Step by Step

When I moved upstate at the height of the pandemic, I finally recycled a banker’s box of user guides for things I no longer owned: a toaster oven, a Palm Pilot, a VCR. That box had moved with me from Chelsea to West Philly to Park Slope, then on to Gramercy and Crown Heights and Peter Cooper Village, even though I hadn’t added or retrieved anything from the collection in years. The oldest manuals were from the mid-90s, when I left my parents’ home and started building a menagerie of appliances and gadgets for which I was solely responsible. Instructions weren’t online then, so it was through these cheaply printed booklets that I understood the operating logics of my devices. Some guides had sections on cleaning, maintenance, troubleshooting, and repair. Others had diagrams that would help me infer how to fix anything that broke. Every manual deposited in that box was a sign of my intention to care for the thingamajig it came with.

Most important, the repair manual establishes what can and should be fixed in the first place.

Designer Scott Mitchell tells the story of a 1980s cathode-ray television with a circuit diagram taped to the back, an X-ray for the electronic patient: “The television, adrift in the world, carried with it information detailing its own construction.” ¹ Such diagnostics are clearly meant for the pros. If I were to follow the service instructions that came with my dishwasher, I would likely flood my neighborhood and electrocute myself. But there are also repair manuals intended for regular users, bundled with machines like pickup trucks and weedwhackers and crockpots. They empower us to make small moves: to clean dried food from cooking elements, to replace zipper pulls, to “verify” that cables are connected. Sometimes I find their advice endearing; sometimes it is condescending or mystifying; but always I am interested in how these texts shape our relationships with our stuff and the systems that surround them.

The manual is a reference book that one keeps ready to hand. While it ostensibly has a functional role, guiding the reader through manual tasks, it also frames that handiwork as synecdoche for the entire agent to whom the hand is connected. It imagines its readers variously as users of a tool, as stewards of an object, as owners of a fetishized commodity, as liabilities to the manufacturer, as authorized embodiments of specialized skill, or as conduits for common material knowledge. It structures our relations with technology and techniques and labor. It affects how we identify failure and assign responsibility, and what we do next. It frames repair as a conservative or progressive act. Usually, the manual walks us through repairs — as the phrase goes, step by step. Less often, it enables a more improvisatory, embodied exploration. Most important, the manual establishes what can and should be fixed in the first place.

Increasingly, the answer it offers is nothing. Our electronics warn that their plastic carapaces contain “no user-serviceable parts.” We can’t see or understand what’s happening inside, and we’re not meant to. My new hair dryer came with a manual informing me that “special tools are required for any examination, adjustment or repair. Unqualified repair work could lead to hazardous conditions for the user.” In some cases, tinkering is actually illegal. ² Products are sold with “setup guides” that lack information on repair. When the washing machine locks our jeans inside, blinking its lights in a proprietary pattern, flashing a cryptic ransom message, we’re forced to search the dark web for a PDF copy of an old service manual, or plug in the magic keywords that help us sift through 18-minute videos on YouTube.

This seems a crucial time to recover the history, politics, and aesthetics of the repair manual as a didactic genre and creative form.

Lots of things broke over the past four years that I simply don’t know how to fix, and which perhaps can’t be fixed. Once, in a dark moment, I amused myself by asking ChatGPT for help. How to heal my COVID-addled brain? How to repair our broken democracy? How to maintain my aging parents? Just follow these fifteen easy steps. But of course that capricious chatbot is impervious to repair: we have no idea what data it was trained on, what logic drives its functioning, what falsehoods and fictions it manufactures, how many resources it consumes or jobs it destroys or bonds of trust it breaks. If we ask ChatGPT how to fix itself, the proposed remedies involve tweaking inputs and verifying outputs — not getting under the hood or into the code. It refuses to be touched. As we stuff our gadgets with artificial intelligence, and potentially cede their repair to the bots, too, we’re increasingly cut off from the manual.

So, this seems a crucial time to recover the history, politics, and aesthetics of the repair manual as a didactic genre and creative form. In the past month, Places has published a series of articles on the plural meanings of repair in architecture, landscape, and urban design, speaking to the many practitioners who are facing disciplinary crisis as climate change compels a shift from “building the world” to repairing it. There is no instruction book for what comes next. My approach is rather different: I want to look at the repair manual itself. I’m especially interested in manuals that perform a kind of “infrastructural inversion,” calling attention to the techno-social systems that underlie our gadgets and appliances. ³ Here we’ll look at works by authors, artists, and activists who have expanded the genre, showing how manuals can translate between the individualized refurbishment of objects and the collective maintenance of systems and societies and ecologies.

Annals of the Manual

Repair, after all, is a social activity. ⁴ For as long as people have been improving their material environments — mending spears, patching frocks, and resetting broken bones — they have been sharing experiential knowledge with others. How-to skills were passed within villages and between generations, first through observation, conversation, and apprenticeship, and later through pamphlets and books. Historians and archivists have identified early manuals for gunnery and bastion fortification, for health and surgery (i.e., repairing the body), for shipping and navigation, for painting and sculpture, for agriculture and mining. As Pamela O. Long argues, these manuals have much to teach us, not just about technologies and labor, but also about the cultural contexts and intellectual frameworks that surround them. ⁵ Manuals raise questions about how we know ourselves and our world, and how we might explore and exploit, express and amend these terrains.

