Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel's 2016 Aeon essay "Hail the Maintainers" advances a deceptively simple claim: the cultural and economic obsession with innovation — the fetishization of the new, the disruptive, the entrepreneurial — radically undervalues the maintenance and repair work that actually keeps civilizations functioning. The essay is not anti-innovation. It is a call to rebalance attention, resources, and dignity toward the vast majority of technological labour that sustains existing systems rather than introduces novel ones.[^1]
This report examines every major dimension of that argument — its intellectual foundations, its empirical grounding in infrastructure failure, its extension into software, gender, and labor economics — while also rigorously presenting the strongest counterarguments from economists, innovation theorists, and pro-growth scholars.
Russell and Vinsel trace the rise of "innovation" as a dominant ideological concept to two distinct historical moments. First, in the late 1960s, as faith in moral and social progress collapsed under the weight of Vietnam, political assassinations, and environmental degradation, "innovation" emerged as a morally neutral substitute — a way to celebrate technological accomplishment without claiming broader social uplift. Second, beginning in the 1950s, economists Robert Solow and Kenneth Arrow found that traditional factors — capital and education — could not explain significant portions of economic growth. They hypothesised that technological change was the hidden variable, cementing a theoretical link between innovation and prosperity.[^1]
By the early 1980s, Silicon Valley had become the mythological exemplar of this ideology. Books like Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class (2002) used the word "innovation" more than 90 times and heavily idealised the region as a model for economic development everywhere. Joseph Schumpeter's concept of "creative destruction" — the gale by which new technologies and business practices destroy old ones — was rediscovered and made into a quasi-religious doctrine. Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma (1997), now largely discredited in its prescriptive claims, became the bible of disruption ideology, with "disruptive" evolving from a technical concept into a vague honorific.[^2][^3][^1]
By 2006, the Economist was already noting that China's officials had made innovation a "national buzzword" — a sign that the term had become hollow. Businessweek declared in 2008 that innovation "died in 2008, killed off by overuse, misuse, narrowness, incrementalism and failure to evolve". By 2012, the Wall Street Journal noted there were more than 250 books with "innovation" in the title published in a single three-month span, and a professional innovation consultant advised clients to ban the word entirely, calling it "a word to hide the lack of substance".[^1]
Russell and Vinsel identify a structural problem: innovation discourse is completely value-agnostic. Crack cocaine, they note, was a highly innovative product in the 1980s — it involved entrepreneurship, reached new markets, and generated revenue. Innovation-speak, stripped of moral or social context, cannot distinguish between genuinely beneficial invention and profitable destruction.[^1]
The first major reframing Russell and Vinsel propose is that technology and innovation are not synonyms. Innovation is a small slice of what happens with technology. Historian David Edgerton's The Shock of the Old (2007) makes this empirically concrete: when you examine technology-in-use rather than technology-as-invented, you discover that the objects shaping most people's daily lives are quite old. The electric fan, major components of the automobile, the corrugated iron sheet — all virtually unchanged for a century or more. Edgerton argues that technology has been "responsible for keeping things the same as much as changing them", and that the obsession with novelty produces a dramatically biased picture of both history and the present.[^4][^5][^1]
Focusing on innovation creates a geography problem too. The canonical innovation story centres on "well-to-do white guys sitting in garages in a small region of California". But people everywhere in the world live with technologies, repair them, adapt them, and sustain them. These stories are almost entirely absent from mainstream technology discourse.[^1]
The second argument concerns physical infrastructure. "Infrastructure" is, as Russell and Vinsel note, the most unglamorous word that nonetheless points to something of immense social importance. Infrastructure failures — train crashes, bridge collapses, urban flooding — are not merely technical events. They are manifestations of a political system that consistently prioritises flashy new projects over unglamorous upkeep.[^1]
