Creation vs Maintenance
So much of today’s society revolves around creating new things rather than maintaining existing things. Yet, the two go hand in hand - innovation without the ability to scale and maintain is frivolous, and maintenance without innovation is stagnation.
There is importance in indigenous knowledge and tradition.
Web3: shouldering the cost of maintenance among the users rather than centralizing it with the creators
Do Eastern vs Western cultures have diff takes on this? “Over the course of the 20th century, open societies that celebrated diversity, novelty, and progress performed better than closed societies that defended uniformity and order.”
MVP vs Product
https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/ Not just building out an initial system, but also about how maintainable and scalable the system is for the forseable future.
Businesses that actually care about turning a profit will spend a lot of time (hence, a lot of engineers) working on optimizing systems, even if an MVP for the system could have been built in a weekend.
This reminds me of a common fallacy we see in unreliable systems, where people build the happy path with the idea that the happy path is the “real” work, and that error handling can be tacked on later. For reliable systems, error handling is more work than the happy path. The same thing is true for large services – all of this stuff that people don’t think of as “real” work is more work than the core service
Defining Innovation
Innovation: the word to hide the lack of substance. A term gains popularity because it resonates with the zeitgeist, reaches buzzword status, then suffers from overexposure and cooptation.
In formal economic terms, ‘innovation’ involves the diffusion of new things and practices. The term is completely agnostic about whether these things and practices are good.
- Proved to be useful -> innovations
- Proved to be useful over 40 years -> technology ma
Innovation is overvalued
The Maintainers Organization and their fellowship
“What happens after innovation, they argue, is more important. Maintenance and repair, the building of infrastructures, the mundane labour that goes into sustaining functioning and efficient infrastructures, simply has more impact on people’s daily lives than the vast majority of technological innovations.”
“These shuttles brought high-tech employees from hip, pricey urban homes to their lush suburban campuses, without exposing them to the inconvenience of public transportation or to the vast populations of the poor and homeless who also call Silicon Valley their home.” -> similar to some concepts in fctc talking about displacement of people during the ‘back to the land’ movement by the New Communalists
It is crucial to understand that technology is not innovation. This preoccupation with novelty is unfortunate because it fails to account for technologies in widespread use, and it obscures how many of the things around us are quite old.
Lindy Effect -> future life expectancy of a bit of technology is proportional to its current age (i.e. the longer something has survived, the more likely it is to have a longer remaining life expectancy). Longevity implies a resistance to change, obsolescence or competition and greater odds of continued existence into the future.
The stalest innovation stories focus on well-to-do white guys sitting in garages in a small region of California, but human beings in the Global South live with technologies too. Which ones? Where do they come from? How are they produced, used, repaired?
Third, focusing on infrastructure or on old, existing things rather than novel ones reminds us of the absolute centrality of the work that goes into keeping the entire world going. We need to acknowledge and attribute where we are today to the shoulders of the giants we stand on.
‘Broken world thinking’ -> focus on constant process of entropy and undoing of work and what we can do to slow/halt this process rather than introducing new things. Curious how this relates to climate tech and general escapist vibes of people like Elon wanting to escape to space rather than fixing problems with our current world.
The Maintainers: the individuals whose work keeps ordinary existence going rather than introducing novel things. Related to paid open source , how do we incentivize maintenance?
“Feminist theorists have long argued that obsessions with technological novelty obscures all of the labour, including housework, that women, disproportionately, do to keep life on track.”
On shifting the focus too quickly
“One important topic of conversation is the danger of moving too triumphantly from innovation to maintenance. There is no point in keeping the practice of hero-worship that merely changes the cast of heroes without confronting some of the deeper problems underlying the innovation obsession.”