Maintenance: the Mattering Instinct for Engineers

I would have gotten around to reviewing Stewart Brand's Maintenance: of Everything eventually. Brand has been an inspiration to me since I first encountered the Whole Earth Catalog many years ago (and my teenage daughter since she watched We Are As Gods a smaller number of years ago), and his new book deserves attention from anyone who cares about the survival of human civilization. But my recent review of Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's The Mattering Instinct made the connection between these two books feel urgent. Reading Maintenance through the lens of entropy and free energy reveals that Brand has written, perhaps without fully intending to, an engineer's version of Goldstein's physics and philosophy. The two books share an overarching worldview but approach it from different directions — Goldstein from physics and philosophy, Brand from tools and engineering practice.

A note on editions: the print version, published by Stripe Press to high production standards, does not perfectly match what is freely available through the Books in Progress website. The web version includes Chapter 3, "Communities of Practice," which contains some of my favorite material but is absent from the print edition. The print version includes content not on the web, including a Digression on Elon Musk and two Postscripts. [The Elon Musk digression and postscripts are indeed available on the web here. -MFM] If you want the physical object, buy the book. If you're fine with digital and want to save money, the web version works. Or read both.

Both the Mattering Instinct and Maintenance, at their core, can be understood to address the same fundamental question: How do ordered systems resist dissolution? For Goldstein, the answer lies in the mattering instinct itself — our recursive drive to matter, to deserve the attention we must give our own lives, which manifests as the creation and preservation of meaning against entropy's tide. For Brand, the answer lies in the unglamorous daily work of keeping things going — "brushing the damn teeth, changing the damn oil." I submit for consideration the hypothesis that these answers converge. Is not the process of building and maintaining robust systems itself a mattering project, an explicit minimization of entropy through the careful extraction of free energy from the environment?

Brand and Systems Theory

Before exploring this connection, some context on Brand himself seems useful. Steve Jobs, in his celebrated 2005 Stanford commencement address, described the Whole Earth Catalog as "Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along." The description captures something important about Brand's project. Beginning in 1968, when communal living and self-reliance were emerging as countercultural values, Brand created a publication that compiled tools, books, and resources for people seeking to understand and shape their own environments. The catalog included reviews of products ranging from seeds to electronics, from outdoor equipment to works of philosophy. But what unified these disparate offerings was a systems perspective — a conviction that understanding how things work enables you to make them work better.

Every issue of the Whole Earth Catalog featured a "Whole Systems" section inspired by the ideas of Buckminster Fuller, who coined the phrase "Spaceship Earth" and promoted the principle of "doing more with less." Fuller understood, as Brand came to understand, that efficiency in the use of resources amounts to a thermodynamic principle. One of my favorite quotes, from biophysicist Harold Morowitz, appears in the Last Whole Earth Catalog published January 1971: "the flow of energy through a system acts to organize the system."^[1]

Brand trained as a biologist at Stanford. His background explains his intuitive grasp of how living systems maintain themselves against dissolution. Plants tend the soil they grow in. Beavers maintain their dams and thereby the pond that protects them. Humans maintain their bodies, their vehicles, their homes, and their cities. Nearly everything worth maintaining, Brand observes, is nested in something larger even more worth maintaining. This ecological sensibility — the recognition that maintenance operates across scales, from the cellular to the civilizational — connects Brand's work to the physics of entropy that Goldstein draws on in The Mattering Instinct.

Both Brand and Goldstein, in other words, have spent their careers trying to understand human beings and society through similar frameworks. Brand approaches the problem more ecologically; Goldstein approaches it through physics and philosophy. But both recognize that ordered systems — whether individual organisms, artifacts, institutions, or civilizations — exist only through continuous work against thermodynamic dissolution.

The Maintenance Race

Maintenance opens with a thrilling story that illustrates this principle in human terms. In 1968, the Sunday Times of London sponsored the Golden Globe Race — the first solo, non-stop, round-the-world sailing competition. Nine sailors entered. Only one finished. The fates of the competitors, Brand argues, were determined not by courage or seamanship alone but by their approaches to maintenance.

Robin Knox-Johnston, the eventual winner, embodied what Brand calls the "whatever comes, deal with it" philosophy. His boat Suhaili was modest, his equipment adequate, his skills formidable. When problems arose — and they arose constantly during his 312 days at sea — Knox-Johnston repaired them. He found, remarkably, that "doing maintenance cures depression." The endless attention required to keep Suhaili functional gave Knox-Johnston's journey meaning. He was engaged in a mattering project, fighting entropy with every splice and patch.

