Clock of the Long Now
by Stewart Brand · 1 Jan 1999 · 194pp · 49,310 words
Published by Basic Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group Copyright © 1999 by Stewart Brand All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations
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SCIENCE THE LONG VIEW GENERATIONS SUSTAINED ENDEAVOR THE INFINITE GAME APPENDIX: ENGAGING CLOCK/LIBRARY AFTERWORD: JANUARY 02000 Notes Recommended Bibliography Acknowledgments Index Other Works by Stewart Brand NOTIONAL CLOCK Time and Responsibility. What a prime subject for vapid truisms and gaseous generalities adding up to the world’s most boring sermon. To
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there. Who is “we”? The Long Now Foundation was established in 1996 to foster long-term responsibility. The founding board is Daniel Hillis (co-chair), Stewart Brand (co-chair), Kevin Kelly, Douglas Carlston, Peter Schwartz, Brian Eno, Paul Saffo, Mitchell Kapor, and Esther Dyson. Hillis created Thinking Machines Inc. and its supercomputer
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touch. Long Now’s executive director, Alexander Rose, can be contacted by E-mail at zander@longnow.org, and I am at sb@gbn.org. —Stewart Brand January 01999 The first working prototype of the 10,000-year Clock as it appeared on December 31, 01999, to bong in the new millennium
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, Mastering the Infinite Game (Oxford, UK: Capstone, 1997). 1:62 “You can always improve things as long as you’re prepared to wait.” Interview by Stewart Brand, “Freeman Dyson’s Brain,” Wired (February 1998), p. 173. 1:62 Another island, Visingsö, in the Swedish lake Vättern, has a gorgeous mature oak forest
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Information Institute, and The Long Now Foundation. Participants were Peter Lyman, Howard Besser, Danny Hillis, Brewster Kahle, Jaron Lanier, Doug Carlston, Kevin Kelly, Brian Eno, Stewart Brand, Margaret MacLean, and Ben Davis. A book of the proceedings is available from The Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90049. 3
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out the 10,000-year perspective, the remainder of this book employs the five-figure year dates proposed in the previous chapter. OTHER WORKS BY STEWART BRAND: Whole Earth Catalog Two Cybernetic Frontiers The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built
Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto
by Stewart Brand · 15 Mar 2009 · 422pp · 113,525 words
• - Gene Dreams • 7 • - Romantics, Scientists, Engineers • 8 • - It’s All Gardening • 9 • - Planet Craft AFTERWORD RECOMMENDED READING Acknowledgements INDEX Praise for Whole Earth Discipline by Stewart Brand “If Mr. Brand is right, maybe some greens will rediscover the enthusiasm for technology expressed in his famous line at the start of The Whole
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cry out for debate, no one has brought more breadth, clarity, and cogency to bear on the biggest issue of our time.” —David Stipp, Fortune “Stewart Brand defines iconoclastic, and has now raised the bar with the most important work of his lifetime, likely one of the most original and important books
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who embraces science as an essential tool for tackling the world’s environ- mental woes. . . . Now the new style of environmentalism has a worthy prophet, Stewart Brand, and a bible, Whole Earth Discipline. . . . You do not have to agree with Brand to enjoy [the book]. . . . Overall the writing is so entertaining and
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, but this wise book is a great start.” —Jon Turney, The Guardian (London) “This is a short course on how to change your mind intelligently. Stewart Brand is the master guru of following the early warning signals of first adopters and the rough edges of science wherever it might lead. In this
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writes, it is likely to see that many of its most cherished notions are inconsistent with reality.” —Mark Williams, Technology Review “It’s not what Stewart Brand says that is important (and there is quite a bit I disagree with in the book). It is the open-minded and pragmatic way that
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it makes its statements in a highly direct controversial fashion.” —David Tribe, Biofortified.org “I adored this book. Even the few parts I disagreed with. Stewart Brand’s mind is exhilaratingly clear, rational, and passionate. His pen is, too.” —Matt Ridley, author of Genome and Nature Via Nuture “On the first page
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of this landmark book, the lateral-thinking, San Francisco tugboat-based ecologist Stewart Brand sums up his philosophy in a single line: ‘We are as gods and HAVE to get good at it.’ It’s a staggeringly arrogant statement
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ecological problems we face today, and the utter inability of faith-based environmentalism to fix them.” —Maywa Montenegro, Seed “Yet again, in a single book Stewart Brand provides us a clear catalog of everything important on Earth.” —Alan Weisman, author of The World Without Us “In these pages
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, Stewart Brand lays out a mind-blowing vision for the planet’s salvation: migration to the cities, power generated by mini-nuclear reactors, healthier crops through genetic
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may be the greatest challenge of our time.” —Eric Drexler, Metamodern.com “After spreading the gospel of self-sufficiency with his inimitable Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand now embraces science and engineering as the disciplines that will see us through the fast approaching crisis of global warming. Brand’s new book is
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are going to have to grow up. This book should help get them out of the nursery.” —Bryan Appleyard, Literary Review (UK) “The brilliantly original Stewart Brand, in his new book Whole Earth Discipline, has a whole chapter on the environmental movment’s age-old divide between the ‘romantics’ and the ‘scientists
