Rethinking Repair - broken world thinking
Intial reflections on a book chapter by Steven J. Jackson
https://sjackson.infosci.cornell.edu/RethinkingRepairPROOFS(reduced)Aug2013.pdf…
This chapter is an exercise in broken world thinking. It asks what happens when we take erosion, breakdown, and decay, rather than novelty, growth, and progress, as our starting points in thinking through the nature, use, and effects of information technology and new media.
This should fit well with a Christian understanding of fall and brokenness and God restoring all things in the future at the eschaton; but not before. We do not now live in a perfect world, we live in a broken world, a world broken by sin; and we will not create a perfect world by our own efforts. Our own efforts are what have produced this mess. The trying to fix the mess ourselves at best simply reshuffles the problems and at worst makes the world even more broken.
The fulcrum of these two worlds is repair: the subtle acts of care by which order and meaning in complex sociotechnical systems are maintained and transformed, human value is preserved and extended, and the complicated work of fitting to the varied circumstances of organizations, systems, and lives is accomplished. Repair in this connotation has a literal and material dimension, filled with immediate questions: Who fixes the devices and systems we “seamlessly” use? Who maintains the infrastructures within and against which our lives unfold? But it also speaks directly to “the social,” if we still choose to cut the world in this way: how are human orders broken and restored (and again, who does this work)? 223
Most of the time recycling is unsexy and in the background, out of site, and highly likely done in a country where health and safety regulations are lax or non-existent.
Ask yourself this: for all the representations of great ships in history you’ve encountered, at what times and in what forms have you seen such vessels? In almost every instance it will be at moments of birth, or at the heights of strength and glory: the christening before the maiden voyage, rounding the cape, facing down the Spanish fleet, and so on. But what happens (or happened) to these ships? Save for the special cases of hostile sinking, shipwreck, or honorable retirement and preservation, it was this: they were disassembled, repurposed, stripped, and turned into other things, in sites and locations like the shipbreaking beaches of Bangladesh that have dropped out of history and imagination. [80% of world’s commercial ocean fleets end up on the beaches of Bangladesh or in neighboring India]
e-waste is scavenged in very dangerous conditions in developing countries, very often by child labour.
the apparent technological simplicity with which Bangladeshi shipbreaking is conducted. Confronted with the bewildering size and array of a modern ocean freighter (and in sharp contrast to the technological conditions surrounding its production), teams of workers armed with nothing more sophisticated than a blowtorch are able to separate, dismantle, and repurpose a ship and its constituent parts in a matter of weeks.
epistemology of repair …
Can breakdown, maintenance, and repair confer special epistemic advantage in our thinking about technology? Can the fixer know and see different things—indeed, different worlds—than the better-known figures of “designer” or “user”? Following on the claims of Hegelian, Marxian, and feminist theorists, can we identify anything like a standpoint epistemology of repair?
If Marxism seeks to disrupt the commodity fiction of the object by connecting it backward to moments of origin, discovering the congealed forms of human labor, power and interests that are built into objects at their moment of production, broken world thinking draws our attention around the sociality of objects forward, into the ongoing forms of labor, power, and interest—neither dead nor congealed—that underpin the ongoing survival of things as objects in the world 230
Repair, Maintenance, and the Ethics of Care
Key section here requires detailed reading and reflection. It is clearly going along some very important lines which I could identify with before I read them. Is there a place for the Mark Vernon ideas about recovering a more participative sense of our place in the universe?
Finally, foregrounding maintenance and repair as an aspect of technological work invites not only new functional but also moral relations to the world of technology. It references what is in fact a very old but routinely forgotten relationship of humans to things in the world: namely, an ethics of mutual care and responsibility.
Returning to an animist understanding is not helpful. However a greater sense of man’s place within the cosmos as being part of it and steward of it and a sense that everything in it is of value in some way surely will.
What may a panpsychist understanding have to say about our relationship with machines. What does the personification of machines have to say? I cannot imaging anyone giving their computer a name. Maybe if it is a really big one the workers give it a name. Steam engines however were very commonly given names. They had personalities. They were and are loved by people. You have a relationship with them. Recovering a sense of relationship with our technology could lead to a more appropriate use of it. The Henry of course is given a name and a personality – it is also very home repairable.
Consider, for example, how “broken world thinking” can benefit product design. What if the person (or team) who invented a new technology collaborated with the person (or team) who would one day repair the same technology? What if the innovation stakeholders and the infrastructure stakeholders collaborated closely with the end users? What if every new product designed by a technology company was designed in such as way as to factor in what happens to the product after planned obsolescence?
What if, as Jackson asks, we “build new and different forms of solidarity with our objects (and they with us)?”