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howardgo's review
hopeful
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
4.0
I have often wondered why we have such a hierarchy of jobs. Why are service and maintenance jobs considered so "low"? After all, someone has to do that work for our civilization to keep working. It takes a different set of skills and experience but there is nothing inherently more valuable to our society about doctors and lawyers than mechanics, nurses, and janitorial staff. We need them all.
Recently I went looking for a book on this subject. I tried searching for the term "maintenance". Unfortunately most of the results were about how to do it. I had to give up. But then I started reading a book on my list and discovered that unlike its title, it is really about maintenance and those who do it. That book is The Innovation Delusion by Lee Vinsel and Andrew L. Russell.
The authors are fed up with what they call "innovation-speak". This is newness for its own sake and comes with all the cliches. We definitely need real innovation and technology. And we are surrounded by it – indoor plumbing, public transportation, electricity, etc. But our focus these days is on digital innovation to the exclusion of the physical technology that requires ongoing maintenance, as everything does.
This book is a primer on how our almost exclusive focus on building new stuff has led to us neglecting the maintenance of our existing technology. You hear this in the cries about our decaying infrastructure and the deep backlog of deferred maintenance. Unfortunately, the answers given in public are more about enhancing what is there or building new. We need to address how we will maintain what we have.
The authors do a thorough job of outlining how we got in this state and how it is affecting all of us while often devastating local communities. But the book is short on solutions, and that is on purpose. This book is a call to arms to pay attention to the situation outlined, to start a conversation that will lead to action. It is well-written and inspiring. And if you have any interest, in addition to reading the book you can follow what the authors are doing at www.themaintainers.org.
jsslwy's review
4.0
Damn, this book feels relevant with the infrastructure bill and the lack of social welfare. We think MORE is better and stop maintaining what we have!!! This should be read by everyone.
I’ve already gone off about it in one of my classes and we’re only one week into the semester.. oy vey
I’ve already gone off about it in one of my classes and we’re only one week into the semester.. oy vey
anlekaha's review
3.0
I really liked the ideas of this book but found the execution a little lacking. The authors run a research network and I am sure they have excellent presentations and articles that do their arguments more justice. There were a lot of anecdotes strung together with meta-writing ('in this chapter we will see...') and I found myself skimming when things felt too repetitive. Still it's a quick book and, again, the ideas inside are strong.
I enjoyed Isaacson's The Innovators, I was an Innovation fellow in college, and I live in Silicon Valley (all things the authors dislike) so I was curious to see how I would feel about this book. I fully agree with them that innovation-speak is annoying ('disrupting' everything, 'move fast and break things'). I think they go a little too far in blaming everything on an obsession with innovation. (Politicians wanting to build new roads rather than repair old ones is due to misaligned incentives not drinking the innovation Kool-Aid.) However, whether or not you lay the blame on an 'innovation delusion', the societal problems they lay out are real and pressing. We do need to consider the upkeep costs and not just upfront costs on everything from a household level (new vs used car) to a local level (roads) to a national level (military budgets). They also rightly point out the social prestige hierarchy of jobs is flawed, something we saw with the "essential workers" of the pandemic. Also included was a reminder that it is good for us and the planet to be maintaining rather than constantly consuming and trashing goods. There were lots of interesting examples and people doing good maintenance work in a wide variety of settings. I will look into their Maintainers society more because quite a few of the lessons were useful and important.
I enjoyed Isaacson's The Innovators, I was an Innovation fellow in college, and I live in Silicon Valley (all things the authors dislike) so I was curious to see how I would feel about this book. I fully agree with them that innovation-speak is annoying ('disrupting' everything, 'move fast and break things'). I think they go a little too far in blaming everything on an obsession with innovation. (Politicians wanting to build new roads rather than repair old ones is due to misaligned incentives not drinking the innovation Kool-Aid.) However, whether or not you lay the blame on an 'innovation delusion', the societal problems they lay out are real and pressing. We do need to consider the upkeep costs and not just upfront costs on everything from a household level (new vs used car) to a local level (roads) to a national level (military budgets). They also rightly point out the social prestige hierarchy of jobs is flawed, something we saw with the "essential workers" of the pandemic. Also included was a reminder that it is good for us and the planet to be maintaining rather than constantly consuming and trashing goods. There were lots of interesting examples and people doing good maintenance work in a wide variety of settings. I will look into their Maintainers society more because quite a few of the lessons were useful and important.
ckreuter's review
5.0
One of the most timely, well thought-out, well researched books I’ve ever read.