Donald Crowhurst, by contrast, exemplified what Brand calls the "hope for the best" philosophy. Crowhurst was a brilliant inventor with perhaps the most technologically advanced boat in the race. But his optimism led him to defer maintenance, to trust that elegant solutions would present themselves when needed. They did not. His boat began failing almost immediately. Rather than face the reality of his situation, Crowhurst began falsifying his position reports, constructing an elaborate fiction of progress while drifting aimlessly in the South Atlantic. The contradiction between his public claims and private reality — between the ordered narrative he presented and the disordered truth of his situation — eventually destroyed him. His logbook became "the most completely documented account of a psychological breakdown." He took his own life.

Bernard Moitessier presents the most intriguing case. At 46, he was the most experienced sailor in the race, with years of vagabonding alone in small boats across the world's oceans. His philosophy was "prepare for the worst" — the inverse of Crowhurst's fatal optimism. Moitessier dealt with maintenance issues in advance. He kept his technology simple and his load light. His maxim was "a new boat every day" — preventive maintenance so thorough that each morning his vessel Joshua emerged as fresh as if newly launched. His decades at sea had taught him that if you don't fix something when you first see it beginning to fail, it will finish failing just when it is most dangerous and hardest to deal with.

Moitessier was on pace to win when something unexpected happened. Approaching England with victory assured, he launched a message by slingshot onto a passing tanker: "My intention is to continue the voyage, still nonstop, toward the Pacific Islands, where there is plenty of sun and more peace than in Europe... I am continuing nonstop because I am happy at sea, and perhaps because I want to save my soul." He sailed on to Tahiti, eventually setting the record for the longest non-stop voyage in a yacht — 37,455 miles over 303 days.

What can the mattering instinct tell us about these three sailors? Knox-Johnston found meaning in the endless repair work itself, in the direct confrontation with entropy that each fix represented. His mattering project was the race, and maintenance was his medium. Crowhurst's mattering project was his self-image as a brilliant inventor, but he refused to engage with the actual entropy of his situation, constructing instead a fantasy that could not survive contact with reality. Moitessier's mattering project transcended the race entirely. He had achieved what Brand calls an "undefinable state of grace" — a condition in which the maintenance of his vessel and his soul had become one continuous act. Winning the race would have disrupted this grace by subjecting him to attention he neither wanted nor needed. His mattering was self-sustaining.

In thermodynamic terms, Moitessier's approach can be understood as an explicit minimization of entropy in the system he had to maintain. By paring down his equipment to the bare minimum — less stuff means less stuff to maintain — he reduced the degrees of freedom in which disorder could accumulate. His steel hull with seven coats of paint resisted corrosion. His simple rigging required few adjustments. The entropy of the Moitessier-Joshua system remained low because he had designed it that way and found enormous satisfaction in merging with the system he designed, built, and maintained to bring him into harmony with the ocean. Winning the race would only have ended what had become for Moitessier his mattering project.^[2]

Three Maintenance Philosophies

Chapter 2 of Maintenance opens with a discussion of Robert Pirsig's celebrated Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a book that shows the mattering project that manifests in the careful attention required to keep a motorcycle running. Pirsig's narrator maintains his motorcycle; his friend John does not. The difference structures the entire book — the romantic versus classical worldviews, the chautauqua of ideas, the philosophy of Quality. Pirsig understood, as Brand understands, that the act of maintenance is not mere drudgery but a form of engagement with reality. "The cycle you're working on," Pirsig wrote, "is a cycle called yourself." It is no coincidence that Freeman Dyson appears in Brand's endnotes to this chapter — Dyson, who helped tame the infinities of quantum electrodynamics, would have appreciated Pirsig's attempt to reconcile technical and humanistic ways of knowing.^[3]

In Section 2 of Chapter 2, Brand extends this analysis to the automobile industry, where three radically different design-for-maintenance philosophies fought for dominance at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Electric cars came first, fully formed by the 1890s. They were noiseless, odorless, and easy to start and drive. Maintenance was simple — primarily battery care. Henry Ford's wife Clara loved her 1914 Detroit Electric and drove it well into the 1930s. But electrics cost $3,000 when a Model T cost $300, and their limited range confined them to cities. Gasoline got steadily cheaper thanks to petroleum discoveries. (And here I will note that a study of John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil would have provided more than enough material for its own Section of Chapter 2.) The electric self-starter eliminated the broken teeth and dislocated shoulders of hand-cranking. Paved roads enabled gas cars to speed into the countryside. Electric cars lost not because of maintenance issues but because the world changed around them.