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? We’d really best get started.” —Scott Walker, Orion “Orthodoxy is the enemy of invention. Despair an insult to the imagination. In this extraordinary manifesto, Stewart Brand charts a way forward that shatters conventional thinking, and yet leaves one brimming with hope. It has been years since I have read a book
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Hartlaub, San Francisco Chronicle “Cities are green. Nuclear energy is green. Genetic engineering is green. Don’t believe it? Read the book and be convinced. Stewart Brand’s pragmatism could save the planet and us.” —Sir Gordon Conway, author of The Doubly Green Revolution “This year’s must-read for anyone who
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considers himself an open-minded green.” —Mark Lynas, author of Six Degrees, in The New Statesman PENGUIN BOOKS WHOLE EARTH DISCIPLINE Stewart Brand trained originally as an ecologist. His legendary Whole Earth Catalog (1968-1985) won the National Book Award in 1972. Brand, whose previous books include The
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United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2009 Published in Penguin Books with a new afterword 2010 Copyright © Stewart Brand, 2009, 2010 All rights reserved Portions of Chapters 2 and 3 appeared as “City Planet” in Strategy + Business, Spring 2006. Excerpt from “A Masque of
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(2004), had read Holdren’s report closely, so when he was asked by an audience member at a San Francisco talk if he “agreed with Stewart Brand in supporting the revival of nuclear,” he surprised the audience and me by saying yes: “To deal with our energy problems we need everything available
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on my nuclear chapter on the day of the book’s publication with a 20,000-word critique titled “Four Nuclear Myths: A Commentary on Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline and on Similar Writings,” plus a summary at Grist.org. You can download the paper from Rocky Mountain Institute. It suffers
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them. As history proceeds, you can watch me be wrong, or maybe even right. Better still, post your own predictions for the judgment of history. —Stewart Brand April 2009 INDEX Abahlali baseMjondolo “Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security, An” (Schwartz and Randall) “Absence of Detectable Transgenes
From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
by Fred Turner · 31 Aug 2006 · 339pp · 57,031 words
. 5. Computer networks—Social aspects. 6. Subculture— California—San Francisco—History—20th century. 7. Technology—Social aspects— California, Northern. 8. Whole earth catalog. I. Title: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth network, and the rise of digital utopianism. II. Title. QA76.9.C66T875 2006 303.4833 — dc22 2005034149 The paper used in
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Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. vii The Shifting Politics of the Computational Metaphor Stewart Brand Meets the Cybernetic Counterculture The Whole Earth Catalog as Information Technology Taking the Whole Earth Digital Virtuality and Community on the WELL Networking the New
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a number of people and institutions for permission to quote conversations and to reprint previously published material. I conducted all interviews myself. All quotations from Stewart Brand’s personal papers appear with his permission and courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries. All quotations from materials in the Whole
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them? To answer these questions, this book traces the previously untold history of an extraordinarily influential group of San Francisco Bay area journalists and entrepreneurs: Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network. Between the late 1960s and the late 1990s, Brand assembled a network of people and publications that together brokered a
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single, interlinked pattern of information was deeply comforting: in the invisible play of information, many thought they could see the possibility of global harmony. To Stewart Brand and later to other members of the Whole Earth group, cybernetics also presented a set of social and rhetorical resources for entrepreneurship. In the early
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, technology, or the state. Rather, it demonstrates that the New Communalist wing of the counterculture embraced those forces early on and that in subsequent years, Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network continued to provide the intellectual and practical contexts within which members of the two worlds could come together and legitimate
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decentralized, systems-oriented forms of thought then occurring at the center of the scientific establishment. Writing in the Hudson Review at about the time that Stewart Brand was making his weekend forays into Manhattan, for example, art critic and professor Leonard B. Meyer described this movement and its effects on American art
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. In 1963, for instance, Stern developed a project called “Verbal American Landscape,” in which three slide projectors showed, in random sequence, photographs—many taken by Stewart Brand— of individual words found on road signs and billboards. Viewers were left to piece the words together into meanings of their own. Gradually “Verbal American
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adult world. No one promoted this doctrine more fervently than the technocratic polymath Buckminster Fuller. Architect, designer, and traveling speechmaker, Fuller became an inspiration to Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth network, and the New Communalist movement as a whole across the 1960s. The geodesic domes Fuller patented soon after World War II
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technologies were deployed in everyday life. In a 1963 volume called Ideas and Integrities, a book that would have a strong impact on USCO and Stewart Brand, Fuller named this individual the “Comprehensive Designer.”29 According to Fuller, the Comprehensive Designer would not be another specialist, but would instead stand outside the
