The case for fixing everything

The Quiet Revolution: Why Fixing Everything Might Save the World

In a world obsessed with the next big thing—the latest app, the shiniest gadget, the most disruptive innovation—there’s a quiet, unglamorous force holding civilization together: maintenance. While headlines celebrate moonshot projects and billion-dollar startups, the people who keep bridges from collapsing, software from crashing, and hospitals from failing are rarely celebrated. Yet, as Stewart Brand, the legendary thinker behind the Whole Earth Catalog and a pioneer of both counterculture and digital culture, argues in his new book Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One, the act of upkeep is not just essential—it’s revolutionary.

Brand, now 87, has spent decades at the intersection of technology, ecology, and human systems. His latest work, the first in a planned series, is a meditation on the profound, often invisible labor of keeping things running. “Taking responsibility for maintaining something—whether a motorcycle, a monument, or our planet—can be a radical act,” he writes. But what makes maintenance radical? And why, in an age of constant disruption, should we care?

The Invisible Backbone of Civilization

Every functioning society rests on a foundation of maintained systems. Roads are paved, power grids are stabilized, water is purified, and software is patched—all through relentless, often thankless work. Yet, this labor is systematically undervalued. In corporate boardrooms and government budgets, innovation gets the funding, the press, and the prestige. Maintenance? It’s seen as a cost center, a drag on growth, a necessary evil.

This bias has real consequences. The American Society of Civil Engineers gives the U.S. infrastructure a grade of C-, citing aging bridges, crumbling roads, and outdated water systems. The 2021 collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, triggered by a ship collision but exacerbated by long-deferred maintenance, was a tragic reminder of what happens when upkeep is neglected. Similarly, the 2003 Northeast blackout, which left 50 million people without power, was traced back to untrimmed trees and failed alarm systems—basic maintenance failures.

Maintenance isn’t just about physical structures. It’s also about knowledge, relationships, and ecosystems. Farmers rotate crops to maintain soil health. Teachers reinforce foundational skills so students can build on them. Coders refactor software to prevent technical debt from crippling future development. These are all forms of care—deliberate, ongoing efforts to sustain what already exists.

The Myth of the Lone Innovator

One of Brand’s central arguments is that maintenance is often portrayed as a solitary, almost spiritual act. He speaks of personal fulfillment, of the meditative rhythm of oiling a chain or tightening a bolt. There’s truth in that. There’s dignity in the craftsman who restores a vintage car, the gardener who tends a community plot, or the programmer who patches a critical bug at 2 a.m.

But this romanticized view risks obscuring a deeper truth: maintenance is fundamentally collective. No one maintains a city alone. It takes teams of engineers, sanitation workers, electricians, and policymakers. It requires shared standards, public funding, and social trust. When Brand frames maintenance as a personal journey, he risks reinforcing the very individualism that has marginalized the work in the first place.

Consider the right-to-repair movement. For years, companies like Apple, John Deere, and Samsung have designed products with sealed components, proprietary software, and planned obsolescence—making it nearly impossible for users or independent repair shops to fix them. This isn’t just about convenience; it’s about control. By locking down their products, corporations extend their profit cycles and reduce competition. The result? A throwaway culture where fixing is harder than replacing.

The right-to-repair movement is a direct challenge to this model. It’s not just about saving money—it’s about reclaiming agency. When farmers can’t fix their tractors without paying a dealer, or when hospitals can’t repair ventilators during a pandemic, the cost of neglect becomes deadly. Maintenance, in this context, becomes an act of resistance.

The Academic Rise of the Maintainers

While Brand’s book brings mainstream attention to the topic, the academic study of maintenance has been growing for nearly a decade. Since the mid-2010s, scholars across disciplines—from sociology and anthropology to engineering and environmental science—have begun to examine the work of keeping things going. This movement, sometimes called “maintainership,” challenges the cultural obsession with novelty.

One of the key insights from this research is that maintenance is not the opposite of innovation—it’s its necessary counterpart. You can’t innovate on a crumbling foundation. The most advanced software in the world is useless if the servers it runs on aren’t cooled, powered, and patched. The most ambitious climate policies fail if the grids delivering renewable energy aren’t maintained.

This imbalance reflects a broader cultural bias. In education, students are rewarded for creativity and originality, not for diligence or consistency. In business, CEOs are celebrated for launching new products, not for ensuring reliability. Even in environmental policy, the focus is often on grand solutions like carbon capture or geoengineering, while basic stewardship—like reforestation or wetland restoration—gets less attention.

But as climate change accelerates, the importance of maintenance becomes impossible to ignore. Forests need to be managed to prevent wildfires. Coastal defenses need to be reinforced against rising seas. Power grids need to be hardened against extreme weather. These aren’t flashy projects, but they are essential.

The Honor of the Maintainer

Brand’s ultimate goal, as outlined in his book’s framework, is to “end with the nature of maintainers and the honor owed them.” This is a noble aim. But honor isn’t just about recognition—it’s about respect, compensation, and systemic change.

Consider the people who keep our world running: the HVAC technicians who ensure hospitals stay cool in summer, the wastewater operators who prevent cholera outbreaks, the open-source developers who maintain critical software libraries used by millions. These are not “low-skill” jobs. They require deep expertise, problem-solving, and often years of training. Yet, they are frequently underpaid, undervalued, and invisible.

Honoring maintainers means investing in their training, paying them fairly, and designing systems that support long-term care. It means valuing resilience over speed, durability over disposability, and care over consumption.

Maintenance as a Radical Act

So, is maintenance radical? In a world that prizes disruption, yes—choosing to fix, to preserve, to care, is an act of defiance. It’s a rejection of the throwaway culture that treats people, products, and planets as expendable. It’s a commitment to the long view, to intergenerational responsibility, to the idea that some things are worth keeping.

Brand’s book, for all its introspective tone, points toward this truth. At 87, he’s confronting his own mortality, and in doing so, he’s reminding us that everything—machines, societies, even life itself—requires tending. Rust sets in. Corrosion spreads. Systems fail. But with vigilance, skill, and care, we can slow the decay.

Maintenance isn’t just about fixing what’s broken. It’s about building a world where things last—where we value the people who keep it running, and where we design for durability, not just disruption. In that sense, fixing everything isn’t just practical. It’s revolutionary.

As we face climate change, technological upheaval, and social fragmentation, the quiet work of maintenance may be our most urgent task. It’s not glamorous. It won’t make headlines. But it’s the work that keeps the lights on, the water flowing, and the world turning. And in the end, that might be the most radical thing of all.

This article was curated from The case for fixing everything via MIT Technology Review