In empowering readers to use and fix and create, manuals can even serve as a worldmaking apparatus.

In empowering readers to use and fix and create, manuals can even serve as a worldmaking apparatus. Song Yingxing’s heavily illustrated Tiangong kaiwu (Exploitation of the works of nature) (1637) addressed eighteen fields of practical knowledge, including milling, weaving, ceramics, papermaking, and metallurgy. But this was no mere book of instructions. Rather, Song aimed to show how “universal principles and the cosmological order” — li, qi, and yin yang — “were connected and understood through practical technologies.” ⁶ Science historian Dagmar Schäfer reads this text as an “effort to cope with the increasing importance of material things and decreasing social and political stability.” In this sense, it is a work of cultural repair, an attempt “to maintain and create traditions around these intellectual trends.” ⁷

A common type of manual in medieval and early modern Europe was the “book of secrets,” collecting recipes and formulas for dying cloth, mixing drinks, preparing medicines, and so forth. Charles Godfrey Leland drew on these conventions in A Manual of Mending and Repairing, with Diagrams (1896), which addressed books, photographs, toys, shoes, hats, lace, porcelain, stone-work, ivory, glass, marquetry, mosaics, gutta-percha, and mother-of-pearl. But rather than merely offering “recipes for repairing” specific to these subjects, Leland focused on general principles of application, rooted in science, so that “whoever reads [the book] can have no difficulty in mending any object, even though it be not described here.” Here again the manual had a philosophical dimension exceeding its practical utility. Leland wrote, “the author of this work modestly trusts that all who read it with care will admit in it that he has distinctly shown that mending and repairing, which has hitherto been regarded as a mere adjunct to other arts, is really an art by itself.” ⁸

Long distinguishes between premodern manuals that addressed an entire craft or practice — or, as we’ve seen, multiple crafts and practices — and modern manuals that focus on a single tool or piece of equipment; say, cordless heated butter knives or particle accelerators. ⁹ These shifts in scope and method map onto trends in specialization, formalized education, and literacy. But the older, more philosophical tradition survives. Margot Rosenberg’s and Bern Marcowitz’s The Care and Feeding of Books Old and New: A Simple Repair Manual for Book Lovers (2002) blends modern specialization with premodern ambition, thinking through books to argue for general, transferrable principles of care. “When we decided to open a bookstore devoted to the literature of dogs,” the authors write, “we discovered that dogs and books have much in common. Each has a head, a tail, and a spine. Both need good homes and loving care.” ¹⁰ Ted Kooser’s Poetry Home Repair Manual (2005) demystifies the immaterial art of poetry by explaining “tools” like rhyme, meter, and metaphor, but it also warns readers against following the instructions too closely. There’s even a chapter called “don’t worry about the rules” — a refreshing departure from the didactic form. ¹¹

Historians Stefan Krebs and Heike Weber trace the proliferation of manuals to rising home ownership, starting in the late 19th century and exploding in the 1950s and 60s, when “repairing things for oneself became a popular pastime across all social classes.” ¹² Repair was thus tied to the post-war expansion of private property. The occupants of the newly atomized single-family home had their own lawns and laundry rooms, so then they had to maintain their own grass-mowing and clothes-washing equipment. New magazines, TV shows, advertisements, and handbooks taught homeowners to care for the machines that filled their ever-larger kitchens and garages.

Single-family home occupants had their own lawns and laundry rooms, so then they had to maintain their own grass-mowing and clothes-washing equipment.

Auto repair manuals sometimes opened with primers on electronics and mechanics before guiding readers through front-end alignment and transmission overhauls. The beloved Haynes series, “based on a complete strip-down and rebuild,” began in the 1960s and continues today, whenever enough vehicles have been sold to justify the cost of buying and disassembling a new model. These guides are satisfying to behold, even for somebody with no love for cars. The 1991 Fiat Tipo manual, for example, features a clean tri-tone cover with the signature Haynes crest, connoting reliability, and a cutaway diagram of the car. It opens with a promise to “help you decide what work must be done (even should you choose to get it done by a garage), provide information on routine maintenance and servicing, and give a logical course of action and diagnosis when random faults occur. However, it is hoped that you will use the manual by tackling the work yourself.” ¹³ To that end, the guide lists the necessary parts and tools, runs through safety tips, and offers a table with measurement conversions. Photographs help readers identify the parts under the hood, while diagrams train their vision on the schematics and mechanics.

