{"id":21300,"date":"2026-04-17T10:34:31","date_gmt":"2026-04-17T10:34:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/17\/book-review-stewart-brand-fixing-everything-maintenance\/"},"modified":"2026-04-17T10:34:31","modified_gmt":"2026-04-17T10:34:31","slug":"book-review-stewart-brand-fixing-everything-maintenance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/17\/book-review-stewart-brand-fixing-everything-maintenance\/","title":{"rendered":"The case for fixing everything"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The handsome new book Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One<\/a><\/em>, by the tech industry legend Stewart Brand, promises to be the first in a series offering \u201ca comprehensive overview of the civilizational importance of maintenance.\u201d One of Brand\u2019s several biographers described him as a mainstay of both counterculture and cyberculture, and with Maintenance<\/em>, Brand wants us to understand that the upkeep and repair of tools and systems has profound impact on daily life. As he puts it, \u201cTaking responsibility for maintaining something\u2014whether a motorcycle, a monument, or our planet\u2014can be a radical act.\u201d<\/p>\n

Radical how? This volume doesn\u2019t say. In an outline for the overall work, Brand says his goal is to \u201cend with the nature of maintainers and the honor owed them.\u201d<\/p>\n

The idea that maintainers are owed anything, much less honor, might surprise some readers. Actually, maintenance and repair have been hot topics in academia since the mid-2010s. I played some role in that movement as a cofounder of the Maintainers<\/a>, a global, interdisciplinary network dedicated to the study of maintenance, repair, care, and all the work that goes into keeping the world going.<\/p>\n

Brand is right, too, that maintainers haven\u2019t gotten the laurels they deserve. Over the past few decades, scholars have shown that work from oiling tools to replacing worn parts to updating code bases all tends to be lower in status than \u201cinnovation.\u201d Maintenance gets neglected in many organizational and social settings. (Just look at some American infrastructure!) And as the right-to-\u00adrepair movement has shown, companies in pursuit of greater profits have frequently locked us out of being able to do repairs or greatly reduced the maintainable life of their products. It\u2019s hard to think of any other reason to put a computer in the door of a refrigerator.<\/p>\n

Some of Brand\u2019s earlier work helped inspire those insights. But his new book makes me think he doesn\u2019t see things that way. For Brand, maintenance seems to be a solitary act, profound but more about personal success and fulfillment than tending to a shared world or making it better.<\/p>\n

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Born in 1938, Brand is 87 years old. A sense hangs over the book\u2014with its battles against corrosion, rust, and decay, with its attempts to keep things going even as they inevitably falter\u2014of someone looking over life and pondering its end. Maintenance: Of Everything <\/em>connects to every stage of Brand\u2019s life. It\u2019s worth reviewing where it falls in that arc. Brand has always been interested in tools and fixing things, but rarely has he focused on the systems that need the most care.\u00a0<\/p>\n

More than a half-century ago, Brand was a member of the Merry Pranksters, a countercultural, LSD-centered hippie collective famously led by Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo\u2019s Nest<\/em>. In 1966, Brand co-produced the Trips Festival, where bands like the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company performed for thousands amid psychedelic light shows.<\/p>\n

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Brand\u2019s Whole Earth Catalog<\/em> had a vision that might feel progressive, but its libertarian, rugged-individualist philosophy of remaking civilization alone stood in contrast to more collective social change movements.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In some ways, the Trips Festival set a paradigm for the rest of his life\u2019s work. Brand\u2019s biographers have described him as a network celebrity\u2014someone who got ahead by bringing people together, building coalitions of influential figures who could boost his signal. As Kesey put it in 1980, \u201cStewart recognizes power. And cleaves to it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Brand applied this network logic to the undertaking he will always be best remembered for: the Whole Earth Catalog<\/a><\/em>. First published in 1968 and aimed at hippies and members of the nascent back-to-the-land movement, the publication had the motto \u201cAccess to tools.\u201d Its pages were full of Quonset huts, geodesic domes, solar panels, well pumps, water filters, and other technologies for life off the grid. It was a vision that might feel progressive or left-leaning, but the libertarian, rugged-individualist philosophy of eschewing corrupt systems and remaking civilization alone stood in contrast to the more collective movements pushing for deep social change at the time\u2014like civil rights, feminism, and environmentalism.<\/p>\n

