Maintenance and the Making of Civilization
Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One by Stewart Brand (Stripe Press, 2025)
Reviewed by Elizabeth Stice
250 years ago, the colonists who became Americans would have been surprised to hear about the “right to repair.” Repairing was part of life, not anything that would need to be protected by law. 250 years later, “right to repair” is very much a legal matter. The companies behind personal technology and farm equipment—and even military technology—do not want consumers to be able to repair or upgrade the things they allegedly own. Attempts to reverse this trend, like Colorado’s right to repair law, face legal challenges from tech companies. We are simply not allowed to fix many of the things we depend on personally, professionally, or as a country.
Not being able to fix things is a big deal. In Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One, Stewart Brand argues that, “Maintenance is what keeps everything going. It’s what keeps life going” (9). Maintenance is annoying and seems optional, but if we don’t do it, “suddenly one day the thing breaks, the system falters, and everything stops in a turmoil of disruption, expense, and blame” (9). To keep society and ourselves afloat, we need to reclaim the mindset that comes with maintenance. This book is the first of an intended series, which offers us examples of maintenance, looks at maintenance in familiar and unfamiliar domains, and considers societal and personal implications. The book combines Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehog and fox—maintenance is the one thing known by the hedgehog, but the book explores that topic in a fox-like manner.
In many ways, maintenance sustains our lives. This is why we brush our teeth regularly and change the oil in our cars. The opening chapter of Maintenance is about the famous 1968 sailing competition for circumnavigating the globe solo. Donald Crowhurst, who tragically did not survive the race, did not value maintenance or prepare for it. Some of the other competitors, like winner Robin Knox-Johnston, sailed with the motto “make do and mend” (21). Bernard Moitessier sailed on a boat that he designed to be easy to maintain and was so self-reliant and satisfied at sea that he didn’t complete the race because he wasn’t ready to stop sailing and claim victory.
Examples of the advantages of maintenance abound. The advent of modern mass-production and interchangeability made maintenance of technical goods more possible. Some products designed for easy maintenance, due to simplicity and interchangeable parts, seem to last forever. The AK-47 was and is easier to maintain than the M-16. The Model T was endlessly modded by owners and was more affordable and easier to repair than its rivals. The Lada was made the same, cheap way for 32 years, which made it easy to repair and kept extra parts readily available (90).
Maintenance is filled with interesting examples and accounts. The book ranges from sewing machines to the Statue of Liberty and from sailing to driving. There’s painted steel and references to Rousseau. As Stewart covers the relevant existing texts and sources, the usual suspects are here. Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is well-represented. There are references to Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft. Brand also goes beyond these more overtly philosophical texts to popular YouTube channels and iconic manuals, like How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive by John Muir.
Probably the most interesting idea explored in Maintenance is “sustainment.” It’s drawn from a military context because “the most active frontiers of maintenance theory and practice” are “manufacturing, aerospace, software, and the military” (159). Brand takes the definition of sustainment from the 2019 Field Manual FM 4-0: “Sustainment is the provision of logistics, financial management, personnel services, and health service support necessary to maintain operations until successful mission completion” (159). Basically, sustainment is the necessary foundation for successful action. It requires constant effort and “distributed empowerment” (161). We can see the importance of sustainment in the war in Ukraine. While Ukrainians have maintained and repaired anything and everything motorized, Russia has lost important missile systems to things as simple as poorly maintained tires (168). Abandoned Russian vehicles, even out-of-date, have been recovered and repurposed by Ukraine. Brand’s contention is that these principles apply broadly, across industries, organizations, and all of society.
Even if you aren’t sold on the idea of maintenance as the foundation of culture and human organization, the declining ability and right to do maintenance is obviously bad. The ability to repair things strengthens personal autonomy. Losing the right to repair can even mean the loss of liberty, if we take liberty to mean independence, as Quentin Skinner argues the colonists did. This loss of our ability to repair coincides with our declining understanding of how things are built and operate and the decline of the trades, two trends which already cause anxiety. Our consumerist mentality and desire to buy things new and not bother with repair also certainly seems related.
There are many reasons we might be concerned about trends related to maintenance. This book responds to those concerns with hope in the possibility of progress. This book is “part one” because there are more parts to come. And though there is plenty of history and historical analysis in Maintenance, there are also enough references to helpful books and websites that you can use it to begin to get better at maintenance if you would rather do that than be worried.
The emphasis on possibilities is related to the author and the publisher. Maintenance was written by an unconventional author in an unconventional manner. Stewart Brand was the creator and editor of Whole Earth Catalog 1968-1998, but he’s also been a figure in tech, and is the cofounder of The Long Now Foundation. Maintenance is published by Stripe Press, which emphasizes “ideas for progress,” and it was written through their “Books in Progress” public drafting tool. Developed with Brand, the tool lets an author write in communication with their audience. According to the website: “As a reader, you can comment on a passage from the text, or respond to another comment. The author will accept or dismiss these comments. Once the author implements comments, a new draft will be created and the current one archived. Helpful commenters will be thanked in print at the author’s discretion.” This quirk of the book’s creation only adds to its charm.
Will we see a surge in the maintenance mindset? Recently some new liberal arts trade schools have been established, like the College of St. Joseph the Worker in Steubenville, OH (profiled in the New Yorker). An even more promising trend is the surge in vinyl records and paper mailings, especially among young people. Even cassette tapes are making a comeback. Will this nostalgia boom and flight from screen dopamine also lead to a more DIY ethos? Will people who practice digital sabbath start picking up screwdrivers? It’s certainly possible. It may even be provoked by the rise of AI, which has created a new wave of Luddites. Brand is certainly no Luddite, but the emphasis on autonomy by the new Luddites seems to align well enough with the maintenance mindset for some positive correlation. The future is filled with possibilities. Now, if we could only get Toyota to bring the Hilux to the States.
Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history and assistant director of the honors program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. She is the author of Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War (2023) and she is a contributing editor and associate books editor at Front Porch Republic.
