This expose really opened my eyes to how our political system will spend billions for a new station but won't fix broken track signals and chewed out cabling:
Maintenance isn't sexy. It doesn't make for catchy political campaign promises. It's dirty, it's hard, it never ends, and you've succeed best when no one notices.
But we live in a world full of old technologies and old systems that need constant maintenance and repair. Big infrastructure like the NY Subway is a prime example. 'Innovation' is only of marginal help when dealing with a system like that. Sure, if we had a spare ~$200 billion and were willing to completely evacuate New York City for 3 years we could rip everything out and build a new subway system to rival Singapore or Hong Kong. But this is the real world, and we have to rebuild the proverbial ship while it's still at sea. And the degree to which we have the tools and money to do so is a consequence of our political system.
For anyone who found the OP article interesting, and who cares about technology as it really is across the world rather than as it's portrayed by the Silicon Valley hype machine, I highly recommend the book cited at one point in the article: The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900, by the historian David Edgerton. It completely changed how I think about technology and the ways people use it.
It's not just our political system. Italy had a crippling drought not seen since 1800 in 2017. Rome shut off public fountains, drinking stations, and finally addressed the 40%-45% water loss due to leaks in the pipes.
Civilisation is a Red Queen; we must keep running just to stand still. Maintaining and conserving things is the job of conservatives, not entrepreneurs, and conservatives resist change. Indeed most changes are detrimental.
Yet in the long run we absolutely depend on change in order to adapt and survive. Therefore there has to be a rigorous way of reconciling these two principles. Without fudging ('maintenance often matters more...')
Maybe: visionaries will develop new ideas with no intention to enact them. Eventually a few will become so well-thought-out, so vivid and so blatantly superior to the incumbent alternatives that they become inevitable. That is, society cannot help but enact them.
This already seems to be happening in some areas:
e.g. moral improvements which come about via fiction, especially fantasy fiction
e.g. individual decision-making (it seems like we deliberate for a while and then actions take place automatically)
e.g. Project Hieroglyph (no idea how this is getting along but what a great idea)
> Maintaining and conserving things is the job of conservatives, not entrepreneurs, and conservatives resist change.
I'm mystified by this. Why does maintenance have to be a 'conservative' thing? Probably 70% of software engineering work is maintenance of one kind of or another. Are those engineers conservatives? Do they 'resist change'? Unless you mean 'conversative' in a very restricted sense of that word.
> so well-thought-out, so vivid and so blatantly superior to the incumbent alternatives that they become inevitable. That is, society cannot help but enact them.
This is a version of 'technological determinism' (Google it if you need to). If there's any single takeaway from the last 50 years of scholarship on the history of technnology, it's that technological determism is false.
> This is a version of 'technological determinism' [...] If there's any single takeaway from the last 50 years of scholarship on the history of technnology, it's that technological determism is false.
This kind of thinking is astonishing to me. "Technological determinism" is a historical term--i.e. reified in its era. The arguments ("stirrups enabled feudalism") are dated and simplistic and easily torn down. But to reduce a thought (discovery of technology influences human behavior, and can bring about its own creation) to a label ("technological determinism") and then dismiss it for historical reasons (older versions of that label were insufficient, therefore it is wrong), is sloppy thinking, imo.
I agree. It would be inaccurate to say that the invention of the electric guitar was the sufficient cause of rock'n'roll. On the other hand, the electric guitar is clearly a necessary cause. I think the best model for this interaction is a feedback loop (in the systems sense) where technology influence culture which influences technology.
Conservative in the sense of conserving existing knowledge and technology; not to try out new ideas.
>This is a version of 'technological determinism'
True, the growth of technology can't be predicted. There's no guarantee any particular idea will work. Many ideas will fail due to unforeseen problems, including in apparently unrelated areas like financing and social media and so on. Entrepreneurs may take up an idea and then change it beyond recognition (PG points out that start-ups usually change their product ideas). Each attempt to enact an idea is just that, an attempt.
Whereas in the past we built things before we understood why they worked (steam engines), or whether people would like them, more and more we'll be trying out stuff in theory (richly animated and exciting fiction) before trying in practice.
> Civilisation is a Red Queen; we must keep running just to stand still.
While this is true, it doesn't prevent a hell of a lot of our engineered world from just being retained while the innovations are piled on top. So there is a hell of a lot of close-to-static stuff that matters a lot -- probably more than the innovative works of any given day.
If the old layers were a bit dodgy, their abstractions will leak, foundations will shift and problems will appear in the layers above. And most things are a bit dodgy to start of with, and will not become a firm foundation until they have gone through incremental improvement and maintenance.
Absolutely yes. There is a goldmine there waiting to be found. Most appliances in our modern world are total maintenance disasters, especially compared to pre-industrial civilizations.
I never understood why we do not copy paste certain ideas from nature in our infrastructure. Why cant pipe secret a protective film, to avoid clogging and fracturing?
Why cant we creat systems that self-repair decently.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/nyregion/new-york-subway-...