Finished reading: Maintenance of Everything Part One by Stewart Brand

This is a beautiful book, like the actual materiality of the book is really nice, cover has kintsugi veins of gold, page layouts with interesting margins for captions and commentary, blue highlights whose meaning and function gradually dawn through reading. Some of the marginalia comes from people who helped Brand during the writing of the book by reading and commenting through a public drafting website tool called books in progress. Just seems like innovative, well considered book design.

The reading of the book was nice. Yet the shape of the argument or maybe just the shape of the content felt weird to me. Banger first chapter of three interlocking stories about solo boat racing (and maintenance). Then a much longer, more varied, subdivided second chapter, nominally about vehicles, but full of (well labeled) digressions… Good fun, but no feeling of beginning, middle, end, or where it’s going. No conclusion, i guess because it’s only part 1, but neither any cliffhanger or much effort to tease future parts.

Abstractable quotes:

“Just owning and using something is not yet mastery—we need a basic intelligibility of our possessions.” (58) That’s Crawford (Soulcraft) quoted by Brand. Ouch… so few of my possessions do i understand well enough to fix or maintain

“The power to maintain is the power to improve.” (63) Means that knowing how to maintain something means knowing how it works means seeing opportunities for improvement.

The developmental path of mass production is the development of precision manufacturing, which went: government guns, private guns, sewing machines, bikes, Ford autos… And i want to pair that with the rise of advertising (attention merchants).

So much of this book was about military history, which makes sense for the topic but also makes a different kind of sense after learning Stewart Brand was “a professional rifleman in the early 1960s, serving for two years as an infantry officer teaching basic training.” I had to update my model of him cause i had only ever heard him talk about himself as a flower child.

”Old systems fail in familiar and prepared for ways. New systems fail in unexpected and unprepared for ways.” (112 and 27)

Sustainability is a concept built around aspiration for the future. In contrast, sustainment is about getting to work now. (165)

“The opposite of maintenance mind is neglect mind. Neglect mind is part laziness, part ignorance, and part surrender to fantasy. Maintainers are realists.” (179-180)

“Sustainment is everything it takes to ensure prolonged endurance of capability.” (180)