The combination of Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel and “Rethinking Repair” by Steven J. Jackson shifted the way in which I am thinking about the death of technology. Ultimately, technology can’t really die. Sure, iPhone screens can crack and circuits can short, but technology is more than any given individual artifact; it is the sum of its many, many parts and the system that maintains them.
Jackson asks us to consider “broken world thinking,” which is the concept of innovation that begins after everything has already crumbled. In this way, technological innovation still exists. The difference is that where we used to innovate from raw materials — we would be working with the remnants of broken, crumbled technology. Take, for instance, the trucks that were repurposed in Station Eleven to serve as the horse-drawn carriages in the caravan.
Jackson defines repair as “the subtle acts of care by which order and meaning in complex sociotechnical systems are maintained and transformed, human value is preserved and extended, and the complicated work of fitting to the varied circumstances of organizations, systems, and lives is accomplished” (222). In this way, repair and innovation go hand in hand, as the repairs we make transform the world in which we live.
As we continue to study the “death of technology,” I’m inclined to argue that technology never really dies, as it is simply a product of humankind. Station Eleven could be painted as a story in which we witness the death of technology, but what we really see is the death of humankind (for the most part) and with that the systems and manpower that technology requires to be sustained.