“All Computers are Broken: Rethinking the Technosphere Along the Lines of Repair and Maintenance Work” is an essay based on a lecture I gave at the Metaforum X Permacrises conference. This presentation is the enacting and expansion of the essay, and closely relates to the installation I propose below. According to Jackson’s Rethinking Repair, breakdown, maintenance, and repair constitute crucial but vastly understudied sites or moments within the worlds of new media and technology today. Repair is a side or moment of technological life that goes, for the most part, unrecognized. Thinking through the life of technological objects in terms of repair labor informs us about new media in uncharted ways. What are the social determinations enacted through the life of technological objects, and how can we unravel them? Following up on Jackson’s broken world theory, I propose that the understanding of the work rendered invisible under our normal modes of picturing and theorizing technology cannot be described by the usual methodologies of those same theories. Instead, my installation ‘Where we’re at’ aims to be informed by Anna Tsing’s methodology, reflecting on the similarities and differences between the global e-waste crisis and a specific local scavenging tradition of precarious survival in Eastern Europe. I claim that informal and temporal scavenging is specialist skilled labor that sustains not only those who perform it, but also the power structures that they are subjected to.