One reason the Haynes guides became popular is that they circulated in a world where manufacturers actively discouraged and obstructed repair. Worried about losing control of the market, many companies refused to make service manuals available to independent repair people and consumers. In his 1960 book The Waste Makers, Vance Packard reported that appliance manufacturers were even hiding model numbers to make it impossible to order replacement parts. He cited a Boston Herald editorial complaining that “manufacturers were getting so ‘cozy’ with service manuals that customers seeking them got the impression they were ‘censored as if they contained obscene material.’” As Packard wrote:

Often this coziness has sprung from the desire of the manufacturer to keep the repair business to itself and out of the hands of independents. The [Electric Appliance Service News] charged that ‘some manufacturers do not make service manuals available to all independent repairmen and therefore it is almost impossible to make repairs easily and properly — and at a time-saving expense.’ ¹⁴

As the 20th century progressed, technical opacity and planned obsolescence transformed people’s relationships with their designed, manufactured world. ¹⁵ Yet many activists and conscientious consumers embraced repair and reuse — not just as domestic practices, but as forms of direct public action. Some were motivated by environmental conservation; others stood against capitalist alienation. Over time, their activities coalesced into an identifiable repair movement, whose genealogical lines could be traced through the Luddites and the Amish, the late ’60s counterculture, the ’70s proponents of degrowth and conviviality, the ’80s and ’90s punks and makers and hackers, and on through the Occupy protests that followed the 2008 financial crisis, which compelled frugality and concentrated corporate disdain. ¹⁶ Instructional publications — including Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, the bulletin series Global Tools, punk zines, and Make magazine — were central to these developments. And, of course, in many communities and parts of the world, repair has long been a way of life, rather than a “movement.” ¹⁷ While some practices of gambiarra in Brazil and jugaad in India have been documented online, most community knowledge passes through everyday observation and skill-shares. ¹⁸

Over time, their activities coalesced into an identifiable repair movement. … This history helps us see the repair manual as part of a larger political ecology.

This history helps us see the repair manual as part of a larger political ecology — one initially characterized by the conservation of social infrastructures and ideals, then rooted in the maintenance of private property, and now often defined by progressive, collective ideals. Today, thousands of local repair cafes and fixit clinics supplement the work of transnational organizations like the Fixers’ Collective, the Restart Project, the Fixperts network, the Repair Association, and the Maintainers. ¹⁹ Their members seek to activate and democratize the knowledge embedded in existing manuals; to supplement or resist manualized orthodoxies; and to generate new insights which are then documented in open-source manuals or other didactic formats. They also work to improve the structural conditions for repair and lobby for change in legal regimes. The computerization of everything, from tractors to toothbrushes, has compelled fervent activism under the banner of “right to repair.” Advocates aim to secure a universal legal right for consumers to modify and repair the things they own, including tools used in essential activities, like growing food. At the forefront of this movement are farmers who want manufacturers to make available the spare parts, software, and instructional manuals they need to fix sensor-studded and networked tractors and drones. ²⁰

While for-profit companies like AllData and Mitchell1 monetize the scarcity of repair instruction by comprehensively collecting automotive manuals and selling subscriptions, hobbyists and artists and activists maintain their own rogue archives. Frank’s Hospital Workshop, based in Zimbabwe, shares medical manuals. At Future Proof, Australian Tim Hicks hosts thousands of laptop service manuals (but not Toshiba’s, after the company issued a cease-and-desist letter claiming that Hicks had violated its copyright and endangered users by putting the wrench back in their hands). ²¹ Frustrated by the inaccessibility of Apple manuals, Kyle Wiens and Luke Soules founded iFixit — a repository of over 95,000 “repair guides for every thing, written by everyone” — in 2003. They started by reverse-engineering laptop computers to write their own instructions, and originally they planned to sell this knowledge. But soon they decided to make the guides freely downloadable and amendable, funding the site by selling repair kits with specialized tools, solvents, and glues. Today, most iFixit guides are created by volunteers. Contributors methodically disassemble new tech devices and catalogue their components, sharing “teardowns” (much like Haynes’s “strip-downs”) that are hosted alongside discussion forums and instructional videos. ²² Gabriele Oropallo has identified iFixit as a deep “reservoir of source material for ethnographic or historical research.” ²³

Moving images allow us to observe the continuity of a process: turning the crank, threading the wire, applying pressure until we hear a ‘pop.’

Crowdsourced repair videos can also be found by the millions on sites like HowCast, wikiHow, Instructables, and YouTube, ²⁴ while TikTok offers a wealth of ASMR-adjacent tutorials on kintsugi pottery repair and the darning of knitwear. Video manuals are perhaps even more ready-to-hand than their print predecessors, in that they can be summoned instantaneously from the web and screened on a smartphone — a gadget likely kept on or near the body at all times. Moving images replace sequential photographs and allow us to observe the continuity of a process: turning the crank, threading the wire, applying pressure until we hear a “pop.” Sound and sight together evoke texture, and thus permit haptic modes of engagement, too.