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Earth Catalog. As Theodore Roszak has suggested, Portola’s efforts were all designed “to scale-down, democratize, and humanize our hypertrophic technological society.”2 When Stewart Brand joined, much of Portola’s energy was directed toward providing computer education in the schools and developing simulation games for the classroom. The person leading
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operation could even begin to define.”5 Nearly forty years later, that law looks less like an abstract principle of metaphysics than the product of Stewart Brand’s network entrepreneurship and the convergence of systems theory and New Communalist politics that it facilitated. At one level, Brand’s migrations throughout [ 72 ] Chapter
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’s contents and shaped the reader’s role in regard to those contents. Coupled to the New Communalist critique of hierarchical politics, it also provided Stewart Brand with a theory of editorial process and management practice that was particularly well suited to the coordination of multiple communities. Married to the frontier rhetoric
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Catalog presented an informational genre—the network forum—that exemplified that vision. The network forum in turn dramatically amplified the social legitimacy of its founder, Stewart Brand. By 1971 he had been profiled in Time magazine, lauded at the National Book Awards, and celebrated nationwide as a socio-technical visionary. Like P
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] Chapter 4 counterculture gave rise to personal computing and computer networking obscures the breadth and complexity of the actual encounter between the two worlds. As Stewart Brand’s migrations across the 1960s suggest, New Communalistvisionsofconsciousnessandcommunityhadbecomeentangledwith the cybernetic theories and interdisciplinary practices of high-technology research long before computers were miniaturized or widely
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other, clustered around the Catalog and the countercultural communities it served, focused on the pursuit of individual and collective transformation in a New Communalist vein. Stewart Brand positioned himself between these worlds and, in a variety of ways, brokered their encounter. In the second phase, which spanned the middle of the 1970s
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undermine bureaucracies and to bring about both a more whole individual and a more flexible, playful social world. Even before minicomputers had become widely available, Stewart Brand had helped both their designers and their future users imagine them as “personal” technologies. The End of Self-Sufficiency and the Rise of Coevolution By
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when sharing products and processes improved profits for all. By the mid-1980s, however, the finances of computer and software development had changed radically. As Stewart Brand pointed out, in what would soon become a famous formulation, information-based products embodied an economic paradox. “On the one hand,” he said, “information wants
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another theme as well, however. Several either quoted or paraphrased Ted Nelson’s exclamation “This is the Woodstock of the computer elite!”68 One listed Stewart Brand among the “luminaries of the personal computer ‘revolution.’” Another described Brand as a “long-time supporter of hackers.”69 Quietly, almost without noticing it, the
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forward a set of ideals, management strategies, and interpersonal networks first formulated in and around the Whole Earth Catalog. Within the WELL’s electronic confines, Stewart Brand brought together former counterculturalists, hackers, and journalists—the same groups he had lately convened at Fort Cronkhite and at the offices of the Whole Earth
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“network members.” These members had been brought together over a number of years through the entrepreneurial bridging of structural holes by the principals, particularly by Stewart Brand. Early members, such as Douglas Engelbart, Mary Catherine Bateson, biologist Lynn Margulis, and ecologist Peter Warshall, represented Brand’s time at the Whole Earth Catalog
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the housing industry and other ecosystems affecting Senco.” For executives like Hoyt, the systems-oriented rhetoric of complexity theory, buttressed by the cultural legitimacy of Stewart Brand, offered a compelling framework within which to understand the topsy-turvy economy of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Even at firms with more skeptical
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reintegration with nature, into a celebration of information technology, post-Fordist production practices, and the entrepreneurial engineers, executives, and scientists who watched over both. Like Stewart Brand and his colleagues at the Global Business Network (of which Kelly was now a member), Kelly had created a series of overlapping networks: social, technological
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in the 1990s. Rather, this particular version of what Kevin Kelly called the “computational metaphor” had been coming together for decades. Since the late 1960s, Stewart Brand and others associated with various Whole Earth publications had been linking information technologies to a New Communalist politics of personal and collective liberation. On the
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Gingrich’s portrait graced the cover of Wired, Dyson and Gilder returned to the Aspen conference, taking with them John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, and Stewart Brand, as well as bionomist Michael Rothschild and representatives from Microsoft, America Online, and Sun Microsystems. In keeping with the Whole Earth’s editorial tradition, Wired
