Stewart Brand on Maintenance as an Organizing Principle
1/19/20261 hr 13 min
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold," wrote W.B. Yeats. I don't know about the centre, but the tendency of things to fall apart is pretty universal, ultimately due to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Anyone living in a society or involved with technology must therefore be interested in the concept of maintenance -- keeping systems working. In his book Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One, Stewart Brand looks at the challenges and rewards of this concept.
Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/01/19/341-stewart-brand-on-maintenance-as-an-organizing-principle/
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:00
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Speaker 10:22
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Sean Carroll· Host0:49
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. I don't know if you know, but recently the Golden Globes happened. This is one of those award shows where they give prizes to movie stars and TV stars and things like that. But they had a new category at the Golden Globes this year, Best Podcast. The Mindscape Podcast did not win Best Podcast. It was not nominated. It was probably not even noticed by the people who did the nominating and deciding who was going to be on the list. You know, what can we say? Our civilization continues to let me down in various ways. But I can't complain too much.