Hail the Maintainers
Innovation is overvalued: “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.”
- Innovation is not 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.”
- Basic infrastructure is more important
- Despite recurring fantasies about the end of work, the central fact of our industrial civilisation is labour, most of which falls far outside the realm of innovation
Physicality / Materiality
Not just maintenance > innovation, but that maintenance often demands a return to the physical roots of digital work — the lithium in the batteries, the water to cool the data centers, the undersea cables:
The Cloud under the Sea (one of my favorite articles of all time)
- It’s a truism that people don’t think about infrastructure until it breaks, but they tend not to think about the fixing of it, either. In his 2014 essay, “Rethinking Repair,” professor of information science Steven Jackson argued that contemporary thinking about technology romanticizes moments of invention over the ongoing work of maintenance, though it is equally important to the deployment of functional technology in the world. There are few better examples than the subsea cable industry, which, for over a century, has been so effective at quickly fixin!g faults that the public has rarely had a chance to notice. Or as one industry veteran put it, “We are one of the best-kept secrets in the world, because things just work.”
Maintenance is also profitable!
from a frontier model economics POV
- Of course, the economics of this space remain in flux. The potential of the largest frontier models to develop agentic capabilities and take on more autonomous decision-making and problem-solving may lead to a re-evaluation of their economic value. But we suspect that, for the majority of commercial applications, end customers will still index on predictability and reliability over unbounded autonomy for the foreseeable future. A sudden advance in capabilities also does not magic away upfront capex or operational costs; if anything, it likely worsens them.
- Recently, Shyam Sankar, the CTO of Palantir, wrote a searing critique of the “cargo cult” mentality in software. He argued that companies focused far more on the process of acquiring technology than on deeply understanding or integrating it into their real-world operations. As decision-makers get caught up in layers of abstraction, software solutions become disconnected from the measurable outcomes they’re meant to be driving.