Consciously or not, many video manuals echo the works produced by grassroots media collectives in the 1960s and ’70s, including Raindance, Ant Farm, and the Revolutionary People’s Communication Project. These media makers embraced newly affordable consumer electronics like the Sony Portapak camera to create and distribute democratic modes of documentation and dialogue, and they had to know how to care for their equipment, too. Artist and scholar Dara Greenwald tells the story of the upstate New York collective Videofreex, “informed by a do-it-yourself, self-sufficiency ethic and a belief that users of technology should be empowered to fix it.” Since they didn’t want to depend on Sony for repair, they figured it out on their own and shared their experience with others, publishing The Spaghetti City Video Manual: A Guide to Use, Repair, and Maintenance (1973), which featured a cartoon camera in all sorts of dilemmas, making the work seem accessible and even mildly enjoyable. Videofreex also started a production studio on their farm, where as many as 200 visitors a year came “to learn video skills and contribute to [local] TV programming.” ²⁵

Spaghetti City is an apt reminder of the recursive nature of repair: we keep our cameras in a state of good repair so they can record videos about repairing other objects. Similarly, librarians and book collectors have, for hundreds of years, repaired printed manuals, mending tears and taping bindings, in order to ensure access to their contents. As technological change accelerates, the complexity of this task grows for the stewards of digital repair repositories. Recursive reparative practices are important not only because they keep the manual legible as a resource, but also because they have potential to shape communities around maintaining that resource.

Recursive reparative practices not only keep the manual legible as a resource, but also shape communities around maintaining that resource.

Indeed, organizations like iFixit cannot do the work of documenting and sharing repair knowledge if they don’t also address the structural conditions in which that knowledge is produced. iFixit hosts a Technical Writing Project in partnership with more than 80 universities around the world, and earlier this year they joined with Public Interest Research Groups (PIRG) to push the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to require manufacturers to share repair information with customers. Their investigation found that 86 percent of appliance manufacturers currently withhold repair manuals, and that regulating the practice would “boost the feasibility of do-it-yourself repair, increase competition in the repair market, and ultimately benefit both the environment and consumers’ wallets.” ²⁶

Companies in some industries have started to come around, under pressure from activist shareholders and public officials. In 2014 a group of U.S. carmakers agreed to make diagnostic tools and repair instructions freely available, and in 2018 Motorola became the first major phone manufacturer to partner with iFixit to supply official repair kits. ²⁷ In the following years, as several states passed right-to-repair legislation, Nokia, Samsung, and Google launched similar partnerships. ²⁸ Even Apple, notorious for its proprietary screws, adhesives, and other design features that obstruct repair — and for the rentiership model that defines access to its software and content — has debuted a Self Service program that gives customers access to official parts and manuals, so they can fix the screens, batteries, and cameras on newer-model iPhones and Macs. ²⁹

Early enrollees in Apple’s program were shocked to find 80-pound repair kits shipped to their doors and $1,200 holds placed on their credit cards to secure the equipment rental. They were also flummoxed by the onerous process to authenticate replacement parts. ³⁰ The Verge’s Sean Hollister reported that he had to “enter a six-digit code to prove I had read the repair manual, which not only suggests you need three pages worth of tools but also a jar of sand in case your battery catches fire.” Checking out the manual myself, I found the density of instruction and intricacy of illustration (so many tiny parts!) to be positively overwhelming. While Apple has since simplified the validation process, many participants still find it defeating. “A nightmare,” The New York Times’ Brian X. Chen called it. A farce, too. Hollister explains:

The more I think about it, the more I realize Apple’s Self-Service Repair program is the perfect way to make it look like the company supports right-to-repair policies without actually encouraging them at all. … Apple gets credit for walking you through an 80-page repair, instead of building phones where — say — you don’t need to remove the phone’s most delicate components and two different types of security screws just to replace a battery.

The semblance of transparency and accessibility frees the company from the task of designing convivial, sustainable tools. ³¹

Meanwhile, some companies are still fighting to keep users’ hands out of their machines, and their service manuals out of users’ hands, on the grounds that transparency would reveal trade secrets or pose safety risks. In June 2023, control-freak carmakers secured a letter from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration advising them against complying with a new Massachusetts law that says they must share mechanical data with owners and repair shops. The official reason: expanding access to telematics systems could help hackers seize control of a vehicle’s steering, acceleration, and braking. Karl Bode, in Tech Dirt, says this is just cover for industry greed: “The very obvious goal is to force car owners into costly and increasingly consolidated dealership repair shops.” ³²

The repair manual prescribes pathways to consumer-dom or citizenship, scripting and scoring our evolving relationship to material things.

Here again we see the repair manual at the center of an entire political ecology, prescribing pathways to consumer-dom or citizenship, scripting and scoring our evolving relationship to material things. Some champions of the repair manual’s democratization espouse a libertarian perspective, emphasizing consumer choice and control over one’s property as a fundamental right. Others take a progressive or socialist approach, presenting information about operation and maintenance as a common resource, or even framing the property itself as a common good. Highly organized MAGA extremists — with their methodical manuals for infiltrating school boards, implementing book bans, and flooding local voting officials with FOIA requests — regard their work as reparative, too: they’re saving the nation from progressive devolution. Right-wing activists demonstrate that repair, framed as a conservative practice, can also be about restricting rights.

The Scripted and the Serendipitous

As the Apple example shows, simply opening up the manual does not necessarily lead to empowered users. At the leading edge of the repair movement, however, there is a desire to move beyond step-by-step instructions, to engage with objects and experiences that resist scripting, and with ways of knowing that defy diagrammatic representation and gradational, methodical enactment.