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culture and rhetoric of collaborative cold war research had become standard features of corporate and governmental life, and they remain so today. In that sense, Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network not only reconfigured the cultural status of information and information technologies as they moved from the government-funded, military-industrial
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throughout the youth movements of the 1960s. Nevertheless, even as they were protesting cold war research and the information technologies that supported it, students of Stewart Brand’s generation were being immersed in the intellectual legacy of collaborative military research. Systems-oriented social theory, information-oriented biology and psychology, and, in cybernetics
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solidity of cold war American culture. The counterculture, he thundered, was “antinomian,” “anti-institutional,” and “profoundly anti-bourgeois.”9 In retrospect, however, the example of Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network suggests that even as the young communards criticized midcentury bourgeois life, the antinomian, antiinstitutional impulses of the New Communalist movement
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the Whole Earth Catalog in 1968 and the departure of Louis Rossetto, Jane Metcalfe, and Kevin Kelly from Wired magazine some thirty years later, then, Stewart Brand and the editors, writers, and entrepreneurs associated with the Whole Earth publications completely reversed the political valence of information and information technologies. As Brand and
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cultural meanings of computing, they returned the technocentric, knowledge-oriented, collaborative social practices of the research world to the center of the culture at large. Stewart Brand and the back-to-the-landers of the New Communalist movement had come of age searching for an alternative to the bureaucratic mode of technocracy
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accounts work well to describe the activities of a highly professionalized press corps, but they leave little room for thinking about the ideological impact of Stewart Brand and his colleagues. Unlike full-time professional reporters, Brand and others associated with the Whole Earth network actively collaborated with what traditional journalism theory might
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professional journalists who had attended the conference; through the writings of Brand, Kelly, and others in the Whole Earth network; and through the promotion of Stewart Brand himself as a prototypical, if predigital, hacker. Out of the conference grew a statement that expressed a way of imagining information, one that would travel
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72. 24. Quoted in Gardner, Children of Prosperity, 113. 25. Brand, Last Whole Earth Catalog, 438, 439. 26. Quoted by Fulton, interview notes for “How Stewart Brand Learns,” Los Angeles Times Magazine, October 30, 1994; transcription in Whole Earth Papers, Special Collections, Stanford University, M1045, box 24, folder 11. 27. Full details
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,” 106. 55. Hiltz and Turoff, Network Nation, 18 –27, 117–21; Kelly, “Birth of a Network Nation.” Quotations from Brand, interview, July 24, 2001; and Stewart Brand, [untitled], CoEvolution Quarterly 37 (Spring 1983), 152. 56. Brand, interview, July 24, 2001. 57. Kelly, interview, July 27, 2001. 58. Felsenstein, interview, July 18, 2001
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Shock.” [ 284 ] N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 9 3 _ 2 0 2 36. Hoyt quoted in Stipp, “Stewart Brand,” 172. 37. Stipp, “Stewart Brand,” 172; Mauceli and Portante quoted ibid. 38. Kelly, interview, July 27, 2001. 39. “Cyberpunk Era”; Kadrey, “Cyberpunk 101 Reading List”; “Virtual Reality”; Dyson
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, Digital Sublime; Terranova, Network Culture. As Thomas Streeter has pointed out, the Californian ideology emerged out of a wider tradition of Romantic individualism, within which Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog played an important role. See Streeter, “That Deep Romantic Chasm.” 5. Gitlin, Sixties, 307. 6. Lehr and Rossetto, “New Right
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American counterculture resides in the Stanford University Library. I have made use of two kinds of resources there: collections of Whole Earth–related materials, including Stewart Brand’s personal papers and diaries, and collections of papers and artifacts connected to the development of Silicon Valley. Stanford hosts three collections of Whole Earth
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.” Media, Culture, and Society 25 (2003): 291–313. Bakel, Rogier van. “How Good People Helped Make a Bad Law.” Wired, February 1996. Baldwin, J., and Stewart Brand. Soft-Tech. Sausalito, CA: Whole Earth Catalog, 1978. Baltzell, E. Digby. The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America. New York: Random House, 1964. Barbrook
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at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Brand, Stewart. “Buckminster Fuller.” In Whole Earth Catalog, edited by Stewart Brand, 3. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, 1968. ———. “Civilization and Its Contents.” In Rheingold, Millennium Whole Earth Catalog, 5. ———. The Clock of the Long Now: Time
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: Broderbund Software, 1989. ———. The Essential Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools and Ideas. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1986. ———. “History.” In Whole Earth Epilog, edited by Stewart Brand, 752 –53. San Francisco: Point Foundation, 1974. ———. How Buildings Learn: What Happens after They’re Built. New York: Viking, 1994. ———. “How to Do a Whole
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, News That Stayed News, 331–37. ———. “Consequential Heresies: How ‘Thinking the Unthinkable’ Changed Royal Dutch/Shell.” Global Business Network, Emeryville, CA, 1990. Kleiner, Art, and Stewart Brand, eds. News That Stayed News, 1974 –1984: Ten Years of CoEvolution Quarterly. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1986. Kline, David. “‘Friction-Free’ Foolishness,” Hotwired, September
