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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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Maintenance of Everything

09 Apr 2026 - 25 Apr 2026
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    • SB has an uncanny ability to find an important topic that is somehow completely neglected, and makes it his own. All of his projects have something of that to them, How Buildings Learn is the closest precedent. And these topics tend to involve time, or more specifically a kind of attentiveness to the real processes of time. Time and a sense of duty, of responsibility. That's the real topic, I suspect. The book spends most of its time on specific stories of maintenance or maintenance-adjacent practices (eg, standardized parts), but there is a Grand Theory peeking out.
    • Strength is the stories and the cheerily hypertextual presentation. This all works well; Brand is an excellent storyteller, with a direct style that conveys the drama and import of these neglected areas of life.

    • The Grand Theory

    • the whole grand process of keeping a thing going — including monitoring, repair, and eventual replacement. In this larger sense, maintenance has nothing optional about it; when you take responsibility for something, you enter into a contract to take care of it.

    • Pre-wonders

      • Wonder if discusses software maintenance?
      • Wonder if he talks much about capitalism as anti-maintenance? Probably not.
      • Something anti-sexy about the concept of maintenance. It is no fun, low status, necessary but unrecognized work.
      • I assume he does address this: if maintenance is no fun, it must be done for other reasons, and that requires something like an institution to support it.
      • Ethics and motivational structure of maintenance. Judgement and character. Do people still judge each other on the neatness of their lawn and such?

    • Presentation

      • The print-hypertext feel of WEC, with sidenotes, reader feedback, extensive annotations and bibliography. It has that quality, of being a really well-written and designed high-level overview, whose job is to point you to the real meaty stuff (in this case, books like Simon Wincchester's Precision and other history of tech).
      • The sidenotes with suggestions from readers, made as the book was coming together on a public web site. I have to say I didn't know what to make of this. Having annotated conversational histories makes sense for a web document, but a book should be a book (some deeply conservative part of me insists). And what does it have to do with maintenance? Well OK that one is easy, especially in light of Brand's other work. It makes explicit the fact that texts are not static chunks of letters but living and evolving entities. It shows you the process, even if that is something normally hidden. And that process is part of mainteance in the larger sense.
      • Something about this being Part 1 of a longer work. Feels that way, the book ends abruptly after a couple of chapters of examples from various real-world domains (boat racing, standardized parts for military weapons, automobiles and bicycles). These chapters have wonderfully concise summaries of very complex stories, and make a few more general points along the way, but one feels there is a final chapter coming that puts it in a cosmic perspective, and it'sgoing to be a long wait for it.
      • Very little mention of governance (other than military policies)

    • Ch 1 - boat races

      • differential maintenance philosophies; illustrated by harrowing tales of ingenuity and habits.
      • It is curious how maintenance requires both inculcated habits and values and deliberate, rational inquiry and creativity. You need both!

    • Ch 2 - vehicles and weapons

      • Brand draws on two earlier works that investated repair and mainetence from a philosophical or existential angle: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Shopcraft as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford.
      • Could do without the paen to Rolls-Royce.

    • Ch 3 - Communities of Practice

      • [nor in print book, but available in draft on the web]

      • Least Village Has its Blacksmith

      • History of Guilds was interesting. Their social and political role (apparently they were a drag on capitalism)
      • I realize I have no very good image of the transition from crude blacksmithing to the kind of tooling you need for industrialism (steam engine). What did that look like, what was the process of innovation?

    • Relations to Protocol Studies

      • (or whatever it should be called).
      • Two ways in which maintenance relates to the protocol world
      • Maintenance protocols (rituals, instution builder)
      • The need and practice of maintaining protocols themselves, evolving or adapting them or making them relevant to new situations.

    • A discordant political note

      • The presence of Elon Musk as some kind of hero of maintenance is a turd in the punchbowl for me.
      • Whatever else Musk may be, he is also a fascist lunatic racist eugenecist. This sounds like invective but it is also 100% factual. He is personally responsible for an all-out assault on the institutions of American government – important parts of the machinery of civilization. Whatever he represents, it's the opposite of maintenance – he is a destroyer of infrastructure.
      • Yeah he also builds some, and at least some of his innovations are useful and important. There are some reasons to admire Musk for his technical and organizational accomplishments. And perhaps his purported goal of being of service to making are sincere and Brand sees a fellow big-thinking-world-savior. They probably hang out at the same high-end conferences. That's more salient to Brand than the fascism, fraud, and lunacy that he spews on Twitter.
      • BUT – we have to look at the full record, and Musk has destroyed more systems than he's built (hm is that true, would have to quantify it). The DOGE effort that he led was a deliberate and sytematic attempt to destroy or corrupt the machinery of government, the sort of thing Brand is encouraging us to take care of.
      • Elon Musk wields chainsaw at conservative gathering, a gift from Argentina's Milei | Reuters
      • Brand has a history of wanting things both ways (the Wendell Berry blowup, which also involved an enthusiasm for space colonization now that I think about it), eventually the contradictions catch up. TODO explanation needed
      • The lack of female representation as noted in Unsung review. Less obviously egregious than Musk, but probably a bigger omission. Actually, one other instance of female besides Statue of Liberty – the book is dedicated to Brand's partner "who maintains him". Yeah no shit, maybe one future chapter should be dedicated to the largely unsung work of basic human biomaintanence, mostly women's work which is a big part of the problem.
        • This is a huge blind spot – not just with Brand, it didn't occur to me either until it was pointed out. Oh well he has 6 more volumes to write so maybe he will address this vast unsung enterprise, that which really keeps the thing going.

