Our economy is the most dynamic and productive in history. It is also the most wasteful and destructive. These two facts suggest a disconcerting yet seemingly unavoidable relationship: Just as new products and tools replace the old, so productivity leaves behind a trail of disrepair. But it is worth pondering whether this apparently iron law of waste necessarily governs an advanced economy such as ours. As historians have observed, the desideratum of economic growth drove many industrial leaders to make waste a key feature of their business strategies. Hence, as early as the 1920s, around the same time that advertisers began describing products as “new and improved,” General Motors President Alfred P. Sloan introduced the annual model change in the automobile industry, setting the standard in the broader industrial economy for what eventually became called “planned obsolescence.”11xGiles Slade, Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 34. In his 1960 book, The Waste Makers, journalist Vance Packard cataloged how such business strategies had transformed the economy by guaranteeing that everything from washing machines to refrigerators would eventually end up in landfills.22xVance Packard, The Waste Makers (New York, NY: David McKay Company Inc., 1960).
These trends have only accelerated in the decades since the rise of a globalized and increasingly digital economy. The constant churn of new electronic devices generates about seven million tons of waste in the United States every year.33xStephen Leahy, “Each US Family Trashes 400 iPhones’ Worth of E-Waste a Year,” National Geographic, December 13, 2017; https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/e-waste-monitor-report-glut. The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that the number of people employed to repair appliances will decline 6.9 percent by 2029, which amounts to a loss of about 3,000 jobs.44xSoo Youn, “Ovens, Dishwashers and Washing Machines Are Breaking Down Like Never Before. But There’s Nobody to Fix Them,” Washington Post, October 22, 2020; https://www.washingtonpost.com/road-to-recovery/2020/10/22/appliance-repair-services-pandemic/. The waste of so-called fast fashion has been widely reported on: According to some estimates, the average American purchases sixty-eight clothing items each year, and the US produces 11.3 million tons of textile waste annually.55xAlexandra Schwartz, “Rent the Runway Wants to Lend You Your Look,” The New Yorker, October 15, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/22/rent-the-runway-wants-to-lend-you-your-look; Rachael Dottle and Jackie Gu, “The Real Environmental Impact of the Fashion Industry,” Bloomberg.com, February 23, 2022, https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-fashion-industry-environmental-impact/. Meanwhile, fast furniture produced by companies such as Ikea and Wayfair adds 12 million tons to landfills and incinerators every year.66xDebra Kamin, “‘Fast Furniture’ Is Cheap. And Americans Are Throwing It in the Trash,” The New York Times, October 31, 2022; https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/realestate/fast-furniture-clogged-landfills.html. While further statistics could be rehearsed here, they would only fill out the picture of a world that is increasingly shaped by what Pope Francis called in his 2015 encyclical Laudato si’ a “throwaway culture.”77xPope Francis I, Laudato si’ [Encyclical Letter on Care for Our Common Home], Holy See, May 24, 2015; https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html.
Pope Francis’s phrase is suggestive, indicating the possibility that this global trail of litter and disrepair is avoidable—and not necessarily the product of an iron law of economic growth. In recent years, scholars and practitioners have been considering how to reimagine an economy that is premised not on waste but on care.
Broken-World Thinking
Historian of technology Steven J. Jackson, for example, published a landmark 2014 article called “Rethinking Repair,” in which he invited readers to an exercise in “broken world thinking.”88xSteven J. Jackson, “Rethinking Repair,” in Media Technologies, eds. Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014), 221–240. Jackson raised a question: “What happens when we take erosion, breakdown, and decay, rather than novelty, growth, and progress, as our starting points…?” The world is always breaking, Jackson noted, which is in fact a generative and productive condition. Breakdown opens up new thinking, offers new perspectives by revealing conditions that were once invisible—and people who were previously obscured or forgotten.
Jackson included a haunting image from Edward Burtynsky’s photographic series on the shipbreaking industry of Bangladesh, an example of breakdown in a largely hidden corner of the global economy.99x“Photographs: Shipbreaking,” Edward Burtynsky; https://www.edwardburtynsky.com/projects/photographs/shipbreaking. Accessed July 25, 2024. An estimated 80 percent of the world’s decommissioned commercial ocean fleets eventually reach their final destination on the beaches of Bangladesh or India, where dozens of local laborers, armed with nothing more than blowtorches, disassemble these gigantic vessels. The scrap metal that is left over accounts for most of Bangladesh’s domestic steel industry.
