Episode 64 Transcript

Grant: Today on the podcast I'm speaking with Lee Vinsel. Lee's an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. He studies human life with technology, with particular focus on the relationship between government, business, and technological change. He recently published a book with his colleague, Andy Russell, called The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most.

Since 2015, Lee has organized and led the Maintainers, which is a global interdisciplinary research network that examines maintenance, repair, and mundane work with technology. Maybe the most important thing is that Lee lived in Pittsburgh while pursuing his PhD at Carnegie Mellon in history. 

So, welcome. Looking forward to our conversation today.

Lee: Thanks for having me, man.

Grant: I want to spend the interview discussing a range of topics that you cover in your book and also in your other work. You'll probably be pleased to know that your book was recommended to me by my very good friend named Brandon, who is a diesel mechanic, an autodidact, a scholar of theology of labor, a seminarian—and I think your book's really speaking to folks in the maintenance business that are thinking about these issues. Maybe somebody who gets to meet Brandon; he's a good hang. 

First question: what is the point of innovation?

Lee: I think that's a contested topic in itself. Historically, we only really started talking in a serious way about innovation after World War II, and I can go into that story and how it happened. But what folks were looking at is they were hypothesizing that innovation—which is new technologies and new business practices moving out into the world—was giving us things like economic growth, job creation, increased quality of life. And so that's why it got so much energy around it, because it became seen as the key to getting all these other things that we wanted.

Grant: How would you differentiate good innovation, bad innovation, and innovation-speak? Those seem to be three concepts that you are really focused on in your book.

Lee: Let me start with the good innovation/bad innovation thing. Part of what I'll explain as innovation-speak is that we've come to treat innovation like it's a good in itself, when it just means new stuff moving out into the economy and society. We have this assumption that it's good, but we joke in the book and in other places that crack cocaine was clearly a major innovation in the 1980s, because it was a new product; it displaced an old product called blow; there's a lot of risky entrepreneurship around it called drug dealing; it was clearly, according to economic definitions, a major innovation. And there's lots of other examples, like the opioid crisis is an innovation story, because it's just new stuff getting out there in new ways, right? And so I do think we need to think through the difference between good and bad innovation in a more holistic fashion. 

And then the way I've come to talk about innovation-speak is, let's think about science for a second. It's easy when we think of a science to think about the difference between our scientific theories of the world and the world. One reason it's easy to think about that is because we have a bunch of debunked and old scientific theories from before that don't hold up anymore. Well, innovation-speak is what we call the ways of talking and thinking about innovation that developed in the post World War II period, right up to the present. Our point is that there's a difference between innovation-speak and actual innovation. In fact, innovation-speak doesn't often get us more innovation. It's full of bad theories, and it's the language of boosters and hype-mongers and like university presidents who want to open up glass covered buildings and stuff. It's the language, often, of people who are promising things in society that don't deliver for us.

Grant: So when you talk about innovation, it sounds to me that you're posing a broader critique of modernity's unwavering commitment to progress. But at the same time, you seem to make distinctions between these two ideas, progress and innovation. So what is the difference between innovation and progress? And is your project really just a critique of progress that's lodged by other thinkers like Postman and Barry and Kingsnorth? What differentiates your focus on innovation as opposed to progress itself?

Lee: Progress is interesting. We use a lot of this tool called Google Ngram, which is a freely available tool on the internet. You can pump in words or phrases and it shows you word use or phrase use over time. And if you look at the use of the word progress, it starts going down around 1968. There's environmental problems, there's the Vietnam War, Watergate on the way, all these kinds of things. The faith in progress starts getting pretty shaky in the 70s. 

This is exactly the moment when use of the word innovation is rising. So one of the things we argue is that innovation becomes a replacement term for progress in many ways. But progress had a social and moral dimension to it; it was supposed to be social improvement. And innovation often promises that kind of change through technological innovation or change in itself. So I think that you can make common links between us and critics of progress, but Andy and I are also people who think that quality of life really has improved a lot in the last 200 years. So we don't want to poo poo the actual technical progress—we can talk about moral and political progress if you want to—but narrow technical progress, quality of life progress, is pretty easy to demonstrate. 

We're more trying to argue that our focus on technological change since the 60s just is not delivering, and it's not getting us what we want. So we have to come up with new and better ways to think about these.

Grant: That leads into this next set of questions. I want to talk a little bit about digital technology, which is really the nexus of 21st century innovation. Why is it that everything I truly need in my house was invented before 1980, maybe invented before 1900?