There is a desire to engage with objects and experiences and ways of knowing that defy diagrammatic representation and gradational, methodical enactment.

In 1969, structural-engineer-turned-mechanic John Muir partnered with illustrator Peter Aschwanden to self-publish How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step by Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot. Being unaffiliated with the manufacturer, the authors were able to take a “stance of subjective resistance,” as communication scholar Miles Kimball puts it, encouraging the use of “local tactics to make do with technology,” rather than promoting authorized channels for repair. ³³ Muir tells his readers to get help from friends and neighbors. He presents repair as collaborative — “we work as a team, you and I” — and embodied: “Talk to your car, then shut up and listen. Feel with your car; use all of your receptive senses and when you find out what it needs, seek the operation out and perform it with love.” Aschwanden’s irreverent drawings, in the style of Robert Crumb, create a sense of levity, while his precise and comprehensive diagrams assure readers that even engineered objects can be made intelligible to the hand. ³⁴

This understanding of repair practice as both scripted and serendipitous was later confirmed by ethnographers in classic studies from the 1980s, ’90s, and aughts. (Many of these are collected in Repair Work Ethnographies, edited by Ignaz Strebel, Alain Bovet, and Philippe Sormani.) Researchers interviewed and observed professional mechanics and service providers whose muscles had memorized particular movements, whose senses were attuned to subtle signals from their materials, and who relied on improvisatory modes of knowledge exchange and problem-solving. At Willie’s repair shop in upstate New York, sociologist and photographer Douglas Harper learned about the delicacy of repairing transmissions: ³⁵

Despite the straightforwardness, or pure mechanicalness, of transmissions, few mechanics repair them. This is in part because the ability to read a shop manual and understand the photographs that accompany the instructions is only part of the knowledge required to do the repair. Even in this most “objective” of procedures it is the subtle play of force and pressure, the simultaneous movement of parts, and an evaluation of wear through the sensations of the fingertips that guide and control the process of the work.

Christophe Lejeune found a similar haptic sensibility in his work with steam locomotive restorers: “They ‘read’ the way parts fit together and manage to reassemble the whole engine by trial and error, without any instruction manual.” ³⁶

While improvisation and embodied engagement are common in practice, they are often precluded by scripted repair manuals. As Julian Orr reported, in a study of photocopier technicians:

[The manual’s] directive documentation is designed not to provide information for thinking about the machine and its problems but to direct the technician to the solution through a minimal decision tree. The directions in this documentation are intended to prescribe the technician’s behavior from arrival at the customer site until departure. The premise is that a careful following of the prescriptions from beginning to end will lead to the resolution of problems more quickly than would be accomplished by the technicians reasoning from their understanding of the machine.

The manual sought to narrow their attention, but the technicians found that they had to understand the machine, and be able to explain what they were doing, in order to satisfy customers. They learned from one another, through the sharing of “war stories,” personal accounts from the field that supplemented and extended the official docs. ³⁷

As sociologist Cornelius Schubert explains, repair knowledge is “distributed knowledge … mediated through tools and devices, embodied in skills and practices, organized through the division of labor, documented in manuals and shared through stories.” ³⁸ At Willie’s shop, the facts on the manual page were remolded by the local social reality: ³⁹

Many who pull in to have their Saabs fixed pay an hourly rate (one-fifth of that charged by a Saab garage in a major city) for roughly the hours the Saab manual suggests a job should take. But for every job completed for amounts established by Saab shop manuals, many more are done as part of an intricate network that includes barter, the exchange of goodwill, loans of equipment, and participation in the sociability of the shop.

Similarly, researchers Nicolas Nova and Anaïs Bloch found cell phone repair technicians using sensory methods and ad hoc networks of exchanging information. Nova and Bloch observed that Swiss repairers “followed a clear operational sequence (chaîne opératoire) imparted by their training” — but the practical application of those sequences involved particular bodily techniques: “repairers feel, touch, push, pull, pull, move, blow, shake, and rub” the devices, often in tandem with particular sensing instruments, as they diagnose and fix each flaw. Because these independent technicians often lacked access to the documentation that manufacturers reserved for “authorized” service providers, they had to create that knowledge for themselves, contriving a manual through intricate manual work. When a new phone model was released, the technicians bought one so they could dismantle and reassemble it, accumulating sensory and technical knowledge through reverse engineering. ⁴⁰

The repairers’ “soft skills,” meanwhile, aided them in listening and responding to customers, and in building networks of knowledge exchange. In the spirit of mutual aid, they shared locally what they learned through their experimentation, including bootleg documents and self-made how-to videos. They also contributed to global discussion forums and service manual repositories and shared tips on WhatsApp groups. Yet each shop or chain, Nova and Bloch found, curated its own aggregated archive, its own scrapbook manual:

Our interlocutors commonly used notebooks full of drawings, technical diagrams, and lists of components with description of their characteristics and shortcomings. They also assembled binders of extracts from forums and annotated screenshots of web forum posts, sometimes in multiple languages, books to describe maintenance procedures, video series, and even and entire ‘internal learning system’ compiling failures and notes on the availability of spare parts.

