Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Hosted by Sean Carroll
"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 https://press.stripe.com/maintenance-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 https://www.patreon.com/seanmcarroll. Stewart Brand received an undergraduate degree in biology from Stanford University. He was the founder, editor, and publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Catalog, which won a National Book Award. He founded the journal CoEvolution Quarterly and the WELL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL electronic community, and was a co-founder of the Long Now Foundation http://www.longnow.org/. He has been called "the 20th century's top influencer https://www.npr.org/2025/07/11/g-s1-76555/from-hippies-to-techies-stewart-brand-is-the-20th-centurys-top-influencer." Web site https://sb.longnow.org/SB_homepage/Home.html Amazon author page https://www.amazon.com/stores/Stewart-Brand/author/B000AQ4GYA Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Brand
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