The two philosophies that looked like winners were diametrically opposed. Rolls-Royce, established in 1906, catered to wealthy customers who expected perfection. Each car was built by craftsmen who filed and fitted every part to work smoothly with every other part in that specific vehicle. A Rolls-Royce required maintenance, but owners were not expected to perform it themselves. Professional mechanics at authorized service centers kept the vehicles running. The hidden umbrellas in Rolls-Royce doors, which Brand mentions, epitomize this philosophy: an elegant solution that owners need not think about until it rains.

Henry Ford, starting Model T production in 1908, embraced the opposite approach. At the Rolls-Royce factory, skilled workers used files to adjust every part for perfect fit. At Ford's factory, files were forbidden because anyone filing a part to improve it would slow or stop the assembly line. Parts arrived perfect enough to require no micro-adjustments. The worker's job was limited to assembly of a small portion of the car.

The entropic implications of these two approaches are striking. Each Rolls-Royce, considered in isolation, might be only slightly higher in entropy than a Model T — both are ordered assemblages of parts that function as vehicles. But consider the systems of production. At Rolls-Royce, each part in each car was slightly different from the corresponding part in every other car, custom-fitted by hand. The configuration space of "all the ways Rolls-Royce parts might be arranged" was enormous. At Ford, every Model T used identical, interchangeable parts. The configuration space was far more constrained. In Boltzmann's terms, Ford's system had far fewer microstates consistent with the macrostate "functioning automobile." Ford had designed a lower-entropy manufacturing process.

Remarkably, Henry Ford never learned the formal theory of thermodynamics in school. According to some (possibly exaggerated) accounts, he couldn't even read a blueprint. But he had an intuitive grasp of entropy from his deep experience with improving engine efficiency. He understood that his factories themsleves were big engines, and that efficiency meant minimizing waste. When Ford noticed that his sawmills generated massive piles of wood scrap, he partnered with his cousin-in-law E.G. Kingsford to compress the waste into charcoal briquettes — recapturing energy that would otherwise have dissipated uselessly into "disorder."

Ford did his customers a different favor than Rolls-Royce. He designed a car so cheap that anyone could buy it and so uncomplicated that anyone could learn to do the maintenance it required. Once customers took on that responsibility, they discovered that the power to maintain is the power to improve. Model Ts inspired user creativity at massive scale worldwide. Decades later, something similar occurred when user inventiveness was unleashed by personal computers, then by cell phones, then by the World Wide Web.

Manuals, Diderot, and the Compounding of Knowledge

Brand devotes considerable attention to manuals — those humble documents that transmit maintenance knowledge from experts to users. Here again, the connection to free energy emerges. A good manual enables a person to harness free energy more efficiently by learning from how others have done so in the past. Knowledge compounds. Each generation of maintainers builds on the insights of predecessors.

Brand traces this tradition to Denis Diderot's Encyclopédie, which appeared in France between 1751 and 1772. Diderot and his collaborators documented not only philosophical ideas but practical crafts — how to make things, how to keep them working, how to repair them when they failed. The Encyclopédie represented a vast effort to reduce the entropy of human knowledge by organizing it systematically. Information that had been scattered across guilds, workshops, and individual practitioners was collected, structured, and made available to anyone who could read.

Brand's discussion of dry stone walls, which appears near the end of his chapter on manuals, provides a perfect example of a system optimized for free energy efficiency. These walls, common throughout Britain and Ireland, use no mortar. Stones are selected and placed such that gravity and friction alone hold them together. A well-built dry stone wall can last centuries with minimal maintenance. The craft requires deep knowledge of stone shapes, weight distribution, and structural principles — knowledge transmitted through apprenticeship and practice.

A dry stone wall is a mattering project par excellence. The builder must attend carefully to each stone, understanding its unique shape and how it fits with its neighbors. The work is slow, demanding, physical. But the result — a structure that resists entropy through pure geometry, with no consumable inputs required — represents a kind of triumph over disorder. Brand's poetic reference to Gary Snyder captures this: "Lay down these words before your mind like rocks, placed solid."

Elon Musk's Five Commandments

The print version ofMaintenance includes material that doesn't appear to be available on the Books in Progress website, including [The Elon Musk digression is indeed available on the web here. -MFM] a digression on Elon Musk and a section presenting Musk's "five commandments" of manufacturing:

1. Question every requirement. Each should come with the name of the person who made it...
2. Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10 percent of them, then you didn't delete enough.
3. Simplify and optimize. This should come after step two. A common mistake is to simplify and optimize a part or a process that should not exist.
4. Accelerate cycle time. Every process can be speeded up. But only do this after you have followed the first three steps. I mistakenly spent a lot of time accelerating processes that I later realized should have been deleted.
5. Automate. That comes last. The big mistake in Nevada and at Fremont was that I began by trying to automate every step. We should have waited until all the requirements had been questioned, parts and processes deleted, and the bugs were shaken out.