These carefully kludged-together manuals were closely held, circulating among colleagues and “trusted contacts from other stores.” Each manual had its own social circle, part of a knowledge economy fluctuating between competition and cooperation, local and global, official and informal. ⁴¹

The manual can be a compound collaborative object around which a social ecology emerges and evolves.

Sociologist Lara Houston has described parallel knowledge economies among independent cell phone repair workers in Kampala. They, too, lacked critical device schematics and repair documentation, as well as the software and tools necessary to do their work. Some technicians relied on firmware repositories, despite the potential violation of copyright and End User Licensing Agreements. This “trans-local knowledge” exchange created unequal access for those who could and could not pay for premium subscriptions. Hence the proliferation of provisional approaches and the reliance on distributed intelligence. ⁴²

Unofficial manuals circulate as forum posts and zines within many professional and hobbyist communities. ⁴³ Yet it’s not only independent repair people who require ad hoc documentation; sometimes large government bodies do, too. Witness the Federal Aviation Administration’s 43.13-1B Advisory Circular, which “contains methods, techniques, and practices acceptable to the Administrator for the inspection of nonpressurized areas of civil aircraft, only when there are no manufacturer repair or maintenance instructions.” Readers can learn how to prepare wood surfaces for bonding, replace drain holes, splice laminated spars, assemble oval plug patches, mend upholstery, and tie modified seine knots for rib lacing, among other useful skills. Some improvisation is permitted, provided that “the repaired structure [is] as strong as the original structure and … equivalent to the original in rigidity and aerodynamic shape.” ⁴⁴

To use a term by sociologist Susan Leigh Star and philosopher James Griesemer, the repair manual is a boundary object: “plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites.” ⁴⁵ As we see in several examples presented here — the mid-century DIYers, the radical collectives like Videofreex, the iFixit community, the cell phone technicians — the manual can be a compound collaborative object around which a social ecology emerges and evolves.

A device might even be so intuitively designed that its repair doesn’t need to be mediated by a manual.

The next step, as some activists see it, is to push designers of the gadgets sustained by those ecologies of repair to reverse-engineer social practices and re-make their own work accordingly. iFixit, for instance, assigns reparability scores to new products. Devices that are hard to open, and those that use specialized fasteners or require specialized tools, get low scores, compared to products that use “easy-to-swap” modular parts, allow for easy access to frequently replaced parts, support simple upgrades, and offer free, public service manuals. ⁴⁶ At companies like Fairphone, repair principles are baked into the product design. Engadget’s Daniel Cooper wrote about the ease of replacing his phone’s camera with the help of Fairphone docs and iFixit guides. He had to remove thirteen screws and detach the display module from the body, but putting everything back together “felt more like building a piece of IKEA furniture than swapping around complicated electronics.” ⁴⁷

Others have envisioned a future beyond the step-by-step guide. “Building a product with repair in mind requires making room for the user,” argues Aaron Perzanowski in The Right to Repair: ⁴⁸

The device needs to accommodate, even welcome, intrusions into the formerly sacrosanct interior. … And the device itself, though its internal layout, text, and diagrams should guide users through the most common repairs.

A device might even be so intuitively designed that its repair doesn’t need to be mediated by a manual. There’s no reason to tape a circuit diagram to the back panel if the very form of the device embodies its operative logics and issues an invitation for manual engagement.

Repairing the Manual

What if we could extend those basic principles — that repair should be social, embodied, intuitive, accessible — beyond the device or object? Could we apply these logics at the scale of civic systems and public spaces? Could we imagine the collaborative work of politics as something akin to authoring a repair manual for society? Do not puncture the crust of this damaged planet to extract buried organic waste. There are no user-exploitable parts inside the case. Here we meet the limits of a step-by-step guide. Some problems don’t lend themselves to methodical rehabilitation and representation in exploded-view diagrams, and some methods and ecologies of repair are not easily manualized. Maybe “repair” itself is too modest an intervention for planetary-scale injuries. Maybe what’s required is abolition, the building of new, “life-affirming” alternatives. ⁴⁹ Is there, should there be, a manual for that?

What if we could extend those basic principles — that repair should be social, embodied, intuitive, accessible — beyond the device or object? Could we apply these logics at the scale of civic systems and public spaces?

A reparable world would be a more convivial world. Philosopher Ivan Illich argued that industrially produced tools (broadly conceived) lead to “dependence, exploitation, and impotence,” while convivial tools — a pencil, a Fairphone, a simple technology, a functional institution — enable autonomous action, giving “each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of [their] vision.” ⁵⁰ Historian Manuel Callahan proposes that a commitment to conviviality could help us re-engineer “the social infrastructure of communities, providing something of a repair manual to get beyond the most destructive elements of capitalism.” ⁵¹ The politics and ethics embodied and espoused in such a manual — including, for instance, a reparability score — could inform the design of the objects and systems we’re invited to repair, while scaling up to shape the communities and societies built with those tools.

