Stewart Brand, Silicon Valley’s Favorite Prophet, on Life’s Most Important Principle
About this episode
Brand, a prophet of Silicon Valley since the 1960s counterculture, defends maintenance as life's most important principle: everything degrades, and the work of caring for, repairing, and tending systems matters more than novelty. He traces the ethos from the Whole Earth Catalog through The WELL and the Long Now Foundation to his new book 'Maintenance: Of Everything,' arguing that maintenance is a kind of contemplative practice. The conversation touches on terraforming Mars — Brand would let Elon Musk try, since Earthly preservation norms do not apply there — the dangers of engineered pandemics and gain-of-function research, and the tech industry's 'move fast' ethos, which he contrasts with the deliberate pace of the Long Now. On AI he is measured: intrigued by large language models but skeptical of apocalyptic timelines, he sees superintelligence as still distant and the more immediate risk being concentrated corporate and state power over attention and information.