The evidence is stark. In the United States, the American Society of Civil Engineers has been issuing Infrastructure Report Cards since 1998. The 2025 report gave America's infrastructure an overall grade of C — the highest ever recorded — and attributed that marginal improvement primarily to the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which funded 60,000+ projects. But half of the 18 assessed categories still receive grades in the D range. Stormwater infrastructure and transit both received D grades, while roads received only a D+. The ASCE estimates $9.1 trillion over the next decade will be needed to bring U.S. infrastructure to a B-level state.[^6][^7][^8][^9][^10]
A critical data point: by 2014, federal funding covered 40% of new infrastructure but only 12% of maintenance costs — an explicit institutional preference for visible capital projects over ongoing upkeep. The result is a compounding maintenance backlog. In Louisiana alone, the state faces $32 billion in infrastructure maintenance needs against a severely constrained tax base. The New York MTA subway system faces repair costs estimated between $19 billion and $43 billion over 15 years — a direct consequence of decades of deferred maintenance.[^11]
Real people die in these gaps. The Ponte Morandi (Morandi Bridge) in Genoa, Italy, collapsed on August 14, 2018, killing 43 people. The bridge had known structural vulnerabilities, required constant maintenance due to its complex original design, and a €20 million tender for structural upgrades had been approved but was still in bidding when the bridge fell. In 2018, a pedestrian bridge in Miami — hailed specifically for its innovative design — collapsed during load testing, killing six people. Both disasters illustrate the same pattern: investment in novelty without proportionate investment in long-term maintenance.[^12][^13][^14][^11][^1]
The third, and most philosophically ambitious, argument is about labour itself. Russell and Vinsel invoke media scholar Steven Jackson's concept of "broken world thinking" — an orientation that takes seriously the constant fragility of the human and technical world, and foregrounds maintenance and repair as central to technological experience. The world is always breaking; breakdown is the default state, not the exception. Jackson argues that repair and maintenance are "unheralded sites of creativity and innovation, knowledge and power, and a neglected ethics of care".[^15][^16]
From this vantage point, the maintainers — those whose work keeps ordinary existence going — constitute the overwhelming majority of the labour force. Inventors and innovators are perhaps one per cent of this workforce. Everyone else manufactures, distributes, operates, repairs, and sustains. Russell and Vinsel extend this to the most mundane forms of labour: janitorial work, waste removal, food preparation, cybersecurity guards who staff graveyard shifts, ID card-readers. These workers are structurally invisible and structurally undervalued.[^1]
One of the most powerful extensions of the maintainer thesis connects to feminist theory. Russell and Vinsel invoke historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan's 1983 classic More Work for Mother, which examined how supposedly labour-saving household technologies — washing machines, vacuum cleaners — actually increased the total amount of work women performed. The mechanism: as technology made certain tasks cheaper, cleanliness standards rose proportionally, leaving women perpetually unable to complete the work. New technologies didn't liberate domestic labour; they reorganised and intensified it.[^17][^18][^1]
Cowan's work exposes the ideological function of innovation discourse in a domestic context: by celebrating the dishwasher as progress, society obscured the ongoing labour — entirely female, largely invisible — required to sustain the household. The male pantheon of inventors — Bell, Morse, Edison, Tesla — received cultural celebration, while the women maintaining domestic infrastructure were structurally excluded from both the story and the accounting.[^19][^17][^1]
This is not merely historical. Globally, women perform 76.2% of unpaid care work, spending an average of 201 days annually on unpaid work compared to 63 days for men. This labour — which includes the maintenance of human life itself — is almost entirely absent from GDP calculations, which only count care work when it enters the marketplace. Oxfam notes that this care economy, despite "laying the foundation for a thriving society," is radically undervalued and treated as a cost rather than an investment. The structural invisibility of maintenance labour and the structural invisibility of women's care labour are, Russell and Vinsel argue, the same phenomenon operating at different scales.[^20][^21][^22]
Russell and Vinsel also note that a renewed focus on maintenance and repair has implications for racial equity. When the innovation lens is set aside, it becomes possible to confront the low-wage maintenance labour performed disproportionately by Black, Latino, and other minority workers. Struggles over minimum wage increases for fast food workers, janitors, and service workers are, from this perspective, arguments for the dignity of being a maintainer — for recognising that the people who keep society functioning deserve the same social regard as those who introduce novel things.[^1]