    • Other reviews

      • We Almost Lost the Statue of Liberty, and Other Misadventures in Maintenance
        • This is more than a review, it also does some abstraction and original thinking about the universal rules of maintenance.
        • And here’s the crux of the whole problem—not only with Statue of Liberty, but pretty much all of life—maintenance is essential, and nobody enjoys doing it.
        • The Israelis and Ukrainians possessed a maintenance mind, whereas the Egyptians and Russians displayed a neglect mind. What constitutes these two ways of seeing the world? As I understand the argument, the primary differences come down to a sense of foresight, ownership, and agency.
        • On the organizational side, the maintenance mind favors bottom-up models over top-down command (think Israelis and Ukrainians)
        • There is something fishy going on here, although I pretty much am on his side. Ukranians have more of a maintenance mind than Russia, but that's just a surface effect of an entirely different organizational morale, I would imagine. Reasons for being in the fight in the first place. Maybe that's the point, "maintenance" is just a view of a whole host of interconnected virtues.
        • While Brand avoids offering universal rules of maintenance, I think we can tease out several principles that generally apply to these two ways of seeing. See on what side of these statements you tend to fall. I already know how I come down, and I’m not proud of myself. In no particular order:
        • Entropy as baseline. Stewardship as obligation. Craft over contempt. Design for the long haul. Learning through feedback. Authority at the point of failure.
        • These are components of "maintenance mind"
      • Book review: Maintenance: Of Everything (Part One) – Unsung
        • I will just say it: I wish the author was more woke. The book is very male-coded. The main chosen areas of investigation are: motorcycles! tanks! guns! wars! There are moments towards the end where Elon Musk and Bill Gates are talked about as if it was still 15 years ago and we haven’t actually learned anything since. (No word of Cybertruck, either.)
      • 341 | Stewart Brand on Maintenance as an Organizing Principle – Sean Carroll (podcast interview with Brand)
        • good intro of Brand, his role and style.
        • Man Brand's voice is shot. Guess he's getting old
        • Brand: foces himself into same situation as reader, doesn't know whats coming. He wants to surprise the reader, conveying his own surprise.
        • The discovery of "infrastructure".
        • Most of us are doing maintenance all of the time (esp at age 87)
        • Book is a survey of maintenance regimes, tries to avoid opinion.
        • quantum error correction
      • Opinion | Stewart Brand on the Ideals the Tech Industry Forgot - The New York Times (interview with Ezra Klein)
        • On seeing a WEC at OpenAI office:
        • I remember thinking that there was something almost ironic about this catalog that was so dedicated to making the world intelligible at this place where they were explaining to me that they didn’t understand the fundamental center of how their systems worked, and that they’re creating something where one of its most fundamental characteristics was unintelligibility.

    • General Maxims

      • Skilled maintainers advise never trying to solve a new or complex problem without a thorough mulling first. (p22)
      • Obsession with detail is a hallmark of the most successful maintainers (p33)
      • The need for maintenance doesn't stop when usage stops. (p44)
      • Crawford emphasizes that repair comes in two stages--that problem finding comes before problem solving. “You try to think logically about a sequence of investigations and fixes that will reveal the most serious problems sooner rather than later.” (p44)
      • Part of pragmatic diagnosis is being realistic about when to abandon repair and think about buying a new motorcycle or giving up on riding. (p44-5)
      • to become expert at keeping anything in good repair, you need to understand it in two ways—how it works and how it’s made...Just owning and using something is not yet mastery. We need... a basic intelligibility to our possessions: in their provenance, in their principles of operation, in their logic of repair and maintenance. (p49) (quoting Pirsig and Crawford)
      • Some of these are very trite and useless. Yes obviously maintenance requires attention to detail; the question is, how does one make oneself be like that?

    • Character and Maintenance

      • Optimists like Crowhurst—and me, I confess—tend to resent the need for maintenance and resist doing it.  Maybe we prefer to think in ideals, and the gritty reality of everything constantly decaying and breaking offends our sense of the world. (p28)
      • My further suspicion is that tidiness, like cleanness, is a social signal—as much to oneself as to others. It is visible evidence that something is respected. (p47)
      • Maintenance implies a stance towards the future – a taking of responsibility, a sort of minimalist agency.
      • A certain note of moral instruction and occasional smugness. Like the ant and the grasshopper, or goofus & gallant, Brand is here to show you proper behavior and attitudes. If you fail at maintenance due to neglect mind, the universe and entropy provide the punishment, Brand is just here to warn you of the consequences. (Note: that he is 100% right doesn't make it less annoying).
        • The general problem of how to do things that are good for you but not inherently fun (aka "work"). See WorkPlay. Fear of the consequences (decay, systems failure, death) only takes you so far. The best solutions involve institutions and rituals (? is this addressed explictly in this book? I know Brand has talked about it elsewhere).
      • A refactoring: you are always maintaining something – your self, one way or another.
      • I detect traces of Stoicism in Brand, a determination to deal with reality as it is
        • Please comment. AskClaude

