All Computers Are Broken: rethinking the Technosphere Along the Lines of Repair and Maintenance Work
*conference lecture abstract*
Broken world thinking suggests that breakdown, dissolution, and change, rather than innovation, development, or design as conventionally practiced and thought about should be the key themes and problems facing new media and technology scholarship today. According to Jackson’s Rethinking repair, breakdown, maintenance, and repair constitute crucial but vastly understudied sites or moments within the worlds of new media and technology today. Repair is a side or moment of technological life that goes for the most part unrecognized. Thinking through the life of technological objects in terms of repair labor informs us about new media in uncharted or unchartable ways. What are the social determinations enacted through the life of technological objects, and how can we unravel them?
Following up on Jackson’s broken world theory, I propose that the understanding of the work rendered invisible under our normal modes of picturing and theorizing technology cannot be described by the usual methodologies of those same theories. Instead, it’s Anna Tsing’s feminist anthropology that may provide a more porous and fluid model to understand relations of repair and maintenance work. In the Mushroom at the End of the World, On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Tsing proposes a methodology of research that is informed by the life cycles of matsutake mushrooms. She disregards established dictionaries and methods of research in favor of centering temporality, assemblages, and the art of noticing. My latest work, ‘Where we’re at’, aims to be informed by Tsing’s methodology, reflecting on the similarities and differences between the
global e-waste crisis and a specific local tradition of precarious survival in Eastern Europe. I claim that informal and temporal scavenging is specialist skilled labor that sustains not only those who perform it, but also the power structures that they are subjected to.
