ORGANIZATION
The Maintainers Movement
The intellectual and policy movement, founded by Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel in 2016, that built directly on Edgerton's framework to argue that innovation culture systematically undervalues the work that keeps civilization running.
The Maintainers is an international research network founded in 2016 by historians of technology Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel, with foundational debt to David Edgerton's The Shock of the Old. The network organizes conferences, publishes research, and conducts policy advocacy around the proposition that maintenance — the unglamorous, distributed, structurally invisible labor of keeping existing systems running — is the actual majority of all work done with technology, and that innovation-centered narratives produce systematic undervaluation of this labor with concrete consequences for infrastructure, policy, and economic welfare. The movement's 2016 manifesto Hail the Maintainers, published in Aeon, has become a canonical reference for critics of innovation worship.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Russell and Vinsel's intellectual project began with a direct extension of Edgerton's empirical findings into contemporary policy critique. Where Edgerton documented the historical pattern, Russell and Vinsel argued that the contemporary undervaluation of maintenance has measurable consequences: collapsing bridges in