But we don’t live in that world — not yet. Ours is a time of privatization and obfuscation, polarization and degradation. Increasingly, technology is sold as a solution to these myriad problems, and so it’s ever more critical that we understand the operating logics governing our technologized terrains — as well as our power to fix and transform them. But some crises defy an instrumental fix. What good is a repair manual when the problem is out of hand, seemingly too complex for any person to make a difference? Yet existential manuals do exist. And whether they are meant earnestly or provocatively, they can prompt critical reflection. They might cause us to doubt solutionist approaches to wicked problems, or they might remind us of our own individual power to take modest steps in our immediate environments to effect larger transformations.

Remember Haynes, the publisher of auto repair guides? They also sell parodic manuals for sex, babies, and midlife crises. Illustrations of complex mechanical parts accompany flowcharts for diaper changes and lists of age-related body breakdowns. The clinical rhetoric, bullet-point format, and discordant imagery highlight the absurdity of equating bodies with gadgets, or framing normal rites of passage and universal life experiences as dysfunction. They also make a joke of the idea that we could ever address complex affairs through universally applicable protocols. We might as well hope to escape our mess by traveling through space or time. Fortunately, Haynes sells manuals for the Star Wars Millennium Falcon, the U.S.S. Enterprise, and the Back to the Future DeLorean Machine.

More seriously, there have been attempts to reorder and repair the biggest dysfunctions of this world. In Sprawl Repair Manual (2010), Galina Tachieva proposes a “step-by-step design process for the re-balancing and re-urbanization of suburbia into more sustainable, economical, energy- and resource-efficient patterns.” Sprawl, we infer, is dysfunctional, broken. We can repair sprawl through particular design principles and various funding and regulatory incentives, to create “complete communities” that have a “mix of uses and are walkable, with many of a person’s daily needs — shops, offices, transit, civic and recreational places — within a short distance of home. They are compact, so they consume less open space and enable multiple modes of transportation.” ⁵² These, you might recognize, are the principles of the design movement New Urbanism; Tachieva is a partner at the firm Duany Plater-Zyberk. The book’s graphics suggest that repairing sprawl is primarily a matter of infill — of “completion.” We are meant to locate the open spots on the map and add more red boxes representing clapboard houses and quaint shops and village greens.

These repair kits can be useful in suggesting possibilities for intervention, but they are reductive, sometimes dangerously so — especially when they propose aesthetic solutions to entrenched social problems.

Stepwise completion may appeal to a certain type of urban developer. But as critic Michael Sorkin argued, New Urbanism “promotes [a] style of universality that … is over-reliant on visual cues in attempting to produce social effects. … Harboring a single species (the white middle class) in a habitat of dulling uniformity, the New Urbanism seeks the stability of the perfectly predictable, a Prozac halcyon in which nothing can go wrong.” ⁵³ Really, any school of formalist, stylistic planning can lend itself to manualization. We might say the master plan itself is a totalizing manual for the “repair” of blighted cities and other underperforming environments. ⁵⁴ And where plans have failed, “tactical” urbanists supply design “toolkits” and guides that espouse manualized approaches to urban and architectural remediation. ⁵⁵ These repair kits can be useful in suggesting possibilities for intervention, but they are reductive, sometimes dangerously so — especially when they propose aesthetic solutions to entrenched social problems.

And why stop at the scale of the neighborhood or city? There are manuals for diplomacy and manuals for climate repair. ⁵⁶ There are manuals to repair battered bodies and minds, and to mend the fabric enveloping them. ⁵⁷ What about social injustice? The thought of “manualizing” a challenge as deep and fraught as, say, prison abolition sounds absurd. Yet a manual can be an accessible way to welcome newcomers into a movement, providing a clear point of entry and prescribing a methodical path toward acclimation and activation. A manual can even be self-reflexive about its own limitations, and about the appropriate context for manual modes of engagement.

In 2019, the Movement for Black Lives published its Reparations Now Toolkit, which presents critical concepts and stories — about the Middle Passage, Jim Crow, redlining, the prison industrial complex — and proposes group activities, from quilting to poetry, where interlocutors can grapple with these terms. ⁵⁸ This curriculum is called a toolkit (and I’ve written elsewhere about that pedagogical genre) but it also has characteristics of a repair manual, providing readers with guidance on how to break down a complex systemic injustice into component parts and, ultimately, to appreciate the need for, and to be able to make the case for, reparations. ⁵⁹

With its red-yellow-green-black Pan-African screen print graphics and Sharpie-style fonts layered atop graph paper backgrounds, the booklet blends the visual grammars of activism and engineering. Strategies are dissected into tables and bullet points. Activities are structured with clear directions, objectives, formats, and lists of materials. Case studies come with executive summaries identifying the types, mechanisms, targets, beneficiaries, and outcomes of the reparative measures deployed in each case. The complex moral, ethical, and political-economic process of reparations is broken down into methodical lessons and actions, yet aestheticized with illustrations and fonts that evoke the hand, that allude to embodied, affective engagement. The manual guides readers in “doing the work” — the study, the self-reflection, the ethical attunement — to prepare for the sort of systemic repair that certainly exceeds a manual’s prescriptions.