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, 1978. ———. The Sociology of News. New York: Norton, 2003. Schwartz, Peter. The Art of the Long View. New York: Doubleday/Currency, 1991. Schwartz, Peter, and Stewart Brand. The 1989 GBN Scenario Book: Decades of Restructuring. Emeryville, CA: Global Business Network, 1989. Schwartz, Peter, and Blair Gibb. When Good Companies Do Bad Things
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, Twenty-first Century Firm, 69 –104. Sterling, Bruce. The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier. New York: Bantam Books, 1992. Stipp, David. “Stewart Brand: The Electric Kool-Aid Management Consultant.” Fortune, October 16, 1995. St. John, Warren. “Agent Provocateur.” Wired, September 1999. Stockwell, Foster. Encyclopedia of American Communes, 1663
Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand
by John Markoff · 22 Mar 2022 · 573pp · 142,376 words
, Inc. Illustration credits appear on this page. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Names: Markoff, John, author. Title: Whole Earth : the many lives of Stewart Brand / John Markoff. Description: New York : Penguin Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021039442 (print) | LCCN 2021039443 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735223943 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735223950
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LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021039442 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021039443 Cover design: Evan Gaffney Cover images: Stewart Brand, (earth) S.E.A. Photo / Alamy Stock Photo Book design by Daniel Lagin, adapted for ebook by Shayan Saalabi pid_prh_6.0_139580513_
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c0_r0 In memory of Douglas Engelbart, whose ideas, like many things, Stewart Brand discovered early on Contents Prologue 1. Shoppenagon 2. On the Golden Shore 3. Acid 4. American Indian 5. Multimedia 6. Access to Tools 7. CoEvolution
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our polestar ever since. Chapter 1 Shoppenagon Preserved in a large photograph, he was a mythic presence in the living room of the cabin where Stewart Brand spent his childhood summers. David Shoppenagon was a Chippewa Indian and a popular hunting and fishing guide for the wealthier residents of frontier Saginaw, Michigan
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, when in 1875 he brought Stewart Brand’s great-great-grandfather, former New York congressman Lorenzo Burrows, and his family to Higgins Lake. The lake would soon become the summer gathering spot
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a budding modern environmental movement as well. * * * It would be a modest continuing family inheritance from these various commercial ventures that would give a young Stewart Brand, then fresh from the army in 1962, the ability to avoid immediately getting a job and the freedom to pursue a variety of potentially sketchy
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friends sensed was not simply leadership but an unceasing font of ideas that would sweep them along in pursuit of each new whim. And occasionally Stewart Brand would have a great notion. * * * * * * Rockford, Illinois, was the quintessential midwestern town. The September 12, 1949, issue of Life magazine featured a photo essay taken
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army when, fascinated by the Beats, he settled in San Francisco. And it would continue in the 1970s, which he spent trying to reinvent himself. Stewart Brand was wealthy in an “as needed” way. Whether it was several thousand dollars in family stock from his grandfather Ralph Morley or the occasional check
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would establish a research group in Menlo Park to study the relationship between creativity and LSD. One of their first subjects would be a young Stewart Brand. * * * Brand’s early flirtation with libertarianism and anticommunism, coupled with his interest in Eastern ideas and mysticism, had collided with his increasing interest in human
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could be used in a directed way to improve rational cognitive abilities. Among the first 153 subjects (ultimately more than 350 people would participate) was Stewart Brand. (Not long after Brand’s original LSD experience, the US government began to add restrictions limiting experiments, and so the researchers specifically chose scientists, engineers
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and Alpert, LSD and other psychedelics would eventually have a dramatic impact on a societal scale. They also had an equally dramatic personal impact on Stewart Brand. Brand’s clinical exposure to LSD was a very different process from what would become commonplace several years later when acid became a recreational drug
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of a backyard swimming pool. Chapter 4 American Indian Comfortably settled in North Beach, still digesting his LSD experience while taking photography and design classes, Stewart Brand quickly got two big breaks from Dick Raymond. The Palo Alto architects who had designed Stanford’s new student union building were unhappy with the
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ultimately become one of the first multimedia exhibitions defining an emerging American counterculture, but their partnership wouldn’t last. Chapter 5 Multimedia In January 1965, Stewart Brand headed east on yet another fundraising tour for America Needs Indians! (now an ambitious traveling sensorium). As before, he made little progress. An approach to
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working-class neighborhood that had been built a half decade after the San Francisco earthquake as a dance hall. That night, amid all the cacophony, Stewart Brand had an unusual encounter with Neal Cassady. Iconic as the quintessential Beat during the 1950s, Cassady was, like Brand, also a bridge between the Beats
