Stewart Brand thinks big and long. He thinks on a planetary scale – as suggested by the title of his celebrated Whole Earth Catalog – and on the longest of timeframes, as with his Long Now Foundation, which looks forward to the next 10,000 years of human civilisation. He has had a lifelong fascination with the future, and anything that could get us there faster, from space travel to psychedelic drugs to computing. In fact, he was arguably the bridge between the San Francisco counterculture of the 60s and present-day Silicon Valley: in his commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005, Steve Jobs eulogised the Whole Earth Catalog and Brand’s philosophy, and echoed its farewell mantra: “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”
You could say that Brand has also lived big and long. He is now 87 years old, in the final chapters of an eventful and adventurous life that has crossed paths with some of the most consequential events and figures of his era. He has been a writer, an editor, a publisher, a soldier, a photojournalist, an LSD evangelist, an events organiser, a future-planning consultant, even a government adviser (to the California governor Jerry Brown in the late 70s). “There was a time when people asked me, ‘What do you do?’ I said, ‘I find things and I found things,’” says Brand, as in he is a founder. He is speaking from a library where he likes to work in Petaluma, California, not far from his houseboat in Sausalito. “I’m always searching for good stuff to recommend, and good people.”
In light of his epic life, Brand’s latest project hinges on what sounds like the most mundane topic imaginable: maintenance. It is “not automatically an exciting concept,” Brand readily admits, but once he started thinking about it, he realised you could view just about everything in terms of it, and a lot could be revealed by doing so: “Maintenance is what keeps everything going. It’s what keeps life going.”
His new book is titled Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One. It is the first of a planned 13 instalments, Brand explains, and it deals with the most literal, material forms of maintenance. Subsequent instalments will investigate everything from buildings to communities, institutions to the human body, plus planetary and environmental maintenance. So perhaps not such a departure after all in terms of long, big thinking. “I fell into it realising it was a tremendously ambitious thing, because I was going to be writing about a range of things I know nothing about,” he jokes.
In this first instalment, Brand’s magpie curiosity roves freely across industrial history, from round-the-world yacht racing to vehicle manufacturing to encyclopedias to the refurbishment of the Statue of Liberty. The military comes up a lot, “because the military is so maintenance-dependent and maintenance-aware”, he says, pointing out that he served in the US army himself for two years in the early 60s.
Wars have been won and lost on the strength of maintenance, Brand notes. In the Vietnam war, for example, the US army’s M16 rifle was lighter, more accurate and more precisely machined; the Viet-Cong’s AK-47s were more crudely made but therefore easier to fix and less likely to go wrong. Many American GIs lost their lives as a result of jammed M16s. Similarly, Russia’s attempted full-scale invasion of Ukraine faltered in its first days in part due to poorly maintained tyres on its long-mothballed trucks, which reflected a broader Russian doctrine of “treating equipment and soldiers as expendable”, as opposed to Ukraine’s flexible, Nato-influenced maintenance culture.
Surprisingly, perhaps, Brand expresses approval for Elon Musk. “What I find so admirable about Musk is that he keeps pushing the envelope of the possible in manufacturing,” he says. Just as Henry Ford revolutionised car manufacturing in the early 20th century with his Model T (which broke down a lot but was relatively easy to fix), so Musk’s Tesla has been a quantum leap, Brand argues. It catalysed the electric vehicle revolution, which has had an invaluable environmental impact. But Tesla also devised an ingenious way to make the entire underbody of its Model Y cars out of just two pieces of cast aluminium, whereas conventional cars used hundreds of parts that had to be welded, bonded, riveted together. Electric motors also have far fewer parts than internal combustion engines. Fewer parts means less to go wrong, which means less maintenance. This is how technology gets better, he says.
