Stewart Brand has spent decades shaping how we think about technology, the environment, and the future. He first came to prominence in the 1960s as co-creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, the counterculture bible that helped inspire personal computing, the hacker ethic, and the modern environmentalist movement. Since then, he’s launched the Long Now Foundation, championed nuclear power and de-extinction, and pushed us to think in 10,000-year time spans.
In his new book, Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One, Brand argues that the real work of civilization isn’t flashy invention but the long, patient care of complex systems. In March, he spoke with Nick Gillespie about what that means—and whether his vision of planetary stewardship conflicts with libertarian values of individualism, creative destruction, and decentralized power.
Reason: Your new book argues that maintenance is the hidden foundation of everything. What do we miss when we focus on innovation, creative destruction, and disruption and forget about checking that everything is tied down the right way on a daily basis?
Brand: I don’t think they’re opposed. A lot of innovation comes out of maintenance. People who figure out how to improve a thing are often the ones who are stuck with keeping it going and realizing how difficult that is. “Gee, we could make it easier this way or that way. Or what if we just throw this stupid thing away and get something better?” Which is all part of the process of keeping something going.
We often think of maintenance in terms of preventive maintenance. Repair is such a big hassle when something breaks. It’s a trauma to you and to the system that the thing is part of. We spend some of our time doing the very unrewarding thing of changing the oil and brushing your teeth so that your teeth don’t fall out and your car doesn’t blow up. But really maintenance is the whole complete process of keeping the thing going. For example, right now, I’m writing on the history of agriculture, because if you’re an animal, you’ve got to keep it fed. We are animals and we have to keep ourselves fed. The process of doing that has been one innovation after another.
You write about how interchangeable parts made it easier for people to fix things rather than throw the whole thing away, and how necessity was the mother of invention—living miles away from your neighbor, you had to figure out how to fix things yourself. Do you feel that, as a society, we still have that ethos, or have the machines we use to live and prosper become mysterious to us?
The Model T was designed to be maintained and tailored any old which way. Henry Ford grew up on a farm in the Midwest. He knew that farmers and ranchers were very good at fixing their own stuff, so he counted on that. The Model T stayed the Model T, and millions of them were made and used, and got old, went in the junkyards, and then got completely pillaged in the junkyards for the parts—because 20 years later, a part from a really old Model T would fit in your brand new Model T.
I’m glad you brought up the bit about interchangeable parts, because it’s probably the most anti-libertarian, anti–Reason magazine section of the book, in that it was government people who for 40 years in the War Department, the Ordnance Department specifically, spent millions of dollars, which now would be a lot more than that, trying to get manufacturers in the U.S. capable of making interchangeable parts. It turns out you have to get down to about a 50th of a millimeter accuracy in order for that to actually work. They did it. And that’s why America wound up taking the lead in the manufacturing part of the Industrial Revolution.
We led the way, a thing called the “American system.” It turned out that the way to get really good interchangeable parts was to basically automate the machine tools that made them.
Ford never allowed anybody to use a file on the assembly line, because as soon as you took a part and filed it to fit better, that would suddenly stop the assembly line. With guns, if your gun failed and you’re military and you’re in the field and you need to fix it, you’ve got to find a gunsmith, which is not going to be anywhere near the battlefield, and they’ll file a part to get it put in there or they’ll make it from scratch. Once they’re interchangeable, like the AK-47, any piece of any AK-47 will substitute just fine and they’re very roughly designed and built.
I see that process in the 19th century as being what led to [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency]. The researchers I counted on call it military enterprise.
In the book, you write about how the AK-47 was created by the Soviet Union and is the weapon of choice for armies and insurgents around the world because it is relatively simple, easily fixed, and there are lots of parts for it. You compare that to the M16, developed in America, which was rolled out en masse in Vietnam and was terrible for that. It has twice as many parts as the AK-47. It’s more subject to corrosion and rust and gunk getting in there. It seems like we’re always going between simpler products that might be more limited vs. something more sophisticated. Is there a sweet spot somewhere in between?
I don’t think so. I think you wind up being rewarded by going in both directions. AK-47s were cheap and M16s are not cheap. AK-47s operate in the mud. They operate in the sand. They operate in humidity. You can pick one up out of the mud and fire it, and as you fire, the mud flies out. [An] M16 basically has to be surgically cleaned to function. When it functions, it’s absolutely fantastic—at 500 meters you can put high-velocity small rounds through a helmet.
