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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

https://aeon.co/essays/innovation-is-overvalued-maintenance-often-matters-more?utm_source=pocket_mylist

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.”

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Welcome weary traveler of the web, it looks like you've stumbled upon part of my
web of thoughts and other things! Feel free to poke around but don't expect
anything here to be remotely polished, accurate, or well-linked. This is mostly
an internal thought dump that I've decided to publish in the hopes that
something in here inspires someone or something. You can find a rough index
here.

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