A thought has crossed my mind today, slowly.
Slowly because I’m sitting in a house that’s about 45 degrees Fahrenheit and falling and I feel like anything besides staring at the screen is a bit much on the effort front. The furnace is blowing air but not heat, and it’s been that way since yesterday. At first I thought it might just be a very dirty filter. Our furnace ductwork is set up in what seems to me a slightly unusual way, so it took me a while to dope out where the filter cover was. I got it after a bit of circling around and yes, it was quite dirty. In with the new filter, up with the hope that it was that simple. It wasn’t.
When we first bought our previous home, I was serious about learning to DIY most household problems. An attempt to fix a dripping tub faucet quickly showed me the limitations of holding a book in your hand and trying to deal with a complex if common problem. I discovered that there were really two major impediments to being Mr. Fix-It. The first was that there were a ton of different models, makes and systems from different eras in most homes, and a lot of them had been installed with varying degrees of cynicism and kludgery by both DIY homeowners and professionals. The second was that you could very easily break something in trying to repair it as a novice and discover that the small part of it that had broken wasn’t available any longer and you’d need to replace the whole damn thing. (I suspect that in some cases, the pros also break little delicate parts while nobody’s looking, by accident and on purpose, and act like that was the problem in the first place.) You also discover as you read that in some cases the systems in your house can be destructive or deadly if you very easily do the wrong thing. Somewhere around the time I was putting hydraulic cement around the pipe for the newly fitted tub faucet since the plumber had declined to do that part himself I reckoned that I was going to just pay people to do this sort of thing.
As a renter, things are easier. We’re part-way through the repair, which at first seemed like a simple pilot light relight but has revealed itself to be something more complicated. I look on with some suspense at this point, as I think the temperature is going to drop even lower inside, heading towards freezing, and the night after that, well below freezing. At that point you turn all the faucets on a drip and evacuate to a hotel. Sleeping through a mid-40s night with a lot of blankets is one thing, sleeping in a house that’s below 30F inside is another.
That thought cascaded a bit for me. The entire scenario here depends on us being the only ones having this issue. If we all were, for one, it wouldn’t be an issue in our houses, it would be an issue with the infrastructure in our area. But let’s suppose that we all had the same model furnace and they were all having the same issue at the same time. At some point in the future, that might even be the case, if we continue to put computing components and wireless networking inside common appliances. We’re already at the point where some appliances can suffer denial of service attacks or be bricked by a bad firmware push from the manufacturer. (Or just be crippled because the firmware is old or buggy.)
We generally suppose that if we have the financial resources or a contractual relationship, issues with our home technology can be fixed with some speed or sidestepped for a time. But what if the next time your furnace dies, that’s it? No more furnaces, or a line of furnace-owners needing replacement so long that it would be another winter before you’d have it fixed.
We tend to find these thoughts unbearably apocalyptic—that a sudden change of that kind that is materially fundamental is only imaginable in a context where everything is ending. Sometimes that’s so: nobody is thinking about the failure of just one technological system in Ukraine or Gaza right now. But also families sometimes come up against these sorts of end-of-life-as-we-know-it moments in rather ordinary ways—their financial situation transforms drastically overnight, or some other status-quo change means “adapt, because there’s no going back”.
It’s a hard problem to think through in purely technological terms. What would you do if you lived in a contemporary house in an area that saw sub-freezing temperatures during the winter and there was suddenly, abruptly no way to have central heating or radiated heating in a house built for them?
You might get some space heaters and try to limp by that way. People do. We ran into a problem with our one space heater, which is that it trips the fuses in most parts of the house except my office. A more classic problem with a lot of space heaters is that sooner or later, they’re probably going to lead to a fire. You might hope there is a chimney and a fireplace, maybe one that could be used to rig a heating stove. (Our chimney has been filled with insulation by our landlord, I think because they deemed it a fire risk, so that would be a major and expensive change.) Or you might just leave the faucets dripping and wear layers and layers of clothing inside for the duration. People did. People do. The problem is that we live within our particular techno-social present. Houses built for furnaces or radiators can’t easily be unbuilt into early 19th or 18th Century structures because those weren’t just technologies, they were systems of labor and ownership and finance, of bodily presence in places that no longer exist or practices we can’t just choose to adopt.