This should be required reading by all - especially those in engineering & technical fields. But the message is applicable to all across many disciplines.
The writing is as accessible as it is engaging. The examples poignant and support the authors’ points perfectly.
This book is a masterpiece!
This should be required reading by all - especially those in engineering & technical fields. But the message is applicable to all across many disciplines.
The writing is as accessible as it is engaging. The examples poignant and support the authors’ points perfectly.
This book is a masterpiece!
mohan_vee's review
5.0
"The Innovation Delusion" is a well researched captivating book that makes a strong and compelling argument against innovation for the sake of innovation. The authors set out a clear distinction between actual technological progress and the hype and misdirection that often substitute for it. They also make a strong argument for the importance of maintaining existing technical infrastructure. This is a must read for anyone currently involved in the operating or maintaining existing technical infrastructure.
mburnamfink's review
3.0
Lee Vinsel is a pro-follow on twitter, and his essays Design Thinking is Kind of Like Syphilis — It’s Contagious and Rots Your Brains and You’re Doing It Wrong: Notes on Criticism and Technology Hype are some of the best STS scholarship I've read in ages: insightful, deeply sourced, provocative, funny, and sharp enough to cut. The Innovation Delusion is a mistitled collection of anecdotes that doesn't quite rise to meet the needs of a research program.
Eroded century old C-hook. Failure of a similar hook caused the destructive 2019 Camp Fire. Source
A better title for this book is The Maintenance Correction. Vinsel and Russell are two of the organizers behind The Maintainers mailing list, an interdisciplinary conversation on the practice of maintenance. This book is built on three pillars. First, American society is valorizes innovation-speak, a specific brand of public relations used by cool Silicon Valley information technology firms, which is distinct from "real innovation". Second, there is a massive and painful structural deficit in maintenance across this country, at scales from regional electrical grids to water systems and bridges to houses to our own teeth and joints. And third, maintenance and care workers, including IT helpdesks, nurses, and people who take out the trash both on our streets and on our social media networks, are underpaid and disrespected. It's hard to argue with these pillars individually, but they don't quite come together as a thesis.
The narrative wanders through little vignettes. Here's the famous IDEO lab, home of expensive design thinking consultants, which can't point to how design thinking makes anything better. Here's the Strong Town network, founded by a libertarian town planner helping municipalities get their infrastructure commitments under control. Here are tech start ups attaching sensors to complex machines to figure out when a pump goes out of true, preventing a $250k repair job. Here are people all across America without the time or money to fix little problems around the home or on the body, who will eventually face expensive and potentially fatal situations because of it.
Some of the book is quite alarming. While I'm sure most people are familiar with the jokes of Trump's Infrastructure Week and the much less funny D- grade for US infrastructure from the American Society of Civil Engineers, the financial cost of deferred maintenance for civic water, power, and road systems is frighteningly high, an off-books expense that would sink local budgets if properly accounted for. Similarly, while functional companies recognize that maintaining capital systems saves money, a culture of quarterly profits and rapid turnover can mean that undone maintenance is someone else's problem, at least until your stuff breaks and starts killing people (hello PG&E, hello ERCOT). Short-termism and a looter's attitude towards capital is at the heart of what this book cares about, and is hardly mentioned, which seems a major oversight.
As a scholarly book and one summarizing several years of The Maintainers conference and conversations, I would have liked some thoughts on best practices for doing research on maintenance, on making this invisible labor visible. So much of what the authors deem as great maintenance is bound up in the local and specific, noting the sound of a machine as it goes out of balance, or the signs that a roof is leaking before the joists rot away. Following workers ethnographically and technological systems in detail is surprisingly hard. Perhaps methods are not worth fetishizing, but a book is a moment for a research movement to make a stand, to say "this is the state of our art", and The Innovation Delusion doesn't do that. Meanwhile certain innovation-centric academic departments I may have formerly been affiliated with are throwing out almost-identical-but-cleverly-renamed research programs every year.