There’s always a place in not just the market, but a range of situations and mindsets, for things that are cheap, fast, and just barely in control, and things that are exquisitely attuned to perfection if they’re in relatively perfect circumstances. Exploring both of those, as a good direction to explore the whole field of design, is always worth doing.
Your work on, among other things, the campaign to have NASA release a photograph of the whole Earth helped inspire the first Earth Day. You helped create the environmentalist mindset. When you say they went too far, that carries a lot of weight.
Greenpeace were anti-technology. Romantics in general are anti-technology. John Henry is always going to get the song. The steam drill never does. But the steam drill is actually a better way to do that kind of work.
The French Revolution—where the idea of interchangeable parts for guns, or muskets then, was actually started—the French Revolution said, “Don’t do that, because these nice gunmakers will be out of work.” They actually shut down the guy named [Honoré] Blanc who was building interchangeable parts for muskets. France went, in the course of a generation, from having the best muskets in Europe to having the worst muskets in Europe. There was no taking account of “Was this beneficial for the customer?”—in that case, soldiers. And that keeps happening.
The anti-technology romantic is almost always: 1) wrong, and, 2) mistaken in his arguments. The way to critique a new anything—AI now—is to embrace it and experiment with it, make mistakes with it, see if you can break it, red-team it, do all these things to sharpen it. And if in the course of that you decide, “You know what, this is a blind alley and we need to back out of it,” the critique from people who have done that is a valid critique.
People are just imagining problems. You can always imagine more problems than you can imagine more ways of things actually going right.
What do you think is the strongest critique of AI as it’s being rolled out now? What are the things that we should be testing it on to see if it’s something that we’re not really going to embrace?
I don’t think of that. But I do know a lot of the people who are going to think of that, and I trust them to investigate the ways it could go wrong.
They’d be able to head off some of them. They won’t be able to head off all of them. Some of them will go probably pretty calamitous, and then we negotiate. The use of AI in weapons is clearly going to be played out very quickly, because the militaries always grab new technologies and turn them into weapons, and rightfully so from their standpoint. It could be a thing like the use of gas that gets tabooed after a while. The use of nuclear weapons, even tactical ones—that’s been tabooed for quite a while.
Everything has to do with a threat. And the massive amount of testing that went on in the ’50s and ’60s was negotiating with threat. But once you had mutual assured destruction with the second strike capability, that actually put a stop to it. That was, in a way, why it was developed. Some problems turn out to be nonexistent. Some problems turn out to be easy to recognize and solve, and some problems are really hard to solve and it takes a while. We’ll go through all of that with AIs.
In the late ’60s, there was more political violence than there is now and it was undergirded by people who actually believed that political violence was the answer. The country seemed to be coming apart. There was no consensus about things. We seem to be back in something like that, where there’s a lot of polarization, demonization, and political violence. Is the political system robust enough to keep things in check or is it just not working anymore? How do we create a consensual government system where we get most of the benefits with fewer of the harsh costs?
This is actually an interesting time to be alive right now, because all of that is up for proof, up for grabs. There’s a lot of grabbing going on. The system was designed to be ungrabbable, but it’s been grabbed. How far down that path of having been grabbed does it go before it becomes stuck there? That’s what we’re in the process of finding out.
There’s lots of reasons to find its way back to some kind of balance. It’ll be different than before. The systems will be different than before. We may have different political parties with different names, but the basic apparatus in the towns, to a large degree in the states, is pretty intact. We’ll find a way to find a new center of balance.
The Whole Earth Catalog‘s statement of purpose says, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” The first issue came out in 1968. We’re coming up on 60 years. Do you think we’ve gotten pretty good at it?
The big test will be climate. We’ve certainly gotten better at a whole lot of godlike powers—god with a small g. These are great god things, not the Almighty.
We haven’t really attempted anything in terms of maintenance of the planet at planet scale, at planet pace. With climate change, we’re dealing with a big, deep, slow process. There’s no instant cures, although some are better than others. Geoengineering is one that we’ll come to just because the cost of continually rising temperatures and rising oceans will make it seem like this is the low-cost way to buy enough time to really convert all of our energy systems to basically noncombustion. That will be a different planet, a different society, different global civilization, because it’s not economic. There’s a global economy, but there’s no such thing as a planetary economy. The things that matter at planet scale are not measurable in dollars and cents.
