Stewart Brand changed my life. At my local library as a teenager, leafing through the massive 1980 edition of the Whole Earth Catalog—the countercultural guide to ideas and tools that Brand originally launched in the late ’60s—I felt as if I’d stumbled across the best book in the world. It introduced me to the architect Buckminster Fuller, who would become a lifelong obsession, and to works that shaped my thinking forever. An encouraging blurb from Brand was enough to send me in search of A Pattern Language, Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics, and many other revelatory reads. Just browsing through the Catalog made me feel like a generalist, and I identified with its charismatic editor, who signed his comments with the initials “SB.”
When I looked into Brand himself, I grew even more intrigued. Raised and educated in the establishment—Phillips Exeter Academy, Stanford, a stint in the Army—he found an early spiritual home with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, and even had a memorable cameo in Tom Wolfe’s tour of 1960s psychedelia, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Later, he pivoted toward technological prophets such as Fuller, from whom he harvested a key insight: “Changing human nature is hard, and when you try, you mostly fail, and it’s discouraging. Changing tools and technology is relatively easy.” This message resonated powerfully with the founders of Silicon Valley, including Steve Jobs, who described the Catalog as “one of the bibles of my generation.”
Over the following decades, Brand devoted more of his energy to nonliterary pursuits, bouncing between corporate-consulting gigs and unrealized dream projects such as cloning the woolly mammoth. His latest book, Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One, allows the author, now 87, to come full circle. It’s a compact, beautifully illustrated hardcover, rather than a grungy oversize paperback, but its mosaic of images and excerpts evokes the same sense of serendipity and curation that I loved in the Catalog. The new book’s most intriguing recommendation, Dry Stone Walls, by the Swiss Environmental Action Foundation (“Its principles apply metaphorically to anything that has to hold itself together—a poem, a theory, a software program”), is out of print and hard to find, but I plan to get my hands on The Long Way, by Bernard Moitessier, and Truck, by John Jerome, as soon as I possibly can.
Unlike its loose and baggy predecessor, the new compendium is built around a single goal: to promote the unglamorous act of maintenance, or “the whole grand process of keeping a thing going.” It also exposes elements of the author’s personality—which has always been more complicated than most readers have known—that were obscured by the Catalog’s embarrassment of riches. To the extent that Brand intends to fascinate us with artifacts such as the Johansson gauge blocks, he succeeds magnificently. “What can be learned,” he wonders, “if you think about all the varieties of maintenance at the same time?” He doesn’t quite live up to the lofty premise of this question—the book is full of obvious gaps—but it’s only Part One, after all, and Brand teases a series of sequels that will cover “system repair, cities, software, and the planet.”
Maintenance should represent a victory lap for a visionary who has influenced our culture profoundly. Unfortunately, I have grave misgivings about any future installments. The first warning sign appears in the table of contents, which features five “digressions,” including one simply titled “Elon Musk.” Flip to that essay and you’ll come across these lines: “Through Tesla and SpaceX, Musk initiated and directly led a new, accelerated regime in climate-friendly electric vehicles and a new, accelerated regime in providing access to Earth orbit. With the success of these projects, Musk may have done more practical world saving than any other business leader of his time.”
[Read: The decline and fall of Elon Musk]
I suspect that I won’t be the only reader surprised to find Musk praised so prominently in a book about nurturing the “maintenance mind.” Musk may have a knack for building hardware from the ground up, but when it comes to what Brand describes as the “repetitive, boring, often frustrating” work of maintaining existing legacy systems, I can hardly think of a less promising role model than the man who was photographed brandishing a chainsaw as the unofficial head of the Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE’s reckless campaign to slash spending, by many accounts, actually cost taxpayers billions. Brand never mentions any of this, even when—borrowing a term from medicine—he warns, elsewhere in the book, of “iatrogenic” disruptions, in which “a sloppy attempt to fix a problem makes the problem worse or adds a new one.”
Instead of exploring these contradictions, Brand devotes a long, glowing section to the Tesla sedan that he calls “the ultimate in irresistible cool.” At one point, he confesses, “I won’t try to write about the ongoing industry-wide shift to electric vehicles because it would be out of date almost immediately.” This is truer than he might have known, but not for the reasons he implies. His claim that Tesla “forced the entire industry into a new era” inexplicably overlooks Musk’s efforts to secure a second term for Donald Trump, who has done his apparent best to stop the energy transition in its tracks. Brand should know better: He informs us that the rejection of Enlightenment values set back the industrial revolution in France for half a century, but he says nothing about a similar backlash in our time, which Musk cheerfully enabled.
If Musk ever reads Maintenance—and much of it seems to have been written with this possibility in mind—he might not be convinced by its arguments, but his ego should be gratified by its tone of unqualified approval. Brand’s love letter to Musk casts a pall on the rest of the book, under which the author’s indifference to politics becomes more difficult to ignore. (For example, he writes, “The war in Ukraine is, in part, a contest between Russian sustainment and NATO-supplied sustainment.” The phrase in part is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.) Yet this makes perfect sense in the context of Brand’s career. The Catalog spoke directly to an off-the-grid, DIY-minded subset of the counterculture—described by one observer as “baling wire hippies”—many of whose members wound up souring on political activism, turning instead to the transformative possibilities of technology. Reading Brand made it seem possible to believe that one could change the world through design, circumventing the messy business of politics entirely.
[Read: The perils of ‘design thinking’]
“Hippies were so dedicated to living in the moment that preventive maintenance was a difficult lesson for us,” Brand writes. “Something breaking is a big event. Repairing the broken thing is a big event. But preventing the thing from breaking is a non-event.” This is equally true of society, and disregarding this truth only postpones the moment of reckoning. You can almost read Brand’s case for maintenance as atonement for his role in shaping an industry whose philosophy is to move fast and break things. What he really shares with the disruptors of Silicon Valley, however, is an impulse to skip over the boring process of incremental change, ideally with the help of a powerful benefactor. As Kesey once said, “Stewart recognizes power. And cleaves to it.”
After winding down the Catalog, Brand spent the ensuing decades looking for this kind of shortcut. He served as a genius whisperer for a wide range of clients—including former California Governor Jerry Brown and Shell oil and gas—who seemed to be useful patrons. His greatest triumph was the construction of a monumental clock, initially conceived by the computer scientist Danny Hillis, that could keep accurate time for 10,000 years. The Clock of the Long Now was finally built for about $42 million by Jeff Bezos in a mountain on his ranch in Texas. It reached its widest audience after Lauren Sánchez, Bezos’s then-fiancée, posed under its gears for an Annie Leibovitz photo spread in Vogue, which left many of the clock’s longtime fans, including me, with mixed feelings. What should have been a collective effort of the imagination—a reminder that the story of our species transcends any one individual—now looks more like a vanity project, a permanent symbol of how radical ideas can be turned into private playthings.
Brand might argue that the result was worth it, because it allowed him to fulfill his dream. What I’ve come to realize since my high-school days, however, is that the anarchic, self-reliant spirit that drew me to Brand doesn’t just run the risk of neglecting maintenance by undervaluing it; by avoiding the thankless task of encouraging social change over time, it can actively make matters worse. For all their fixation on revolutionary design solutions, innovators often find it expedient to ally themselves with the opportunists who already control the more conventional levers of politics and capital. The rest of us are left to navigate the world they have built, and to maintain it as well as we can.
The post The Lost Promise of Stewart Brand’s Futurism appeared first on The Atlantic.
