Brand is right, too, that maintainers haven’t gotten the laurels they deserve. Over the past few decades, scholars have shown that work from oiling tools to replacing worn parts to updating code bases all tends to be lower in status than “innovation.” Maintenance gets neglected in many organizational and social settings. (Just look at some American infrastructure!) And as the right-to-repair movement has shown, companies in pursuit of greater profits have frequently locked us out of being able…
