 I have a friend who just got fired from his job at the Department of Transportation for taking work supplies home with him. I never would have thought he was the type, but the last time I went over to his apartment, all the signs were there. Richard Feynman once said, the whole universe is in a glass of wine, gesturing to the way a single object can contain a fractal representation of a much larger system that created it. Taking a similar tack, we're going to start here with a glass of wine. Actually hold on, with a wine glass, a dirty wine glass. If you don't watch how it's made, you should, particularly this episode about the mass manufacture of wine glasses. It's an incredible operation, dozens of complex machines, heating, spinning, forming and polishing, white hot balls of molten glass to create hundreds and hundreds of elegant vessels with which one might enjoy a nice more low. But if you think about it, even if every single one of those tens of thousands of glasses were painstakingly blown and shaped manually by expert craftsmen, the amount of labor required to create them would pale in comparison to the amount of labor that will be expended to care for each of them over their lifetimes. You make a glass once, but unless you're very rich or very clumsy, you wash it a thousand times. Glass like glass washing is an essential part of what it means to have and use technology. Every tool, every piece of furniture, every building, road, farm, even parks and forests require continuous effort and investment to keep them fit for purpose. It's painfully obvious how much work goes into upkeep whenever we're the ones doing that work, around two hours every day for the average person. Washing the dishes, taking out the trash, vacuuming, cleaning the toilet, folding laundry and so on occupy about 8% of most people's lives. And even the Marie Kondo's of the world who have a particular love of tidying up occasionally find that they simply don't have enough time or energy to do all of it. That's just maintaining our households and ourselves. The effort required to keep glass office buildings or sidewalks in working order is truly staggering to consider. But weirdly, while it's hard to avoid a glimpse here and there of someone in the high-vis vest keeping these communal spaces operational, most of the maintenance work poured into civilization is invisible to our everyday experience. Servers, electrical panels, heaters, ducts, vacuum cleaners, irrigation controls, not to mention water purification plants and power stations. Most of the stuff that keeps the lights on, both literally and figuratively, is stuffed into utility closets, back rooms, basements, sometimes remote locations, out of sight and out of mind. The efforts of the people who keep those utterly essential technologies running are also hidden from view. Some dressed in coveralls and a tool belt carrying a pipe wrench might wander through your building's lobby before quietly opening a door to the boiler room and closing it behind them so you don't have to listen to them soldering new pipes together. Janitors and cleaning crews often arrive after everyone else has vacated the building, cleaning and emptying waste baskets in the dead of night like secret agents. If not for those anxiety-inducing YouTube videos, I might never have even thought about the guy who has to climb a radio tower to change out the light bulb at the top. There's a massive army of people who scrub oil and speck replace and patch the technology that we rely on every day without even thinking about it. Or them. Unless something's out of order. If you recall episode 182, Fred Brooks's off-reference The Mythical Man Month posits that the best sort of technology becomes an extension of the user's will, to the point that the device itself vanishes. You don't think about dragging a plastic object across a table top until a glowing rectangle displays a patch of white pixels over another patch of blue pixels and then squeezing a spring until you trigger a switch, you think subscribe to Patreon. But if that switch doesn't trigger for some reason, suddenly that object emerges from the background and registers as a thing unto itself. You become aware of its construction and operation, all the little details and components that make it into a thing that's usually well suited for clicking. Similarly, the technology that works behind the scenes to deliver electricity, water, mail, internet service and so on becomes an extension of our will when it's working properly, and the people who work behind the scenes to keep all the technology functioning tend to escape our notice until it stops working for whatever reason, when we suddenly find that we can't do the thing we intended because the stuff and people that make it possible aren't working right now. As an aside, this is one reason that strikes and similar labor actions can be so effective at winning benefits for workers. When a company is firing on all cylinders, the people who are working there can start to seem like cogs in a money making machine that becomes an invisible extension of the will of management. When they stop working in that capacity, that illusion vanishes and it's easier to see them as individuals whose synchronized efforts are all necessary to make that machine function. The cognitive invisibility field that spreads over functional technology definitely works on infrastructure, stuff like water, electricity and internet service, masking all the maintenance behind the scenes that keeps those utilities running from our consideration. That blind spot means us to simultaneously overestimate the potential severity of disasters and underestimate the work necessary to keep things functional on a daily basis. Those of us who remember Y2K probably recall the widespread anxiety as 1999 came to a close. Journalists and tech experts raised the alarm for possible failures ranging from phone system crashes to airplane crashes to erroneous nuclear launches, prompting all sorts of historical disaster prepping and forecast of doom. When New Year's Day came, everyone held their breaths, and while there were a few bugs here and there, the predicted apocalypse failed to manifest, leading to a round of ribbing and jokes at the expense of those who had been worried about it. The thing is, Y2K marked what technology theorists Graham and Thrift describe as the largest concerted repair operation in human history. A huge international effort to identify and mitigate the worst IT and communication issues that might well have occurred without a ton of diligent work, millions of man hours dedicated to meticulous inspection, testing, patching, and workarounds. Unfortunately, those efforts went largely unappreciated. Most folks remember Y2K as a nothing burger, not