Steward Brand & Maintenance As The Art Of Living

My husband John loved to repair things: He loved to fix cars, boats, and musical instruments. As a scientist, he knew that all things move toward entropy, and so maintenance is the science as well as the art of living.

Stewart Brand, founder of the countercultural Whole Earth' Catalog,' who came to embrace technological solutions after the hippie dream faded, is interviewed by Ezra Klein here.

This fascinating interview covers why the 1960’s communes mostly failed (see my novel, Joyous Lies here) and why the internet has helped countless people solve problems that arise with their possessions.

It is when we give up that agency to corporations that won’t let us fix our own lawnmowers, cars, refrigerators, or phones that we allow ourselves to be manipulated. This is new. And we feel helpless in the face of such fast changes. Do we really have to give away our agency to AI, or to the titans of industry? We are made to solve problems, even though solving one problem always creates another.

The takeaway from Brand’s conversation: Things always need fixing. That is called maintenance. But do it carefully.

He says, ”Looking into the things that you’re not good at, especially intellectually, is one way to stay young, because you’ve got a beginner’s mind.”

“Don’t just jump for the solution, because you might make the problem worse. Think through the solution. Disrupt the system minimally in the process of figuring out what needs to be fixed, fixing only that, and then back out carefully so the rest of the system doesn’t get disrupted.”

And talking of the spirit of inquiry:

“And that’s what really needs to be maintained if we want to maintain civilization on the planet. It’s the engagement with science, with engineering, with open discourse, with replacement of political leaders without bloodshed — basically, dealing with problems in a way that we honor that they can be corrected and that there will be other problems, and of being comfortable with that and moving with that and being as intelligent as we can be in managing all that.”

Maintenance and repair are what hold everything together.