Brand is also right, that the maintainers do not get the respect they deserve. Over the past few decades, scholars have shown that tasks ranging from oiling equipment to replacing worn out parts to updating code bases amount to inferior “innovation.” Maintenance is neglected in many organizational and social settings. (Just look at some American infrastructure!) And as the Right to Repair movement has shown, companies in the pursuit of greater profits have often prevented us from being able to repair or greatly reduced the maintainable life of their products. It’s hard to think of any other reason to put a computer on the refrigerator door.
Some of the 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 appears to be a solitary task, intense but more about personal success and fulfillment than tending to the shared world or improving it.
Born in 1938, Brand is 87 years old. There is a sense pervading the book – with its battles against decay, rust and decay, with its attempts to keep things going even as they inevitably falter – that of someone looking at life and contemplating its end. Maintenance: of everything Connects with every stage of a brand’s life. It’s worth reviewing where it falls in that arc. The brand has always had an interest in tools and fixing things, but it has rarely focused on the systems that need the most care.
More than half a century ago, Brand was a member of the Merry Pranksters, a countercultural, LSD-focused hippie group led by celebrated author Ken Kesey. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In 1966, Brand co-created the Trips Festival, where bands such as the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company performed for thousands of people amid psychedelic light shows.
of brand whole earth catalog It was an approach that might seem progressive, but its libertarian, rugged-individualist philosophy of rebuilding civilization alone stood in contrast to more collective social change movements.
In some ways, the Trips Festival set a model for the rest of his life’s work. Brand’s biographers have described him as a network celebrity – someone who thrived by bringing people together, creating coalitions of influential figures who could promote his signal. As Casey said in 1980, “Stewart recognizes power. And sticks to it.”
Brand applied this network logic in the venture for which he will always be best remembered: whole earth catalog. First published in 1968 and aimed at hippies and members of the emerging back-to-the-land movement, the publication’s motto was “Access to Tools.” Its pages were filled with Quonset huts, geodesic domes, solar panels, well pumps, water filters and other technologies for living off the grid. It was an approach that might seem progressive or left-leaning, but the libertarian, rugged-individualist philosophy of escaping corrupt systems and rebuilding civilization alone stood in contrast to the more collective movements pushing for deep social change at the time—such as civil rights, feminism, and environmentalism.
That approach also led directly to the empowerment that came with new digital tools and Silicon Valley. In 1985, the brand published Whole Earth Software CatalogThe last of the series, and also co-founded WELL-The Whole Earth’s Electronic 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 technology. Brand wrote, “The Laboratory will correct the distortions of technology not by economics or politics but by technology.” Again, not collective action, not policymaking: tools. And Brand then co-founded the Global Business Network, a group of valuable consulting futurists that connected him to MIT, Stanford, and Valley. The brand literally helped usher in the modern digital revolution.