          • Stoicism in Brand

          • The observation has merit but requires careful qualification.
          • Where the parallel holds:
          • Brand's insistence on facing truth without self-deception resembles Stoic katalepsis - firm grasp of reality
          • His rejection of comfortable compromise echoes Stoic discipline of desire
          • His indifference to personal suffering and physical hardship parallels Stoic apatheia
          • Where it breaks down significantly:
          • Brand is not actually a Stoic character in the classical sense. His problem is arguably the opposite of Stoic balance:
          • The Stoics counseled proportionate response and acceptance of human limitation - Brand refuses all limitation
          • Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus emphasized oikeiôsis - natural affection and duty to community - which Brand systematically destroys
          • Stoic logos is rational and accommodating; Brand's "All or Nothing" is fanatical, closer to a pathology than philosophy
          • The more precise diagnosis: Brand mistakes rigidity for integrity. What looks like Stoic resolve is actually an inability to yield - which Ibsen treats critically, not admiringly.
          • The traces you detect may be superficial resemblance rather than deep structural alignment. Ibsen seems more interested in exposing the destructiveness of Brand's absolutism than celebrating any philosophical virtue within it.
          • Do you want to pursue a specific aspect of this further?
          • Where in the world do you get this "all or nothing" and systematic destruction of community stuff from? Is that really about Musk?
            • AskClaude

              • On Stoicism in Brand

              • The Stoic trace is plausible but needs precision. Stoicism counsels acceptance of what cannot be changed combined with vigorous action on what can. If Brand demonstrates this, the key question is whether his "dealing with reality" includes genuine amor fati - embracing difficulty rather than merely tolerating it - or whether it's closer to stubborn willfulness dressed in Stoic clothing.
              • The distinction matters because Ibsen's Brand is arguably anti-Stoic in one important sense: Stoics counsel proportion and working within human limitation. Brand's "all or nothing" is almost the opposite - a refusal to accept limitation that destroys rather than endures.

              • On "All or Nothing" and Systematic Destruction of Community

              • This is a fair challenge. You're right to push back.
              • The "all or nothing" pattern and systematic dismantling of institutional community could apply to several figures or phenomena beyond Musk:
              • Certain revolutionary political movements
              • Tech disruption ideology generally (not one person)
              • Religious absolutism
              • Specific organizational leadership patterns
              • If the annotation implies Musk specifically, it's worth asking: is the evidence actually there, or is a contemporary association being projected onto the text?
              • What is the source document this annotation comes from? That context would sharpen the answer considerably.
            • Try again, this is a review of Brand's book on maintenance.
              • AskClaude
                • You're right, I confused myself badly. The "all or nothing" and "systematic destruction of community" response was pulling from Ibsen's character Brand (the priest in the play), not Stewart Brand the author. That was a hallucination of context - nothing in your notes supports applying those characterizations to Stewart Brand.
                • Let me actually respond to what you wrote.
                • On Stoicism in Stewart Brand specifically:
                • The trace you detect is real but modest. Brand's maintenance ethic does share Stoic structure: entropy is the baseline condition of reality, resistance to that fact is foolish, the proper response is disciplined attention and action. That's recognizably Stoic. The Meditations would fit comfortably on a shelf next to How Buildings Learn.
                • But there's a tension worth noting. Classic Stoicism is inward-facing - you maintain your own character and judgment regardless of outcomes. Brand's project is outward-facing - he wants things in the world actually maintained, institutions to survive, systems to persist. Stoicism is somewhat indifferent to whether the boat race is won; Brand is not.
                • The more precise frame might be pragmatist rather than Stoic - William James or Dewey, where facing reality clearly is instrumental to actually changing it, not an end in itself.
                • The Musk observation in your notes is the real contradiction: someone Brand apparently admires who embodies the anti-maintenance mind at civilizational scale. That tension deserves more weight than Brand seems to give it.

    • Outline for review

      • Intro, framing, who is Stewart Brand and how this book fits in with his broader project
        • Systems and time
        • Some broad statement of how this relates to protocols. Brand is a systems guy, systems are built out of protocols, maintenance reveals the connection
        • Brands age and his generation
      • Maintenance as a fundamental task of systems in general. How to keep things going.
        • Autopoesis
      • The particulars: boats, guns, cars etc. Standardized parts (very protocol). Capitalist advances
      • The psychology and sociology of maintenance
        • Sustainment
        • Ritual
      • Maintenance patterns
      • Relevance to protocol theory
        • Maintenance makes use of protocols
        • Protocols themselvs must be maintained
        • Whitehead advances and invisibility vs Maintenance
      • Political critiques
        • Musk
        • Male-coding
      • Maintenance and ethics, caring for systems