CONCEPT
Maintenance and Repair — The Invisible Majority
Edgerton's argument that the most important work in any technological system is not invention but maintenance — the unglamorous labor of keeping existing systems running, repairing what breaks, and adapting what was built for one set of conditions to function under another.
Maintenance and repair is the structurally invisible majority of all labor performed with technology. Edgerton has documented across multiple domains that the ratio of maintenance work to creation work is roughly seven to three, and often higher. Seventy percent of all software engineering labor is devoted not to building new things but to maintaining existing ones — debugging, patching, updating dependencies, migrating to new infrastructure, fixing what breaks when an upstream library changes its API, managing technical debt. The same ratio appears in transportation, manufacturing, energy, and military operations. Yet maintenance receives a fraction of the attention, investment, and cultural celebration that invention receives. The asymmetry is not accidental; it is a structural feature of how dramatic narratives organize attention.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel, building directly on Edgerton's framework, published the 2016 manifesto