On Stewart Brand’s Maintenance: Of Everything

I was thankful to read Marcin Wichary’s review of Stewart Brand’s Maintenance: Of Everything. I first heard about the book months and months ago; it sounded potentially interesting but I was afraid it was going to suffer from a now-familiar myopia of the “tech” old guard. Wichary writes:

I will just say it: I wish the author was more woke. The book is very male-coded. The main chosen areas of investigation are: motorcycles! tanks! guns! wars! There are moments towards the end where Elon Musk and Bill Gates are talked about as if it was still 15 years ago and we haven’t actually learned anything since. (No word of Cybertruck, either.)

We know maintenance tends to be unrewarded and forgotten come promotion time. We know that tedious tasks are often assigned to women and people of color while white men go around doing “genius things.” It’s hard to imagine women not being present in a book about maintenance, and yet — and I wish I was joking — the only woman of any significance in the entire book is… The Statue Of Liberty.

Oof. Yeah. Writing a book with that title (and its attendant aspirations) while ignoring the expertise and experiences of the vast majority of the world’s population (and more than half of the US population) is just not good enough at this point. It’s lazy and incurious, especially for an author frequently lauded as the opposite of both.

(Bit of a sharp turn perhaps, but a recent contrast to Brand’s approach is the PBS series The American Revolution, directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt. Instead of yet another retelling of the Revolutionary War focused on battles, Founding Fathers, and heroic tales of the good guys, Burns and his team drew from a broader pool of participants (many voices of women, free & enslaved Black people, Native Americans, etc.) and emphasized the extent to which the Revolution was many different things to many different people: a fight for freedom, a campaign to continue the enslavement of Black people, a cover for raping & pillaging, and the birth of a new colonizing nation. The result was a balanced, truthful, and insightful look at the war, an event that should be reckoned with at least as much as it’s celebrated.)

• books
• Maintenance: Of Everything
• Marcin Wichary
• Stewart Brand

Not sure what level of prank/gag/stunt this is (note today’s date), but this is supposedly a fully functional compass that only points to the Olive Garden in Times Square.

The Compass To Olive Garden · olivegardencompass.com

FULLY FUNCTIONING BRASS COMPASS THAT GUIDES YOU TO THE OLIVE GARDEN IN TIMES SQUARE

The Pioneering Coffee House Serving Since 1645. “In Oxford, ‘runners’ would go from coffee house to coffee house, picking up all the best news and delivering it back to customers, said Garner. You’re talking human wi-fi.”

Secret Oxfordshire: The coffee house serving since 1645 · bbc.com

Radio Oxford visits the historic shop that has been serving the city since the Civil War.

After two years off, Tom Scott is back with a new YouTube series: “I took a road trip through every county in England, and filmed something interesting in each of them.”

“All of Humanity’s Problems Stem From Marc Andreessen’s Inability to Sit Quietly in a Room Alone”

Tech investor and billionaire Marc Andreessen has many bad opinions (as evidenced by his investment portfolio). On a recent podcast, he shared a real boner: that he isn’t introspective, that people 400 years ago weren’t at all introspective, and that introspection was a construct invented by Freud in the early 1900s.

If you’ve read one (1) book, it’s not difficult to see what is wrong with Andreessen’s assertion and The Nation’s David Futrelle does a good job of rebutting it (archive link). But importantly, he also talks about why Andreessen might say such a thing (either because he honestly believes it or he’s performing the belief):

When you examine your own motivations, desires, and inner life, neuroscientists have discovered, you are using the same parts of the brain that allow you to understand the motivations, desires, and inner lives of others. This means in turn that when you wall off access to your own inner life you also impair your capacity to imaginatively inhabit the experience of other people. Zero introspection is not just a personal quirk or a supposed productivity hack. It’s a permission slip for zero accountability. And Andreessen, it turns out, has good reasons for wanting to avoid accountability.

His firm has bet big on war and the companies that provide the technology behind it…

Futrelle goes on to add:

A man with enormous influence over the technologies of war and surveillance, over the political direction of the country, over the infrastructure of violence that his firm has spent a decade funding, has, in effect, announced that he has no interest in examining his conscience.

Andreessen has built the perfect ideology for Silicon Valley in the Trump age: Move fast, break people, and don’t devote even a moment to self-examination.

As a commenter said on the video snippet I linked to above: “He’s just describing psychopathy. Zero introspection, zero remorse, 100% actions that benefit you.”

• David Futrelle
• Marc Andreessen
• politics