Maintenance Is a First Principle
Stewart Brand's new book advances a simple thesis: how we care for our stuff determines our fate.
The Whole Earth Catalog publisher and Long Now Foundation founder has written an authoritative treatment of an elemental idea. In this letter we draw out what it means for product, service, and business model strategy.
Maintenance: Of Everything—Part One opens with a quote from Pete Seeger:
“You should consider that the essential art of civilization is maintenance.”
Brand presents his thesis as a paradox.
"Maintenance is absolutely necessary and maintenance is optional."
The stakes are high. “[Maintenance] is easy to put off, yet it has to be done. Defer now, regret later. Neglect kills."
He resolves this paradox with what he refers to as a “softening” of perspective.
"Let 'maintenance' mean the whole grand process [my emphasis] of keeping a thing going. From that perspective, occasional repair is part of the process. Close monitoring is part of the process. Changing the oil is part of the process. Eventually replacing the whole thing is part of the process."
Circularity demands we account for (and promote) the whole grand process.
The Paradox Persists by Design
How does something "absolutely necessary" remain "optional"?
Because it’s compulsory under the linear economy.
In a linear model, value is captured at the point of sale. What happens after—use, care, repair, disposal—belongs to someone else: the customer, or the repair shop, or the landfill, or the atmosphere.
That is the business model.
As industries "mature," any necessary thing that cannot be directly monetized gets externalized. The return on maintenance is indirect. It requires ongoing management. It incurs costs without generating immediate results.
So it gets pushed outside the model's boundary.
Deferred maintenance is an externality. And the circular economy abhors externalities.
Maintenance Conserves
Brand cites the work of two contemporary philosophers who share a common medium: motorcycle maintenance.
Robert Pirsig rode his motorcycle across America and wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Observes Brand: "He had to acquire a certain nondivided relationship between mechanic and motorcycle, a craftsmanlike feeling for the work." The essence of that relationship, Pirsig found, is caring.
Matthew Crawford left a think tank to open a motorcycle repair shop and wrote Shop Class as Soulcraft. His insight was the same. Thinking and making, using and maintaining—these are not separate activities. They are one activity, artificially divided.
Both men found joy by internalizing the process of maintenance.
Brand finds a commonality in their approach: "Tidiness, like cleanliness, is a social signal, as much to oneself as to others. It's visible evidence that something is respected."
Marie Kondo would say that the signal also moves in another direction: to and from the object itself.
She points out that the energy between owner and beloved object is joy. But joy requires relationship. And relationship requires the whole grand process—not a fragment of it.
The linear economy promises convenience by externalizing maintenance. What it delivers is alienation. From our objects. From the systems that produce them. From the consequences of their disposal.
The Progression
Brand traces the history of vehicle maintenance from Rolls-Royce to Tesla. The progression is revealing:
Object. Rolls-Royce built machines of such craftsmanship that only specialists could maintain them. The relationship was between artisan and artifact. Beautiful, but unscalable.
Components. Ford's Model T introduced interchangeable parts. Maintenance became democratized. Anyone with a wrench could replace what broke. An ecosystem grew around the platform—including the hot rod culture that transformed the act of repair into an expression of joyful self-reliance.
System. Tesla integrated software and hardware into a unified whole. Maintenance became invisible: over-the-air updates, predictive diagnostics, data-driven optimization. Brand notes that by 2011, the auto industry was "enormous, intensely competitive, and asleep." Car manufacturing had become "highly efficient and perfectionist but also conservative." Sound familiar?
Relationship. Brand’s progression can be extended further. Consider analyst Ben Thompson’s account of his first Waymo ride. The car greeted him by name. It explained the process. It dropped him off with a cheery "Happy Friday."
"I felt a twinge of—what is this?!—sadness as it drove away," Thompson wrote. "I felt like I had just made a new friend."
Thompson didn't maintain the Waymo. He didn't own it. Yet the experience of it filled him with joy. Someone, somewhere, had designed Waymo’s whole grand process with care. The maintenance was invisible, but its effects were palpable: the car worked, it was clean, it remembered him.
The Relationship stage separates the act of maintenance from the experience of its benefits. But it preserves the emotional resonance.
The Loop Must Close
Here is where circular economy thinking completes the progression.
Pirsig, Crawford, and Brand show that relationship comes from engaging with the whole grand process. But the answer is not simply "more maintenance." That would be ideology, not strategy. Not to mention laborious.
The answer is that maintenance must be designed from the beginning—as a first-class citizen in product strategy, service strategy, and business model strategy.
Lean manufacturing's limitation was not its principles. It was its boundaries. Lean optimized brilliantly within factory walls, value chains narrowly defined. But those walls permitted everything outside them to be someone else's problem. Lean could coexist with planned obsolescence because end-of-life was beyond its jurisdiction.
Circular economy extends the jurisdiction. The value chain stretches far enough—upstream to design, downstream to end-of-use—that nothing gets externalized. When you cannot push maintenance outside the model, you must design for it from the start.
The right maintenance posture depends on what the object calls for. A cast iron skillet calls for seasoning. A Waymo calls for fleet operations. The burden may be high or nearly zero. What matters is that the choice is deliberate. The value is captured or shared fairly. And the relationship remains intact.
Your view on maintenance will determine how much circularity potential exists in your enterprise.
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