The flipside is, we now expect things to work all the time. “Most consumer products pretty much don’t require maintenance. You get an electric clock and plug it into the wall or change the batteries from time to time, and it’ll tell perfectly good time. You don’t have to do anything else. So there’s a getting out of the habit of expecting to do maintenance, and then when the thing has a problem, we’re offended: ‘Well, it’s not supposed to do that.’” For this reason Brand is also a huge fan of YouTube, where you can find lessons and instructions on how to fix just about anything. “We have higher expectations of not needing to maintain things, and lots of good ways to find out how to maintain them when we encounter a problem. So that’s basically progress, as far as I’m concerned.”
Brand is now thinking about institutions in terms of maintenance, he says, and he has plenty of material. We’re speaking shortly after the Davos economic forum, where Donald Trump’s attempts to “acquire” Greenland came to a head, and the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, declared that there was a “rupture” in the “rules-based international order”. Rather than progress, we seem to be going in reverse here.
Like the electronic clock, perhaps we’ve become so accustomed to the global order working (at least for powerful western nations), when it starts breaking we don’t know how to fix it. Brand is relatively relaxed, though. Some institutions might falter, others might prevail, or come back in a different form, he says. Davos is a good example of both: “Carney could say: ‘We’re having a rupture. And here’s a way to rethink ordering for the middle-level nations.’ So that was a great case of acknowledging an institution that’s in trouble – at an institution that was not in trouble: Davos.”
Brand has been trying to foster a similar vein of long-term thinking with the Long Now Foundation. He co-founded it 30 years ago “to get people comfortable with thinking about not just the next 10,000 years, but more importantly, the last 10,000 years: we’ve come a long way, baby. How did that happen?” The idea began with an email conversation with the computer scientist and inventor Danny Hillis in 1994. They were discussing the year 2000, which had long been considered “the future”, but was then just six years away. The plan became to create an artwork “that would help pop through this membrane of the year 2000 for people, and let them take on various degrees and sizes of future, and not just the next decade”. Hillis conceived the Clock of the Long Now – a mechanical timepiece that would chronicle the next 10,000 years (the name came from Brian Eno, another collaborator). He had approached a lot of people with the idea, but, typically, it was Brand who responded and said: “OK. Let’s build the clock.”
Improbable as it sounds, the clock is almost finished, buried a few hundred feet into a mountaintop in Nevada. The land and the money were donated by the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos. It’s really a giant work of land art, Brand explains. “There’s a statue of liberty in New York, and this is kind of a statue of responsibility. It’s beautifully engineered and beautifully constructed and designed as an experience … it’s going to be a day in your life you’ll never forget.” And maybe it will inspire visitors to think as big and long as Brand does. “It would be nice to have an institution of thinkers and explainers that can last as long as the clock does.” The foundation’s other initiatives have included a series of seminars on long-term thinking (hosted by Brand), a library of “books you would want to restart civilisation from scratch”, and a project to preserve all the world’s languages.
This benign global scope has always been a hallmark of Brand’s brand, combined, paradoxically, with a sense of entrepreneurship and individualism. The opening words of the first Whole Earth Catalog, for example, were: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” Born in Illinois, in relative privilege, he came of age in a postwar America that felt it had largely figured out the “operating manual for spaceship Earth”, as the forward-looking designer Richard Buckminster Fuller put it at the time. Atom bombs, computers, vaccines, space travel – anything seemed possible.
Brand combined these grand ambitions with a human-scaled ethos of empowerment. The strapline of the Whole Earth Catalog was “access to tools”, and it was meant in the broadest sense. The huge, thick directory, first published in 1968, listed all kinds of literal tools for the budding commune-dweller – from seed drills to footwear, kayaks to macrame kits – but it also championed books on all manner of hippy-era interests: esoteric religions, sociology, architecture, philosophy, science, the occult, how to talk to dolphins, you name it. Ideas are tools too, Brand points out. As such, the Whole Earth Catalog offered access to a multitude of alternative lifestyles. “It opened doors for people in a way that invited them to consider, ‘maybe I could just build a guitar, or live off the grid.’ And so it had the impact of conferring agency,” he says.