The maintainer thesis maps powerfully onto the software industry. Studies consistently show that software maintenance — including corrective work (bug fixes), adaptive work (updating for environmental changes), perfective work (enhancements), and preventive work (refactoring for future reliability) — accounts for 50-80% of the total cost of ownership of any software system. IBM research places maintenance at 50-75% of total software costs. Gartner estimates that organisations spend 55-80% of their IT budgets on maintenance rather than new initiatives.[^23][^24]
Yet corporate culture mirrors the broader cultural bias: organisations budget extensively for new development while treating maintenance as an afterthought. Computer science programs have historically drilled students on programming and design, even though the overwhelming majority of jobs are in IT maintenance. This mismatch between cultural celebration and actual labour distribution is precisely the pattern Russell and Vinsel identify in physical infrastructure.[^23][^1]
The crisis is most acute in open-source software, which underpins essentially all of modern digital infrastructure. The 2024 Tidelift State of the Open Source Maintainer Report found that 60% of open-source maintainers are unpaid, unchanged from the prior year. Simultaneously, 60% have quit or considered quitting. Burnout (44%), competing life demands (54%), and loss of interest (51%) top the reasons for abandonment.[^25]
The stakes are not abstract. 95% of enterprise software depends on open source. Approximately 300 million companies extract value from open-source projects. Yet only 4,200 participate in GitHub Sponsors — a participation rate of 0.0014%. Paid maintainers are 55% more likely to implement critical security practices than unpaid ones and resolve vulnerabilities 45% faster.[^25]
This disparity has produced catastrophic near-misses. In December 2021, the Log4Shell vulnerability in the Apache Log4j library — described as "the single biggest, most critical vulnerability of the last decade" — was discovered in a project run primarily by volunteers who lacked resources to prioritise security. In February 2024, a sophisticated multi-year social engineering campaign successfully planted a backdoor in XZ Utils (CVE-2024-3094), a compression utility installed by default on most Linux systems, assigned the maximum possible CVSS score of 10.0. The attack vector was the exhaustion and isolation of the lone maintainer, who was susceptible to social engineering precisely because he was overworked and alone. The OpenSSL library, which underpins secure internet communication globally, was at one point supported by two volunteers. In November 2025, Kubernetes retired Ingress NGINX — one of its most popular components — not because it was obsolete, but because maintainers could no longer sustain the work.[^26][^27][^28][^29][^25]
Media scholar Steven Jackson's influential essay "Rethinking Repair" proposes "broken world thinking" as an alternative to the innovation-centric orientation of technology studies. Where conventional frameworks focus on the introduction of novel objects, broken world thinking begins from the premise that breakdown, dissolution, and decay are the foundational conditions of technological and human experience. Everything is always breaking; maintenance is the work of slowing or halting entropy. From this vantage, repair and maintenance are not passive responses to failure but active, creative, knowledge-intensive practices.[^16][^30][^31][^15]
Jackson's framework has been applied across domains — from the maintenance of physical infrastructure to the ongoing labour of ecological care. It suggests that the dominant innovation narrative suffers from a profound selection bias: it studies technologies at the moment of birth, ignoring the decades-long life of use, decay, and repair that constitute most of a technology's existence.[^4]
Since the 2016 Aeon essay, Russell and Vinsel have institutionalised these ideas through The Maintainers, a global research and practice network. Conferences from 2016 to 2019 brought together professionals from engineering, history, social science, policy, and the arts to share experiences of maintenance neglect across fields. Their 2020 book The Innovation Delusion extends the argument with reporting and case studies, arguing that the innovation obsession has made America "poorer, less safe, and — ironically — less innovative". They document how corporations have spent millions on chief innovation officers while core businesses stagnated, how suburban sprawl has created infrastructure maintenance backlogs that cities cannot afford to address, and how innovation sometimes kills — as in the Morandi Bridge and Miami bridge disasters.[^32][^33][^34][^35][^11][^1]
The maintainer thesis is intellectually serious and empirically well-grounded, but it faces significant counterarguments that deserve rigorous treatment rather than dismissal.
