As this NY Times piece argues, we have “an impoverished and immature conception of technology, one that fetishises innovation as a kind of art and demeans upkeep as mere drudgery”.

In the ‘innovate or die’ shark tank of the startup world, we idolise innovators as ‘creators of the future’ while the unsexy work of keeping old systems running smoothly is seen as clinging to the past. Unfortunately, a functioning society heavily relies on the latter: “While innovation – the social process of introducing new things – is important, most technologies around us are old, and for the smooth functioning of daily life, maintenance is more important.”