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The Persistence of Technology:
Summary
This study examined the repair movement as a social and environmental practice, exploring how repair cafes and online platforms frame fixing objects as a form of activism against capitalist consumption models and a pathway toward sustainability.
Today, the act of repair has developed into a kind of social movement.The repairers who meet in repair cafs and other such venues, assisted by various organisations, forums and online platforms, are driven by the political idea that by fixing objects, they can fix the world and its predominantly capitalist economic model. 1 In their view, repairing is associated with sustainability goals; it is seen as an act of environmentalism. 2 Yet at its core, repairing is, and will remain, a user operation on objects and goods; it is a fundamental interaction between humans and technology.According to Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift, repair and maintenance constitute "the engine room of modern economies and societies". 3 Henke and Sims see repair at work in any process which restores social or material order, but they particularly emphasise the role of infrastructure repair in today's interconnected, standardised world -interventions that encompass local fixes as much as systemic approaches or efforts to "reflexively" repair the unintended environmental consequences of modern infrastructures. 4 This omnipresence makes it somewhat 1 See
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