The most powerful counterargument comes from economics. Joseph Schumpeter's theory of creative destruction, formalized mathematically by Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt in their landmark 1992 Econometrica paper, holds that sustained economic growth depends on a cycle in which new innovations render old ones obsolete, dynamically reallocating capital and labour toward higher-productivity uses. The 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Aghion, Howitt, and Joel Mokyr precisely for demonstrating how innovation-led growth works and why it cannot be replaced by stability or maintenance alone.[^36][^37][^38][^3]
The empirical record over the 20th century is hard to dismiss: the era of most rapid innovation was also the era of most dramatic improvement in human living standards. Robert Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth (2016) documents that between 1870 and 1940, the United States experienced unprecedented economic growth driven by simultaneous revolutions in electricity, chemicals, transportation, communication, and domestic technology — and that the gains in quality of life during this period were genuinely staggering. Life expectancy, infant mortality, sanitation, nutrition, communication — all transformed fundamentally. This was not maintenance work; it was innovation at civilisational scale.[^39][^1]
Aghion and Howitt's model also shows that without ongoing creative destruction — without new entrants displacing incumbents with better technologies — economic growth stalls. Governments that protect incumbents or attempt to "strategically guide" innovation risk entrenching mediocrity. The innovation ecosystem — open markets, property rights, competitive pressure, permissionless experimentation — is not a luxury; it is the mechanism of growth itself.[^37][^38][^36]
Interestingly, Peter Thiel's famous lament — "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters" — is often cited alongside Russell and Vinsel, but points in a different direction. Thiel is not arguing for more maintenance; he is arguing for more ambitious innovation. His complaint is that contemporary innovation culture has become too incremental, too focused on communication apps and consumer software, and not focused enough on hard physical breakthroughs in energy, transportation, and biology. His critique of Silicon Valley is that it has become complacent and risk-averse — insufficiently innovative, not too innovative.[^40][^41][^42]
This tension reveals a genuine complexity: the problem may not be "too much innovation focus" but rather the wrong kind of innovation focus — attention captured by marginal consumer products rather than infrastructure-level breakthroughs that would themselves reduce maintenance burdens. Fusion energy, nuclear power, and next-generation water treatment would simultaneously represent innovation and dramatically reduce the maintenance costs of energy and water systems. The maintainer/innovator dichotomy may be false.
A further counterargument holds that certain problems — climate change, pandemic preparedness, artificial general intelligence alignment — cannot be addressed through maintenance of existing systems. They require genuine innovation that does not yet exist. Maintaining fossil fuel infrastructure, however well-maintained, does not solve climate change. The decarbonisation of global energy systems requires breakthroughs in solar, storage, nuclear, and grid technology that are genuinely new. Advocates argue that focusing resources and talent on maintaining existing systems when the systems themselves are inadequate is a recipe for civilisational stagnation.[^43][^44]
This argument has real force. Russell and Vinsel acknowledge it implicitly — their critique is of innovation ideology, not innovation activity. But the practical effect of deprioritising innovation investment in favour of maintenance could be to slow the development of technologies that are precisely what the 21st century requires.
Perhaps the most important counterargument is that the dichotomy itself is analytically misleading. Innovation and maintenance are not opposites; they are symbiotic. You cannot innovate your existing service unless someone is maintaining the current service. Most organisations cannot close down while they design the next thing — they must build the new while sailing the old. Similarly, maintenance without innovation eventually becomes the preservation of inadequate systems. Smart maintenance — the application of sensors, predictive analytics, and machine learning to infrastructure upkeep — is itself an innovative enterprise.[^45][^46]
The argument from industry is that maintenance and innovation are complements, not rivals. Industrial organisations use innovation to reduce maintenance costs — to design systems that need less intervention, to develop sensors that detect failure earlier, to automate upkeep processes. Christoph Reinhard Schlemmer, in dialogue with Russell, makes this point directly: "In the industry, innovation plays a more and more important role because maintenance costs are a big challenge".[^45]
Even within the creative destruction tradition, there is complexity that supports the maintainer thesis. Schumpeter himself was ultimately pessimistic about capitalism's sustainability. Creative destruction, he argued, "wipes away not only obsolete technologies, ideas, and institutions, but also the flying buttresses that prevented capitalism's collapse". The very mechanism of growth destroys the institutional fabric that makes growth possible. Schumpeter feared that as capitalism matured, entrepreneurship would be bureaucratised, risk would be institutionalised, and the dynamic spirit of innovation would hollow out — replaced by financialised abstractions detached from production. This reads as a sophisticated endorsement of the maintainer concern: that capitalism, left to its own logic, systematically undermines its own foundations.[^47][^48]
