Maintenance Of Everything In Civilisation - The Hidden Work That Holds the World Together #942356

Everything you depend on is falling apart.
The bridge you crossed this morning. The software processing your bank transactions. The soil that grew your breakfast. The institutions you trust to hold society together. Not dramatically, not all at once, but constantly, quietly, inevitably. Entropy is patient, and entropy always wins—unless someone pushes back.

That push is called maintenance. And we are failing at it.
In Maintenance of Everything in Civilisation, Val examines the most undervalued activity in human life: the ongoing work of keeping things going. From motorcycles to democracies, from supply chains to the internet, from topsoil to trust, this book traces the maintenance imperative across every system that civilisation depends on. It reveals a world that celebrates innovation while ignoring preservation, that rewards founders while forgetting maintainers, that builds extraordinary systems and then neglects them into decay.

The journey begins with machines—what motorcycles teach us about care, how competing maintenance philosophies shaped the auto industry, why precision raised the stakes of upkeep. It moves through the war against corrosion, the fragile infrastructure of knowledge transmission, and the military discipline of sustainment. It confronts the rot accumulating in our software, the erosion of institutional trust, and the quiet crisis beneath our feet as we consume millennia of topsoil in decades.

Along the way, we meet the maintainers: the invisible workforce whose labour keeps civilisation running while receiving little recognition in return. We examine repair as a political act, challenge the cult of the new that devalues preservation, and ask what it would mean to build a culture that honoured keeping as much as creating.

This is not a book about fixing things. It is a book about what happens when we don't—and what we must do differently if we want the systems we depend on to survive. Drawing on engineering, history, economics, ecology, and philosophy, Maintenance of Everything in Civilisation makes the case that maintenance is not a cost to be minimised but civilisation's core discipline: the practice that makes everything else possible.
Everything is falling apart. Everything can be held together. The choice is ours.