And finally, there is a lot of room to dismantle innovation-speak. Some areas which I know about just from reading tech news, and which are not mentioned in the book follow. We can laugh at Juicero, Theranos, and WeWork, but I have no idea how salad chain Sweetgreen is pivoting to being a tech company. Unicorn tech darlings like Uber and AirBNB are successful because they shift the cost of maintenance off their books and onto their users. Driving for Uber may seem profitable, until you account for all the wear you're putting on your car. Similarly, renting out a spare room on AirBNB regularly means being a hotel maid and washing a lot more sheets. Avoiding maintenance costs is core to how these tech companies make money; well, that and massively breaking local laws. On the other side of the tech equation, cloud services like AWS allow companies to avoid the tricky matter of running, maintaining, and upgrading their own datacenters by renting computing resources from Amazon, Google, or Microsoft. I'm not experienced enough to know when Cloud vs on-prem makes sense, but having worked as a software developer for two years now, if you're not actively refactoring and paying down your technical debt, you're accruing interest on something which will come back to hurt you.
At the end of the day, The Innovation Delusion is okay, but it feels like a missed opportunity.
Eroded century old C-hook. Failure of a similar hook caused the destructive 2019 Camp Fire. Source
A better title for this book is The Maintenance Correction. Vinsel and Russell are two of the organizers behind The Maintainers mailing list, an interdisciplinary conversation on the practice of maintenance. This book is built on three pillars. First, American society is valorizes innovation-speak, a specific brand of public relations used by cool Silicon Valley information technology firms, which is distinct from "real innovation". Second, there is a massive and painful structural deficit in maintenance across this country, at scales from regional electrical grids to water systems and bridges to houses to our own teeth and joints. And third, maintenance and care workers, including IT helpdesks, nurses, and people who take out the trash both on our streets and on our social media networks, are underpaid and disrespected. It's hard to argue with these pillars individually, but they don't quite come together as a thesis.
The narrative wanders through little vignettes. Here's the famous IDEO lab, home of expensive design thinking consultants, which can't point to how design thinking makes anything better. Here's the Strong Town network, founded by a libertarian town planner helping municipalities get their infrastructure commitments under control. Here are tech start ups attaching sensors to complex machines to figure out when a pump goes out of true, preventing a $250k repair job. Here are people all across America without the time or money to fix little problems around the home or on the body, who will eventually face expensive and potentially fatal situations because of it.
Some of the book is quite alarming. While I'm sure most people are familiar with the jokes of Trump's Infrastructure Week and the much less funny D- grade for US infrastructure from the American Society of Civil Engineers, the financial cost of deferred maintenance for civic water, power, and road systems is frighteningly high, an off-books expense that would sink local budgets if properly accounted for. Similarly, while functional companies recognize that maintaining capital systems saves money, a culture of quarterly profits and rapid turnover can mean that undone maintenance is someone else's problem, at least until your stuff breaks and starts killing people (hello PG&E, hello ERCOT). Short-termism and a looter's attitude towards capital is at the heart of what this book cares about, and is hardly mentioned, which seems a major oversight.
As a scholarly book and one summarizing several years of The Maintainers conference and conversations, I would have liked some thoughts on best practices for doing research on maintenance, on making this invisible labor visible. So much of what the authors deem as great maintenance is bound up in the local and specific, noting the sound of a machine as it goes out of balance, or the signs that a roof is leaking before the joists rot away. Following workers ethnographically and technological systems in detail is surprisingly hard. Perhaps methods are not worth fetishizing, but a book is a moment for a research movement to make a stand, to say "this is the state of our art", and The Innovation Delusion doesn't do that. Meanwhile certain innovation-centric academic departments I may have formerly been affiliated with are throwing out almost-identical-but-cleverly-renamed research programs every year.
And finally, there is a lot of room to dismantle innovation-speak. Some areas which I know about just from reading tech news, and which are not mentioned in the book follow. We can laugh at Juicero, Theranos, and WeWork, but I have no idea how salad chain Sweetgreen is pivoting to being a tech company. Unicorn tech darlings like Uber and AirBNB are successful because they shift the cost of maintenance off their books and onto their users. Driving for Uber may seem profitable, until you account for all the wear you're putting on your car. Similarly, renting out a spare room on AirBNB regularly means being a hotel maid and washing a lot more sheets. Avoiding maintenance costs is core to how these tech companies make money; well, that and massively breaking local laws. On the other side of the tech equation, cloud services like AWS allow companies to avoid the tricky matter of running, maintaining, and upgrading their own datacenters by renting computing resources from Amazon, Google, or Microsoft. I'm not experienced enough to know when Cloud vs on-prem makes sense, but having worked as a software developer for two years now, if you're not actively refactoring and paying down your technical debt, you're accruing interest on something which will come back to hurt you.
At the end of the day, The Innovation Delusion is okay, but it feels like a missed opportunity.
the_bfool's review against another edition
challenging
hopeful
informative
reflective
medium-paced
3.5
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