An encouraging blurb from Brand was enough to send me in search of A Pattern Language, Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics, and many other revelatory reads. Just browsing through the Catalog made me feel like a generalist, and I identified with its charismatic editor, who signed his comments with the initials “SB.”When I looked into Brand himself, I grew even more intrigued. Raised and educated in the establishment—Phillips Exeter Academy, Stanford, a stint in the Army—he found an early spiritual home with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, and even had a memorable cameo in Tom Wolfe’s tour of 1960s psychedelia, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Later, he pivoted toward technological prophets such as Fuller, from whom he harvested a key insight: “Changing human nature is hard, and when you try, you mostly fail, and it’s discouraging. Changing tools and technology is relatively easy.” This message resonated powerfully with the founders of Silicon Valley, including Steve Jobs, who described the Catalog as “one of the bibles of my generation.”Over the following decades, Brand devoted more of his energy to nonliterary pursuits, bouncing between corporate-consulting gigs and unrealized dream projects such as cloning the woolly mammoth. His latest book, Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One, allows the author, now 87, to come full circle.

It’s a compact, beautifully illustrated hardcover, rather than a grungy oversize paperback, but its mosaic of images and excerpts evokes the same sense of serendipity and curation that I loved in the Catalog. The new book’s most intriguing recommendation, Dry Stone Walls, by the Swiss Environmental Action Foundation (“Its principles apply metaphorically to anything that has to hold itself together—a poem, a theory, a software program”), is out of print and hard to find, but I plan to get my hands on The Long Way, by Bernard Moitessier, and Truck, by John Jerome, as soon as I possibly can.Unlike its loose and baggy predecessor, the new compendium is built around a single goal: to promote the unglamorous act of maintenance, or “the whole grand process of keeping a thing going.” It also exposes elements of the author’s personality—which has always been more complicated than most readers have known—that were obscured by the Catalog’s embarrassment of riches.

To the extent that Brand intends to fascinate us with artifacts such as the Johansson gauge blocks, he succeeds magnificently. “What can be learned,” he wonders, “if you think about all the varieties of maintenance at the same time?” He doesn’t quite live up to the lofty premise of this question—the book is full of obvious gaps—but it’s only Part One, after all, and Brand teases a series of sequels that will cover “system repair, cities, software, and the planet.”Maintenance should represent a victory lap for a visionary who has influenced our culture profoundly. Unfortunately, I have grave misgivings about any future installments.

The first warning sign appears in the table of contents, which features five “digressions,” including one simply titled “Elon Musk.” Flip to that essay and you’ll come across these lines: “Through Tesla and SpaceX, Musk initiated and directly led a new, accelerated regime in climate-friendly electric vehicles and a new, accelerated regime in providing access to Earth orbit. With the success of these projects, Musk may have done more practical world saving than any other business leader of his time.”[Read: The decline and fall of Elon Musk]I suspect that I won’t be the only reader surprised to find Musk praised so prominently in a book about nurturing the “maintenance mind.” Musk may have a knack for building hardware from the ground up, but when it comes to what Brand describes as the “repetitive, boring, often frustrating” work of maintaining existing legacy systems, I can hardly think of a less promising role model than the man who was photographed brandishing a chainsaw as the unofficial head of the Department of Government Efficiency.

DOGE’s reckless campaign to slash spending, by many accounts, actually cost taxpayers billions. Brand never mentions any of this, even when—borrowing a term from medicine—he warns, elsewhere in the book, of “iatrogenic” disruptions, in which “a sloppy attempt to fix a problem makes the problem worse or adds a new one.”Instead of exploring these contradictions, Brand devotes a long, glowing section to the Tesla sedan that he calls “the ultimate in irresistible cool.” At one point, he confesses, “I won’t try to write about the ongoing indu