You can spend money and time living in a different way with a common technology. I spent time with a couple in northern Maine who own an old house where they only heat one part of it in the heart of winter with a cast iron woodburning stove. They leave all the faucets in the rest of the house dripping. But it’s a whole lifestyle for them in the winter—it takes considerable daily labor for them and a lot of mindfulness, and they’re in close quarters for much of the winter, more or less a single living room and an adjoining kitchen. The rest of the house is shut up until spring. You can spend money retrofitting a house to take out a furnace. We can always choose another material culture, if we have the resources to make the transition and it’s about hewing to a new way of being, but that’s different from having no choice.
And it’s different from one of those moments, which sometimes come, where everybody chooses differently, suddenly, or has a choice thrust upon them.
American mytho-historical narratives present those moments as a series of technosocial miracles, and in those stories, we tend to compress each successive leap forward as if everyone experienced it simultaneously. Trains! Indoor plumbing! The telegraph! The telephone! Electric lighting! The automobile! The Pill! The personal computer! The compression isn’t wrong in the sense that each of these momentous technologies started as a relatively fringe technology for early users and hobbyists and then hit an inflection point where it became available for a much broader range of people and at that point transformed economic and social life, often following a series of experimental implementations. Reading about early experiments in interior electrical wiring or pedestrian fatalities after automobiles began to spread is a sobering reminder of how rough this transition often has been.
I think you can describe other changes that aren’t quite so material in some similar ways—social and cultural practices that were seen as fringe or marginal that suddenly flashed over into being mainstream, and which were then appended to the overall story of progress.
What many of us are not ready for is a story where things get taken away. Where what we’re used to degrades, disappears, becomes more expensive to the point that most people can’t afford it any longer—and where that happens slowly at first at the margins and then suddenly flashes over to almost everybody. Where health care becomes unaffordable, where education slips out of reach, where property isn’t something most people own, where media becomes a tumult of expensive streaming services, where good unprocessed produce, meat and other pantry staples become an upper middle-class luxury. Where it all compresses and suddenly seems the new normal. That’s not that unprecedented in the 20 and 21st Century: that’s the way the Great Depression felt to many, all over the world. It’s the way that the more recent global recession of 2007-08 felt to many: suddenly the horizons of the future contracted sharply.
I keep dreading that this is what November portends: the possible confirmation of a great taking away, the exact opposite of the rhetoric that Trump slings around. He and his followers feel like they would be an ending. A furnace going out, a new normal where we’re told that “greatness” is sitting in the dark, groping for a candle, huddled against the night and the cold. It is only after you don’t have something fundamental that you realize how essential it is to the life you’ve been living. What I think his acolytes are counting on is that if they take everything away that’s been basic to our lives, we’ll just have to accept it as the new normal rather than curse the darkness they’ve created. They might be right.
Of course, for someone such as myself who has become perhaps a too ambitious DIY-er, I immediately visualize the comment I want to write having read your first few paragraphs, glossing over the darker metaphorical aspects. And ironically, I was going to write this comment earlier but became occupied with a home repair issue of my own, the refill line spontaneously breaking off on the toilet in our addition, which is both more aggravating than a broken furnace, because of all the damaged materials that must be cleaned up and disposed of and replaced, but also easier to deal with, because we can easily adapt if the addition is a sort of no-go space for a few days or even weeks.
But on to my actual comment: one of the most liberating revelations I've had in the whole DIY-space is that repairpeople and contractors use exactly the same tools that anyone else can buy at the hardware store. (OK, HVAC is sort of an exception.) There's very rarely something an official repairperson would need to fix something that I can't also get. Appliance repairpeople need to contend with thousands of different models--they're not trained on each one individually. I'm more struck by the same-ness of everything than the differences.
I think this is especially true of appliances: the individual repair parts work for so many different models, and the brand-to-brand differences between, say, a dryer heating element or a gas oven igniter, are very subtle. Compatibility seems more about being able to fit in the right space and have the right holes on the bracket. Over Christmas break, I replaced the heating element in my mom's 50-year-old dryer, and I got a new Whirpool heating element which is still being produced mainly because it's also used in probably hundreds of other Whirpool dryer models. I've replaced several parts in my dishwasher, and having seen that the parts for my budget-priced dishwasher are often exactly the same as those in the more expensive models, I actually find myself amazed that there can be such dramatic differences in cleaning ability between models.
HOTEL!