These commandments are, in thermodynamic terms, a recipe for extremizing the free energy of a manufacturing system. Questioning requirements eliminates unnecessary constraints — degrees of freedom that contribute nothing to the final product but increase the ways things can go wrong. Deleting parts and processes directly reduces the configuration space of the system. Simplifying and optimizing ensures that remaining components extract maximum work from available free energy. Accelerating cycle time increases throughput per unit of energy input. Automating, done last after the system is already low-entropy, locks in the optimized configuration.

Musk's ordering is crucial. Automating first, before simplification, locks in high-entropy configurations. The Tesla factory learned this lesson the hard way. Brand quotes Musk acknowledging the mistake: "I mistakenly spent a lot of time accelerating processes that I later realized should have been deleted."

With this many examples already, I can leave the remaining stories in Maintenance as an exercise for the reader. But here's one more thermodynamic puzzle to consider: How many moving parts are there in an electric motor versus an internal combustion engine? An EV drivetrain has perhaps 20 moving parts; an ICE drivetrain has around 2,000. The entropy implications are obvious.

Communities of Practice

The material that feels most relevant to The Mattering Instinct appears in Chapter 3, "Communities of Practice," which is available on the Books in Progress website but not in the current print edition. It looks like these will form the beginning of a sequel to this first volume on Maintenance. It is beginning in Chapter 3 that Brand explores how maintenance knowledge lives not in manuals alone but in communities of practitioners who share skills, solve problems together, and pass traditions to newcomers. With this eye for ecology, what Brand recognizes in communities of practice is the potential for humans working together to extract free energy at a scale that would be inaccessible for any human acting independently. What he describes is what for me is a beautiful example of the mattering project of individuals weaving together into a mattering project that is greater than the linear sum of what each person contributes.

The title of Section 1 of Chapter 3 ("The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine") is a play on Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine,^[4] which documented Data General engineers building a new minicomputer in the late 1970s. But the story in Section 1 is about a different community of practice: Xerox copier technicians who solved problems through peer conversation and "war stories" — not corporate manuals. Their knowledge was social, built through shared diagnostic narratives. PARC researchers developed Eureka, a tip-sharing database, but headquarters resisted for years, viewing service as a cost center rather than a knowledge resource. Eureka eventually succeeded globally, proving technicians' collective expertise was invaluable. Yet Xerox never truly integrated this insight: technicians remained isolated from product design and sales. The company popularized "communities of practice" but failed to learn its own lesson—that maintainers constitute essential intelligence about customers and machines.

The Xerox technicians collectively minimized prediction error about machine states by pooling observations into shared generative models (war stories, tips) that predicted failure modes, while their repair actions constituted active inference—intervening to bring machines back to expected functional states. Xerox's documentation attempted top-down prediction but lacked the feedback loops; the community of practice closed that loop, continuously updating its distributed world-model through social circulation of surprising observations and their resolutions. The Community of Practice itself acted to extract free energy that no single technician working by themselves would have been capable of extracting.

Section 2 of Chapter 3, "Unending World" stands on its own in many ways. I won't even try to summarize or analyze it here. Go read it yourself. It's worth the time. It feels like a more direct manifestation of Brand's own mattering project than anything else in Maintenance thus far.

Section 3 of Chapter 3 tells the story of the village blacksmith, and in the process reveals something about human communities. Every settlement beyond the most primitive requires people who know how to maintain things — how to repair tools, mend structures, keep vehicles running. These maintainers form communities of practice that transmit knowledge across generations. A young person apprenticed to a blacksmith learns not only metallurgy but a way of being in the world, an orientation toward objects as things to be understood and cared for.

This orientation is, I could argue, a manifestation of the mattering instinct. The maintainer matters because the maintained thing matters, and the maintained thing matters because it enables activities that matter. The cascade runs in both directions: down from meaning to maintenance, up from maintenance to meaning. A well-maintained machine is not merely functional but right in some sense that transcends function — it embodies care, attention, and respect for the physical world. And the people who devote themselves to maintenance of both machines and communities are in some sense in harmony with the mattering instinct. But I will not as, Goldstein caution overgeneralize from here into asserting that this is the the best manifestation of the mattering instinct. I'm with Goldstein in believing that there isn't a best. They all matter. On the other hand, I feel confident asserting that this isn't the worst!