Lee: Yeah. We draw a lot on the economist Robert Gordon and people who think like him, and Gordon argues that the biggest period of actual innovation is between 1920 and 1970 in U.S. history. And contrary to people who are like, “Oh, technology's changing faster than ever,” in the last decade or two, most of the technologies that we use in our daily lives were invented in this earlier period and haven't changed that much since 1970. So I think you're really putting your finger on it. When we talk about innovation today, it's all about digital technologies, but digital technology has all been massively over promised in terms of quality of life improvements. So it draws our attention back to older stuff.

Grant: So are Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple actually innovative? That’s what we hear; are they actually innovative, or is it innovation-speak?

Lee: We can kind of break them apart and think about what their actual innovations are. Google innovated in search—it still makes most of its money from search and advertising, basically. Amazon has innovated around logistics and moving stuff around the planet, although it builds on Walmart and other companies that innovated in that way much earlier. Facebook—social media is a new technology, but I think that what goods it has delivered is an open question, something we can chew on.

Grant: So if you're sitting in a room with executives from these companies, what goods would you ask them to deliver? And that kind of goes back to the first question about what is the point of innovation? What are the goods which you think good innovation would serve? 

Lee: That's a great question. There's two places we could have gone in the book. In the first part of the book, we question innovation-speak, and then in our book we talk about how it leads us to neglect other important ends like maintenance and repair. It could have been a book about innovation policy and how we get the kind of innovations we want, or something like that. 

I think that we're maybe at the end of another technology bubble; some things have been imploding for the last year with technology firms. And when you look at sharing economy apps, all this kind of crap that has come around in the last decade, they're really not delivering much quality of life improvement, frankly. You get food delivery now? Well, I could order a pizza in the 1990s with a phone. It's not that good. 

So what I think we need to do is focus on ends, and I think you and I could have really interesting conversations about how we need to focus on ends that we actually care about.

And so the two I focus on—I mean, we can talk about climate change and the Green New Deal and stuff like that—but just housing. We have housing crises all over the nation right now, in many nations around the world. And I think those are the kinds of things we need to focus on in technological change. Let's house people in environmentally sustainable housing would be an end worth achieving. And I think you're going to need government action to do that. It's pretty clear that the market alone is not going to solve that problem.

Grant: One thing your book made me think about—is digital technology just another form of technology, or is it a paradigm shift? Is it radically different conceptually from the wheel or the light bulb or indoor plumbing? I often hear that the smartphone is just like the wheel; it's just a new thing that we have and we just need to deal with it. Or is it a total paradigm shift, a new technology that totally changes the way that we should think about technology?

Lee: I'm on the “it's not a paradigm shift” team. Like a lot of historians of technology, I think there's basically two major technological revolutions in human history, and they are when we settled down and started growing agriculture—that happened a long time ago; that was a big change. And the second one's the technological or industrial revolution. Historians like Nathan Ensmenger, the historian of computing, when they do this history, they just show that computing is an extension of the industrial revolution and not a fundamental change.

Grant: That's interesting, [there’s a] guy named Jeffrey Ramos [who] argues that essentially this has ushered in an entirely new age of networks that almost is a new industrial revolution that puts an end to the industrial revolution and engages something entirely new. But it sounds like you don't think so.

Lee: I think that's just wrong. Let's just look at economic numbers since the seventies, when digital technology is supposed to have taken off: we just don't see a new era of productivity change or production change. Production output's been growing very slow. So for me, there's no quantitative evidence that we entered a new economic moment as a result of digital technologies.

Grant: What about the shifts in the distribution of employment from manufacturing to service? That seems to be a new economy. Or are you just saying it's the same economy, just redistributed in a way that's new but not fundamentally disruptive and revolutionary?

Lee: The shift of services preceded personal computers and cell phones and stuff like that. It is a change, but it has to do with the industrialization and globalization and these much larger forces. And I think that digital technology is going to play some role—I mean, we can do remote work for certain kinds of white collar work. Although, my point with Maintainers is, let's not forget your diesel mechanic buddy. He can't do remote work, right? He needs a shop. So there's only so many kinds of forms of labor that are really going to shift as a result of this.

And I'm all for it. Some of my friends would like to live on the side of a mountain in West Virginia and do their tech work, and I say amen to that. That sounds like a beautiful life, right? I'm up for those improvements. I just think we should not overestimate their overall impacts.

