Maintain-ability: On Life Alongside Computer Software

Abstract

This paper examines what lessons can we learn about living with technology from software maintainers who struggle to keep digital infrastructures – at least most of the time – in good running order. The empirical material of the research was collected at three events as programmers convened to give testimony of disruptions of code and life. Inspired by hyphenation of response-ability by feminist technoscience theorists Karen Barad (2007) and Donna Haraway (2016), and in response to invitation for broken world thinking by Steven Jackson (2014), I theorise the concept of maintain-ability and demonstrate its application to foreground the capacity to not only give but also receive care which holds together more-than-human worlds at the dawn of the third millennium. The findings nuance and specify the notions of maintenance documented in science and technology studies literature, and weave it into life. Software maintainers exercise considerable agency over the material in their immediate care: code. However, in doing so they also find themselves having to articulate dynamic, interdependent and hybrid networks of relations which they are intimately entangled with, and whose durability depends on the success of their ongoing, indeterminate reconfiguration. Both the programmers and the software they maintain must continuously navigate risks of breakage, burnout, bugs or falling into obsolescence.