“You should consider that the essential art of civilization
is maintenance.”
--Pete Seeger, age 85
MAINTENANCE is what keeps everything going. It’s what keeps life going.
Every living thing spends a great deal of time and toil in maintaining its own life and the life of the systems it depends on. Plants tend the life of the soil they grow in. Beavers maintain their dams and thereby the pond that protects them. Humans maintain their bodies, their vehicles, their homes, and their cities, along with much else. Nearly everything worth maintaining is nested in something larger even more worth maintaining.
But so much of doing maintenance is tiresome. Brush the damn teeth, change the damn oil. They are unrewarding chores—repetitive, boring, often frustrating, and endless. Since that part of maintenance is a pain, we shirk it, defer it, fail to budget time or money for it, let it drop to the bottom of the priority list. That’s easy to do because the necessity of maintenance accumulates invisibly and gradually. Then suddenly one day the thing breaks, the system falters, and everything stops in a turmoil of disruption, expense, and blame.
The apparent paradox is profound: Maintenance is absolutely necessary and maintenance is optional. It it easy to put off, and yet it has to be done. Defer now, regret later.
Neglect kills.
What to do?
Here’s a suggestion: Soften the paradox and the misbehavior it encourages by expanding the term “maintenance” beyond referring only to preventive maintenance to stave off the trauma of repair--brushing the damn teeth, etc. Let “maintenance” mean the whole grand process of keeping a thing going. From that perspective, occasional repair is part of the process. Close monitoring is part of the process. Changing the oil is part of the process. Eventually replacing the thing is part of the process.
Maintenance in this larger sense has nothing optional about it. The necessity of maintenance doesn’t accumulate invisibly, it is understood as a given. When you take responsibility for something, you enter into a contract to take care of it. If it’s a child, to keep it fed. If it’s a knife, to keep it sharp.
This book, I’m pretty sure, is the first to look at maintenance in general. It asks: What can be learned if you think about all the varieties of maintenance at the same time? I doubt if there are any non-trivial “laws” of maintenance to be discovered. All I can offer here is to muse across a representative sample of maintenance domains and see what emerges.
The logic of the book is this:
- Start with a dramatic contest of maintenance styles under life-critical conditions— a true story told as a fable.
- Explore the insights from several domains of maintenance that everyone is aware of—vehicles, buildings, cities.
- At the same time, see what social scientists and system engineers have to say about upkeep and repair in those familiar domains.
- Then explore the most highly disciplined maintenance frontiers, which are exotic to most people—the military, manufacturing, aircraft and spacecraft, software, and Japanese culture.
- Apply what has been learned to the largest domains that humanity is becoming obliged to take on the care of—civilization and the planet.
- Zoom back in to individual humans and their lifelong health.
- End with the nature of maintainers and the honor owed them.
The book is an invitation. Using maintenance as a frame of reference is—I hope to show—a fruitful way to rethink all manner of things.
The Path to Print
“Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” —Eric Raymond
RESEARCHING “all manner of things” these days is drastically easier than it used to be, thanks to the Internet. You can use keyword- and AI-powered search to find damn near anything. You can use images to find images. Often, you can track important things down to their original sources. And when it comes to writing, plenty of cloud-based grammar checkers, synonym finders, and other aids smooth the process.
But what about questionable facts and tone-deaf language? To write authoritatively about subjects new to me, I needed access to experts who could help debug my prose toward accuracy. The Internet has those, too. The question was how to find them—or get them to find me. I wanted some kind of public drafting tool—where early drafts of my writing and illustrations could be presented online in a form that invites detailed public comment.
Fortuitously, Stripe Press was interested in the same thing, and had recently acquired an online publication called “Works in Progress.” At Stripe’s request, they created “Books in Progress”—the public drafting tool I yearned for. With this software, my book began to appear online in serial form. Every two weeks for six months in 2023, I published a new section of this book, readable and commentable for free on the Books in Progress website. On Twitter (later “X”), I announced each new section and invited readers to critique it. Stripe and Works in Progress did the same with their online channels.
We got traffic. Some 73,000 visitors showed up on the site, and a good portion of them took the trouble to comment on the material and even comment on each other’s comments. I was jubilant. Minds were reading my book while I was writing it! Book publishing’s customary years-long lag between writing and being read was gone. Most book authors have to write for an imagined future audience. I got to write for an audience that was real, present, and pitching in to make the book better. In this print version, I’ve added a few marginalia demonstrating how their comments were helpful.
Meanwhile, this is just Part One of what is shaping up to be a substantial book. Part Two (and beyond) is well underway. Drafts of my new sections appear online periodically at Books in Progress. If you like, come help sharpen their edge.
You’re also welcome to comment on the material in this printed book online because the Books in Progress version of the whole book is a living document. It continues to evolve in response to my ongoing research and reader commentary.
—SB, September 2024