Grant: So I want to read a quote from an essay called “The Cross in the Machine” by Paul Kingsnorth. I don't know if you've been reading Kingsnorth or not, but he has some similar critiques that you have in your book. So here's what he says. “Dig in for long enough, and you see that something like climate change or mass extinction is not a problem to be solved through politics or science, but the manifestation of a deep spiritual malaise.”

So for Kingsnorth, climate change is really the sign of a deeper spiritual issue that's rooted in our worship of progress. I'm wondering, to what extent do you think modern's fixation with innovation is a spiritual issue before it's political or scientific or technological?

Lee: That's a deep question. I want to answer it two ways. I think that a lot of the problems—and this is especially true of climate change—we just didn't know what we were getting ourselves into when we started building up the modern technological world. It was honestly mostly on track before we even knew climate change was a real problem. We became aware of a deeper thing.

Where I connect with Kingsnorth is I just don't think that technological solutionist folks who want to solve climate change purely through technological change, I don't think they can do it honestly. The way it's a spiritual question is because you have got to imagine a future where Americans decide to consume less as a society. And that to me connects to Aquinas and all kinds of Christian theologians and Asian, Buddhist thinkers. But that's a spiritual issue to tangle with: how do we choose to consume less?

Grant: In Kingsnorth, one of his big points is that every culture needs someone on the throne. It was God, and now we've replaced it with progress. And when I read your work, you seem to use innovation very similarly to the way that Kingsnorth talks about progress.

Lee: Yeah. Or growth.

Grant: Growth. Exactly. That's really it. Kingsnorth is about want and growth and greed, really. That's really the center of what Kingsnorth is talking about. 

This actually leads to my next question. I want to talk a little bit about the political implications of our commitment to innovation and our lack of attention to maintenance. Would you be in favor of more of a zero growth economy that shifts away from innovation to simply maintaining what we have? And if so, who wins and loses in such a scenario?

Lee: I think part of our problem is that we're focusing on kind of ridiculous technologies in this last bubble that we've been living in for the last decade. I'm for positive technological change that actually improves daily life, and I think we need to think about how to get that stuff; but I do think we need to consume less. I have not spent serious time with the degrowthers yet—there's a whole school of degrowth—but I need to. I feel like there was another part of your question I'm not answering though.

Grant: If we do commit to a de-growth model, who wins and loses? My first thought is, well, if we de-grow, then maybe the laptop class loses, because they're sort of the engine of innovation. But if you look at countries in the developing world that have de-growthed, it tended to be those in poverty, because the growth that has been already accumulated has been accumulated by the wealthy. And when you stop growing, the wealthy aren't giving their stuff away. It's just now the poor can't catch up.

Lee: Right. I think that if you have the kind of social hierarchies we have in place, the economic hierarchies, then the poor are going to suffer. And this is a big problem. I know that de growthers are thinking through this systematically—that if you're going to degrow, you have to think about inequality and poverty, otherwise you're just going to screw poor people. 

But if we stop growth—we can see it in how the air has been leaving the market in the last year or so—the asset holding classes are also suffering right now. When you have recessions, everyone suffers. But you know that it's the suffering that happens on the bottom that you’ve got to worry about the most, because they have the least and they suffer the hardest.

Grant: To what extent might the emergence of 21st century populism be driven by our fixation with innovation?

Lee: What some people call neoliberalism—which is not a term I tend to use, but it’s kind of free market economics that both the Republicans and the Democrats were into for a period of time, say from 1980 to 2016—is in a sense about innovation. Because it's about cutting taxes, cutting back regulations. Why are you going to do that? Well, because it's going to spur on entrepreneurship and give us technological change, and we'll get all kinds of benefits from that, right? 

My read on Bernie and Trump—and I'm not alone, I'm drawing on others here—but I think they are a reaction to how that economic system, which is a system of innovation, has failed the normal people. I think populism is all about our overall economic system, including the fetish for innovation, failing us, and then people being pissed about that. And they react to it in different ways. You have the Democratic socialists under Bernie; and then you have anti-immigrant and other kinds of right wing concerns under the Trump forces. But I believe that there are similar causes to both of those things.

Grant: These sort of ideologies, it's not a line, it's a circle right? So Bernie and Trump actually kind of meet at a particularly odd place. I know both of those guys would not like that comparison, but in many ways they're very similar.

Lee: This is called the Horseshoe Theory, and I kind of buy into it in a way. The way they tap into emotion, for instance, and the kinds of the rhetorics they're willing to use are pretty similar. But my hardcore Bernie fan friends really get angry when I say this kind of thing. I'm just getting myself into trouble here.

