Stewart Brand, Silicon Valley’s Favorite Prophet, on Life’s Most Important Principle

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1:34I think if you were to look for the philosopher, the thinker who is most influential in the culture that became the internet, who sort of laid down the way Silicon Valley thought, at least in its more idealistic era, the person you come up with is Stuart Brand. Brand has one of these amazing lives where he seemed to be present, at least for a part of the culture, at almost everything that mattered. They're in the 60s, in the moment of the hippies, in a$20 a month apartment in San Francisco with other beatniks. They're at the mother of all demos that creates much of the structure for modern computing that foresees many of the places we're ultimately going to go.

2:16They're creating the well, one of the earliest online communities. They're with the whole Earth catalog, which Steve Jobs describes as an early inspiration for what we now think of as the internet. When I was young, there was an amazing publication called the Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the Bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand, not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 60s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras.

2:52It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. A list of all the places Brandt was and all the things he influenced from the clock of the long now to his long-running correspondence with Brian Eno, it is very, very long. And along the way, Brandt has been writing these very beautiful, unusual books. Not just the whole Earth catalog, but How Buildings Learn in 1994, which I love. And if you've not read, you really should. And then most recently, this book, The Maintenance of Everything, Part 1, which explores something many of us would rather avoid.

3:31The constant and almost spiritually important work of fixing our cars, of doing home repairs, of caring for each other. Brand makes maintenance sound philosophically potent, even beautiful. And one thing I think is interesting about this book at this moment, to be written by somebody with the weight of brand, is that it points towards maybe a different way of thinking about technology. It points towards maybe a different ethos on which Silicon Valley, with its great man of history, Congress of the world, dimensions now, can maybe move towards something a little bit more humble, something a little bit more rooted in the natural relationship we all have to each other and that we all have to aging and to loss.

4:21So I wanted to have Brand on to talk to him about that and so much else that he's seen and thought over the years. As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com.

4:41Stuart Brand, welcome to the show. Well, thank you, Rizzer. Glad to be here. I want to start a little bit back in your history. In the 1960s, you were part of a movement that got called the Back to the Landers, Communards. What was that? Hippies. What was that? How would you describe the vision there for society? For various reasons, a whole lot of people basically in college in the early 60s and on through into the early 70s thought they needed to reinvent civilization. The 50s had been so successful, it became kind of bland. And the beatnik poets who preceded us showed a kind of a revolutionary path of going wild and going deep.

5:33And so we figured out ways to go wild and go deep. Many dropped out of college, decided that since civilization had to be reinvented, they would deal with the gathering of their peers and go back to the countryside and farm and build their own buildings and have their own rules and start over. They all failed. But they were all highly educational. We learned that free love isn't free. We learned that if you expect the women to do all of the really hard work of carrying the water and cooking the meals and taking care of the kids, like pioneer women used to have to do, all the guys were building domes and other interesting buildings.

6:23The other thing that we discovered was that the countryside is actually kind of boring, especially if you don't connect with your neighbors, which we did not, mostly. And so we fled back to the cities. Some of us figured out how to do too many drugs, and some of the rest of us noticed that and didn't. But it was a wonderfully fearless time. We undertook wild and crazy things. We had this aesthetic of the most wonderful adventures you could with the least amount of money that you could, and you have to be creative under those circumstances. So that was the hippies. And the Whole Earth Catalog was speaking in a way to the fact that these were college dropouts who didn't know how anything worked.

7:14They had not been raised on a farm or a ranch. How would you describe what the Whole Earth Catalog looked and felt like to somebody who's never seen one? It was pretty big. Actually, bookstores complained about it because it's about as big as a laptop now, basically folio-sized. and thicker than a laptop now. I've seen them. It's big. Oh, yeah, yeah. By the time we did the so-called Next Whole Earth Catalog, it was several pounds of everything. But, I mean, you know, Steve Jobs in his famous commencement speech said it was like Google, decades before Google came along. The Whole Earth Catalog had all those books, you know, how to be a beekeeper, how to grow sheep, how to make candles, were actually candle-dipping.

8:06So that was what the locality blog was. And it turned out what it really did is what YouTube does now. It conferred agency. You mentioned that among the communards, some of them did too many drugs. I've always wondered if this story about you is true, that the reason we have NASA's picture of the whole Earth came from you doing psychedelics on a roof one day. Yeah, I was in San Francisco and kind of bored. And one of the things he did with boredom at that time was drop some acid and see what happens. It was kind of a minor dose. It was about 100 micrograms. And I went up on the roof of a$20 a month place that I lived in North Beach.

