Maintenance: Of Everything

The first in-depth exploration of maintenance – and a powerful argument for its civilisational importance – from the author of How Buildings Learn and creator of the Whole Earth Catalog.

Maintenance is what keeps everything going. It’s what keeps life going. Yet it’s also easy to shirk or defer – until the thing breaks, the system falters, and everything stops. The apparent paradox is profound: Maintenance is absolutely necessary and maintenance is optional.

The first in a multi-volume work, Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One offers a comprehensive overview of the civilisational importance of maintenance. The book begins with a dramatic contest of maintenance styles under life-critical conditions: the Golden Globe around-the-world solo sailboat race of 1968. It goes on to explore the insights that can be gleaned from vehicle maintenance, from the zeal of motorcycle maintainers to the maintenance philosophies that fought for dominance of the auto industry to the state of electric vehicle manufacturing today, with absorbing detours into the evolution of precision in manufacturing, the enduring importance of manuals, sustainment in the military, and the never-ending battle against corrosion.

Maintenance: Of Everything is a wide-ranging and provocative call to expand what we mean by 'maintenance' – not just the tiresome preventative tasks but the whole grand process of keeping a thing going. It invites us to understand not only the profound impact maintenance has on our daily lives but also why taking responsibility for maintaining something – whether a motorcycle, a monument, or our very planet – can be a radical act.

About the Author

Stewart Brand is the cofounder and president of The Long Now Foundation and cofounder of Global Business Network, the Hackers Conference, and the WELL. He created and edited the National Book Award-winning Whole Earth Catalog from 1968 to 1998.

His books include The Media Lab (1987), How Buildings Learn (1994), The Clock of the Long Now (1999), and Whole Earth Discipline (2009). He was the subject of the documentary We Are As Gods (2020). He graduated from Stanford with a degree in biology and served as an infantry officer in the US Army.