Grant: I'm acutely aware—here I am at the University of Pittsburgh—that higher education is complicit in the promotion and expansion of this innovation delusion. How has your study of innovation changed the way you teach?

Lee: I have a class called Innovation and Context, which is not about maintenance—I bring maintenance in, but it really is about innovation. And the first half of that class, I arrange around myths about innovation that are out there in our culture. So for instance, the idea that small businesses and startups give us most of our innovation—that's just not true. So really, I'm kind of old school. I do raise political and moral questions for my students and we deal with ethical quandaries, but I really try to have them understand what we know about innovation and how we get it. And it turns out that when you do that work, all the innovation-speak ideas about how to get it, like building glass covered buildings on campuses or whatever that we like to do in higher ed, they just don't turn out to produce actual innovation. We've been misled by our leaders.

I really try to give students a sense of the world around them. I'm old school in that way. I want to teach them how the world works. And then for me, there's a kind of critique of creating safe spaces; I try to create safe spaces for everyone, conservatives and liberals alike. I want Christian conservatives and libertarians to feel comfortable in my classroom. When I teach them the way the world is, to the best of our knowledge, then what I want from them is to connect their values and where they're coming from morally and religiously, for them to deal with that from their own point of view, with my help.

Grant: Before I read your book, I'd been thinking about these issues, and I'm beginning to conceive of my job as one that's very conservative. Particularly my teaching, as a person in health sciences, the real focus is NIH funding; that's all that we really care about. And I realize that what I really think my job is here is teaching students. 

To your point, I haven't really thought about it this way—[this] is the way the world works, and helping them to conserve wisdom as opposed to just cranking out more R1s, which obviously the institution likes, but I don't know if it’s really serving the needs of these kids at the institution.

Lee: Do you remember Neil Postman, who was one of these technology critics? I can't remember if you mentioned him earlier or not, but he's interesting because he had two books. One's called Teaching as a Subversive Activity or something like that. And then his second one was Teaching as a Conserving Activity. I think we have a balancing act to play there.

Grant: I'll tell you something funny about that. I literally just got those books from a library. Our library has the radical one; it doesn't have the conserving one. I thought that was kind of telling.

Lee: Yeah.

Grant: So, are you encouraging your children to go to college?

Lee: Thank you for asking that question. We talk about college, but I also talk to them about the trades a lot. My wife and I have even played with the idea of not insisting, but very much encouraging them to get a trade degree at the junior college, maybe in high school or something like that—either plumbing or becoming electrician. What I want them to understand is that you can have a solid middle class life and not go to college. I would love it if they went to college and studied philosophy or theology and thought, but I want them to go for the right reasons and not the wrong ones. We've seriously over promised college as a path to a career, unfortunately.

Grant: I don't know if you've been following this at all, but Franciscan University in Steubenville, it's a small, faithful Catholic college, and some of the faculty there just started something called the College of St. Joseph the Worker. The way that it's structured is you get a bachelor's degree in Catholic studies, but at the same time, you learn a trade and you have an apprenticeship with a contractor in Steubenville who's a Catholic, and you make money. So you emerge both with a Bachelor's in Arts in Catholic Studies, and you have some accreditation or certification as a plumber or an electrician or a carpenter; and you emerge debt free, because you've paid for it along the way through your apprenticeship. 

I'm seeing these models emerge quite a bit, and a lot of them are sort of grounded in Catholic thinkers—there's one in New Mexico called Kateri College. I wonder, do you see this as a movement that's happening outside of my own sort of Catholic bubble?

Lee: I want to learn more about the instances you're talking about. I've seen people chatter about real enlivening junior colleges and trade schools, not for-profit ones, but old school trade schools; and Germany often gets brought up as an alternative training model. But I just haven't seen as many experiments with it in practice as I would like to. 

Grant: Well, offline, I'll send you an email about these instances. I think they're very, very promising. I mean, I'd love to teach at one of these places. I think they're pretty great. 

So—who benefits from STEM education?

Lee: The NSF? I don't know. [laughter] I just had breakfast for the first time with this engineer and businessman and writer named Bob Charette, who wrote at IEEE Spectrum. His title “The STEM Crisis Is a Myth,” it's from 2012 or 2013. It's [about] the whole idea that there's a crisis in STEM and we need more STEM majors is largely a creation of the National Science Foundation and has to do in part with getting more grad students into R1s and elite research universities to do work for free, basically. 

