341 | Stewart Brand on Maintenance as an Organizing Principle
episode
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
1h 12m
3 speakers
8 chapters
transcribed
Transcript
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. I don't know if you know, but recently the Golden Globes happened. This is one of those award shows where they give prizes to movie stars and TV stars and things like that. But they had a new category at the Golden Globes this year, Best Podcast. The Mindscape podcast did not win Best Podcast. It was not nominated. It was probably not even noticed by the people who did the nominating and deciding who was going to be on the list. You know, what can we say? Our civilization continues to let me down in various ways. But I can't complain too much. The winner of Best Podcast this year was Amy Poehler, who won for her podcast Good Hang with Amy Poehler, which I think I've mentioned previously.
And it's a good podcast. All of the people who actually were nominated, entertainers, comedians, and whatever, not a lot of natural philosophers were represented. But I bring this up not just because I want to put the idea in the minds of anyone listening that maybe I should be nominated in the future, but there was an episode of Good Hang with Amy Poehler featuring Kate McKinnon. I haven't actually heard this episode, but Jennifer, my wife, has heard it. I've heard other episodes. And one of the things that happened in the interview with Kate McKinnon is that she expressed her enthusiasm for a YouTube channel by an Australian guy named Bruce the Plumber. And the YouTube channel is called Drain Cleaning Australia.
Yes, you heard that correctly. It's all about cleaning clogged drains. Bruce the Plumber, who in a hilariously cartoonish, over-the-top Australian accent, goes to various kitchens and restaurants and things like that and finds clogs and cleans grease traps and basically pulls out these ugly messes that have accumulated over the years in the pipes. You might think... This is somewhat of a niche kind of activity to have as a popular YouTube channel, but it's not just Kate McKinnon's favorite. Every one of these videos that he puts up gets millions of hits. They are intrinsically interesting to, I guess, a whole bunch of people. And that does warm my heart because maintenance of our world is kind of important, right?
Fixing things is something that has an endless fascination for a lot of people. Of course, it also has a repulsion for a lot of people. Plenty of people don't have anything to do. with doing important maintenance. That's why these drains get clogged in the first place. But you know, we live in a society that is increasingly interconnected, complicated, hierarchical, networked in various ways. There's a lot of infrastructure, a lot of stuff that needs to be kept up from our cars to our kitchens to our houses to our electronic infrastructure through which you're listening to this podcast right now. And there's just a simple fact about the laws of nature and the second law of thermodynamics that things are going to break.
There's a lot more ways to be broken than to be in good working order. And what we do to keep things from breaking is we maintain them in various ways. You can think of the act of maintenance as generating entropy somewhere in the universe in the service of lowering it somewhere else, lowering it either in some mechanical thing or some electronic thing or in a biological thing. Biology can be thought of as a set of systems that have solved the problem of self-maintenance, at least to some accuracy. But despite the importance of maintenance for living in a world with the second law of thermodynamics, as a subject, we all know about it, but we don't sort of take it as a particular theme of interest in its own right.
Maybe drain cleaning or fixing your car or something like that is of interest, but the general idea aspect of maintenance overall is not given a lot of attention. It should be because the world is becoming more complicated. And there's even sort of flashpoints of controversy. Increasingly, various companies don't want to let you fix their stuff. They want to make it unfixable.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–17:39
2
How does maintenance relate to the Second Law of Thermodynamics?
17:39–24:10
3
What are the challenges of modern maintenance in technology?
24:10–25:25
4
How does the concept of 'right to repair' impact maintenance practices?
25:25–26:54
5
What is the significance of Stewart Brand's book on maintenance?
26:54–37:57
6
How does maintenance influence cultural practices and societal resilience?
37:57–41:09
7
What role does maintenance play in the sustainability of civilization?
41:09–45:02
8
What optimistic perspectives on maintenance does Stewart Brand offer?
45:02–1:12:16
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
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364 | Stuart Firestein on How Science Relies on Ignorance and Failure