8:53$20 a month in North Beach. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, okay. That's already hard to believe. But it was true. Somehow it's easier to believe that you got NASA to take a picture of the Earth and that anything in North Beach ever cost$20. Well, it turns out I didn't really get NASA to do that. You know, we'd been in space for 10 years at that point, we and the Soviet Union. And the cameras had always been looking outward or at pieces of the Earth, but they could have been looking back to see the Earth as a whole. And I was pretty sure that would change everything. I wound up starting a campaign. There was a button that said, why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?

9:38And I know it got looked at by a lot of people in Congress and NASA and so on, but I got to know some of the astronauts like Rusty Schweikart when they took photographs. It came just a year or two later after my campaign. Got it. So it was a little coincidental. You had the idea on the roof, but the roof is not what led to the picture. I think that's correct. But it led to understanding the picture, I think, for a lot of people. That metaphor of the camera pointing outward as opposed to inward at what we don't yet have as opposed to what we do have, that actually feels like a nice metaphor for maintenance.

10:20And I hear this in the Whole Earth Catalog, too, that in a way it feels like a lot of your career and thinking has been building up to this topic, that the Whole Earth Catalog was also a manual for maintaining your life, for maintaining the things you had. Let's begin with the most basic question. What is maintenance? It's what keeps things going. I'm a biologist by training, and so you find that everything alive spends a lot of its time basically maintaining being alive, even to the extent of reaching outside itself. So you're not just eating. If you're a beaver, you're busy cutting down trees to maintain your dam, which is what protects your lodge.

11:04Most plants spend a lot of time basically helping the soil around them to things that work well for the plant. And the soil itself is alive, and we're always maintaining our bodies. We maintain our vehicles and our houses and homes and cities that we live in, and we're catching on that civilization is something to maintain as a whole. And even the planet, we've now stepped up to terraforming. So we've been terraforming badly, and we need to terraform well. So the levels of maintenance are enormous and the constancy of it is a given. How did it come to occupy so much of your mind? Because I'm a bad maintainer.

11:55I brushed my teeth when I felt like it and consequently I lost quite a few. And looking into the things that you're not good at, especially intellectually, I think is one way to stay young because you've got a beginner's mind. But I did grow up with a father who was a do-it-yourself kind of guy with a big bench in the basement. And I had a bench in the basement. And as you know, many software programmers began by building teach-kit radios and stuff. Well, that was me too. I was building teach-kit radios. You grew up in a time when the technologies we used were more intelligible. And something you track in the book is that some of them were designed to be that way.

12:42One of the really interesting stories you tell, that I hope you could tell here, is about the Ford Model T versus the Rolls-Royce. I had known about the Ford Model T. I didn't realize the Rolls-Royce was a contemporary. So tell me about the difference between those two cars. Well, we both began basically in 1908, and Ford was building a car that could manage American driving when it was all dirt roads. And so it had to be pretty rough and ready and rugged and robust. And he'd figured out interchangeable parts by then so they could manufacture cheaply. the Rolls-Royce went the other way, which was to have a car so perfectly tuned with every part filed to exactly fit with all the other parts around it.

13:36And it was really, really reliable. It would always run. But you couldn't do maintenance yourself because everything was so perfectly tuned and assembled that you would have to take it back to Rolls-Royce to do any upkeep on it. But if you got a Model T, it was basically just a platform for adding things that you wanted and doing the repair yourself. There's a dimension of the way you describe what that made possible in the Ford, which is it became, as you say, a platform. It became a space of creativity. People sold all these kits to change what the Model T was. And it struck me reading this, and you're very intertwined in the history of Silicon Valley, that it had a lot of the feeling of early technology, which people could hack and alter and add to in all kinds of ways versus later technology, where you got to jailbreak an iPhone to do anything with it, where we now have AI systems.

14:42We don't even really understand what's happening inside of them. So there is this tension between the builder-hacker ethos that was so present in other technological eras, but also at the earlier periods of the web and personal computers, versus where a lot of these systems and companies have gone. You describe maintenance as an ethos, but it's also, I think, a question of what we are capable of doing, both somewhat legally and technically with our technologies, which makes it also a decision made by the companies. How do you think about that? Well, I'm just working up on writing about the right to repair issues going on now.

15:27There's a question of ownership. ownership i think is not just a question of having paid for and having legal possession of something it's actually possessing the knowledge of what it's really about how it functions how to look for problems how to diagnose problems when they come up how to fix it and doing maintenance on something is basically how you really take ownership of it into your not just physical life, but your mental and social life. This will be another thing that AI, I think, is going to raise another level of discourse on. Because one of the things software engineers are always trying to do, they hate doing endless, simple maintenance, taking care of dependencies and stuff like that.