I think our economy hasn't benefited from STEM. I think the people who get STEM degrees are often not well served by the hype around that. I really think it's elites and the science interest group that benefit the most. And that's another thing I teach in that innovation class: when you hear researchers saying, “What we need is more federal research funding,” you’ve got to understand that these groups—the National Academy of Science, NSF—these are interest groups pushing for rents, just like any other interest group.

Grant: The first question's always cui bono, right? Who benefits?

Lee: Yeah, exactly.

Grant: Some of my friends who teach in the English department have stopped taking PhD students, because they know they know it's immoral at this point. I think getting a PhD in English is worth doing for its own sake, but not for the sake of the belief that you're going to get a job. Do you think that STEM educators should begin feeling the same? Are they setting people up not to have jobs and to over promise?

Lee: I think that I would want to really look at the numbers to think through that, but—I guess I'll just say this out loud—I think that programs like my own should probably wind down over time. I just think like in humanities and social sciences, we really need to start closing programs. And unless something very compelling happened, I don't think I'm going to be taking more grad students who are looking at the academic job market in the United States. I just think that's immoral, basically. Although I think we do need important kinds of research, so the question is, how do we create new institutions to do that kind of work? And I don't think that's obvious; that takes thought.

Grant: So you're saying winding down your sort of program from a PhD/graduate school perspective, or even undergraduate? Because I would imagine that what you're teaching is worth knowing for its own sake.

Lee: I just mean that we need to put hard limits on folks coming into programs like mine who want to become professors. If people have compelling reasons to do it for other reasons ... The undergrad thing is interesting. Here at Virginia Tech, we don't have a major yet. I can make a stronger argument for STS as an undergraduate major than I can as a graduate major at this point.

Grant: Most of my research, at least the stuff that I get funded, is related to nurse practitioners. If there's a growth industry, it's obviously the healthcare system. Actually, to be honest with you, if there's a growth industry, it's not nurse practitioners, it's home health aids; that's the real growth industry These programs are growing like crazy. There's been this enormous growth in nurse practitioner programs and the number of graduates we crank out, and we're all under the assumption that these jobs are out there; but I just reviewed a paper a little while ago for a journal that seemed to demonstrate that NP salaries were flat—that what's probably happening is we're flooding the market without us even knowing it. I don't think any field thinks through this stuff in a systematic way.

Lee: We're doing the same thing with CS degrees right now. I mean, frankly, I think in a couple years, we're going to end up in a place where there's many more CS graduates than we have jobs. The deeper thing I’ve become interested in is, when we think about economic problems like inequality and other things, how it's become an article of faith, especially amongst Democrats, but also amongst Republicans, that education's the key to that.

I'm writing a paper right now about the nineties and the Clinton administration and Robert Rice and all these characters, and they really think education is the solution to poor black people and women and all this kind of stuff. And then what you see is like by 2005 or right around there is that the wages that college graduates are bringing in stagnate and then actually start going down.

And it's because you're just turning out all these college grads, but you're not actually creating more work. If you're not dealing with the lack of work, you're really not dealing with the problem.

Grant: The interesting point that you make in your book too, is we think that computer science is somehow a fancy, innovative field, but it's actually a maintenance field. So if you're going to be working in an IT department—I know those aren't exactly people that have computer science degrees, but I'm sure some of them do this—you might as well be working as a plumber.

Lee: Yep. You might as well be working as a plumber. And also since so much of computer work does not need a CS degree, we really need to create more working class training programs in junior colleges and stuff. We just need to rethink that.

Grant: We haven't even really spoken about what's the real focus of your book and the organization that you started, the Maintainers, which is maintenance. So talk a little bit about that, maybe within the context of what I think is the biggest sign of America's lack of attention to maintenance, which is our physical infrastructure.

Why is it important to my city leaders that I have wifi on the city bus? I noticed that the other day. I didn't know we had this, but I was sitting there, I just dropped my kids off somewhere and I just sent out an email. And lo and behold, my city bus has wifi. Why do city leaders care that we have wifi on the bus?

Lee: The TransitCenter in New York is a public transit advocacy group. They work in New York, but they also do public transit advocacy all throughout the nation. They've done studies that show that city leaders think that you need to add bells and whistles to transit to get people to use it. So it's partly an inducement: Well, we have wifi on our bus, so now you can do work on the way to work or whatever. But what the TransitCenter has found repeatedly is that people just want service that works, runs on time, and doesn't break down and operates really effectively, and they don't need all these bells and whistles.

