Maintenance is meditative — one of Brand’s heroes, the great French philosopher/round-the-world-sailor Bernard Moitessier, told him “My rule is, a new boat every day.” By that he meant that everything on his one-man boat should be as good as new; no repair job was so trivial that it could be postponed. (View Highlight)
Photocopier repair is beyond most of us, but the same instinct applies whether the problem is a software glitch, a faulty washing machine or a garden pest: we seek advice and compare notes. Many manufacturers of complex products and services will direct troubleshooting requests to online communities of other users. That can feel like a frustrating piece of cost-cutting, but it is also a sensible reflection of the fact that it can take a village to fix a widget. (View Highlight)
The third fact follows from the second: because maintenance can require deep expertise, learning to maintain something is empowering. That is true whether the thing in question is a motorcycle or a motorcycle club, or even your own body. Stewart Brand declares that the power to repair is the power to improve. He’s right. (View Highlight)
Los resultados relativos al entrenamiento involucrado en la escritura
It sometimes feels that maintenance is a lost art: so many appliances are miniaturised and mass-produced that they become much simpler to replace than to repair. Still, this technological change cuts both ways: YouTube and large language models can assist with all manner of household maintenance tasks, and both manuals and spare parts are often easy to obtain online. (View Highlight)