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.