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
City messages So far the complete list of messages I've picked up from cities is: wealth, style, hipness, physical attractiveness, fame, political power, economic power, intelligence, social class, and quality of life. My immediate reaction to this list is that it makes me slightly queasy. I'd always considered ambition a good thing, but I realize now that was because I'd always implicitly understood it to mean ambition in the areas I cared about. When you list everything ambitious people are ambitious about, it's not so pretty. Paul Graham, Cities and Ambition Everybody worships