Reading

These are the works the practice draws on: books, essays, and films that keep company with the doctrine of repair, the commons of pattern, and the slow craft of keeping things usable. The list is curated, not exhaustive. Each entry stands on its own, and nothing here is required reading.

This is a living document. The entries below are the first six, from the information architecture §5 list. Full annotations are still to come; the list earns its keep only when every entry can say why it belongs. Where the Internet Archive holds a borrowable or streamable copy, the title links there. Unlinked titles are not yet on archive.org.

The list

• Shop Class as Soulcraft — Matthew B. Crawford. 2009. A philosopher-turned-motorcycle-mechanic’s case for the manual trades as morally and intellectually serious work.
• The Right to Repair — Aaron Perzanowski. 2022. A legal history of how manufacturers came to control what we do with the things we buy, and what the right-to-repair movement is trying to take back.
• Free Software, Free Society — Richard M. Stallman. 2002. Collected essays on the four freedoms and the philosophy behind the GNU project.
• The Soul of a New Machine — Tracy Kidder. 1981. Reportage on the small Data General team that built the Eagle minicomputer through eighteen-hour days and steady burnout.
• The Gift — Lewis Hyde. 1983. An argument that art moves in a gift economy distinct from market exchange, and an accounting of what is lost when commodity logic swallows creative labor.
• The Real World of Technology — Ursula M. Franklin. 1989. The Massey Lectures that distinguish “holistic” from “prescriptive” technologies, and trace how the prescriptive kind reshapes social relations.

How the list grows

Additions come by amendment, the same way the rest of the doctrine is amended. A new entry should say why it belongs among the others: what practice it serves, and what it asks of the reader. Once added, an entry is never removed. It may be marked superseded or out of print, but the record stays.

Two companion lists sit alongside this one: /library/repair for repair resources, and /library/links for the broader commons we depend on.