a triumph of hard work and preparation, and went forward having learned the wrong lesson that when experts warn about potential globe-spanning disasters, no action is necessary because there's probably nothing to worry about. On the flip side, because the repair and maintenance that happens around us all the time is so invisible, we tend to underestimate the robustness of highly technological societies when something important stops working, what Joseph Convitts calls the myth of terrible vulnerability. If you're not one of the folks who regularly works in and around infrastructure or other essential tech, you might think of those systems as delicate monoliths of meticulously engineered functionality, fragile clockwork that would suffer immediate irreparable failure if not treated with the utmost care at all times. But if you talk to the folks who have to keep the things running, you're likely to get an earful about how stuff is failing all the time, how that facade of continuous functionality is only maintained by heroic efforts of people behind the scenes to keep the wheels on. You might think that the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on 9-11 would have been disastrous for the Lehman Brothers investment firm, as their Manhattan data center was part of the rubble at ground zero. It seems reasonable that dropping a pair of skyscrapers onto the servers containing the digital records of all their financial transactions will create a cascade of failures and disruptions that would also destroy the company and the institutions that relied on it. But massive data loss is just one of the problems IT guys have to deal with on a regular basis. While fleeing down the stairs, their chief technical officer sent a text message that switched the company over to a remote backup server in Jersey and the day after the collapse, Lehman Brothers was operational and trading stocks with all its data intact. For many, 9-11 was an unfathomably destructive hammer blow to one of the most sophisticated cities on earth, a cataclysm that shook everything we thought we knew about the world to its core. For Lehman Brothers IT department, it was Tuesday. Then some other stuff happened. So it seems we have a bit of a blind spot for the work necessary to keep things running. Of course, making new stuff is fun and exciting. It makes some intuitive sense that we'd have more mental bandwidth for the innovation, development, and production of technologies that have never existed than for the upkeep of existing things. But it's worth noting that that bias ultimately comes from a position of entitlement. Because so much of the technology we rely on is maintained and taken care of in utility closets and basements by largely invisible maintainers, we have the luxury of being allowed to forget that it exists. Of letting it fade into the background while we lionize the new-fangled stuff. Jiggle a handle and clear drinkable water starts flowing out of a tap. No need to consider the legion of machinery and labor that made this miracle possible. I can just sit here, sip, and marvel at the much celebrated brilliance of designers and architects dreaming up the next big thing. That's not true for everyone. It's hard to imagine overlooking the nitty gritty details of infrastructure necessary to supply internet in Kolkata or electricity in Nigeria. That intrusive awareness of the technology that has failed to get out of the way is just a fact of life in places where the technology is unreliable or too patchwork and gerry-rigged to ignore. Most of us are just lucky enough to live in places where we can take it for granted. Well, I say lucky, but the degree to which we are insulated from repair and maintenance activities denies us an invaluable resource for understanding both the world we live in and how we live in it. Watching things wear out, break down, and fail, or personally putting in the effort necessary to prevent those failures, teaches us how those things work and how things work in general. At a level of detail we'd never have access to if we could just treat every technology we interact with like a black box. You might read extensively about the theory and design of refrigerators, but spending an hour examining, fixing, maintaining, and tuning a fridge will still teach you tons of important stuff about materials, design, ergonomics, thermodynamics, failure modes, not to mention dozens of ways fridges can suck and potentially might be improved. If a refrigerator only ever appears to you as a monolithic device, always operational, never needing any upkeep, always inconspicuously keeping your next dinner cold until you throw the whole thing out and get a new one, you'll never be able to see it as a technician or custodian might see it. 22 stainless steel sheet metal screws. 36 feet of coiled copper wire. A vacuum-formed PVC liner. The appearance of this collection of corroding, loosening, wearing, aging components as a single cohesive product is a tidy illusion encouraged by the manufacturer. And so long as that illusion remains in place, there are all sorts of powerful ways of thinking about them that you simply won't be able to access where the raw materials came from. What sort of effort was necessary to dig them out of the ground and press them into useful shapes? How to potentially modify or swap one of them out to improve the system? What will happen to them when they wear out or when the system inevitably wears out past the point of usefulness? And that's the real punchline of maintenance. Eventually, our greatest inventions and most enduring technologies will succumb to the inexorable grinding machine of entropy worn down by the same forces that ultimately wear down everything, including us. The work that goes into holding off that end date, letting things go a little bit longer than they would if nobody were to invest the energy necessary to sustain them is really the most fundamental business of life itself. Maybe minimizing hiding or ignoring that work is really just a feeble attempt to avoid thinking about the fate that awaits us all. But it's solely by the massive and continuous effort to dedicated maintenance, repair, and care that the world we've created persists in any capacity and devaluing or overlooking that work for whatever reason isn't just disrespectful. It's short-sighted. Whether you're talking about refrigerators, servers, infrastructure, or your own body, if you don't schedule maintenance, your equipment will schedule it for you. Something to reflect on the next time you find yourself rumbling about having to do the dishes. What sort of essential maintenance work do you find people overlooking? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah, blah, subscribe, blah, share and don't stop thunking.