Overthinking the apocalypse

We live in a society that incentivises productivity and consumption, and devalues maintenance, cleaning, repurposing, degrowth; even though the first type of thing is destroying the world and the second type of thing is what is needed to avert collapse. In fact, perversely, the more problems are created by productive labour the greater its prestige, because doubling down is a method of denial.

Notice how, since the Industrial Revolution, productive labour is given to men and has both higher pay and more prestige than reproductive labour, which is given to women and often not paid at all.

The IT instance of that general attitude is, programmers are given prestige while QA, sysadmins, tech writers, translators, designers, teachers are depreciated. This is true even in open source; in organisations that aren't even about profit, there is no obvious reason why programmers should be the stars of the show and the core decision-makers of FOSS projects, but culturally they are. There's no reason why shipping new software should be glorified over maintaining existing systems, but it is. This creates the IT equivalent of carbon in atmosphere: ever-growing levels of technical debt.