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’s only one place where you can find a catalog of everything in the world,” Baldwin responded. “The Yellow Pages of the Manhattan phone book.” Stewart Brand responded, “Well, I’ve heard you read catalogs. Why should the Manhattan phone book make a difference?” “What’s important about a product is
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of lies, double-talk, persuasion, and downright madness I had just sat through.” The highlight of the resulting cartoon was a panel portraying an oblivious Stewart Brand flirting with poet Michael McClure’s blond daughter. * * * The first issue of the Quarterly was produced by a staff of about a dozen people
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8 Anonymity A rt Kleiner was a struggling graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley School of Journalism when he decided to send Stewart Brand an unusual proposal. A transplanted New Yorker, Kleiner hadn’t had much contact with the Whole Earth Catalog, but he was a devotee of
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To which Ted Nelson responded, “That’s nice, but can you read them?” * * * Sitting in Peter Schwartz’s Berkeley living room, John Brockman discovered a Stewart Brand he had never seen before. Despite the commercial failure of the Whole Earth Software Catalog, Brockman’s literary agency was booming. Beyond the book deals
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documentary series titled How Buildings Learn, with a musical score provided by Eno, that ignored Rogers. Chapter 10 Float Upstream In the spring of 1994, Stewart Brand found himself back on the edge of Stanford University, camping out in an office belonging to Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. He was there thanks to
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aspect of wind and solar—they did not produce power continuously. On the day Whole Earth Discipline was published, Grist, an online environmental site, posted “Stewart Brand’s Nuclear Enthusiasm Falls Short on Facts and Logic,” a full-throated attack by Lovins on a draft of the chapter of the book focused
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was a distillation of a much longer twenty-thousand-word paper, “Four Nuclear Myths,” which Lovins helpfully appended. He began by stating, “I have known Stewart Brand as a friend for many years,” but there was nothing affable about his article, which concluded that despite Brand’s reputation as an environmental icon
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with the reality that consciousness of humanity’s impact on the world entails responsibility as well. It is that realization that is the heart of Stewart Brand’s contribution and his continuing relevance. Revive & Restore was launched as a Long Now Foundation project in early 2012 after Brand and Phelan sponsored
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age took the Outdoor Life magazine’s pledge to protect the nation’s forests, lands, air, and water. The children of upper-class Michigan families, Stewart Brand’s parents, Arthur and Julia, attended MIT and Vassar, but then settled in Rockford, Illinois, where after several years Arthur Brand would start an advertising
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sparked the counterculture was a turning point for Brand as well. At the end of the evening he proposed to Lois Jennings. In November 1966 Stewart Brand and Lois Jennings were married on the beach in Santa Cruz in a ceremony presided over by Paul Lee, a University of California philosophy professor
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deeply about the consequences of artificial intelligence. I embarked on this project at the suggestion of Kevin Kelly, who is both a longtime friend of Stewart Brand’s and a classic example of someone whose life was set in a completely new direction by his encounter with the Whole Earth Catalog. Brand
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and Paula Terzian aided with research at various points in the project. Fred Turner and Katherine Fulton, both of whom have previously written extensively about Stewart Brand, were kind to help with questions and by making their research materials available. Jason Sussberg and David Alvarado of Structure Films shared research materials with
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hours spent in the Stanford University Special Collections reading room. One thing I discovered after beginning my research was that for much of his life Stewart Brand has been a pack rat and that he has fortuitously kept his journals, correspondence, and papers, simply tossing things into a conveniently located shipping
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by in great haste,’ he says. ‘The mind collects stories, collects experiences, and it’s pretty good at managing aphorisms and slogans and little rhymes.’ ” —Stewart Brand as quoted by Katherine Fulton, Los Angeles Times Magazine, October 30, 1994 “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” —San
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there is plenty of time to do that. Just keep bearing down.” —Email to the Long Now board of directors, September 20, 2019 Notes Prologue Stewart Brand has described his mystic experience on the roof in various publications. The most complete account is in Michael Katz et al., eds., Earth’s Answer
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Last Book on Earth,” Washington Post, November 16, 1980, https://www.washingtonpost.com/ BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4 Ansel Adams, personal letter, February 11, 1964, Stewart Brand Papers, Stanford University Special Collection. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5 Lyndon Baines Johnson’s inaugural address, January 20, 1965, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th
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G. Kirk, Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2007), 42. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13 Michael Malone, “Stewart Brand: From Hippie Prince to Software Savant,” San Jose Mercury News West Magazine, September 16, 1984, 16. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 14 Yale Joel, “Psychedelic Art
