Maintaining Everything That Matters
Matthew McDowell-Sweet and Mike Travers discuss Stewart Brand’s recently-published book ‘Maintenance: Of Everything’
Two new Special Interest Groups are spinning up in our Protocol Institute Discord. SIGPSY, the Special Interest Group in Psychohistory, will meet every other Thursday at 1600 UTC, starting tomorrow, June 4, and the Distributed Robotics Group will meet every other Thursday at 1630 UTC, starting June 11. Details on all six of our active groups can be found in the Special Interest Groups category at the Protocol Institute Discord.
Maintaining Everything That Matters
Stewart Brand is the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, a “proto-Google,” large-format printed compendium of tools, texts, and ideas that appeared between 1968 and 1972 and served as a declaration that anyone could have access to the tools to build something better. Shaped by Buckminster Fuller’s systems thinking, Gregory Bateson’s cybernetics, and Marshall McLuhan’s media theory, Brand’s message to the communes and hackers and back-to-the-landers was: think at scale and take responsibility for outcomes. The revolution, if there was to be one, would be built out of care and competency. The question of how systems evolve and are kept going has animated everything he has done since, as co-founder of the Long Now Foundation, and author of influential books such as How Buildings Learn.
Maintenance: Of Everything (2025) comes from the perspective of someone who has watched enough cycles of creation and decay to understand entropy not as a problem to be solved but as the fundamental condition to be worked with. Prompted by the book, the following conversation between UK-based product manager and builder Matthew McDowell-Sweet and software developer, researcher, and writer Mike Travers, based in the Bay Area, emerged from the Protocol Institute Discord in April 2026 and was produced through a mix of live and asynchronous conversation.
Backgrounds
MT
I’ve been a Stewart Brand fan for a really long time, actually – I kind of latched onto the Whole Earth Catalog in my childhood, which was a long time ago! I’m actually quoted in one of his books, because he wrote a book on the Media Lab, where I worked for a time. When I did a presentation at Refactor Camp, maybe seven years ago, introducing Brand to that new audience, I tried to sum up his career by calling him a “civilization hacker.”
So the thing I admired – and it shows in the maintenance book – is that he’s trying to think on a large scale and take responsibility for these large-scale systems, in a way which is both ambitious and pretentious.
MMS
Given that you were exposed to the Whole Earth Catalog when its contents were current, do you feel like the maintenance book is similarly ambitious?
MT
Yeh, I think it is, at least in its goals. It’s very consistent – same level of ambition, same focus on the world’s systems. He’s found a new theme, but it’s the same general goal. Impressively consistent, actually. Also in form and style – he brings in some Whole Earth Catalog-type layout elements, and I thought that worked very well. I might have some issues with the politics and some of the details, but my overall reaction is positive. What got you interested in this? And what’s your top-level reaction?
MMS
I’ve been tracking the protocols dialogue since it started to emerge, and the topic of maintenance appealed to me because I’ve had a long-running interest in different paradigms for computing and intelligence. I take the position that current approaches to advanced intelligence and computation aren’t sufficiently embodied to get us to human-level intelligence, and that’s driven a lot of my explorations. When you look at the maintenance of civilizational infrastructure, it’s a very interesting topic.
I spent three or four years working in manufacturing, at a place producing technical fabrics. Stuff that was too high-spec and bespoke to easily outsource: aerospace fabrics, that kind of thing. So I’ve seen maintenance in that context. The previous startup I worked at was focused on software with a lot of maintenance capabilities involved. And now, by day I’m in product management at an enterprise-scale government body in the UK, dealing with technical debt and maintenance across a massive, sprawling software footprint.
When I finished the book, it landed as a manifesto for me, rather than a playbook.
MT
I’m glad you have some manufacturing experience. I work in scientific software and don’t have much contact with the physical world.
MMS
One thing I was wondering: would you say that this is an instance of that Silicon Valley stereotype, where someone at a high level – and we’ve said that Brand operates at civilization-scale – comes at a concept from first principles, rediscovers a lot of distributed and diffuse wisdom, packages it up nicely and brings it out in the form of a manifesto?