16:23They call it toil. Good word. And they try to automate it. so that the system can be capable of seeing when a problem is coming and immediately get itself to go around it. And I'm sure that AI is going to bring many more levels of that. That's the upside. The downside is you spend more and more of your life arguing with robots because we have a theory of mind. So you and I are talking, and we each have a pretty good idea of what the other's doing mentally. With the AIs, that's not the case. And they're all different. So in a way, we're dealing with all these new species who talk our language, but are from a different frame in some deep respects.

17:17I think the AIs are going to teach us more about being human, because we're going to see what a not-quite-human is like and getting more and more acquainted with the difference.

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18:26That's joinmidi.com. Midi, the care women deserve. I'm Vivian Wong. I'm a journalist at The New York Times. I've covered China for years, and it's really, really hard to get information. I go on plenty of wild goose chases. One time, I went to meet a woman who said that she had been the victim of horrific domestic violence and was trying to get support from the legal system. She lived in a super remote part of southwestern China. So I took a three-hour flight from Beijing and several hours of train also. When I got there, local officials showed up, insisted on trying to interrupt the interview, and eventually they took her and her family away from their home.

19:07And so I had to leave. One of the things that makes The New York Times unique is that it's willing to pursue all sorts of stories, even the ones that might not go anywhere. because that's how you get the stories that no one else is telling. This kind of work is in decline, but that makes it even more important. If you think so, too, consider subscribing to The New York Times. Let me pick up on the AI question. Something that you write about in Maintenance of Everything, and in this section you're quoting the philosopher Matthew Crawford, is that there is a necessity to the intelligibility, is the word that gets used, of the things we use.

19:49And when I read that, I was thinking about a moment I had with one of your creations that relates to AI, which is, you mentioned the Whole Earth Catalog, which is this remarkable, deep catalog of all these tools and ways to fix things and ways to know about things and to create a whole life in a do-it-yourself way. And the first place I ever saw one physically was in the offices of OpenAI. Really? When I visited them before ChatGP2. That's amazing. 2021 or 2022. And 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, that they were creating something that one of its most fundamental characteristics was unintelligibility.

20:39And as somebody who's just been around Silicon Valley a long time, I wonder what you make of that, as somebody who cares about whether or not we understand things well enough to work on them, we are now, all the energy is creating things we don't understand. So we can offload more of our work onto these systems we don't understand in a way that I think is also going to change who we are and what we are as human beings. So AI is moving very fast and is solving a whole lot of problems. And of course, it is creating a whole lot of new problems. They're kind of alien intelligences in a way. And one of the good things that happened with large language models is they train basically on human communication.

21:32And so they are, in that sense, intelligible as human intelligence. How it actually functions in there in terms of the extreme niceties of what's going on down at the bits and bytes level is not so intelligible. But so far, we're kind of making them in real imitation of human communication and to some extent human thought. It's going to move beyond human thought pretty quickly. and it's certainly reaching out in terms of data space much wider than any human can in a much shorter time. And that fact alone puts us feeling like redwood trees trying to communicate with a hummingbird. They're linked.

22:25They live together and the hummingbird maybe lives in the redwood tree, but the redwood tree isn't capable of paying much attention into who's in expanses or how fast they're moving. We're introducing new kind of pace layers into the world we live in. And the cellular, the brain moves really quickly in these computers because they don't have to use chemicals the way our brain does. They go a lot faster. We can engineer at these levels more than we can understand. And part of being a human society now is having a range of specialists that understand these things at depth, that can speak up and say, well, here's what we're pretty sure is going on.

23:18I guess my question on this, and I'm going to be thinking about that Redwoods and Hummingbirds analogy for a little bit, is what role maintenance and the associated virtues and knowledge have in a world where technologically it's requiring now so much sophistication and specialization to understand things. And some of them, like AI, we don't even, even the people making it can understand. A lot of the examples in the book, which I often found very, very moving, are sailboats and Model Ts. And even if somebody was precision calibrating every single bolt in the Rolls-Royce, somebody knew what those bolts did.

24:02And in that way, this book struck me as almost countercultural. that it was arguing for virtues that it feels our society is pulling further away from. I try to take a position of never shaking my finger and saying, you should brush your teeth, you should change your oil, you should be a nanny to your behavior. Do you child wake up and be a grown-up and take care of things? most things work pretty damn well most of the time. When they don't, it comes as a surprise. Suddenly there's a problem, and oh dear, oh dear, people who do maintenance for a living obviously do not have that frame of mind.