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3 John Markoff, “It’s Moore’s Law, but Another Had the Idea First,” New York Times, April 18, 2005. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4 Stewart Brand, “History,” The Last Whole Earth Catalog (Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, distributed by Random House, 1971), 439. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5 Brand, “History,” 439
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his 1974 work II Cybernetic Frontiers was the first modern use. The 9100A was programmable but only for numeric applications. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3 Stewart Brand, “SPACEWAR: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums,” Rolling Stone, December 7, 1972, 33. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4 Paul Krassner, Sex, Drugs
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Murders (Port Townsend, WA: Loompanics Unlimted, 2000), 55. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5 Paul Krassner, “A Question of Lifestyle: Fond Memories of My Old Roommate Stewart Brand,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, 15, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-12-18-bk-10177-story.html BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6
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Krassner, “A Question of Lifestyle,” 15. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7 Susan Elizabeth Lewak, “Sustainable Gardens of the Mind: Beat Ecopoetry and Prose in Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Publications,” PhD diss., University of California at Los Angeles, 2014, iii. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8 Quoted in Kevin Kelly, Out of
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Calvin Fentress, “The Next to Last Book on Earth,” Washington Post, November 16, 1980. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2 Stewart McBride, “Stewart Brand and His Five Pounds of Ideas for the ’80s,” Christian Science Monitor, January 15, 1981. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3 Sue M. Halpern, “Private Jets
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-of-the-Art Rapping,” New York Times, August 15, 1989, A14. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 22 Ken Kelley, “The Interview: Whole Earthling and Software Savant Stewart Brand,” SF Focus, February 1985, 76. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 23 Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984), 27
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/story/hackers-at-30-hackers-and-information-wants-to-be-free/ BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 27 Levy, “Hackers at 30.” BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 28 Stewart Brand, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987), 190. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 29 Lawrence Hunter, “Gadgets for Utopia,” New
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Rheingold, “An Exercise in Perspective,” Deeper News, September 22, 1989. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3 Rheingold, “An Exercise in Perspective.” BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4 Stewart Brand with John Aiello, “The Rescue That Failed—Disorganization, Empty Hydrants Killed Janet Ray,” pt. 1 of series of 3, San Francisco Chronicle, April 16, 1990
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, 32. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5 Stewart Brand, “Earthquake Lessons: The Crucial Difference of Volunteers,” Whole Earth Review, Spring 1990. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6 Brand, “Earthquake Lessons.” BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7
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NOTE REFERENCE 1 Jeff Bezos letter to shareholders, 1997, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312513151836/d511111dex991.htm BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2 Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary (New York: Penguin Books, 2010), 78. BACK TO NOTE
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, 3, 4, 5; 6, 7, 8, 9; 10; 11, 12; 13, 14; 15; 16, 17; 18. 19, 20, 21, 22; 23: Courtesy of Stewart Brand 24; 25; 26: Stewart Brand and the Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries 27: Bill Young / San Francisco Chronicle / Polaris 28: Ted Streshinsky, © Shirley Streshinsky
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–95 SB’s stay on houseboat of, 69, 74 in USCO, 106–7 Stewart, Zach, 85, 93, 100 SB and, 113–14, 119, 122, 130 “Stewart Brand, Slow Thinker” (Brand; college essay), 32–33 Stieglitz, Alfred, 90 Stolaroff, Myron, 41, 42, 77, 84 Stone, Robert, 160 Streeter, Thomas, 348 Strong, Maurice, 204
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mountain lions. A research center here archives fifty years of student projects; a habitat map of two tarantula species by one of Ehrlich’s undergrads, Stewart Brand, who would later publish The Whole Earth Catalog, is still used. Years before The Population Bomb appeared, Paul Ehrlich had already gained renown among ecologists
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that their every move is being recorded, they will be less tempted to cheat. Chapter 12. Wider Access "Information wants to be free." So said Stewart Brand at the first Hackers Conference in 1984. If you take a few precautions, you can share your data with the world by giving SQL access
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Buildings Work (Oxford University Press, second edition 1995). The books shows how many things find resolution in a building’s design, and is complemented by Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built (Viking, 1994) which shows how people adapt buildings to overcome problems that the designers did not
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my failure’ (Nelson 2011). Although people were and still are inspired by his design, like Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’, it exists in potentia. Everyone from Stewart Brand to Alan Kay seems to have been ‘inspired’ by Nelson, but nobody has built the design exactly as he wants it. ‘Nobody is building my