MT
I think Brand definitely does that. He’s not exactly a Silicon Valley type – he’s more like a prototype for them in some ways. The Whole Earth Catalog was similarly a mix of grand ideas about systems alongside a real emphasis on very concrete, physical tools and skills for dealing with the real world. He put those together. I was impressed by that 50 years ago, and I think he’s doing a version of that in this book too.
MMS
The book apparently started as a series of blog posts, which Stripe Press compiled. Given that you have a good sense of his trajectory, do you think it’s a surprise that someone like Brand is thinking about maintenance?
MT
I don’t think it’s a surprise at all. It’s very consistent with everything else he’s done. He has a sense of, and has always been concerned with, taking responsibility at a very abstract level, and he has a very pragmatic view of that. He tries to convey a sense of responsibility and induce it in others. Part of the Whole Earth Catalog was to empower all these hippies who wanted to go back to the land to actually do it. Whether that worked or not, who knows, but the idea was: here are the tools, here are the skills.
MMS
Is there something similar in the air right now? Given we’re on the precipice of huge capability jumps, the explosion of software-building ability, but also a real bottleneck in building big things in hardware. Is there something similar provoking a kind of “call to tools”?
A 21st Century ‘Call to Tools’
MT
That’s an interesting question. We are at a very critical moment with a lot going on. But I don’t think his position is quite the same – he’s 87, and while he worked on the early internet and personal computer revolutions, he’s not involved in building AI or supplying tools for that. He’s focused less on how to do new things and more on how to maintain the old things, which is kind of age-appropriate. And the current moment doesn’t seem very equivalent to the 60s – I don’t think there’s quite the same sense of hope that people felt then, when they genuinely believed they could just drop out and build an alternative lifestyle in the woods.
MMS
If there is some similarity between that time and ours, the balance is certainly different. The idea of disconnecting and building your own thing or looking after yourself in your own way is still something that is lurking.
Brand has been adept at surfing these cultural surges, and some of those waves feel like they’re recurring again in a very different context. There’s talk of a permanent underclass, things going on with longevity, the calculus around building software is changing because you can almost treat software like single-use plastic – all these big themes are forming some kind of wave. And if someone like Brand is noticing it and picking it up, there’s presumably some through-line, but I can’t quite put my finger on how to frame it.
MT
I don’t see it myself – partly because I’m on the older side, I suppose. Do you know Brand’s theory of “pace layers”? He’s thought a lot about time and change, but I think because of his age and position, he’s thinking at the grander scale rather than the current cultural moment. The Long Now has given a lot of thought to climate change and ways to ameliorate that – that’s the closest he comes to dealing with current events. The maintenance book doesn’t seem particularly of the moment to me; most of his examples are from the 20th century or earlier.
Maintenance Maturity
MMS
On a more personal level, I’m 34, so I probably think about maintenance a little differently than someone like yourself.
MT
I’m 68, and not particularly good at maintenance of body or physical systems – so the book partly made me feel guilty, like Brand is giving moral instruction which I should try to listen to. One reason I liked the Whole Earth Catalog was that it showed: here are ways to engage with the physical world, here are all the tools and things you can do. That’s always been aspirational for me – I’m a live-in-my-head type, and engaging with the body and physical world is always a bit of a struggle. I was at MIT for many years doing computing, AI, and math, and I always had a slight envy of the people doing materials science who got to actually break things.
MMS
I found it interesting that he used examples from four industries that have quite strong maintenance cultures: aerospace, defense, manufacturing, and software, I believe. I was trying to think about why, but I don’t know if software really belongs in that frame.
MT
I read one review of the book that made an interesting political critique. All the examples are very male-coded fields: war and fast cars. If you’re looking at maintenance on a broad scale, women do a lot of the maintenance work of culture and civilization, but they aren’t part of the story here. Maybe he’ll get to that in later volumes.
MMS
Yes. In aerospace, defense, and manufacturing there’s a very direct connection between downtime from bad maintenance protocols and cost. Half a percentage point of downtime on a high-throughput manufacturing line has a very direct connection to missed unit counts; in defense, canceling a mission sets off a chain of operations that’s really costly to accommodate. That’s perhaps why Brand focuses on those industries in the book – they’re easier to relate to direct, tangible dollar costs. I suppose that’s how you get to maintenance maturity.
