degree to which we have the tools and money to do so is a
consequence of our political system.

For anyone who found the OP article interesting, and who cares about
technology as it really is across the world rather than as it's portrayed by
the Silicon Valley hype machine, I highly recommend the book cited at one
point in the article: _The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History
since 1900_ , by the historian David Edgerton. It completely changed how I
think about technology and the ways people use it.

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erasemus
Civilisation is a Red Queen; we must keep running just to stand still.
Maintaining and conserving things is the job of conservatives, not
entrepreneurs, and conservatives _resist_ change. Indeed most changes are
detrimental.

Yet in the long run we absolutely _depend_ on change in order to adapt and
survive. Therefore there has to be a rigorous way of reconciling these two
principles. Without fudging ('maintenance _often_ matters more...')

Maybe: visionaries will develop new ideas _with no intention to enact them_.
Eventually a few will become so well-thought-out, so vivid and so blatantly
superior to the incumbent alternatives that they become inevitable. That is,
society cannot _help_ but enact them.

This already seems to be happening in some areas:

e.g. moral improvements which come about via fiction, especially fantasy
fiction

e.g. individual decision-making (it seems like we deliberate for a while and
then actions take place automatically)

e.g. Project Hieroglyph (no idea how this is getting along but what a great
idea)

[http://hieroglyph.asu.edu/](http://hieroglyph.asu.edu/)

...and of course all those brilliant videos on YT of engineering schemes for
the future, e.g.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMbI6sk-62E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMbI6sk-62E)

~~~
apsophus
> Maintaining and conserving things is the job of conservatives, not
> entrepreneurs, and conservatives resist change.

I'm mystified by this. Why does maintenance have to be a 'conservative' thing?
Probably 70% of software engineering work is maintenance of one kind of or
another. Are those engineers conservatives? Do they 'resist change'? Unless
you mean 'conversative' in a very restricted sense of that word.

> so well-thought-out, so vivid and so blatantly superior to the incumbent
> alternatives that they become inevitable. That is, society cannot help but
> enact them.

This is a version of 'technological determinism' (Google it if you need to).
If there's any single takeaway from the last 50 years of scholarship on the
history of technnology, it's that technological determism is false.

~~~
sooheon
> This is a version of 'technological determinism' [...] If there's any single
> takeaway from the last 50 years of scholarship on the history of
> technnology, it's that technological determism is false.

This kind of thinking is astonishing to me. "Technological determinism" is a
historical term--i.e. reified in its era. The arguments ("stirrups enabled
feudalism") are dated and simplistic and easily torn down. But to reduce a
thought (discovery of technology influences human behavior, and can bring
about its own creation) to a label ("technological determinism") and then
dismiss it for historical reasons (older versions of that label were
insufficient, therefore it is wrong), is sloppy thinking, imo.

~~~
BaronSamedi
I agree. It would be inaccurate to say that the invention of the electric
guitar was the sufficient cause of rock'n'roll. On the other hand, the
electric guitar is clearly a necessary cause. I think the best model for this
interaction is a feedback loop (in the systems sense) where technology
influence culture which influences technology.

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MrVitaliy
How about innovation in system maintenance, or maintenance of innovative
streak?

~~~
crocal
Absolutely yes. There is a goldmine there waiting to be found. Most appliances
in our modern world are total maintenance disasters, especially compared to
pre-industrial civilizations.

~~~
WillReplyfFood
I never understood why we do not copy paste certain ideas from nature in our
infrastructure. Why cant pipe secret a protective film, to avoid clogging and
fracturing? Why cant we creat systems that self-repair decently.

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jorgec
Is called business continuity.

~~~
arca_vorago
You spelled planned obsolescence wrong.