That vision also led straight to the empowerment that came with new digital tools, and to Silicon Valley. In 1985, Brand published the Whole Earth Software Catalog<\/em>, the last of the series, and also cofounded the WELL\u2014the Whole Earth \u2019Lectronic Link, a pioneering online community famous for, among other things, facilitating the trade of Grateful Dead bootlegs. He also wrote a hagiographic book about the MIT Media Lab, known for its corporate-sponsored research into new communications tech. \u201cThe Lab would cure the pathologies of technology not with economics or politics but with technology,\u201d Brand wrote. Again, not collective action, not policymaking: tools. And Brand then cofounded the Global Business Network, a group of pricey consulting futurists that further connected him to MIT, Stanford, and the Valley. Brand had literally helped bring about the modern digital revolution.<\/p>\n

His attention then turned toward its upkeep. Brand\u2019s 1994 book, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They\u2019re Built<\/em>, argued against high-modernist architectural ideas. Nearly all buildings eventually get remade, he argued, but he especially favored cheap, simple structures that inhabitants could easily retool to suit changing needs. In some ways, Brand was recapitulating the liberated\u2014or libertarian\u2014philosophy of the Whole Earth Catalog<\/em>: People can remake their world, if they have access to tools. In a chapter titled \u201cThe Romance of Maintenance,\u201d he asked readers to see the beauty, value, and occasional pleasures of fixer-uppers of all kinds.<\/p>\n

This chapter was a touchstone for many of us in the academic subfield of maintenance studies. Researchers in disciplines like history, sociology, and anthropology, as well as artists and practitioners in fields like libraries, IT, and engineering, all started trying to understand the realities and, yes, romance of maintenance and repair. Brand joined and contributed to Listservs, attended conferences, chatted with intellectual leaders. So it\u2019s a bit uncharitable when he writes that his new book is \u201cthe first to look at maintenance in general.\u201d He knows better. The real question, though, is what his work has to teach us that others have not said before. In this first volume, the answer is unclear.<\/p>\n

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Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One<\/em> is an odd book. If so much of Brand\u2019s thinking has been about access to tools, he now asks, in a more extended way: How are our tools maintained? But where Brand began his career with a catalogue, in this volume we get \u2026 what? A digest? An almanac? An encyclopedia? Its form and riotous variety fit no genre easily.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The book has two chapters. The first, \u201cThe Maintenance Race,\u201d recounts the story of three men who took part in the Golden Globe, a round-the-world race for solo sailors held in 1968. Each of the sailors, Brand explains, had a different philosophy of maintenance. One neglected it and hoped for the best. He died. Another thought of and prepared for everything in advance, and while he didn\u2019t win the race, he completed it and once held the record for the \u201cworld\u2019s longest recorded nonstop solo sailing voyage.\u201d The final sailor won and did so through heroic acts of perseverance; his style was \u201cWhatever comes, deal with it<\/em>,\u201d Brand explains. Structured like a fairy tale and unremittingly romantic, the story\u2014like most of the anecdotes in the book\u2014focuses on the derring-do of vigorous white guys. The strategy is no secret. Brand\u2019s outline explains: \u201cStart with a dramatic contest of maintenance styles under life-critical conditions\u2014a true story told as a fable.\u201d This myth is meant to inspire.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The second chapter, \u201cVehicles (and Weapons),\u201d is over 150 pages long. It has five sections, multiple subsections, five subsections designated \u201cdigressions,\u201d one called a \u201csubdigression,\u201d two \u201cpostscripts,\u201d and several \u201cfootnotes\u201d that are not footnotes in a formal sense but, rather, further addenda. At times, it all feels like notes for a future work. Brand makes no apology for the book\u2019s woolliness. \u201cAll I can offer here,\u201d he writes, \u201cis to muse across a representative of maintenance domains and see what emerges.\u201d Perhaps the most charitable reading of the potpourri is that it represents the return of a Merry Prankster, offering us a riotous varied light show. It\u2019s a good book to leave on a table and occasionally open to a random page for entertainment. But it often seems as if it does not know what it wants to say or be.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cVehicles (and Weapons)\u201d begins by paraphrasing two famous works of maintenance philosophy, Robert M. Pirsig\u2019s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance<\/em> and Matthew B. Crawford\u2019s Shop Class as Soulcraft<\/em>. Maintenance involves both \u201cproblem finding\u201d and \u201cproblem solving.\u201d While much repair work is marked by anxiety, impatience, and boredom, it also offers positive values and outcomes. \u201cMotorcycle maintainers take heart from what they repair for<\/em>\u2014the glory of the ride,\u201d Brand writes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The beauty and triumph of cheapness is a running theme throughout the work, harking back to How Buildings Learn<\/em>. Henry Ford\u2019s Model T won out over early electric vehicles and hugely expensive luxury vehicles like Rolls-Royce\u2019s Silver Ghost because it was cheap and easier to maintain. The three most popular cars in human history\u2014the Ford Model T, the Volkswagen Bug, and the Lada \u201cClassic\u201d from Russia\u2014all privileged cheapness, \u201cretained their basic design for decades, and \u2026 invited repair by the owner.\u201d Or, to be fair, maybe demanded it? For every hobbyist who delighted in being able to self-reliantly keep a VW running, there must have been thousands who appreciated how cheap it was and hated that it broke a lot. Brand never points to social research, like surveys, that might help us know people\u2019s feelings on such matters.<\/p>\n

