Stewart Brand on How Progress Happens

In 1968, Stewart Brand, a young hippie who had studied biology at Stanford, co-created the Whole Earth Catalog, a “do-everything-yourself compendium” that became a touchstone for both Bay Area counterculture and, eventually, Silicon Valley technologists. “Maintenance: Of Everything,” his new book, is a kind of spiritual descendant of the Catalog—a celebration of the practice of learning how things work and how to fix them. In the book, the first in a planned series, Brand argues that maintenance should be seen not as an “unrewarding chore” but as an essential driver of technological and scientific progress. Not long ago, he joined us to discuss a few books that he drew on. His remarks have been edited and condensed.

The Perfectionists

by Simon Winchester

One of the things that made it so fun to research my book was the way that it kept leading me to interesting digressions. One of those digressions was the history of interchangeable parts, which I embarked upon when I was writing about vehicles, and specifically about Henry Ford’s Model T—an eminently maintainable car, whose manufacture depended on its parts being truly interchangeable.

It turns out that the story of interchangeable parts is tied up with military innovation. In the late eighteenth century, English and French engineers had invented new ways of casting cannons that made them more uniform and more accurate. Applying that technique to James Watt’s steam engines made them efficient for the first time. The Industrial Revolution took off from there. Then the French started to standardize their muskets. At that time, muskets were all made by gunsmiths, and the parts of one couldn’t fit another—if a soldier’s firearm broke on the battlefield, he couldn’t fix it himself. A French gunsmith named Honoré Blanc devised a way to make each part of a gun to a standard model. When Thomas Jefferson, who served as the minister to France after the Revolutionary War, saw the interchangeable parts being deployed there, he became a promoter of them. That went on to influence the way that manufactured products were made in the U.S., and helped the country take the lead in the Industrial Revolution.

Winchester’s book really shows how precision helps to drive progress. For Watt, a tolerance of one-tenth of an inch made his steam engines efficient. In Ford’s day, engineers and manufacturers could be precise at the level of a millionth of an inch. Today, chip fabricators have gotten things down to five nanometres. And, as the saying goes, a nanometre is to a tennis ball as a tennis ball is to the whole earth.

The Scottish Enlightenment

by Arthur Herman

At another point in my research for the book, I was looking at early versions of what might be called “manuals,” like Diderot’s Encyclopédie, which consists of hundreds of gorgeous illustrations and descriptions of how all the trades in France of that time worked. It’s a real display of the dignity of what we’d call blue-collar skills, and it shows how much was owed to them. Diderot was fierce about that, but with the end of the French Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie completely fell away.

In Scotland, though, people were paying attention to it, and at a time when they were starting their own—the Encyclopædia Britannica. That became a huge event. It was part of a boom in rational discourse in Scotland. Herman’s book is a great account of this period of history, and maybe the best book about that particular Enlightenment that I have read.

Even though Scotland was one of the poorest countries in Western Europe, by the late sixteen-hundreds, Herman writes, it had become “Europe’s first modern literate society.” Scotland produced luminaries like David Hume, Adam Smith, James Watt, James Hutton, and Joseph Black. Institutions like the Encyclopædia Britannica speak to the spirit that helped create an environment where intellectuals like them could flourish.

The Beginning of Infinity

by David Deutsch

This is a cosmically optimistic book. Deutsch basically says that we’re still in the Enlightenment discussed in Herman’s history. That’s because we live in a culture where we figure that problems are solvable, but then, when we discover explanations, we realize that there are always more problems. And we look for what he calls “good explanations,” which are explanations that open up more things you can do with your understanding, with your knowledge. For example, we had Newton, who gave us a way to understand gravity—but then that wasn’t good enough, there were still some things that didn’t fit, so we got to Einstein, who came up with space-time and all of that. This process goes on.

This book is very much in favor with tech people in the Bay Area. One of the peculiarities of this place, ever since the Gold Rush, is a kind of generalized optimism—an expectation that when you fail at something, that doesn’t doom your career. In fact, it may be instructive for the next thing. It’s a “just try stuff” mentality. So when someone like Deutsch, who is a quantum physicist at Oxford, says that the many universes we occupy can basically be bent toward improvement, toward potentially infinite progress, and that’s the way to think about things—of course, that’s going to be pretty welcome here.