341 Stewart Brand on Maintenance as an Organizing Principle

"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: S upport Mindscape on Patreon . Stewart Brand received an undergraduate degree in biology from Stanford University. He was the founder, editor, and publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog , which won a National Book Award. He founded the journal CoEvolution Quarterly and the WELL electronic community, and was a co-founder of the Long Now Foundation . He has been called " the 20th century's top influencer ." Web site Amazon author page Wikipedia

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341 Stewart Brand on Maintenance as an Organizing Principle is an episode from Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas by Sean Carroll.

This episode is 01:12:41 long.

This episode was published on Jan 19, 2026.

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