The costs of a consumerist culture in which obsolescence is a strategy for perpetual growth without an effective and shared ethic of sustainability continue to mount. In response, we saw the first “right to repair” law passed in Massachusetts in 2012, an attempt to give consumers greater ability to maintain their automobiles. In recent years, we have seen the topic of maintenance and repair taken up on a wide front as a mix of climate-crisis and infrastructure failures give birth to public discussions of concepts like anti-fragility and the need for “broken world thinking.”
A Relationship of Care
I recently found myself standing in front of probably the most famous motorcycle in the world, a 1966 Honda Super Hawk, now on temporary display in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The exhibit, “Zen and the Open Road,” marks the fiftieth anniversary of Robert M. Pirsig’s best-selling Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values.
Reader, how many years did you, like me, hang on to an unread paperback copy of this book, waiting for just the right mood to strike?
For me, the moment has come. And I can report that Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance turns out to be quite a bit more readable than I expected, despite the author’s famous demurral that readers wouldn’t learn much about either Zen or motorcycle maintenance. Nonetheless, Pirsig can be seen as a precursor of several streams of thought that are converging in a new social framing of our condition—specifically, a new and promising politics of maintenance and care:
It occurred to me there is no manual that deals with the real business of motorcycle maintenance, the most important aspect of all. Caring about what you are doing is considered either unimportant or taken for granted.1010xRobert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (New York, NY: William Morrow, 1974), 25.
The author is here identifying a relationship of care as the essence of maintenance, some years before the emergence of care ethics in feminist theory during the 1980s. I owe this observation to Mark Thomas Young and Mark Coeckelbergh, coeditors of a new collection of articles, Maintenance and Philosophy of Technology: Keeping Things Going.1111xMark Thomas Young and Mark Coeckelbergh, eds., Maintenance and Philosophy of Technology: Keeping Things Going (New York, NY: Routledge, 2024).
But let’s first note some milestones on this metaphorical road trip. Readers of this journal likely know the work of Richard Sennett, whose 2008 book, The Craftsman, examined the premodern history of workshops and guilds, and theorized that craftsmanship “names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake.”1212xRichard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 9. Likewise, in his book Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew B. Crawford observed the connection between manual engagement with technology and human flourishing.1313xMatthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work (New York, NY: Penguin, 2009).
My attention to this wider vision of care for the world was first captured by media scholar Shannon Mattern’s wonderful 2018 article “Maintenance and Care,” her “working guide to the repair of rust, dust, cracks, and corrupted code in our cities, our homes, and our social relations.”1414xShannon Mattern, “Maintenance and Care,” Places Journal, November 20, 2018; https://doi.org/10.22269/181120. Mattern includes artistic photos of urban repair, spaces in the household life of the care economy, the open-air shops in favelas and on street corners in the Global South where electronic waste is repurposed, as well as the “sustainers” of the open-source code communities.
As an example of the widening circle of interest around these topics, Mattern links to articles by tech historians Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel, as well as to their (initially tongue-in-cheek) Festival of Maintenance, an annual event that brought together people working in various disciplines of maintenance, repair, and stewardship in fields of infrastructure, the environment, computer programming, and so forth. Russell and Vinsel have subsequently gone on to build an international network and community of practice, The Maintainers. In 2020, they published a manifesto encapsulating the social vision behind this still-emerging movement, The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most.1515xLee Vinsel and Andrew L. Russell, The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most (New York, NY: Currency, 2020).
Finally, someone was saying it: The neoliberal cult of creative destruction, disruptive innovation, and the corporate credo to “move fast and break things” had combined to devalue the activities of maintenance and repair, replacing genuine innovation, as the authors argue, with innovation-speak.
Essential Workers and Mutual Aid
The costs of our neglect—our lack of care, our carelessness—are everywhere around us: the feeble American health-care system, the flourishing of platforms like Uber while our public-transportation systems crumble, the mounds of postconsumer plastic accumulating in our oceans. Russell and Vinsel write, “It’s difficult to see how these forms of maintenance, or any forms of maintenance, can be performed in the absence of care. In turn, it’s difficult to see how any technological civilization could survive without it.”1616xIbid., 43.
The essay collection by Young and Coeckelbergh is a feast of reflection on the field of maintenance and repair studies (MRS) from a philosophical perspective. It includes articles on the humanness of infrastructure, the metaphysics of artifacts, sustainability as planetary maintenance, the metaphysics of software maintenance, eco-ethics, aesthetic values in the maintenance of urban technologies, the ethics of maintaining waste infrastructures, and “Repairing AI.” As the editors note, these studies take us into the “engine room” of our modern economies in order to emerge with clearer terminology and a better understanding of their social implications.
