[Themaintainers] My Review of Stewart Brand's *Maintenance: Of Everything*, vol. 1.

[Lee Vinsel]

Hi, all.

MIT Technology Review asked me to review Stewart Brand's new book,
*Maintenance: Of Everything*, vol. 1
<https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/04/17/1135408/book-review-stewart-brand-fixing-everything-maintenance/?utm_source=staff_social_outreach&utm_medium=tr_staff_social&utm_campaign=social&utm_content=guestbp>.
Knowing Brand's earlier work well, I went into it with lots of questions,
including about how Brand would treat labor, politics, and social
structure. But the book was a lot worse than I expected. Beyond the foibles
I anticipated, it just isn't very well put together. For example, it's
loaded up with long block quotations and often feels like notes for a
future work.

I only briefly touch on my biggest disappointment in the review, though:
Brand makes the empty and simply wrong claim that his book is the first
account of maintenance we have. He could have used his massive platform for
highlighting the work of junior, marginalized scholars who have been
working on this topic for years now. To be clear, I'm not talking about me
and Andy, who have gotten plenty of love for one lifetime. Over time, The
Maintainers became more and more about the community, and there is a ton of
great work in this network - a network Brand knows well - that could have
been elevated and amplified. It's a shame.

Otherwise, life is grand. I'm involved in a local community tool library
here in Virginia's New River Valley and continue to work on maintenance and
repair in other ways too. I hope to share about some of these things soon.

And I hope you all are doing well, too.

Lee



-- 
Associate Professor
Department of Science, Technology, and Society
Virginia Tech
leevinsel.com
@STS_News
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.stevens.edu/pipermail/themaintainers/attachments/20260425/d2602b08/attachment.htm>