Stewart Brand's New Chapter Revisits Julian Orr's Xerox Technician Study
dreamwieber · x · 2026-09-25
Stewart Brand shares a new draft chapter from his Maintenance book, recounting anthropologist Julian Orr's 1979 Xerox PARC study of photocopier technicians — showing how their repair knowledge was fundamentally social, and how Xerox's institutionalized wrong theory of their work resisted change. Brand also reveals he once called Xerox the "Shy Corporation" after it banned reprints of his Rolling Stone piece.
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