The case for fixing everything

The Forgotten Art of Maintenance: Why Stewart Brand’s New Book Misses the Point

In a world obsessed with innovation, Stewart Brand’s latest work, Maintenance: Of Everything, arrives as both a timely reminder and a frustrating misstep. While Brand is right to highlight how maintenance workers have been overlooked, his perspective on the subject feels oddly disconnected from the collective, systemic change that true maintenance demands.

For decades, scholars have documented how tasks like oiling tools, replacing worn parts, and updating codebases are consistently undervalued compared to the glamour of “innovation.” Maintenance is often neglected in organizational and social structures—just look at the crumbling state of American infrastructure. The right-to-repair movement has further exposed how corporations, in pursuit of profit, have locked consumers out of fixing their own products, shortening the maintainable lifespan of everything from smartphones to refrigerators. As Brand himself might ask: what’s the point of putting a computer in a fridge door if it can’t be repaired?

Brand’s earlier work helped lay the groundwork for these insights, but Maintenance: Of Everything suggests he hasn’t fully internalized them. For Brand, maintenance seems to be a solitary, almost meditative act—profound, yes, but more about personal fulfillment than about tending to our shared world or making it better.

Born in 1938, Brand is now 87, and there’s a sense of reflection in this book—a grappling with decay, corrosion, and the inevitable decline of things. Maintenance: Of Everything ties into every stage of his life, but it’s worth examining where it fits in his broader arc. Brand has always been fascinated by tools and fixing things, but he’s rarely focused on the systems that most desperately need care.

More than half a century ago, Brand was a member of the Merry Pranksters, the LSD-fueled hippie collective led by Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In 1966, he 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. In many ways, the Trips Festival set the template for the rest of his career.

Brand’s biographers have described him as a “network celebrity”—someone who advanced by bringing people together, building coalitions of influential figures to amplify his message. As Kesey put it in 1980, “Stewart recognizes power. And cleaves to it.”

This network logic defined Brand’s most iconic project: the Whole Earth Catalog. First published in 1968 and aimed at hippies and the back-to-the-land movement, it carried the motto “Access to tools.” Its pages were filled with Quonset huts, geodesic domes, solar panels, well pumps, and water filters—technologies for off-grid living. While this vision might seem progressive, its libertarian, rugged-individualist philosophy of eschewing corrupt systems and remaking civilization alone stood in stark contrast to the collective social change movements of the time, like civil rights, feminism, and environmentalism.

That same vision paved the way for the digital revolution. In 1985, Brand published the Whole Earth Software Catalog, the final installment of the series, and cofounded the WELL (the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), a pioneering online community famous for facilitating the trade of Grateful Dead bootlegs. He also wrote a glowing 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—just tools. He later cofounded the Global Business Network, a group of high-priced consulting futurists that further connected him to MIT, Stanford, and Silicon Valley. Brand had literally helped bring about the modern digital revolution.

Yet, in Maintenance: Of Everything, Brand seems to miss the forest for the trees. Maintenance isn’t just about fixing things—it’s about caring for the systems that sustain us, about collective responsibility, and about resisting the forces that prioritize profit over longevity. It’s a shame that someone who has spent a lifetime building networks and tools hasn’t fully grasped that maintenance, at its core, is a communal act.

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