Maintenance
The first in a multi-volume work, Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One offers a comprehensive overview of the civilizational importance of maintenance. The book explores the insights that can be gleaned from the maintenance of sailboats, vehicles, and weapons, with absorbing detours into the evolution of precision in manufacturing, the enduring importance of manuals, sustainment in the military, and the never-ending battle against corrosion. Maintenance: Of Everything is a wide-ranging and provocative call to expand what we mean by “maintenance.” It invites us to understand not only the profound impact maintenance has on our daily lives but also why taking responsibility for maintaining something—whether a motorcycle, a monument, or our planet—can be a radical act.
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What Hacker News says
- For similar ideas (not specific to software), check out Stewart Brand's book Maintenance of Everything.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_...
https://www.bartneck.de/projects/research/pirsig/zen.pdf (starts at page 313)
Rediscovered while reading Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46696276 - January 2026 (35 comments) ISBN13 9781953953490 (pages 46-48)
- > Cars became a self-reinforcing driver of individualism, especially in net new geographies. The negative effects are resisted better in societies/regions that were built long before them. (For both the cultural reasons and plain physical reasons, like not having wide enough roads).
Something I recently learned about roads from Stewart Brand's new book "Maintenance" is that the first groups pushing for paved roads were cyclists:
https://www.governing.com/context/how-gilded-age-bicyclists-...The Good Roads Movement of the late 19th century began as a grass-roots crusade to improve roads for bicyclists. By the 20th century, it had turned into a national effort embraced by the automobile industry, railroad tycoons and presidents. - It's a fantastic museum and featured a bit in Stewart Brand's Maintenance of Everything (https://books.worksinprogress.co/book/maintenance-of-everyth...).
