Dismantling can be a purposive form of progress

Evidence

I am interested in manifest dismantling as a form of purposiveness bound up with remediation, something that requires us to give up the idea that progress can only face forward blindly. It provides a new direction for our work ethic. Remediation certainly takes the same amount of work: in this case, a dam that had taken three years to build took close to the same amount of time to remove. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 643

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is the named definitional core of the chapter — ‘manifest dismantling’ as remediation-driven purposiveness that rejects blind forward progress.
• SEED: The ‘work ethic’ redirection is a strong angle for a piece on why repair and upkeep deserve the moral status we give to invention.