While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.
Maintenance is a low-status affair: you can confess to being unable to change a tyre in a way that you would never confess to being unable to name a play by Shakespeare.
…We understand the expertise of janitors, plumbers and mechanics, and we suffer mightily in their absence, yet somehow we take them for granted. We take for granted, too, the most basic maintenance of all — preparing food, washing clothes, changing dirty nappies. Nobody would boast at a dinner party or on a first date about doing any of this, yet it is essential.
…This is about more than breaking bridges and breaking bike chains. There is a missed opportunity here to find something rather wonderful in maintenance.
I'd like to call the more general phenomenon that this is a specific instance of "ghost knowledge": It is knowledge that is present somewhere in the epistemic community, and is perhaps readily accessible to some central member of that community, but it is not really written down anywhere and it's not clear how to access it. Roughly what makes something ghost knowledge is two things:
It is readily discoverable if you have trusted access to expert members of the community.
It is almost completely inaccessible if you are not.
In this sense, most knowledge is ghost, particularly if you take an expansive view of what counts as an epistemic community.