12/11/2021 21:50 Pocket - Innovation is overvalued.

Maintenance often matters more

Innovation is overvalued.
Maintenance often matters more
By Andrew Russell • Aeon • 13 min

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Innovation is a dominant ideology of our era, embraced in America

by Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the Washington DC political elite.
As the pursuit of innovation has inspired technologists and
capitalists, it has also provoked critics who suspect that the peddlers
of innovation radically overvalue innovation. 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.

The fates of nations on opposing sides of the Iron Curtain illustrate

good reasons that led to the rise of innovation as a buzzword and
organising concept. 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.

In the late 1960s in the face of the Vietnam War, environmental

degradation, the Kennedy and King assassinations, and other social
and technological disappointments, it grew more difficult for many
to have faith in moral and social progress. To take the place of
progress, ‘innovation’, a smaller, and morally neutral, concept arose.
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Innovation provided a way to celebrate the accomplishments of a

high-tech age without expecting too much from them in the way of
moral and social improvement.

Before the dreams of the New Left had been dashed by massacres at
My Lai and Altamont, economists had already turned to technology
to explain the economic growth and high standards of living in
capitalist democracies. Beginning in the late 1950s, the prominent
economists Robert Solow and Kenneth Arrow found that traditional
explanations – changes in education and capital, for example –
could not account for significant portions of growth. They
hypothesised that technological change was the hidden X factor.
Their finding fit hand-in-glove with all of the technical marvels that
had come out of the Second World War, the Cold War, the post-
Sputnik craze for science and technology, and the post-war vision of
a material abundance.

Robert Gordon’s important new book, The Rise and Fall of American
Growth, offers the most comprehensive history of this golden age in
the US economy. As Gordon explains, between 1870 and 1940, the
United States experienced an unprecedented – and probably
unrepeatable – period of economic growth. That century saw a host
of new technologies and new industries produced, including the
electrical, chemical, telephone, automobile, radio, television,
petroleum, gas and electronics. Demand for a wealth of new home
equipment and kitchen appliances, that typically made life easier
and more bearable, drove the growth. After the Second World War,
Americans treated new consumer technologies as proxies for

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societal progress – most famously, in the ‘Kitchen Debate’ of 1959

between the US vice-president Richard Nixon and the Soviet
premier Nikita Kruschev. Critics wondered if Nixon was wise to
point to modern appliances such as blenders and dishwashers as the
emblems of American superiority.

Nevertheless, growth was strongly tied to continued social

improvement. As older industries matured and declined, ‘new
industries associated with new technologies’ would have to rise to
take their place.

Yet, this need for booming new industries became problematic as

the United States headed into the troubled times of the 1970s and
early 1980s. Whole economic sectors, the auto industry, for
example, hit the skids. A new term – ‘innovation policy’ – arose,
designed to spur economic growth by fostering technological
change, particularly in the face of international economic
competition from Japan. Silicon Valley, a term that had just emerged
in the late 1970s, became the exemplar of innovation during this
time.

By the early 1980s, books casting Silicon Valley as a land of almost

magical technological ingenuity had begun to hit the market.
Innovation policy turned to focus more and more on ‘regional
innovation systems’ and ‘innovation clusters’. Everywhere was
potentially the next Silicon Valley of X. This theme of locality
reached its apotheosis in Richard Florida’s 2002 book, The Rise of the
Creative Class, which argued that regions succeeded by becoming
the kinds of places that granola-crunching, mountain-bike-riding,
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computer-coding creative types wanted to live in. The book used

the word ‘innovation’ more than 90 times and heavily idealised
Silicon Valley.

During the 1990s, scholars and pop audiences also rediscovered the
work of Joseph Schumpeter. Schumpeter was an Austrian
economist who championed innovation and its partner term,
entrepreneurship. Schumpeter pictured economic growth and
change in capitalism as a ‘gale of creative destruction’, in which new
technologies and business practices outmoded or totally destroyed
old ones. Neo-Schumpeterian thought sometimes led to a mountain
of dubious scholarship and magical thinking, most notably, Clayton
M Christensen’s 1997 tome, The Innovator’s Dilemma: The
Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business. Now
mostly discredited, Christensen’s work exerted tremendous
influence, with its emphasis on ‘disruptive’ technologies that
undermined whole industries to make fortunes.

At the turn of the millennium, in the world of business and

technology, innovation had transformed into an erotic fetish.
Armies of young tech wizards aspired to become disrupters. The
ambition to disrupt in pursuit of innovation transcended politics,
enlisting liberals and conservatives alike. Conservative politicians
could gut government and cut taxes in the name of spurring
entrepreneurship, while liberals could create new programmes
aimed at fostering research. The idea was vague enough to do nearly
anything in its name without feeling the slightest conflict, just as

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long as you repeated the mantra: INNOVATION!!

