The forgotten art of maintenance

Why our systems are collapsing

Firth of Forth Bridge

In the early 20th century, it took a team of 50 men three years and 18 tons of paint to keep the 1890-built bridge corrosion free and looking fresh, by which time the whole process had to be repeated.

The quirk became so well-known that the phrase "painting the Forth Bridge" soon entered common parlance…

Source

I still remember learning about this historical factoid in my youth. Though as it was told to me it only took a year to paint the bridge before they started again - in reality it was a three year job. Looking at the numbers you understand why - 135 acres of steel, 6.5 million rivets. It was a continual process. At the end of three years they would start again. As much of a miracle as the construction of this bridge was and is perhaps the real miracle is in the maintenance. This is what makes civilizations great, and what makes them last. In our modern day mythos we have been repeatedly sold the lie of the Silicon Valley tech nerds that innovation is the most important thing - but in reality it is maintaining what we have built. It is largely our abandonment of proper maintenance in society that is hurrying us along to a lower standard of living and a slow collapse.

They repainted that bridge for a long time but they were not immune to improved technology. The latest coat of paint is much more powerful in resisting the elements than the old ones and so we will still have to repaint it but when 2027 rolls around it will have been 25 years since the bridge was last painted. No doubt an achievement but even with our advances you can’t escape the need to maintain and repair. Maintaining isn’t just about repairing either - it encompasses things like cleaning too. I recall visiting a school in London that was, shall we say, interesting from an architectural viewpoint. That is to say it was ‘modern’. So modern for the time that how it was built meant that there were weirdly inaccessible areas where filth and grime accumulated. The innovation of the time and the radical new design by the architects of the time was shown to be ultimately stupid because none of these intelligent people had considered the need to keep it clean.

John Michael Greer - the archdruid of collapse theorizing postulates that slow collapse is rarely seen or felt over time because the drops down in standards become masked. We adapt to the new normal quickly and tell ourselves that it was always this way. When services are cut often what is cut is maintenance. Jolts to our fragile system make changes that never really come back. Covid era policies are a good example of this. A lot of public services were curtailed and shut down, many have never really recovered and so we adjust to a new normal of worse standards. We should use this concept to think about policing and general society as well - after all Police actions and behaviors effectively maintain a status. Many urban centers are now worse off than before 2020 because in part Police stopped maintaining public spaces. There are huge areas of a large city near me now that were once a charming public space of greenery that are now overrun with homeless OR just fenced off with chainlink. The city is no longer able to maintain a safe and pleasant green space by its governmental buildings.

One of the better books that you can read about this is “The Innovation Delusion”. It’s a 2020 book not without some appalling shitlib priors present in it but for the most part they can be overlooked. The authors are beholden to their class virtue signals but it is mostly fleeting. Instead what they offer is a sobering look at what I have discussed but with a more neutral focus. They are so close to connecting the dots between the ideological reasons for why new ‘innovative’ bridges designed by women collapse catastrophically but so far. Regardless they present many such examples and even if they can’t themselves understand some of the reasoning they offer up other examples of incompetence in our governance that just stem from the slow rot and bad decision making.

One of the most pertinent examples they talk about is how federal funding is used to build new but never to maintain:

In 2014 the federal government paid for nearly 40% (or 69$ billion) of new infrastructure projects but only 12% (or 27$billion) of operations and maintenance. Put another way, more than 70% of federal infrastructure spending went to new construction, whereas 65% of state and local funding went into operations an maintenance…

None of this would be a problem if American communities were generating enough tax revenue to cover maintenance costs…

When Marohn and some colleagues did a study of Lafayette, Louisiana, they found that the city had infrastructure needs of about 32$billion but a tax base of only 16$ billion.

Preceding these points the book tells the story of a Kafakaesque situation where a man has to invent a stupidly expensive “new” system to solve for a simple fix that the town could not afford - the fix of course didn’t qualify for federal funding. Instead he had to invent a new system with the fix built in as an afterthought. Ultimately though the town he helped still ended up taking more debt on.

As you can see what we have now is a system that compounds on its mistakes. We build new infrastructure for places with magic federal funding and then these places that have been decimated by decades of anti-American labor policies have no tax base to maintain them. They work until they don’t and then decay. Often times the new complexity of these systems makes them even harder to maintain for struggling areas. It appears like we are caught in a vicious trap. The concerning part of this trap though is how difficult it feels to break free from. We seem to be accelerating decline through pursuit of innovation.

Maintenance is the forgotten part of society. In many ways much of what we think of as ‘service’ jobs are for the maintainers. Cleaners being the most obvious one. These aren’t glamorous jobs and one of the books failings is to whine a little bit about this. This is unfortunate but also the authors myopia shows - an imported underclass of illegal immigrants will always end up in these bottom tier jobs and not be appreciated. It is my understanding that in India some of the untouchable castes are the ones who are only able to do things like sweep the streets - it gives them a purpose and designation. Our enlightened shitlib leaders would never dream of explicit castes but are happy to import an underclass they can use to do these jobs. Perhaps if we wanted to change the perception of the value of these jobs we could start with not importing an underclass to do them.

Civilizational decline is inevitable in my mind. There are cycles to each one. A rise and a fall. Living through this decline in part provides the ammunition required to halt it and begin the next rise. We see our systems decay and fail. We look at our roads getting worse. It is a bit more hidden though for us because we still are allured by the seductions of screen based technologies. Even these suffer though. Everyone I have ever spoken to in technology talks about how maintenance of systems is always always an afterthought. The backlog of bugs and chores grows whilst people push for new innovations. The glamor is always in the new tech features and products being pushed out not in making sure things are stable. Relentless innovation and the new is a curse in these places, people make do with buggy systems that are forever ignored.

Often we talk of the need to look forward as much as looking to the past but the challenge really is to re-imagine a mindset that is forgotten. We have to plan for the maintenance of systems and products. Even in your own life this has value. Every person (Democrat) who buys an electric vehicle is surrendering away power. I’m not a car guy but I guarantee I could fix my 20 year old car with some manuals, YouTube instructional and basic tools. The guy who bought a Rivian? Not so much - he’s caught in a delusion. A fancier car to drive on worsening roads. Wherever we aim to go, whatever we want to do the future for our people as a whole - for any people - has to see a return to understanding the value of maintenance at every level of civilization.