Maintenance: Of Everything

Auteur

Stewart Brand is the cofounder and president of The Long Now Foundation and cofounder of Global Business Network, the Hackers Conference, and the WELL. He created and edited the National Book Award-winning Whole Earth Catalog from 1968 to 1998. His books include The Media Lab (1987), How Buildings Learn (1994), The Clock of the Long Now (1999), and Whole Earth Discipline (2009). He was the subject of the documentary We Are As Gods (2020). He graduated from Stanford with a degree in biology and served as an infantry officer in the US Army.

Texte du rabat

The first in-depth exploration of maintenance—and a powerful argument for its civilizational importance—from the author of How Buildings Learn and creator of the Whole Earth Catalog.





Maintenance is what keeps everything going. It’s what keeps life going. Yet it’s also easy to shirk or defer—until the thing breaks, the system falters, and everything stops. The apparent paradox is profound: Maintenance is absolutely necessary and maintenance is optional. 




The first in a multi-volume work, Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One offers a comprehensive overview of the civilizational importance of maintenance. The book begins with a dramatic contest of maintenance styles under life-critical conditions: the Golden Globe around-the-world solo sailboat race of 1968. It goes on to explore the insights that can be gleaned from vehicle maintenance, from the zeal of motorcycle maintainers to the maintenance philosophies that fought for dominance of the auto industry to the state of electric vehicle manufacturing today, 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”—not just the tiresome preventative tasks but the whole grand process of keeping a thing going. 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 very planet—can be a radical act.


Contenu

Introduction


The Path to Print


Credits


 


Chapter 1: The Maintenance Race


 


Chapter 2: Vehicles (and Weapons)


What Motorcycles Teach about Maintenance


        	Motorcycle Footnote 1: Ride to Die


        	Motorcycle Footnote 2: The Instruction in Disassembly


Three Maintenance Philosophies Fought for Control of the Auto Industry


        	Digression 1: Precision: How America Made Machines Make Machines


What the Three Most Popular Cars in History Have in Common


        	Digression 2: From Manuals to YouTube (with a Detour)


                    	 Great Manuals in History

                    
Two Assault Rifles

                    
YouTube Rules


        	Digression 3: Corrosion: Rust Never Sleeps


        	Digression 4: Sustainment


                    	 How Poor Maintenance Loses Wars: 1973, Israel Maintains


                    	 Sustainment: The Concept


                    	 How Poor Maintenance Loses Wars: 2022, Ukraine Maintains


The End of Combustion Vehicles


        	Digression 5: Elon Musk


        	Postscript 1: Unreliability Incorporated


        	Postscript 2: First Vehicle





Recommended Reading


Endnotes 


Bibliography


Index