24:51I mean, online access to information and parts is just astounding now. And that's, I think, the great solution for people. They'll have a problem with something they've owned for three or four years. And it came with a manual, but they've misplaced that for sure. Well, it turns out they go online, and here comes some recommendations for some videos for exactly your problem and exactly your make and model and year of the device that you're having trouble with. Actually, there's four different versions of the issue you have and four different solutions to doing it, one notably better than the other, and you follow that, and then the thing is fixed, and you're all powerful.

25:40You've totally taken agency, and that particular device is now more legible to you. YouTube has replaced manuals. It's replaced the whole catalog in terms of conferring agency on anybody to learn anything or fix anything. So it's mostly a happy story. But you've got to go online to get the aggregate wisdom of humanity on the case. You've lived on a tugboat for 40 years? Yeah. That must require a fair amount of maintenance. Well, especially if the tugboat is made of wood and built in 1912. Wooden boats don't usually last more than a century. Ours has because of a whole lot of maintenance. and boats are so lovable.

26:29We call them she. They are all that stands between us and the wine-dark sea trying to kill us. They're like a motorcycle in that respect and they're kind of hazardous and so relying on them is an intimate process. So maintaining a boat has an endearingness quality to it that is attractive. What is not attractive is the amount of it and the cost of it and the specializedness of the work that has to be done. It's like living inside a beautiful violin where all of the curves and all the nuances are very carefully crafted. And replacing parts crafted in that detail takes some doing. But it's worth doing.

27:26One thing I enjoyed about the book is the way that it recasts work that can be described or thought of as tedious as almost a spiritual practice. You write, treat the boring task as a ritual, alive with aesthetic nuance and a welcome respite from the clamor of thinking. Find your own contemplative practice. Tell me about that idea of maintenance as a contemplative practice. Well, I can't do meditation. I get bored. But people who do meditation sort of embrace the boredom and utilize it as a way to calm their mind and maybe center their mind on something they don't usually go to mentally. For example, often things of maintenance are done by Japanese with a great deal of ceremony, you know, just changing the lights of a street lamp.

28:22There's guys in uniform. They have a special routine they do with a ladder where they go up the pole and do a little formal thing at the beginning and another little formal thing at the end. And it turns the simple task into a somewhat more complex dance. Moving together in time is one of the profound things that humans have been doing for a very long time. And having a uniform where you're doing something, especially a service, may make a kind of a big deal of it. So ritual is one way to make really, really repetitive maintenance less onerous. the other dimension that struck me as interesting when i read contemplative practice is that there's a lot of ideas about thinking in the book and you quote quite a lot from zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance which is a classic book i was also very struck uh in the first chapter you're writing about this sailboat race and you talk about a sailor thinking about how to fix a problem on his boat and forcing himself to think for two days before acting because, quote, I did not want to crystallize my thinking prematurely.

29:40Right. And I really liked that line, did not want to crystallize my thinking prematurely. Tell me about maintenance and speed, maintenance and rhythm. It comes up often in the motorcycle part of the book as well, about not moving too quickly. One of the problems with repair is it's a trauma for the system that you're trying to fix. And it's easy to get things wrong. So when a couple of years ago, they were in the process of doing maintenance on the Notre Dame steeple, the tallest part. It was kind of rotted out. They were doing work there. because they were up there doing stuff that introduced flame in an area that then took off and burned down the cathedral.

30:29Chernobyl, they were doing just a routine maintenance and were careless and it got out of hand. So that's his reason to be cautious and take thought, often for diagnosing the problem. And on that particular case, Bernard Matessier had a steel boat that was pretty much waterproof. But he had a collision with a ship that bent the bowsprit 20, 25 degrees off. It meant that a storm might take down his whole rig because it was no longer symmetrical. And so he knew what the problem was, but how could he fix it by himself at sea? And that was where he took the advice he had heard from other maintainers.

31:25Don't just jump for the solution because you might make the problem worse. Think through the solution. Disrupt the system minimally in the process of figuring out what needs to be fixed. fixing only that and then backing carefully out so the rest of the system doesn't get disrupted. It's a highly intellectual process doing diagnosis and repair. And so there are dimensions of it that are highly intellectual. And then, as you said at the beginning, it's what living things are doing all the time. One thought I had while reading the book was that maintenance is what we call care when it is applied to things as opposed to people.