Other sections recount how Americans created interchangeable parts (enabling not only cheap mass production but also easy maintenance), examine how maintenance works with assault rifles and in war, and track the history of technical manuals from the early modern period to the age of YouTube. These stories are solid, but they\u2019re also well known to students of technology, and nearly all are recycled from the work of others, featuring many large block quotes. The volume breaks little new ground.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Brand treats maintenance as an unalloyed good. But the field of maintenance studies has moved on, burrowing into the domain\u2019s ironies, complexities, and difficulties. A simple example: In most cases, it is environmentally far better to retire and recycle an internal-combustion vehicle and buy an electric one than to keep the polluting beast going forever. Maintaining a gas-guzzler or a coal-\u00adburning power plant isn\u2019t a radical act but a regressive one. Also, maintenance can become a life-breaking burden on the poor, and it falls inequitably on the shoulders of women and people of color. Keeping existing systems going can be a way of avoiding tough, necessary change\u2014like making technological systems more accessible for people with disabilities. In this volume, Brand is uninterested in such difficult trade-offs. He avoids any question of how politics shapes these issues, or how they shape politics.<\/p>\n

This avoidance comes out most clearly in a section of \u201cVehicles (and Weapons)\u201d that talks about Elon Musk\u2014a character of \u201cunique mastery,\u201d Brand informs us. He tells us that Bill Gates once shorted Tesla\u2019s stock, only to lose $1.5 billion. The lesson is clear: Elon won.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In what political and social vision is money the best way to keep the score? Brand rightly points out that electric vehicles have fewer moving parts and, in that sense, are more maintainable than internal-combustion vehicles. He celebrates Musk most of all because his products \u201chave all proven to be game changers in part because they combine ingenious design with surprisingly low cost.\u201d Again, it\u2019s Brand\u2019s \u201ccheap, available tools\u201d hypothesis. But there\u2019s a real superficiality and lack of follow-through in thinking here: Teslas remain luxury vehicles whose sales have slumped since federal tax subsidies disappeared. The company has faced several right-to-repair lawsuits; there\u2019s even a law review article on the topic. Musk is in no sense a maintenance hero. Yet Brand writes that with his companies, \u201cMusk may have done more practical world saving than any other business leader of his time.\u201d By the time Brand was writing this book, the controversies surrounding Musk for at least flirting with<\/em> antisemitism, racism, sexism, authoritarianism, and more were quite clear. About this, the book says not a word.<\/p>\n

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\"book<\/a>
Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One<\/strong>
Stewart Brand<\/figcaption>
STRIPE PRESS, 2026<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

For sure, Brand needn\u2019t agree with Musk\u2019s critics, but failing to even broach the subject is tone deaf and out of touch. Others have argued that Silicon Valley\u2019s \u201cMove fast and break things\u201d mentality undermines healthy maintenance. Brand doesn\u2019t raise the idea\u2014even to dismiss it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It could be that with Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One<\/em> Brand is just getting going; that in subsequent volumes he\u2019ll have something more coherent to say; that he\u2019ll raise really hard questions and try to answer them. But given his track record, we might reasonably doubt it. Kesey said Brand cleaves to power; he certainly doesn\u2019t question it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Lee Vinsel is an associate professor of science, technology, and society at Virginia Tech and host of <\/em>Peoples & Things, a podcast about human life with technology.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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