Manuals can also prompt critical reflection about the concept of repair itself, questioning the ideologies and ethics underlying our assessments of what’s broken or needs remedy.

Manuals can also prompt critical reflection about the concept of repair itself, questioning the ideologies and ethics underlying our assessments of what’s broken or needs remedy. In Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment (2021), media scholar Jonathan Sterne offers a “user’s guide” to “impairment theory.” We might mistake this guide as a repair manual, but Sterne argues that impairment doesn’t require repair; it “is not simply a defect or a malfunction“ but “better understood as a productive distortion of an ability.” Similarly, impairment is not an exception within an otherwise functional system, but “in fact the rule. Nothing works as it’s supposed to.” ⁶⁰

Sterne’s conclusion echoes Steven Jackson’s “broken world thinking,” a resonant framework in repair studies, which asks “what happens when we take erosion, breakdown, and decay, rather than novelty, growth, and progress, as our starting points” in considering the relations between technology and society — or, I’d add, between society and the environment, between technology and the environment, or between individuals within society. There are so many potential sites of vulnerability. Rather than offering a step-by-step fix, a repair manual drafted through the lenses of “impairment theory” or “broken world thinking” would invite us to focus on the breaks, the cracks, the leaks, the things that don’t fit, the miscellany. It would ask us to accept the ubiquity of impairment in our worlds; to look for systemic impairments, like protocols of exclusion or discrimination, that are normalized; and to consider what larger social remediations are required to repair a world that pathologizes and criminalizes impairment. It would also question our attachment to normative ontologies and temporalities: the purported “state of good repair” or basic functionality to which we seek to return. When, if ever, were things right or “normal?”

Engagement with the systemic nature of repair — including its historical, cultural, and economic contexts — can lead to what Christopher R. Henke and Benjamin Sims call “reflexive repair,” or repairing repair itself. Manuals for repairing racial or environmental injustice could prompt us to consider what, exactly, needs to be repaired: an object, a structure, an infrastructure, or an entire society? We have to acknowledge the interconnections between various objects and infrastructural systems, the interdependencies between various scales of repair. One model is the reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which involve analysis of nested scales of activity, from the neighborhood to global bodies; recognition that “human actions and material structures” are linked; and remedies that span regulation, taxation, investment, engineering, and beyond. ⁶¹

“Manuals” for similarly complex matters could also prompt us to distinguish between “repair as maintenance and repair as transformation.” Henke and Sims ask, “Does a proposed repair largely reproduce existing power structures, or does it seek to remedy inequalities or injustices”? Further, does it “restrict or close off possible futures, especially those we can imagine wanting for ourselves and future generations”? ⁶² Literary scholar Patricia Stuelke argues that reparative efforts committed to amelioration and endurance can actually “stave off the difficult work of imagining possible worlds that break definitively with this one”; as a consequence, “racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and empire often emerge as structures only in need of repair and remediation,” rather than systems necessitating radical transformation. ⁶³

What do we remedy when we deploy a manual to fix a car or a phone? What larger systemic breaks — dysfunctions enabled by these same gadgets — go unquestioned? What knowledge communities and epistemic politics are cultivated when we share knowledge about the making and maintenance — or collective remaking — of our material worlds? Is repair about reclaiming a past or building a future? Is it about conserving the status quo or about inciting systemic change? Fixing prisons or abolishing mass incarceration? Tuning up individual cars, or overhauling an inefficient, environmentally harmful transportation system that privileges privatized transport? Repairing racially biased facial recognition technologies, or prohibiting invasions of privacy and racial profiling? Can a manual, with its gradational logic, tackle those broader scales of intervention?

What do we remedy when we deploy a manual to fix a car or a phone? What larger systemic breaks — dysfunctions enabled by these same gadgets — go unquestioned?

In 2019, I invited the undergraduates in my Tools class to create “critical manuals” that questioned normative uses — and the values embedded in those norms — for a tool of their choice. ⁶⁴ Their projects ranged from the tampon to the Leatherman, from jury-rigged prison equipment to beasts of burden. They considered not only how to use and maintain their tools for maximum effectiveness, as determined by inventors or manufacturers, but also how to wield those gadgets for maximal thoughtfulness or minimal environmental impact, for the greatest virtuosic skill or most egalitarian access. These manuals outlined the tools’ histories, political-economic contexts, and cultural resonances. Some students, determining that their chosen tools had overwhelmingly negative effects on communities of use, imagined their objects out of existence — or into other, less deleterious applications. Their manuals modeled a methodology: a means of thinking though the hands, of theorizing through manipulation, to imagine new worlds in which quotidian objects carry different values, and to then use those same tools to build and maintain those worlds. Repairing drinking fountains to restore the commons. Fixing software bugs according to a computational counter-logic that prioritizes privacy, consent, and inclusion over extraction and optimization. Not fixing a pipeline, or dismantling a hydroelectric dam, so as to remediate a polluted ecology.

Even a modest manual has the potential to bring big political, epistemological, and ontological questions close to hand — and to put the potential for repair and abolition into readers’ hands, prompting their first steps toward more ambitious, concerted action.