Rethinking Repair An Essay by Steven J. Jackson sjackson.infosci.cornell.edu This chapter is an exercise in broken world thinking. It asks what happens when we take erosion, breakdown, and decay, rather than novelty, growth, and progress, as our starting points in thinking through the nature, use, and effects of information technology and new media. The modern infrastructural idealThe fulcrum of these two worldsA creature of bones, not wordsThe world is always breakingA side that goes unrecognized+8 More 104. Site RepairMakers and MakingMaintenance and Care repair
Dependence is more profitable than education A customer who pays—in advance—for service contracts is a more stable income source than a customer who has fully mastered a product's use. Customer dependence is more profitable than customer education. What I find truly baffling are manuals—hundreds of pages long—that accompany software applications, programming languages, and operating systems. Unmistakably, they signal both a contorted design that lacks clear concepts and an intent to hook customers. Niklaus Wirth, A Plea for Lean Software The design concept documentation