The Thermodynamics of Mattering

Let me attempt a broad synthesis. Goldstein argues in The Mattering Instinct that a life well-lived "joins forces with life in its resistance to entropy." A person who responds to the mattering instinct by creating order, by reducing chaos, by fostering consciousness and knowledge and beauty and love — such a person lives objectively well by a standard that transcends individual preference. Conversely, a person who increases entropy, provoking conflicts and confusion, spreading disease and disaster and death — such a person lives objectively badly.

Brand's Maintenance provides hundreds of pages of examples showing what this principle looks like in practice. The sailor who maintains his vessel with daily care resists entropy and survives. The inventor who hopes for the best succumbs to disorder and dies. The manufacturer who designs for interchangeable parts creates a low-entropy system that scales. The craftsman who files each piece by hand creates beauty but not abundance.

What emerges is a picture of maintenance as mattering made concrete. The mattering instinct, in Goldstein's account, drives us to deserve the attention we must give our own lives. Maintenance is one way — an excellent way — of enacting that drive. When I maintain something, I declare through action that it matters, that its continued existence is worth my effort. When I maintain myself — "brushing the damn teeth, changing the damn oil" — I declare that I matter, that my continued existence is worth the trouble.

Maintenance is a direct reduction in entropy within the physical world. Entropy accumulates at every scale. The sailor must attend to his rigging and his hull and his provisions and his own body. The manufacturer must attend to parts and processes and workers and supply chains. Civilization must attend to infrastructure and institutions and knowledge and values. At each scale, maintenance extracts finite, meaningful function from a world that naturally tends toward disorder.

This is why maintenance feels like mattering. It is mattering — the physical instantiation of our drive to create and preserve order against entropy's relentless flow.

Conclusion

I began by suggesting that Maintenance: of Everything is an engineer's version of The Mattering Instinct. Having traced the connections, I believe we can ask whether the relationship might not be even deeper than that. Aren't Brand and Goldstein writing about the same phenomenon from different but complementary perspectives? Goldstein gives us the physics and psychology of mattering — the thermodynamic imperative, the recursive self-model, the varieties of heroic striving. Brand gives us the practice — the daily work, the tools and techniques, the communities that sustain skilled attention across generations.

Together, these books suggest that the meaning of life is not separate from the maintenance of life. We matter by maintaining what matters. We resist entropy not as a metaphor but as a physical reality. The universe tends toward disorder; we tend toward order; the conflict between these tendencies is the drama of existence.

Brand closes his introduction with an invitation: "Using maintenance as a frame of reference is — I hope to show — a fruitful way to rethink all manner of things." He is right. And rethinking maintenance through the lens of the mattering instinct makes it even more fruitful. We are not merely keeping things running. We are fighting for meaning in a universe that offers none by default. We are mattering.

As I noted in my review of The Mattering Instinct, I am not yet convinced that we can or should aspire to a society that perfectly eliminates entropy. Entropy may be the tax we pay for entanglement with each other. So long as we need connection, we are destined to pay in entropy for our entanglements. But the work of maintenance — the daily, unglamorous, essential work of keeping things going — represents our best response to this condition. We cannot escape entropy, but we can fight it. And in the fighting, we matter.

Stewart Brand's Maintenance: of Everything is available from Stripe Press in print and from the Books in Progress website as an evolving online document. The companion review of Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's The Mattering Instinct can be found here.

---

1. Biologist Martin Picard is at least a spiritual heir to Morowitz, doing amazing work fleshing this concept through study of mitochondria in human biology. ↩︎

2. I still haven't read Moitessier's memoir, The Long Way, which has been on my list since completing this chapter of Maintenance, but will update this footnote with any interesting evidence either way when I do. ↩︎

3. Is it coincidence that Freeman Dyson was one of three physicists who shared a Nobel Prize for developing renormalization techniques? Note, however, that the renormalization techniques pioneered by Feynman, Schwinger, and Dyson to produce quantum electrodynamic theory were a predecessor to the renormalization group theory not fully developed until later in work by Gell-Man, Low, Kadanoff, and Wilson, among others. ↩︎

4. Since he was also the author of the late Paul Farmer's biography Mountains Beyond Mountains, I cannot resist pointing to that book for anybody interested in what the peaks of the mattering instinct look like for a doctor who is also a heroic striver. Paul Farmer was a saint and if you don't know who he is, please read this biography and consider donating to Partners in Health. (I receive no compensation for referring you to them, and have myself been a donor to them for many years.) I miss Paul Farmer in the same way I miss Fred Rogers. When we lose folks like them, it feels like a light going out forever. ↩︎