Steven J. Jackson’s ‘Rethinking Repair’ offers a profound reconceptualisation of technological life by displacing innovation, novelty and seamless functionality from the centre of media and technology studies, and replacing them with repair, maintenance, breakdown, care and material endurance. The chapter begins from a deceptively simple premise: contemporary societies habitually imagine technological progress through invention, acceleration and obsolescence, yet the actual survival of socio-technical worlds depends upon continuous acts of fixing, mending, improvising and sustaining. Jackson argues that breakdown is not an exceptional interruption of technological order, but one of its constitutive conditions; every system is already vulnerable, contingent and dependent upon forms of labour that usually remain invisible until failure occurs. This perspective challenges heroic narratives of design and innovation by foregrounding the overlooked workers, informal economies, infrastructures and practices that keep artefacts, networks and institutions operational. The conceptual force of the chapter lies in what Jackson calls a movement from “thinking through novelty” towards thinking through repair, a shift that reveals technology not as a finished object but as an ongoing process of deterioration, adaptation and renewal. His discussion of shipbreaking in Bangladesh is especially significant, because it demonstrates how the afterlives of technological systems are distributed unevenly across global geographies of labour, toxicity and value extraction. What appears in one context as waste, abandonment or technological death becomes elsewhere a dense economy of salvage, skill, danger and survival. Through this case, Jackson exposes the moral and political limits of conventional technological imaginaries: devices and infrastructures do not simply disappear when they cease to function for affluent users; they enter new circuits of disassembly, reuse, contamination and repair. The chapter also reframes innovation itself, suggesting that creativity often emerges not from pristine laboratories or entrepreneurial invention, but from constrained environments where people must work with broken, incomplete or ageing materials. Repair, therefore, is not merely secondary or derivative; it is a generative practice through which knowledge, agency and alternative futures are produced. Jackson further connects repair to ethics of care, arguing that to maintain technological objects is also to sustain relations among people, communities and environments. This claim broadens the chapter’s relevance beyond media technologies, positioning repair as a political and ecological principle capable of contesting planned obsolescence, extractive production and disposability. The example of Apple’s contested repair cultures and consumer resistance illustrates how technical maintenance is inseparable from questions of ownership, corporate control, environmental responsibility and public agency. Ultimately, ‘Rethinking Repair’ insists that the most revealing stories of technology are not found only at the moment of invention, but in the aftermath: in breakdown, reuse, damage, restoration and persistence. Jackson’s contribution is thus both analytical and normative, offering a rigorous framework for understanding technological worlds as fragile, repairable and ethically entangled systems whose futures depend less on perpetual innovation than on the humble, skilled and often invisible labour of keeping things going.