ENTREPRENEURSHIP!!

A few years later, however, one could detect tremors of dissent. In a

biting essay titled ‘Innovation is the New Black’, Michael Bierut,
writing in Design Observer in 2005, lamented the ‘mania for
innovation, or at least for endlessly repeating the word
“innovation”’. Soon, even business publications began to raise the
question of inherent worth. In 2006, The Economist noted that
Chinese officials had made innovation into a ‘national buzzword’,
even as it smugly reported that China’s educational system ‘stresses
conformity and does little to foster independent thinking’, and that
the Communist Party’s new catchphrases ‘mostly end up fizzling out
in puddles of rhetoric’. Later that year, Businessweek warned:
‘Innovation is in grave danger of becoming the latest overused
buzzword. We’re doing our part at Businessweek.’ Again in
Businessweek, on the last day of 2008, the design critic Bruce
Nussbaum returned to the theme, declaring that innovation ‘died in
2008, killed off by overuse, misuse, narrowness, incrementalism and
failure to evolve… In the end, “Innovation” proved to be weak as
both a tactic and strategy in the face of economic and social turmoil.’

In 2012, even the Wall Street Journal got into innovation-bashing act,
noting ‘the Term Has Begun to Lose Meaning’. At the time, it
counted ‘more than 250 books with “innovation” in the title…
published in the last three months’. A professional innovation
consultant it interviewed advised his clients to ban the word at their
companies. He said it was just a ‘word to hide the lack of substance’.

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Evidence has emerged that regions of intense innovation also have

systemic problems with inequality. In 2013, protests erupted in San
Francisco over the gentrification and social stratification
symbolised by Google buses and other private commuter buses.
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. The dramatic, unnecessary suffering exposed by such
juxtapositions of economic inequality seems to be a feature, not a
bug of highly innovative regions.

The trajectory of ‘innovation’ from core, valued practice to slogan of

dystopian societies, is not entirely surprising, at a certain level.
There is a formulaic feel: a term gains popularity because it
resonates with the zeitgeist, reaches buzzword status, then suffers
from overexposure and cooptation. Right now, the formula has
brought society to a question: after ‘innovation’ has been exposed as
hucksterism, is there a better way to characterise relationships
between society and technology?

There are three basic ways to answer that question. First, it is

crucial to understand that technology is not innovation. Innovation
is only a small piece of what happens with technology. 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. In his book, Shock of the
Old (2007), the historian David Edgerton examines technology-in-

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use. He finds that common objects, like the electric fan and many
parts of the automobile, have been virtually unchanged for a
century or more. When we take this broader perspective, we can tell
different stories with drastically different geographical,
chronological, and sociological emphases. 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? Yes, novel objects preoccupy the
privileged, and can generate huge profits. But the most remarkable
tales of cunning, effort, and care that people direct toward
technologies exist far beyond the same old anecdotes about
invention and innovation.

Second, by dropping innovation, we can recognise the essential role

of basic infrastructures. ‘Infrastructure’ is a most unglamorous
term, the type of word that would have vanished from our lexicon
long ago if it didn’t point to something of immense social
importance. Remarkably, in 2015 ‘infrastructure’ came to the fore of
conversations in many walks of American life. In the wake of a fatal
Amtrak crash near Philadelphia, President Obama wrestled with
Congress to pass an infrastructure bill that Republicans had been
blocking, but finally approved in December 2015. ‘Infrastructure’
also became the focus of scholarly communities in history and
anthropology, even appearing 78 times on the programme of the
annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association.
Artists, journalists, and even comedians joined the fray, most
memorably with John Oliver’s hilarious sketch starring Edward
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Norton and Steve Buscemi in a trailer for an imaginary blockbuster

on the dullest of subjects. By early 2016, the New York Review of
Books brought the ‘earnest and passive word’ to the attention of its
readers, with a depressing essay titled ‘A Country Breaking Down’.

The best of these conversations about infrastructure move away

from narrow technical matters to engage deeper moral implications.
Infrastructure failures – train crashes, bridge failures, urban
flooding, and so on – are manifestations of and allegories for
America’s dysfunctional political system, its frayed social safety net,
and its enduring fascination with flashy, shiny, trivial things. But,
especially in some corners of the academic world, a focus on the
material structures of everyday life can take a bizarre turn, as
exemplified in work that grants ‘agency’ to material things or wraps
commodity fetishism in the language of high cultural theory, slick
marketing, and design. For example, Bloomsbury’s ‘Object Lessons’
series features biographies of and philosophical reflections on
human-built things, like the golf ball. What a shame it would be if
American society matured to the point where the shallowness of the
innovation concept became clear, but the most prominent response
was an equally superficial fascination with golf balls, refrigerators,
and remote controls.

