The word of the Lorax But now, says the Once-ler, Now that you're here, the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear. UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not. Dr. Seuss, The Lorax careconservation
This obsession with permanence I think a lot about the lifecycle of websites. I’m frustrated by so much of the short-term thinking I see in the world today, and the way we think about websites is a part of that: it’s “normal” for them to just go up in smoke as soon as their authors stop paying attention. People switch platforms and providers and break links without a second thought. It pains me to see people build websites with no feeling of obligation to them — when you put something out into the world, it is your responsibility to care for it. At the same time, I wonder if this obsession with permanence is misplaced. Wesley Aptekar-Cassels, How Websites Die care
To love deeply a world of things Care brings the worlds of action and meaning back together, and reconnects the necessary work of maintenance with the forms of attachment that so often (but invisibly, at least to analysts) sustain it. ...What if we care about our technologies, and do so in more than a trivial way? This feature or property has sometimes been extended to technologies in the past, but usually only ones that come out of deep folk or craft traditions, and rarely the products of a modern industrial culture. ...Is it possible to love, and love deeply, a world of things? Steven J. Jackson, Rethinking Repair carecraftproducts
You've got to do this with love Third, you’ve got to do this with love. You’ll need to take a radically different approach to supporting and partnering with customers to help them adjust to new and better ways of working. Dear Microsoft careux
Snipping the dead blooms A Quote by Robin Sloan newpublic.substack.com I recognize this is a very niche endeavor, but the art and craft of maintaining a homepage, with some of your writing and a page that's about you and whatever else over time, of course always includes addition and deletion, just like a garden — you're snipping the dead blooms. I do this a lot. I'll see something really old on my site, and I go, “you know what, I don't like this anymore,” and I will delete it. But that's care. Both adding things and deleting things. Basically the sense of looking at something and saying, “is this good? Is this right? Can I make it better? What does this need right now?” Those are all expressions of care. And I think both the relentless abandonment of stuff that doesn't have a billion users by tech companies, and the relentless accretion of garbage on the blockchain, I think they're both kind of the antithesis, honestly, of care. carerepairwwwgardenstechnology
Maintenance and Care An Article by Shannon Mattern placesjournal.org Maintenance has taken on new resonance as a theoretical framework, an ethos, a methodology, and a political cause. This is an exciting area of inquiry precisely because the lines between scholarship and practice are blurred. To study maintenance is itself an act of maintenance. To fill in the gaps in this literature, to draw connections among different disciplines, is an act of repair or, simply, of taking care — connecting threads, mending holes, amplifying quiet voices. Rethinking RepairWhat this site is repaircareconnectionknowledge
Seeing and Knowing An Essay from The Beauty of Everyday Things by Yanagi Sōetsu The results of intuition can be studied by the intellect, but the intellect cannot give birth to intuition. Scholars and criticsUnderstanding its essence knowledgeintuitionseeing
Scholars and critics Let us take a look at how one of these scholars or critics goes about his work. Let’s say he is going to write a commentary on a particular painting. If he is not a man of intuition, certain features will characterize his approach. First he will try to place the painting genealogically, or he will try to define the painting by assigning it to a particular school. He feels uneasy unless he succeeds in doing this. But more than anything, he is extremely wordy. He seems incapable of speaking of beauty without innumerable layers of adjectives. critique
Understanding its essence One can study an object and note its features, but that only touches the surface. A knowledge of an artwork’s properties does not lead to an understanding of its essence. understanding