For me that’s a beautiful example of how nifty innovations become honey or something for these leaders, when really the people mostly just want functioning stuff in their lives.

Grant: Another great example in our city: I’m a bicyclist, I bike to work from time to time, and they put in these traffic circles on our street where they're supposed to slow the flow of traffic and be really great for bicyclists. It's not quite clear to me how that works. You go down the street, all these amazing traffic circles that they just put in; and then you turn left on East Liberty Boulevard and the bike lane is just riddled with potholes. 

[laughter]

Lee: You guys also had that bridge collapse, was it last year? Maintenance played a part in that too.

Grant: Yeah. Why is it that Americans seem so unimpressed with our crumbling infrastructure? It seems like, a big bridge will collapse, we’ll be very upset, and then … You make the point about Japan that it has these amazing trains that travel however many miles per hour—very, very fast. And they're always within a minute of their supposed arrival time. If anyone rides Amtrak, you know you're not going to get there within a minute of your proposed arrival time. But we don't seem to care all that much. Or maybe we do; maybe I just don't hang out with the right people.

Lee: Well, it pops up every now and again when a disaster strikes, like you were just saying. I think part of the problem is that this is both ideological and kind of structural when it comes to social structures. But in America, when we say infrastructure policy, especially at the federal level, we’re mostly focusing on building new stuff. Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns—a Catholic libertarian thinker by the way—has done pretty good analysis of how federal infrastructure policy basically encourages localities to build new things, but then the localities are promising to deal with maintenance in perpetuity, and they don't have the tax bases to deal with them. So there's very deep ideological and structural issues that force us into building new things but not taking care of what we have. And to do that you'd really have to rethink federal policy, I think. That's part of what we say in the book, is that we really need to think about maintenance more than building.

Grant: This is literally the next question. In November of last year, Joe Biden signed a trillion dollar infrastructure bill. Is this going to do the trick? 

Lee: No.

Grant: Why not?

Lee: Because it's pork and building new stuff and it's not a maintenance centered bill, you know? That's the other thing. I forgot to mention pork earlier, but when we look at what these policies turn into—it's just like a grab bag for all the legislatures from all over the nation. It's like, well, what am I going to get out of it?

Grant: So what would it take? What are the political conditions that might move us towards some sort of reasonable infrastructure plan?

Lee: We talk a bit about this when we talk about solutions near the end of the book. I think there's a lot more to say here, but this is a place where progressives and conservatives could come together. One of the things you want to do is start counting all the infrastructure that localities possess as liabilities. So when they apply for more infrastructure spending, they should have it down how many liabilities they have on the books. We could create standards for what's reasonable, like liabilities versus tax base and just build standards, for saying you can only have so much liability, unless we decide oh, you're a very poor place that we need to help federally or something like that.

I think that both conservatives and progressives should be on board with that kind of shift in thinking. It’s just like, let's think about our debts. It's very classic. We could draw in lots of theologians here to think about that issue,  about our sins and debts, and work on those first.

Grant: So those are some political conditions that might lead us to smarter infrastructure maintenance. But what are the cultural conditions? Under what cultural conditions might the West, the United States, move towards a prioritization of maintenance above innovation? What would have to change about our imaginations and the way that we conceive of ourselves in the future?

Lee: This goes back to what you were talking about with Kingsnorth. I think that we would have to move away from the idea that technological change is going to save us. And when you move away from that, then we have to start thinking about ends.

Let's talk about means and ends for a second. Technologies are means to ends, and yet we've come to treat technological improvement as an end in itself, effectively. You could say that's the idol part of it. If we shift that and let's say human wellbeing becomes the end we're trying to seek, and we give up on the idea that technology is going to get us to some holy land in the end, then I would think that maintenance really does come forward. Maintenance and care, caring for each other and taking care of what we have, really comes together. 

Because we want the things that we have in our world to be functional. And even more than that, we want them to be beautiful, even. We want to live with bridges and things that are appealing to our senses. I think we start bringing in those bigger questions when we push technology aside.

Grant: It's interesting that you say that. Beatrice Institute's going through this sort of slow process of thinking through what it might look like to try to unify the sciences around this question of [what] we call human flourishing. That's sort of our focus. So the humanities saying, what is a person, and then what are the needs and motivations of that thing that we call person? And then how do we orient technology and healthcare and politics? We're teaching a class in the spring—me and some buddies from English and engineering—called Human Flourishing. And the whole point is, what is flourishing? But the big part is, if we had this idea in mind, what would innovation look like? We're going to have a little module on innovation, healthcare, et cetera.