The Whole Earth Catalog became a huge bestseller in the late 60s and 70s, which made Brand a lot of money – too much for his liking, in fact. In the early 70s he wound the publication down and founded the Point Foundation, which gave grants to worthy causes, though he continued to publish books and periodicals in a Whole Earth spirit until the early 2000s.
One of the key schisms of the counterculture was a tension between the technologists and the environmentalists. The former embraced space exploration and computing; the latter condemned industrial civilisation and consumer society as inherently destructive. Brand straddled both camps. He saw how they could complement each other. That Nasa image of the whole Earth, for example, he points out, galvanised conservation movements such as Earth Day and Greenpeace, but it “was a direct result of something that environmentalists hated, which was the space programme”.
Predictably, Brand was in on the ground floor when it came to computers. In 1968 he was a camera operator at what is now known as “the mother of all demos” – a seismic event put on by the Stanford Research Institute showcasing what we would recognise today as the foundations of personal computing: windows, hypertext links, video conferencing, even navigation using a then-unheard-of “mouse”. In a 1972 article for Rolling Stone, Brand declared personal computing to be “good news, maybe the best since psychedelics”. “Actually quite a lot better,” he says today. “Because one of the things that soon became apparent was that psychedelics kind of levelled off”, whereas computers have been “an exponential takeoff”: Moore’s law (the doubling of processing power every two years), the internet, and now artificial intelligence – we’re still on that path.
Having lived through the rapid rise and fall of the commune movement, Brand saw the potential of online community early on. In 1984 he organised the Hackers Conference (these were the days when “hacking” simply meant “doing cool stuff with computing”), at which he coined the now-familiar maxim “information wants to be free”. A year later he co-founded the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (Well) as a sort of proto social media platform, with discussion forums on various topics. Meanwhile, many of Brand’s Whole Earth crew went on to found Wired magazine in 1993 (Brand features in the first issue, interviewing Camille Paglia).
To his critics, Brand paved the way for the neoliberal, libertarian mindset of today’s Silicon Valley. But he was also a community-focused idealist and a lifelong environmentalist. That technology v nature tension persists – hence his apparent affinity with tech figures such as Bezos and Musk. He’s still ambivalent: “Finding anything that is an absolutely unmitigated benefit is pretty rare,” he says. But “I would say the benefits of personal computers and smartphones and the internet vastly reached beyond, in good terms, what we imagined at the time.”
In terms of physical maintenance, Brand has always been a healthy, active, outdoorsy person – he was a keen sailor, he was hiking up mountains with rocks in his backpack in his 60s, and he started going to CrossFit when he was 75 – “that built a pretty strong constitution”. Now, though, he has a respiratory illness, he says, “which is progressive, incurable and fatal”. He’s in a stable condition, and still exercises, but uses supplementary oxygen as well. “I’d be very surprised by making it into my 90s,” he says, seemingly without regret: “Imagine the luck, to get to be 87 – it’s just fantastic!”
Brand has always been an optimist, he says, and taking the long view, he still is. “I find optimism in terms of being able to find a way to not only continue but keep getting better.” It might be hard to see a positive way forward right now, but that’s always been the way, he says. Brand brings up yet another of his incarnations, the Global Business Network, a consultancy he was part of in the 90s that mapped out future scenarios to help clients plan ahead. “It’s harder to imagine how something might go well than go badly,” he says. But we do not need to passively accept our fate as if we have no control over it. “If you like some scenarios better than others, you can be aware of the ones you don’t like and look for signs of them, and also look at signs of the ones you want to have come to pass, and lean differentially toward them. That’s how you negotiate your way into a future you were glad of. It’s done incrementally by, among other things, lots of individuals and some institutions, and that’s how we grapple our way, muddle our way forward.”
The Guardian
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