Manufacturing as Maintenance

The maintenance spectrum has two ends.

At one end, an object is lovingly maintained with effort and care through the years. A cherished blade sharpened on a whetstone every few months.

At the other end, we have manufacturing: just toss the dull knife into the smelter at one end of a factory, and out the other end comes a beautiful, perfect, factory-sharp replacement.

The former garners respect. And it's easy to see why: frequent maintenance was requisite for civilization until the Industrial Revolution. When a suit of armor took months of skilled labor to produce, you'd better maintain it well.

So our culture developed in a world where maintenance has a quasi-moral component and is nearly synonymous with virtue.

My own aesthetic preference is the opposite. Maintenance is tedium. It's using up valuable mental real estate perpetually juggling the upkeep status of all the objects in my life.

The modal reaction to this preference is mild revulsion. Our culture has inculcated in us the morality of thrifty maintenance.

I propose the opposite: the amount of precious time and effort spent on maintenance is a disgusting waste of human potential.

We should view the need for maintenance as a historical burden to be shrugged off, just as we've shrugged off the need for most people to participate in back-breaking agriculture.

The most common reason people give for preferring maintenance over manufacturing is wastefulness. Re-forging a knife is wasteful. But what's being wasted?

The metal is not destroyed or transmuted into some lesser element. The only "waste" is the energy needed to melt my dull knife and cast it into a new, sharp one. In our industrial age, this is only a few cents' worth of energy.

And in our industrial age, the cheapest energy is bountiful, clean solar.

Rather than spending 10 minutes sharpening a knife on a whetstone, you'd be better off spending 10 minutes making solar panels, and then using those solar panels to melt and reforge your old knife.

A market economy, of course, intermediates all this, but the thought experiment is still a useful way to show how our inherited intuitions on alleged wastefulness are wrong.

There are more benefits to manufacturing as maintenance.

Rebirth is a cleansing fire. Rebirth is a chance to start anew. With continual re-making, we get better at making.

How much better would home construction be if we rebuilt every 10 years instead of every 50?

We'd have 5x the societal experience. Every homebuilder could be a master of his craft in 5 years instead of 25.

Homes would never be long out of date. No knob-and-tube wiring to contend with. No lead pipes. A home built in the 2000s would have Ethernet cable running throughout. And one in the 2010s would have a WiFi mesh in the walls.

Homes would transform to grow with families. A starter home in your 20s. A home for kids in your 30s, and a different one for teens in your 40s. Then another for empty-nesters in their 50s.

We'd build them much faster and cheaper. What shortcuts and simplifications can you make if you know you'll tear it down 10 years later? How would society change when a home costs only a few months' salary, and could be built in a month?

We are headed this way.

People increasingly don't maintain modular desktop computers whose parts can be upgraded piecemeal. They buy a brand new maintenance-free laptop every 5 years.

Electric cars, too, require very little maintenance, and aren't likely to join the ranks of classic cars people lovingly maintain for a half-century.

Homes, too, will be swept up in this.

Industrial production of homes has existed for decades, but only at the low end: manufactured mobile homes designed for trailer parks or rural plots.

But a few startups are succeeding at industrial production of homes. Cover, for example, builds luxury homes in record time.

Even without producing components in a factory like Cover, technologies such as humanoid robotics would get us there anyway. Imagine a squad of fifty humanoid robots descending on a homebuilding site, working 24/7 with inhumanly perfect coordination and plan-adherence. They'd finish in days.

I'm reminded of Ise Jingū, a Shintō shrine that is ceremonially rebuilt every 20 years.

It's a manifestation of the concept of tokowaka (常若). The word literally means "ever-young". It's the idea that vitality is preserved with periodic renewal.

The direction of industrial society is toward ubiquitous tokowaka. We should throw off our fetishization of maintenance and actively work towards this.

A quick postscript on pollution: modern chemistry has enabled the creation of materials that are not readily renewed with energy alone.

Such products are popular in large part because they are so low-maintenance, but that chemical durability results in pollution.

By embracing manufacturing-as-maintenance of products made of recyclable materials like metal and wood, we can draw people away from such polluting materials.