So I do actually think that's a promising way forward, putting the person in the center of all of this stuff.

Lee: One of the traditions I come out of is, it's related to existentialism and phenomenology—philosophical anthropology is how I think of it. But I think that we can't move forward with things like climate policy and thinking about these very deep existential issues without thinking about what humans actually need. And that's controversial in capitalism, where it's just supposed to be open to whoever. And it's like, no, you actually have to think about needs, because we actually have to cut back consumption. So what do we need to be happy? What kind of free time do we need? What kind of entertainments do we need? What kind of spiritual life do we need? 

Grant: There’s this great section of a sermon that was done by Martin Luther King—this was the end of 1950s—and he said, the central conflict between communism and capitalism is ultimately a question about what is man. Because those are two systems that have very particular views of the human person, and they're using the human person for different ends. And this was the center of the pontificate of John Paul II and of Benedict XVI. So, yeah, you're exactly right—I think the reemergence of philosophical anthropology or theological anthropology is probably at the spiritual center. At least that's kind of what I'm betting on.

Lee: I also look back to Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum and the so-called capabilities approach, which is also about thinking about what humans actually need to be happy. 

Grant: Do you know of any companies that develop technology that have the innovation/maintenance/decay process in their design schemes? Or is it literally just innovation, sell, rinse, and repeat?

Lee: I’ll end up somewhere different, but it's kind of fun to think about Amazon Web Services and Netflix for a second. Amazon Web Services—I think this is still true—is by far the most profitable part of Amazon. It's basically where the money comes in for the rest of the operation. The similarity between Amazon Web Services and Netflix is they both compete on uptime or quality of service, and so they both have amazing maintenance teams as a result of it, cutting edge ones that have actually introduced innovations in maintenance. So you see it when maintenance is so important to the bottom line that you have to think through. 

But I also think you see it in more mature firms like Oracle and places like this, where that's just such a part of their business. In Oracle, you can get credit for being a maintainer in a serious way; you can do that and be an important part of the company, recognized on it. Just to contrast this with something, because of how our startup system works with venture capital and stuff, startups are often not thinking through maintenance and sustainability at all, because they're just trying to get some kind of viable “product” off the ground that will get hoovered up by one of these big tech firms. And so that is the contrast—these startups that are not focused on thinking through these issues at all.

Grant: Your book really crystallized some things in my mind that I'd already been thinking through. So I got rid of my electric mower and replaced it with a real mower; because I can look at real mower, and I'm like, oh, there's the seven parts that make this thing work. And I suspect if I took it apart, I could probably put it back together and replace the blades. So I've been trying to do this. But, this is teeing up this next question: to what extent is the crisis of maintenance a crisis of time? 

Lee: Time and money. Well, it raises interesting questions about how much we all take on in terms of stuff. There’s really good data on the growing size of the average American home over the last half a century and all the stuff we bring into it. So it might just be true in some sense that we've taken on so much stuff in our households that we simply cannot do all the maintenance ourselves.

Andy and I tend not to over idealize diy. I mean, there's stuff I diy, but I also am glad to live in a capitalist economy where I can hire an expert who actually knows what they’re doing. I live in a house that has a well, and I'm kind of outside of town. So there's systems that I rely on that I just have no knowledge of whatsoever. 

Grant: So how might I decide to fix something myself as opposed to hiring a maintainer? Because it's good both for me, because the job will be done correctly; but then it also makes money for people, a group of people that we think are important. How do you make that decision then? 

Lee: It's about a bunch of things. I actually enjoy some maintenance work, so if it's something that's going to give me pleasure or give my family, there's projects worth taking on because they have bigger ends and values than just getting it done. 

But then, I'm a busy guy. You're a busy guy. There's things that sometimes I need done that it looks pretty implausible that I'm going to do it quickly or properly, like replacing the floor of my basement. I think it's just that you have to do cost benefit analysis effectively.

The only thing I'll say is that my wife and I hold family meetings. We've kind of gotten out of it the last couple months, but we try to hold a family meeting on Saturday morning where we look through what we're going to eat that week, but also things like where maintenance is at and where the budgets are at. And then, I'm privileged to some degree—I'm a professor, I make good money—[but] we also just created maintenance funds, where we regularly put money aside for the car and for the house. It's just realistic; you're going to have to deal with stuff. So I do think there's changes we can make on a personal level to think through these things.