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. Despite recurring
fantasies about the end of work or the automation of everything, the
central fact of our industrial civilisation is labour, and most of this

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work falls far outside the realm of innovation. Inventors and

innovators are a small slice – perhaps somewhere around one per
cent – of this workforce. If gadgets are to be profitable, corporations
need people to manufacture, sell, and distribute them. Another
important facet of technological labour comes when people actually
use a product. In some cases, the image of the ‘user’ could be an
individual like you, sitting at your computer, but in other cases, end
users are institutions – companies, governments, or universities
that struggle to make technologies work in ways that their inventors
and makers never envisioned.

The most unappreciated and undervalued forms of technological

labour are also the most ordinary: those who repair and maintain
technologies that already exist, that were ‘innovated’ long ago. This
shift in emphasis involves focusing on the constant processes of
entropy and un-doing – which the media scholar Steven Jackson
calls ‘broken world thinking’ – and the work we do to slow or halt
them, rather than on the introduction of novel things. In recent
years, scholars have produced a number of studies of people who do
this kind of work. For example, the science studies researcher Lilly
Irani has examined the work low-wage labourers do to scrub digital
information for the web, including Indian workers who check
advertisements to ‘filter out porn, alcohol, and violence’. Why not
extend this style of analysis to think more clearly about subjects
such as ‘cybersecurity’? The need for coders and programmers in
the cybersecurity field is obvious, but it should be equally obvious
that fundamental vulnerabilities in our cyber-infrastructures are

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protected by the guards who work graveyard shifts and staff who
repair fences and ID card-readers.

We can think of labour that goes into maintenance and repair as the
work of the maintainers, those individuals whose work keeps
ordinary existence going rather than introducing novel things. Brief
reflection demonstrates that the vast majority of human labour,
from laundry and trash removal to janitorial work and food
preparation, is of this type: upkeep. This realisation has significant
implications for gender relations in and around technology.
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. Domestic labour has huge financial ramifications but largely
falls outside economic accounting, like Gross Domestic Product. In
her classic 1983 book, More Work for Mother, Ruth Schwartz Cowan
examined home technologies – such as washing machines and
vacuum cleaners – and how they fit into women’s ceaseless labour of
domestic upkeep. One of her more famous findings was that new
housekeeping technologies, which promised to save labour, literally
created more work for mother as cleanliness standards rose, leaving
women perpetually unable to keep up.

Nixon, wrong about so many things, also was wrong to point to

household appliances as self-evident indicators of American
progress. Ironically, Cowan’s work first met with scepticism among
male scholars working in the history of technology, whose focus was
a male pantheon of inventors: Bell, Morse, Edison, Tesla, Diesel,

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Shockley, and so on. A renewed focus on maintenance and repair

also has implications beyond the gender politics that More Work for
Mother brought to light. When they set innovation-obsession to the
side, scholars can confront various kinds of low-wage labour
performed by many African-Americans, Latinos, and other racial
and ethnic minorities. From this perspective, recent struggles over
increasing the minimum wage, including for fast food workers, can
be seen as arguments for the dignity of being a maintainer.

We organised a conference to bring the work of the maintainers into

clearer focus . More than 40 scholars answered a call for papers
asking, ‘What is at stake if we move scholarship away from
innovation and toward maintenance?’ Historians, social scientists,
economists, business scholars, artists, and activists responded.
They all want to talk about technology outside of innovation’s
shadow.

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. One of the most significant
problems is the male-dominated culture of technology, manifest in
recent embarrassments such as the flagrant misogyny in the
‘#GamerGate’ row a couple of years ago, as well as the persistent pay
gap between men and women doing the same work.

There is an urgent need to reckon more squarely and honestly with

our machines and ourselves. Ultimately, emphasising maintenance
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involves moving from buzzwords to values, and from means to ends.

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. Crack cocaine, for example, was
a highly innovative product in the 1980s, which involved a great deal
of entrepreneurship (called ‘dealing’) and generated lots of revenue.
Innovation! Entrepreneurship! Perhaps this point is cynical, but it
draws our attention to a perverse reality: contemporary discourse
treats innovation as a positive value in itself, when it is not.

Entire societies have come to talk about innovation as if it were an

inherently desirable value, like love, fraternity, courage, beauty,
dignity, or responsibility. Innovation-speak worships at the altar of
change, but it rarely asks who benefits, to what end? A focus on
maintenance provides opportunities to ask questions about what we
really want out of technologies. What do we really care about? What
kind of society do we want to live in? Will this help get us there? We
must shift from means, including the technologies that underpin
our everyday actions, to ends, including the many kinds of social
beneficence and improvement that technology can offer. Our
increasingly unequal and fearful world would be grateful.

Printed with ❤️from Pocket

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