MT
Was maintenance maturity a concept in the book, or is that something you’re bringing in?
MMS
It wasn’t, but that idea is key to my reaction to the book. If you think about maintenance maturity on a spectrum, starting with reactive maintenance – fix it when it’s broken. Then planned maintenance – do some maintenance work every week or every ten thousand hours. Then preventative, which is more condition-based: once the car has accumulated 100,000 miles, do these tasks – usage-based rather than time-coded. Then once you move to the more sophisticated side you get truly condition-based: hook up sensors, and if those sensors exceed defined thresholds for a defined period, do XYZ. And then the most advanced cases, which I think are really only in operation for things like energy grids – continuous monitoring combined with machine learning approaches to project out the load a connected system is going to endure and what maintenance needs to be done as a result.
MT
Is maintenance maturity an industry term, with those canonical levels – reactive, planned, preventative, predictive?
MMS
Yes, it is. And Brand is definitely coming at this as an outsider, so he may be missing that existing framework. To get to those more advanced maintenance models you need an institution that can make and enforce the rules – and a lot of these things are protocolish, right? The question is: who makes, executes, and enforces such protocols?
MT
That’s interesting. Where would you say Brand’s book stands in relation to actual industry maintenance practices – is it a familiar discourse, or giving a new view?
MMS
It’s more like popularizing the criticality of maintenance on sufficiently advanced systems. Almost like the inverse of the Whiteheadian idea about civilization advancing in proportion to the operations it can perform without thinking, Brand is saying: we have to start thinking about some of those things again, at least periodically, so that we can all have a nice life.
Whitehead Advances and Brandian Returns
MT
Whitehead advances are abstractions which let people ignore the underlying machinery. Brand is reminding us that we – or someone – actually does have to pay attention to the machinery, to take care of it. The whole 60s counterculture was a rejection of ‘straight’ abstractions – job, family, etc. Going to live on a commune in the country means giving up a set of abstractions. Brand was giving people tools to create new ones. Mostly these efforts failed; but it wasn’t his fault. He was urging people to take responsibility for their lives.
I’d agree that the book makes a popularizing move – in a positive way. He has a compelling writing style, very good at telling a concise, interesting story that illustrates a point.
Can you say more about how you see the relation between Whiteheadian advances and maintenance?
MMS
We could cut by decade, or by technological era – mainframe, personal computer, early internet, internet boom, mobile, cloud, social media. At each stage there are advances at the protocol level – in hardware, software, and socioculturally – that flavor the development of history. And then there is the payoff: maintenance isn’t just a thing now; it’s something that keeps coming back to the surface. I’m led to the idea of a Brandian return. There’s actually a line in the book, something like “every civilization has to choose to care.” You advance, you get all the benefits, but at a certain point you realize that something which was made invisible still matters – community, face-to-face relationships, whatever was abstracted away. You don’t throw away the advance; you correct course, return to what was lost, and position for the next jump.
MT
By “Brandian return” you mean a return to a maintenance mindset, or a coming back to something which has been made invisible or taken for granted?
MMS
Exactly. Like hyper-individualization from algorithmic feeds – you get that advance and all its benefits, but after a certain point you realize community matters, face-to-face relationships matter. You don’t reject the advance; you return to what you’d discarded, correct the balance. And crucially, this return isn’t a woo-woo thing – it has to happen in a protocolish fashion. You’re not going back to the land; you’re asking how to systematically revitalize or sustain something.
MT
I’m not sure about the term Brandian return, but I like the abstract idea. It connects to what I’ve been arguing outside the context of Brand’s book – a Whiteheadian advance is an abstraction, it hides lower-level details, but those details are still somebody’s job. Somebody has to do the maintenance. Which is important from the protocol perspective too: you can be a user of a protocol, but there’s also the underlying layer. And it connects to the maintenance maturity point – the return, or choosing to care again has to happen in a structured, protocolish way.
