341 | Stewart Brand on Maintenance as an Organizing Principle

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold," wrote W.B. Yeats. I don't know about the centre, but the tendency of things to fall apart is pretty universal, ultimately due to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Anyone living in a society or involved with technology must therefore be interested in the concept of maintenance -- keeping systems working. In his book Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One, Stewart Brand looks at the challenges and rewards of this concept.
Blog post with transcript: preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/01/19/34…
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Stewart Brand received an undergraduate degree in biology from Stanford University. He was the founder, editor, and publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog, which won a National Book Award. He founded the journal CoEvolution Quarterly and the en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL electronic community, and was a co-founder of the Long Now Foundation. He has been called "the 20th century's top influencer."
• Web site (sb.longnow.org/SB_homepage/Home.html)
• Amazon author page
• Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Brand)