While reading Jackson’s Rethinking Repair, the book The World Without Us kept coming to mind. Alan Weisman, the book’s author, describes it as a thought experiment: What if all humans disappeared? No catastrophic global disaster or epidemic, just the simple, nonviolent evaporation of humankind.
Almost immediately, the world would begin to rapidly decay. This is where Jackson comes in–it isn’t the threat of a violent end to society that would damage or end the existence of technology, it’s the possibility that humans would stop constantly repairing literally everything that keeps our lives invisibly in motion.
An effective example that Weisman gives is New York City’s subway system. Within days without humans, all of the tunneling would be flooded. Each day, those who work in for New York City Transit fight to keep 13 million gallons of water from flowing in, even without considering out of the ordinary rainfall.
As Jackson phrases it, this is the “extent to which such work is rendered invisible under our normal modes of picturing and theorizing technology.” I hadn’t thought of the maintenance of the subway system as an uphill battle, just a sort of neutral existence. What Jackson and Weisman seem to be circling around has to do with the adage, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Jackson seems to think such a thing as “broken” only exists if people have stopped fixing it for too long entirely.
What Jackson calls “Broken world thinking” is interesting to consider as the ultimate postmodernism–the idea that these technologies we make and the systems around them can not only be recategorized or redistributed, but disappear altogether.