Posit Newsletter #03
Maintenance / Permacomputing / Cycles in Utopia
Just Maintaining
Maintenance is the broad theme of this newsletter. It was inspired by my recent interest in so-called permacomputing, a school of thought that, as the name suggests, aims to bring computation into line with permaculture principles. Permacomputing poses interesting questions about how this essential but highly extractive and energy-intensive area of technology can be made more ecological. I wrote a bit about it here:
Doug Bierend
Another reason for this theme is the recent release of Stewart Brand’s new book, Maintenance of Everything: Part One. I’ve written a bit more about that below.
A few years ago, I started following the work of the Maintainers, “a global research and practice network that is focused on advancing maintenance, repair, and care.” Associated with principles of degrowth, their work and thinking — and the simple, unfortunately counterintuitive notion of maintenance as a central pillar of social life — struck me as a welcome subversion of the hubbub around innovation and disruption. Maintenance is, after all, crucial to the proper and sustainable functioning of everything. Not just machines, but bodies, societies, institutions, bioregions, relationships. Though invention and novelty are given priority in our society — a model of progress based on the call to “move fast and break things” — maintenance is the often unseen and thankless connective tissue that makes life as we know it possible, innovative industries being no exception. In the future, as resources grow more constrained, I believe that it will regain its proper place as a central priority of collective thought and action. Unfortunately, the costs of deferring maintenance do not wait for us to recognize its value.