Philosophically minded readers may be struck by Young’s point that we are here leaving behind substance ontology for ontologies of change and process. I was struck by the insights into the infra (i.e., what’s below, hidden) in infrastructure, how our lives depend upon invisible water mains, electrical conduits, fiber-optic cables, steam tunnels. As with infrastructure, so with tools: We often fail to notice the role that human labor plays in the creation of technologies.
Infrastructure, properly understood, is then not a thing but a human practice, an ongoing activity. This labor, like the pipes beneath us, is relatively invisible—which makes it a political and a moral question. That is, unseen work tends to be unrecognized and devalued in economic terms, especially if it occurs not in a workplace but in the home, as in the case of domestic work.
Our post-pandemic condition has left us, like survivors of some giant earthquake that exposed the foundations, pondering what has been revealed to us in the apocalypse. At least for a time, the American public “discovered” a population that had been there all along but suddenly looked different: our essential workers.
If we go beyond the medical providers to caretakers in general, we are speaking of what economist Neva Goodwin has described as the “core economy”—“where households and communities carry on their internal activities of production, distribution, and consumption. The core economy’s justification and purpose are the survival and well-being of its members. It is located in home, family, and neighborhood; places that function as markets for emotional, social, and civic transactions.”1717xNeva Goodwin, “There Is More Than One Economy,” Real-World Economics Review 84, (2018): 17. With all our economic sophistication, we have been mostly blind to social production—the activities of child-rearing and homemaking, for example.
The pandemic also reminded us of the lost social practices of mutual aid, as we suddenly felt concern for those in our immediate area who might need help in various ways. This experience, argues lawyer and writer Dean Spade in a brilliant, short book called Mutual Aid, “produces new ways of living where people get to create new systems of care and generosity.”1818xDean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (New York, NY: Verso, 2020), 2. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina’s destruction in New Orleans, and Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, to take only a few well-known examples, new community groups focused on local aid sprang up and continue to operate today. The creation of these new systems begins in the shared realization that the systems we have in place are not going to meet our needs or truly keep us safe. Moreover, disasters—especially those that are climate-related—will break more systems and expose more preexisting crises, Spade suggests. This sad reality is also an opening, as such moments always are.
Mutual aid, let’s recall, is not charity but solidarity, the ingredient needed for effective organizing of large groups of people. Such groups always spring up after disasters, but, as Spade notes, “We need groups and networks that do not disappear after the peak of the crisis, but instead become part of an ongoing, sustained mobilization.”1919xIbid., 33. He cites the case of Occupy Sandy, in 2012, when more than 60,000 volunteers came together spontaneously after Hurricane Sandy to provide food, water, and medicine. In such cases, mutual aid 1) teaches us how the world used to be and 2) lets us practice something different—a society organized by collective self-determination. In the social-movement ecosystem, it’s only one tactic, alongside direct action, political education, and more. But its impact is immediate, and it is the on-ramp to movement participation.
Uncaring by Design
Beyond mutual aid, what are the key features of a caring community? I recommend the answers found in another publication from 2020, The Care Manifesto, from the Care Collective, a UK-based interdisciplinary group of female academics.2020xThe Care Collective et al., The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence (New York, NY: Verso, 2020). The authors cite mutual support, public space, shared resources, and local democracy.
Does this kind of small-scale, community-led effort seem insignificant? From the early twentieth century, we might recall the Tredegar Workmen’s Medical Aid Society, a service of the local labor union in a small Welsh town, which became the model for Britain’s National Health Service. A similar process of taking up whatever local projects were working enabled the New Deal to mostly avoid a top-down approach and instead move to replicate these efforts on a national level. As Sara Horowitz notes in her excellent book Mutualism: Building the Next Economy from the Ground Up, “Rather than build new institutions from scratch, he [Franklin Roosevelt] looked at the ecosystem of mutualist organizations that already existed and realized that unions were the perfect tools to find workers where they already were.”2121xSara Horowitz, Mutualism: Building the Next Economy from the Ground Up (New York, NY: Random House, 2021), 150.
As the Care Collective points out, we live in a moment that lacks an adequate vocabulary of care. Our economy has become, in some senses, organized systems of loneliness that leave most of us less able to provide care, as well as less likely to receive it—we are uncaring by design.