Amazon is a good example: as a consumer you have this seamless protocol – think of what you want, click a few buttons, it arrives on your doorstep the next morning. But there’s all this machinery, people, effort, and money underneath it, which you’re not actively discouraged from seeing, but you’re certainly not encouraged to think about. Present-tense capitalism is very good at creating these abstraction layers. Every Starbucks is another one – convenient, mediocre, invisible machinery.
MMS
Have you heard of the concept of exocapitalism? That’s the title of a recent book by Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo.
MT
I don’t think so.
MMS
I’ve only seen a discussion of it, haven’t read the book, but I think the thesis is that the endgame of capitalism is a system that recursively generates value for itself regardless of where the value comes from, as long as it’s recognized as value within the system – just extracting and abstracting until the human-labor element is completely worn away, leaving a self-sufficient self-referential system.
It’s like financial engineering at the mergers and acquisitions level – one company paying another that’s only utilizing a credit note, but on a civilizational scale.
Maintenance, Reskilling, Class
MT
Right. Though what I find interesting about Brand’s approach – in the maintenance book but also in the early hippie moment – is the attempt to de-abstract some of that. Rather than accepting a packaged consumer lifestyle, you go out and grow your own food, compost, build alternate systems. It’s a human-focused political orientation I find appealing. It’s not exactly humanist in the philosophical sense, but it’s centered on human agency and human scale.
Brand also pointed out, in a recent interview with Ezra Klein, that working-class kids didn’t need to buy books on how to manage a ranch – they were already doing it. The Whole Earth Catalog was for middle-class college dropouts trying to get down to that layer of practical knowledge and needing instruction. There are weird class dynamics running through all of this.
MMS
That rhymes with something I heard recently – a podcast with a founder of one of these organizations trying to build space data centers. He had felt disconnected from building things, so he attempted to build a Shelby sports car by hand. It showed up in a box; he had to get all the manuals and bring in professional mechanics to check his work. Very similar to what you’re describing: buying a textbook on composting. The class dynamics are strange – this high-achievement person performing manual labor as a kind of re-grounding.
MT
There’s another thing from my long study of Brand’s output that might be worth including: after the Whole Earth Catalog he published Co-Evolution Quarterly, a continuation of the same sensibility – composting, ecosystems, tools. But at one point he devoted an issue to space colonies, specifically Gerard O’Neill’s proposal for orbital habitats. I was about 18 at the time and thought it was wonderful that you could have composting and space colonies in the same journal. But it enraged a lot of his audience – the ecohippies who were serious about going back to the land. Wendell Berry in particular, the American poet, wrote a furious letter saying Brand was betraying the cause and the two things were incompatible. Brand published the letter and his response – I was impressed that he was willing to include that divergent opinion. But it’s interesting: 50 years later, Brand is getting involved with Musk, the space colonizer of today, and the same tension seems to be re-emerging.
MMS
That’s what I was thinking about with the rhyming of historical moments – just from how you describe it, some of those tensions and structures feel like history rhyming with itself.
MT
It’s the class dimension again – maintenance work is in general lower-status, less sexy than other kinds of work. Computer technology actively encourages ignoring the lower layers. One of the things I valued about the MIT education at the time was that it pushed back against that and encouraged you to look a level below. I remember very vividly: I was writing software for years, and then I got involved in debugging some hardware, and suddenly all the machinery behind the software popped into view where I’d been ignoring it. That was a bit of a revelation.
MMS
A friend of mine, John Romkey, was at MIT as well, and he described something similar: a scarcity mindset that made you think more deliberately and elegantly about how you deployed resources. Now it’s an era of abundance and there’s a tendency to just waste, waste, waste. Brand’s book is certainly a good counter to that.
2026 Protocol Symposium
The theme for the 2026 Protocol Symposium is New Nature – the rapidly evolving planet-scale technological layer governed by laws with a hardness and inviolability approaching those of nature. New Nature is our overarching frame for the technological future, shaped by the intersection of AI and protocols.
The symposium will be held fully online, September 21–25 (Monday–Friday), and comprises two workshop days and three days of talks.
Abstracts for talk and workshop proposals are due by Sunday, June 14, midnight Pacific Time. You can find details and the submission form here.
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