| Dimension | Maintainer Thesis | Innovation Counterargument | |---|---|---| | Primary concern | Neglect of upkeep, visible vs. invisible labour | Economic stagnation, existential risks unsolvable by maintenance | | Infrastructure | Chronic underinvestment causes preventable deaths | Infrastructure failure is often an argument for smarter innovation | | Labour economics | Most technological labour is maintenance; dignity gap is real | Innovation creates the productivity gains that fund maintenance | | Gender | Maintenance is feminised and devalued systematically | Not contested; but solution may require revaluing rather than deprioritising innovation | | Software | Open-source maintainer crisis is an existential security risk | Better tooling, automation, and business models can sustain open source | | Capitalism | Innovation ideology is value-agnostic; serves incumbent interests | Creative destruction is the engine of living standards; maintenance preserves inadequate systems | | Historical record | Maintenance gaps cause civilisational failures | Innovation has been the primary driver of long-run human welfare improvements | | Climate/existential risks | Existing renewable infrastructure must be maintained and scaled | New innovation (storage, nuclear, carbon capture) is the necessary response |
The strongest reading of this debate is that Russell and Vinsel are substantially correct in their diagnosis while being slightly wrong in their proposed corrective — or rather, their corrective is correct for rhetoric and culture but potentially dangerous as policy.
Where they are correct:
The cultural glorification of the innovator at the expense of the maintainer is real, documented, and has material consequences. The American infrastructure report card's chronic D-range grades are not an accident — they reflect decades of preferring ribbon-cutting on new projects over the unglamorous funding of upkeep. The open-source maintainer crisis — with 60% unpaid, security disasters like Log4Shell and XZ Utils traceable to understaffed and unsupported maintainers — is a direct product of an industry that celebrates the launch and ignores the sustaining. The structural invisibility of domestic, care, and maintenance labour — disproportionately performed by women and minorities — is a genuine injustice that feminist economists have documented for decades.[^7][^21][^28][^6][^20][^25]
The innovation discourse is also, as Russell and Vinsel argue, morally empty. Christensen's disruption theory has been substantially discredited as a predictive tool — he famously predicted the iPhone would fail. The disruptive innovation framework has metastasised into a rhetorical device that justifies anything novel while stigmatising anything existing.[^49][^50][^2]
Where they require qualification:
The maintainer thesis is at its weakest when it implies that resources should flow away from innovation toward maintenance. The better argument is that both deserve proportionate investment — that we have dramatically under-resourced maintenance while remaining adequately or over-resourced in certain kinds of innovation. The problem is not innovation per se but the specific distribution of attention and capital.
The existential innovation counterargument — that climate change, pandemic preparedness, and AI alignment require genuinely new technologies — is not effectively answered by the maintainer thesis. Maintaining existing coal infrastructure better does not decarbonise the economy. Some systems need to be replaced, not maintained.
Finally, the symbiosis point matters: innovation that is not designed for maintainability is bad innovation. The Morandi Bridge's collapse was as much an innovation failure — a bridge designed without adequate provision for long-term maintenance — as it was a maintenance failure. Good innovation bakes in maintainability; good maintenance enables the next round of innovation.[^14][^51]
Russell and Vinsel's argument is a necessary corrective to a cultural and economic discourse that has become dangerously myopic. The innovation obsession is not merely semantic; it has structural consequences — deferred infrastructure maintenance causing preventable deaths, an open-source security crisis born from unpaid and burned-out maintainers, the systematic erasure of women's and minority workers' contributions to economic life.
The deeper insight is about values, not resources. "Emphasising maintenance involves moving from buzzwords to values, and from means to ends," as they put it. Innovation is a means; the question is always what end it serves, who benefits, and at whose cost. Maintenance asks: what are we actually trying to sustain? What kind of world do we want to keep intact? These are not less interesting questions than "what is next?" They may be more important ones.[^1]
The resolution is not to choose between maintainers and innovators but to recognise that most people, most of the time, are maintainers — and that the dignity, compensation, and cultural recognition afforded to that work should reflect its actual importance to human flourishing. A civilisation that invests in keeping its bridges standing, its software secure, its domestic labour valued, and its infrastructure humming is not an uncreative one. It is a mature one.