Indeed we are all living in the wreckage of a failed project, one which was not only a matter of certain policies but a cultural project, as described in the Roosevelt Institute’s recent “Cultural Contradictions of Neoliberalism” report.2222xShahrzad Shams, Deepak Bhargava, and Harry W. Hanbury, “The Cultural Contradictions of Neoliberalism: The Longing for an Alternative Order and the Future of Multiracial Democracy in an Age of Authoritarianism” (New York, NY: The Roosevelt Institute, April 18, 2024); https://rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/the-cultural-contradictions-of-neoliberalism/. On this account, our “spiritual disintegration” (a term used recently by Senator Chris Murphy) and “time poverty” can be attributed to the rise of wellness and self-help culture, with its mix of religious gurus and success gurus, many of whom won fame on The Oprah Winfrey Show.
The wellness movement, as the latter report notes, has its origins in the hippie culture, civil rights, Black Panther, human-potential and anti-psychiatry movements, for all of which self-care was a political act, justifiably skeptical of institutions and mainstream politics. Today, by contrast, much of care has been relegated to self-help, something we are supposed to buy ourselves.
Thus, the Care Collective’s call for more examples of care in practice, alternative caring kinships, and demarketizing our care infrastructure in order to resocialize it. The latter transition is what theorist Bruno Latour describes as a shift from a system of production (on a principle of individual freedom) to a system of engendering (on a principle of human dependency).2323xBruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 2018).
Another theorist (who is also a practitioner) is Canadian John Restakis, whose recent work calls for a “partner state” in order to develop a social market, one funded by social finance, in order to shift the care sector away from the flawed and misguided transactional model to a relational one.2424xJohn Restakis, Civilizing the State: Reclaiming Politics for the Common Good (Gabriola Island, British Columbia: New Society Publishers, 2021).
Restakis is a champion of the social economy broadly, especially the Italian tradition of the civil economy.2525xLuigino Bruni and Stefano Zamagni, Civil Economy: Another Idea of the Market (Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Agenda Publishing, 2016). Two champions of the latter are the Italian economists Luigino Bruni and Stefano Zamagni. Bruni is associated with the Economy of Communion project, originated in 1991 by Pope John Paul II with Focolare founder Chiara Lubich. Zamagni (whose wife, Vera, is a notable economist of cooperativism) was an economic adviser to the late Pope Benedict on his encyclical, Caritas in veritate, and is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.2626xPope Benedict XVI, Caritas in veritate [Encyclical Letter on Integral Human Development in Charity and Truth], Holy See, June 29, 2009; https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20090629_caritas-in-veritate.html.
While Catholic social teachings are often presented in the United States as theological or moral frameworks floating safely above any particular real-world practices, the Catholic-influenced civil economy represents a remarkable and humanistic (through the influence of Italian humanism, notably) road not taken in contrast to the well-trod northern version of capitalism associated with Adam Smith. This Southern European tradition has informed the social economy of that region, with its mix of welfarism and a vigorous civil society. The result is, quite simply, much higher levels of social capital and well-being than we find in the United States, and with substantially less economic inequality.
Zamagni’s contributions to a more human-centered economics include writings on mutualism, cooperativism, and the economy of the gift. According to one friend’s account, he once attempted to show, using several economic graphs, that the smile of a person with severe disability is an important source of social capital and trust essential for a healthy economy to operate.
The foundation of Zamagni’s theories—taken up by his non-Catholic friend and colleague John Restakis—is the concept of reciprocity, a crucial notion in the care economy. The term refers to the reciprocal acts continually going on in families, networks, neighborhoods, and communities.
These informal transactions (or gifts) number in the millions, working to redistribute wealth as well as nurture social capital better than either the market or the state. Reciprocity, in Zamagni’s formulation, is thus nothing less than the foundation of associational or social life.
While we cannot re-create the moment of postwar Christian social democracy as some may wish, we just may be able to adopt the European-style mutualistic, bottom-up, democratic workplace culture for this moment of crisis in our own care sector.
In other words, transforming the capitalist market to a civil market—or, indeed, simply restoring the social safety net—in our impaired political condition may require us to think first not of federal politics but of local communities. That is where civil partnerships with municipalities offer a chance to reinvent and democratize social care, precisely in the midst of serial climate emergencies of various kinds.
If communities of practice can form around these ideas of maintaining and caring for our local world, a new sense of well-being, and even a kind of public happiness, could emerge.2727xOn the phrase, “public happiness,” see Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1990), 126–127. Perhaps even a new and ecumenical zeal for tikkun olam, the repair of the world, and the new politics that would come with it.