The case for fixing everything

Brand is right, too, that maintainers haven’t 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 “innovation.” Maintenance gets neglected in many organizational and social settings. (Just look at some American infrastructure!) And as the right-to-­repair 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’s hard to think of any other reason to put a computer in the door of a refrigerator.

Some of Brand’s earlier work helped inspire those insights. But his new book makes me think he doesn’t 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.

Born in 1938, Brand is 87 years old. A sense hangs over the book—with its battles against corrosion, rust, and decay, with its attempts to keep things going even as they inevitably falter—of someone looking over life and pondering its end. Maintenance: Of Everything connects to every stage of Brand’s life. It’s 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. 

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’s Nest. 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.

Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog 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.

In some ways, the Trips Festival set a paradigm for the rest of his life’s work. Brand’s biographers have described him as a network celebrity—someone who got ahead by bringing people together, building coalitions of influential figures who could boost his signal. As Kesey put it in 1980, “Stewart recognizes power. And cleaves to it.” 

Brand applied this network logic to the undertaking he will always be best remembered for: the Whole Earth Catalog. First published in 1968 and aimed at hippies and members of the nascent back-to-the-land movement, the publication had the motto “Access to tools.” 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—like civil rights, feminism, and environmentalism.

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, the last of the series, and also cofounded the WELL—the Whole Earth ’Lectronic 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. “The Lab would cure the pathologies of technology not with economics or politics but with technology,” 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.