341 | Stewart Brand on Maintenance as an Organizing Principle
0
0
"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/
Support 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 siteAmazon author pageWikipedia
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Плейлист
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
The connectome is the wiring diagram of a brain, a big matrix that tells us what neurons talk to what other neurons. Understanding it is an important step to understanding how brains work, but a...
Peter Singer has been an influential philosopher for a number of decades. He was a significant early voice in animal rights, has been a leading thinker of utilitarianism, and helped inspire the...
We are more familiar with ourselves than with anything else in the universe, but we generally don't come very close to really understanding what our "self" is. That's not too surprising, as selv...
Welcome to the April 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by...
There is something special about gravity. After decades of effort, there is still no convergence on the right way to reconcile Einstein's theory of general relativity with the framework of quant...
"Lamarkism" is a term often attached to a seemingly discredited idea in evolutionary biology: that one organism could acquire characteristics (e.g., becoming stronger through exercise) that woul...
In the 18th century, philosopher Jeremy Bentham suggested the Panopticon as a model of a prison where inmates could be constantly observed by just a single prison guard. Although his original id...
Intelligence is a many splendored thing, especially when it comes to comparisons between species. Chimpanzees are better than humans at some numerical tasks, but less good at understanding what...
Welcome to the March 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by...
Behaving rationally involves facing up to conditions of uncertainty; we never navigate the world with perfect confidence. Sometimes we are uncertain about the way the world is, but we can also b...
It's possible to look at the course of history over the past few centuries and discern a movement toward increasing democracy, freedom, and individual rights -- "liberalism," in the political-ph...
For all that human beings spend a lot of their time thinking, it's far from obvious what that process actually entails. Part of it amounts to classical logical reasoning. But an even bigger part...
Welcome to the February 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Pa...
Evolution with natural selection involves an intricate mix of the random and the driven. Mutations are essentially random, while selection pressures work to prefer certain outcomes over others. There...
"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 Thermody...
At any given moment, an uncountable number of events are happening, but only some of them matter to us. What does it mean for something to matter, and more importantly, what does it mean for us to mat...
It's become increasingly clear that the Turing Test -- determining whether human interlocutors can tell whether a conversation is being carried out by a human or a machine -- is not a good way to thin...
Time for the holiday message! Rounding off the year with a brief and casual reflection on some issue that doesn't quite rise to the level of a full solo podcast. And hopefully something uplifting.This...
Welcome to the December 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Pa...
The story goes that Wolfgang Pauli, who first proposed the existence of neutrinos, was embarrassed to have done so, as it was considered uncouth to hypothesize new particles that could not be detected...
Game theory is a way of quantitatively describing what happens any time one thing interacts with another thing, when both things have goals and potential rewards. That's a pretty broad class of intere...
Machine learning using neural networks has led to a remarkable leap forward in artificial intelligence, and the technological and social ramifications have been discussed at great length. To understan...
Welcome to the November 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Pa...
Science has an incredibly impressive track record of uncovering nonintuitive ideas about the universe that turn out to be surprisingly accurate. It can be tempting to think of scientific discoveries a...
The universe as revealed by physics is objective: it's out there, existing and behaving in ways that are completely independent of human thought. But the process by which we learn about the universe,...
Why are people wrong all the time, anyway? Is it because we human beings are too good at being irrational, using our biases and motivated reasoning to convince ourselves of something that isn't quite...
Music is math that you can dance to. The fact that certain notes sound good when played together, or in succession, is related to the mathematical properties of the frequencies to which they correspon...
Welcome to the October 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Pat...
Certain features of our universe seem unnatural to us. These include "constants of nature" such as the cosmological constant and the mass of the Higgs boson, as well as features of the initial conditi...
A characteristic of complex systems is that individual components combine to exhibit large-scale emergent behavior even when the components were not specifically designed for any particular purpose wi...