Grant: Yeah. Although my most basic heuristic is, will this burn my house down?

[laughter]

Lee: Dude, yeah. I don't mess with electricity. I don't mess with my, well, and I don't mess with electricity. 

Grant: Right. Those are my two heuristics: could I burn my house down or flood my house, and then, if the answer is yes, I try not to do it.

I do want to talk a little bit about this connection between sustainability and maintenance. There's this deep irony that I see amongst political and business elites that speak incessantly about sustainability, but nothing about maintenance. Talk about that deep irony—I find it totally ironic.

Lee: Yeah. It is ironic in a number of ways. The first thing is that poorly maintained systems use more energy. So just on that level, if we don't take care of our things, we're being less sustainable. And then the other thing—we already see this happening in some places with solar arrays and stuff—we can adopt a bunch of new stuff into the world and not think through the maintenance of it, and it will fail on us eventually. And the third thing—and this ties to not just the climate, but other kinds of environmental issues—there's a notion of the circular economy, which is that we just have to keep our things alive for longer. And it's both because we're wasting resources because every time we take something and throw it in the garbage, we've just wasted metal and plastic and all this stuff; but also if we just have a waste society, we have to produce more, and production has all kinds of environmental outcomes. So we need to keep things alive for longer.

So you're right. I think that this conversation exists in some expert domains, but is largely lacking in popular consciousness.

Grant: This actually circles back to some points that Paul Kingsnorth has been making on his Substack Abbey of Misrule: to what extent is the contemporary sustainability movement really just an effort to sustain the innovation delusion?

Lee: Kingsnorth I think of as a person [who’s] politically off the map. Not a conservative or on the left—he is a different animal, for good reason. But this is the classic left critique of sustainability and a lot of this stuff, is that it's just about keeping the capitalist machine going. And I think there's a lot of truth to that.

Grant: As you know, my interest is really in the wellbeing of healthcare workers, particularly ones that haven't gone to college. Those sorts of maintainers are unique, right? They’re not caring for pipes and wires. They're caring for the human person, bodies. So how do the needs of maintainers in the care economy differ from the needs of other maintainers, such as plumbers, carpenters, handymen? Could you think about them in a different way? In your Maintainer group, are any home health aids a part, or is this a lot of plumbers and carpenters?

Lee: No, we include care work under our definition of maintenance, and we do that for a number of reasons. But one difference is, when we were talking about the trades earlier, you can make pretty good money as a plumber or an HVAC person. Home healthcare work and these other service care jobs that have grown up in the past couple decades just pay terribly low. There's a lot of burnout; they often don't have healthcare and other kinds of things. And they get sick. There's this book Forced to Care that shows that they get diseases more, they get heart disease more because they're stressed out all the time. And so I think that they really are a class of folks that we need to especially pay attention to.

Grant: I've actually noticed that in a lot of the health services research, which is my field, there's a lot of talk about nursing burnout, physician burnout, and there's a little bit about nurses aides; but it's a big hole, because there's no nurses aid who has a PhD at the University of Pittsburgh who's doing nurse aid research. I don't want to poo poo people that are actually doing this, but it is certainly a hole within health services research that we're trying to fill here at the University of Pittsburgh.

Lee: Have you read Gabriel Winant?

Grant: I did. In fact, I interviewed Gabe for this podcast. It was probably my favorite one, because Gabe is a self-avowed atheist Marxist, and I'm Catholic personalist; but those two traditions have a lot to say to each other, and they agree on so many things. So it was actually a really fun interview to think about the ways in which we agree and disagree. 

His book actually really sparked my interest in this field. I'm a Pittsburgher, I'm from Pittsburgh; and you sort of stand at the Homestead Works now, it's a shopping mall. And then you get down the river and see the UPMC tower, and you realize just how much the city has changed, how much the face of American labor has changed. I think that his book does a really, really great job of pointing that out.

Lee: Yeah.

Grant: Well, that's the end of my questions. This was really, really fun.

As we were emailing, I had a feeling this was going to be a fun conversation, and it certainly lived up to that. So I thank you for taking some time out of your busy schedule to chat with me, and hopefully we'll have a chance to collaborate on some things, because I think we have a lot of mutual interests.

Lee: That's right, man. Thanks a lot for having me and I agree. I think we have a lot of overlapping interests, so let's talk.

Grant: All right. Great. Have a good day.

Lee: All right, man. Thanks so much.