The great thing of the advance of science is that we have lots and lots of capabilities of sensing that something is going wrong and what exactly is going wrong in that thing. In terms of maintenance, the ability to do that kind of sensing is crucial. They call it predictive maintenance. Before the thing breaks, you have indications that would like to break, and that’s when you try to head it off. Often, you can’t. So far, we’ve not fully succeeded in doing that with climate. We’ve gone a long way, much farther into solar than I would ever have thought. We were pushing solar 60 years ago in the Whole Earth Catalog in a big way. Among our crowd, we thought, “This is obvious,” but it took a while for it to become cheap and easy.
If you’re a farmer and you have 100 acres of your farming, you can get a certain amount of food out of it. Even with precision farming, it’s going to be just a certain amount. If you let some company put a whole bunch of solar collectors on your 100 acres and you lease it to them, you get 10x to 100x the money and none of the hassle. The cheap, abundant source of energy is increasingly becoming the sun. And there’s quite a lot of sunlight. There’ll be even more in orbit as these guys are trying to figure out how to start having major data centers in space.
Do you feel like the world is growing up a bit about nuclear energy? You rankled a lot of people in the environmentalist movement when you claimed that nuclear power makes obvious sense if you want to reduce various kinds of emissions and minimize impact on the planet. Do you feel that message is about to be fully accepted around the world?
The opposition got outlived. Basically, they were not able to convince younger and younger generations to buy into what turned out to be a false fear. And then very wealthy young people want to do AI or want to do crypto or whatever; that takes a lot of energy. They look directly at the advantages of nuclear power. They’re not looking at it through the history of nuclear weapons, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Three Mile Island and all that. They’re looking at “Can this be made safe?” Yes, totally. “Is it something that can really scale?” Yes. So nuclear scaling up and solar continuing to scale up look like they’re both going to happen.
What are you doing to maintain your legacy? How does one go about maintaining their legacy while they’re still around to do it?
I tried to write a memoir at one point, and as soon as I wrote a line of it, I hated it. I was just bored with myself. But I didn’t have to because some guys came along and wanted to make a film about me and this documentary called We Are As Gods was made, and it’s good. John Markoff came along and wanted to write a biography, and he did, and it’s good. All of the Whole Earthwork we did over 30-plus years is now online at wholeearth.info. My legacy has gone ahead and somehow established itself. It’s not something I’m concerned about. I’m one of the really very lucky people in that respect.
After The Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich died, you wrote, “I’ll speak up for Paul. He was wrong about discounting the ‘demographic transition’ in human population, but he co-authored (with Peter Raven) one of the most cited papers in biology, on co-evolution.” Given his large role in stressing people about overpopulation and his influence among governments in reducing births, how do you assess his overall contribution to science and society?
Remember, it was Dave Brower at Sierra Club who asked Paul to write that book and to write it not as science but as a polemic. Overpopulation was an environmentalist obsession before Paul lit the fuse on his book. (These were the same self-named “ecologists” who couldn’t tell a trophic level from a Tyrannosaurus.)
Peter Raven is a botanist (whose Wikipedia bio says, “Raven is possibly best known for his work ‘Butterflies and Plants: A Study in Coevolution,’ published in the journal Evolution in 1964, which he coauthored with Paul R. Ehrlich”). Paul was a zoologist, a lepidopterist focused on checkerspot butterfly populations. He noticed that supposedly identical butterflies dined on completely different plants in different regions. Over coffee, he and Raven complained to each other that zoologists treated plants as just so much edible plastic, whereas in evolutionary reality, plants pay just as much active attention to animals as animals do to them. Naming that attention “coevolution” was a thunderclap in evolution theory, because it forced biologists to notice that most of evolution is in fact coevolution—living things devote most of their adaptation to dealing with other living things, who are busy adapting right back at them.
It’s a profound idea that reframes everything. That’s why I named a magazine for it—CoEvolution Quarterly. For me, it far outweighs Paul’s exaggerations about human population numbers.
In a sense, I’m attempting something similar with “maintenance.” It’s not just a persistent nuisance. It’s so essential that it’s what most living things have to spend most of their time and attention on tending to.
This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity, as well as augmented by questions answered over email.
The post Stewart Brand on Fixing Stuff, Modern Environmentalism, and the Nuclear Future appeared first on Reason.com.
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