It’s always easier to make than to fix. And when something is made it’s so easy to take it for granted. (The picture is from the Brownstoner, a great site about renovation in Brooklyn.)
This is true for everything. It’s true for roads, it’s true for houses, it’s true for water, it’s true for our bodies, and it’s true for the Internet itself.
There are two ways to renew. You can destroy, or you can repair.
Throughout human history we’ve usually renewed through destruction. People die and new ones are born. Wars eliminate the old systems and we build anew. Then we take what’s built for granted, we decline to fix or maintain it, yet after the destruction of a war we go eagerly into the greenfield and we build again, from scratch.
The Great Secret of Our Time is this won’t work anymore. We have to repair. We repair ourselves or we die. No one wants to fight a literal war inside the U.S. so we can rebuild it again.
We’re entering the Age of Repair.
The problem with this new era is that it’s not sexy. Going to the
Moon is sexy. War is sexy. Fixing roads, fixing sewers, or
re-architecting how we use the Internet so we get more bandwidth is not
sexy. (Jim Dandy Sewer Repair is located in Seattle, Washington.)
Ennui
is a pretty old word but it describes our preference. Better to relax,
to do nothing, to let things slide than to renew and repair. The aging
process represents a genetic preference for replacement over repair. As
individuals we will, all of us, give in to that process.
But as a civilization we’re faced with a harder, starker choice. We
can’t give in to ennui. And some forms of destruction, as in the
destruction of our environment, are beyond replacing and rebuilding.
Everything we have inherited from our forefathers — the roads, the
water system, the heating system, the Earth, the Internet — all these
things must be repaired, and should be maintained constantly. Or the
house falls in around our ears.
That’s what has been happening to the world this decade. The house
has been falling down around our ears. Better to destroy, or do
nothing, than acknowledge the reality, to grow up as a species, and to
do the dirty job of repair.
The political problem is that repair leaves you pretty much where
you started. And the shared infrastructure must be repaired together, paid for through the agency of government. Repair the road and it’s pretty much the same road as before. Repair
the sewer and it’s pretty much the same sewer. The improvements are
marginal, and a little growth, a little time eliminates the shine
straightaway.
Repair is a continual process.
My generation has sought constant youth. We have fled the cities
when they needed repair, and built new suburbs instead. Now a new
generation is coming back into the cities, fixing up the old houses,
and finding the joy in repair. That’s good.
But we have to take the idea of repair further. We have to get down
to the hard task of repairing the Earth we live on. We have to repair
our infrastructure, and invest more in the Internet so broadband
doesn’t just mean 1.5 Mbps for our kids as it does for us.
In terms of technology this is the key difference between the Internet Age and the computer ages that came
before. We could advance in those other times by simply replacing the
box, tossing the old one onto a scrap heap and getting something new
and shiny. The Internet must be repaired.
We have to do something about the scrap heap, too. We have to do a
better job of mining the scrap we make instead of tossing everything
out. That’s a form of repair as well, recycling.
We will still build some new things in the Age of Repair, but we
will spend far more fixing and maintaining what we have, and hopefully
gaining a new appreciation for it. We will hopefully learn that you
must continually maintain an old home, that you can’t just pay it off
and sit in it, because if you do that it falls down around your ears.
As this world is falling down around our ears.
So the next year offers us the choice. Destroy or repair. We have
chosen destruction for a long long time. It’s the habit of a lifetime,
of many lifetimes, which must be broken.
Breaking that habit is the kind of generational challenge that’s
worth taking on. It’s the legacy I offer my children, and to you.
