What Stewart Brand Taught Me About Maintenance
From February 2009 to May 2021, I was part of the team handling marketing, web development, design, and sysadmin work for The Rock Poster Society, including the web presence at trps.org. A community built entirely around the idea that things made with craft and intention deserve to be preserved. Posters designed to be thrown away after the show, collected and catalogued instead.
Two of the logos you’ll see in the image above were created by artists who defined that community. David Singer, legendary Fillmore poster artist, designed the TRPS mark. The other was created by Dave Hunter - Gammalyte - a friend whose work I wanted to honor here. Dave moved to San Francisco in 1985, embedded himself in the world of Fillmore and Avalon Ballroom poster art, and went on to create silkscreen posters for Metallica, Gov’t Mule, the Grateful Dead family, and dozens more. He passed on May 5, 2017, after a battle with brain cancer. His daughter Jasmine - Jaz - was there with him. Our daughters used to hang out.
So it shouldn’t surprise me that an Ezra Klein episode with Stewart Brand hit me the way it did.
Brand is one of those figures who shaped the modern internet before most people knew what the internet was. He co-created the Trips Festival with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. He was present at “the mother of all demos.” He built the Whole Earth Catalog - what Steve Jobs called “Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along.”
His new book is Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One. And his argument is quietly radical: in a culture that worships novelty and disposability, maintenance - caring for things over time - might be the most important and undervalued act.
That resonates with me. Still.
Books I’m adding to my reading list from the episode:
The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch
The Perfectionists by Simon Winchester
The Scottish Enlightenment by Arthur Herman
If you’re interested in technology, culture, and what it means to build something that actually lasts, this episode of The Ezra Klein Show is worth your time.
We spent 12 years building a community around events that mattered - and the things people kept that were never meant to be kept. I think about Dave when I think about that. Maintenance isn't just a philosophy. It's what you do when something matters enough to keep.