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, 1995. Turkle, Sherry. The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, 20th anniversary ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005. Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Vincenti, Walter G. What Engineers Know and How They
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express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity’.1 The fact that key figures like Stewart Brand, who founded The WELL, were also central participants in the 1960s counterculture, with its egalitarian and universalist ethos, helps explain some of this utopian hyperbole
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Break Through: Why We Can't Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalists
by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus · 10 Mar 2009 · 454pp · 107,163 words
Not the End of the World
by Hannah Ritchie · 9 Jan 2024 · 335pp · 101,992 words
Coastal California Travel Guide
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Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI
by Yuval Noah Harari · 9 Sep 2024 · 566pp · 169,013 words
The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal
by M. Mitchell Waldrop · 14 Apr 2001
The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power
by Max Chafkin · 14 Sep 2021 · 524pp · 130,909 words
The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age
by Astra Taylor · 4 Mar 2014 · 283pp · 85,824 words
Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism
by John Elkington · 6 Apr 2020 · 384pp · 93,754 words
The Facebook Effect
by David Kirkpatrick · 19 Nov 2010 · 455pp · 133,322 words
The Misfit Economy: Lessons in Creativity From Pirates, Hackers, Gangsters and Other Informal Entrepreneurs
by Alexa Clay and Kyra Maya Phillips · 23 Jun 2015 · 210pp · 56,667 words
Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future
by Paul Mason · 29 Jul 2015 · 378pp · 110,518 words
We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production
by Charles Leadbeater · 9 Dec 2010 · 313pp · 84,312 words
The Longing for Less: Living With Minimalism
by Kyle Chayka · 21 Jan 2020 · 237pp · 69,985 words
The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-To-5
by Taylor Pearson · 27 Jun 2015 · 168pp · 50,647 words
The Little Book That Builds Wealth: The Knockout Formula for Finding Great Investments
by Pat Dorsey · 1 Mar 2008 · 141pp · 40,979 words
Seveneves
by Neal Stephenson · 19 May 2015 · 945pp · 292,893 words
What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live
by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers · 2 Jan 2010 · 411pp · 80,925 words
Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers
by Timothy Ferriss · 6 Dec 2016 · 669pp · 210,153 words
I Live in the Future & Here's How It Works: Why Your World, Work, and Brain Are Being Creatively Disrupted
by Nick Bilton · 13 Sep 2010 · 236pp · 77,098 words
The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems-And Create More
by Luke Dormehl · 4 Nov 2014 · 268pp · 75,850 words
Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions
by Paul Mason · 30 Sep 2013 · 357pp · 99,684 words
Your Computer Is on Fire
by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks and Kavita Philip · 9 Mar 2021 · 661pp · 156,009 words
After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back
by Juliet Schor, William Attwood-Charles and Mehmet Cansoy · 15 Mar 2020 · 296pp · 83,254 words
Lurking: How a Person Became a User
by Joanne McNeil · 25 Feb 2020 · 239pp · 80,319 words
Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
by Howard Rheingold · 24 Dec 2011
The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath
by Nicco Mele · 14 Apr 2013 · 270pp · 79,992 words
A New History of the Future in 100 Objects: A Fiction
by Adrian Hon · 5 Oct 2020 · 340pp · 101,675 words
Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World
by Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott · 9 May 2016 · 515pp · 126,820 words
Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It
by Brian Dumaine · 11 May 2020 · 411pp · 98,128 words
Freedom
by Daniel Suarez · 17 Dec 2009 · 427pp · 112,549 words
Collapse
by Jared Diamond · 25 Apr 2011 · 753pp · 233,306 words
Anathem
by Neal Stephenson · 25 Aug 2009 · 1,087pp · 325,295 words
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
by Naomi Klein · 15 Sep 2014 · 829pp · 229,566 words
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
by Jared Diamond · 2 Jan 2008 · 801pp · 242,104 words
The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
by David Wallace-Wells · 19 Feb 2019 · 343pp · 101,563 words
The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives
by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen · 22 Apr 2013 · 525pp · 116,295 words
The Techno-Human Condition
by Braden R. Allenby and Daniel R. Sarewitz · 15 Feb 2011
Designing Social Interfaces
by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone · 30 Sep 2009 · 518pp · 49,555 words
The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy
by Matthew Hindman · 24 Sep 2018
The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World
by Scott Galloway · 2 Oct 2017 · 305pp · 79,303 words
You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All
by Adrian Hon · 14 Sep 2022 · 371pp · 107,141 words
Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker
by Kevin Mitnick · 14 Aug 2011
Who Owns This Sentence?: A History of Copyrights and Wrongs
by David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu · 23 Jan 2024 · 305pp · 101,093 words
The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism
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Daemon
by Daniel Suarez · 1 Dec 2006 · 562pp · 146,544 words
Diet for a New America
by John Robbins · 566pp · 151,193 words
Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media
by Tarleton Gillespie · 25 Jun 2018 · 390pp · 109,519 words
The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry
by John Warrillow · 5 Feb 2015 · 186pp · 49,251 words
Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat
by John P. Carlin and Garrett M. Graff · 15 Oct 2018 · 568pp · 164,014 words
The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture
by Brian Dear · 14 Jun 2017 · 708pp · 223,211 words
Makers
by Chris Anderson · 1 Oct 2012 · 238pp · 73,824 words
Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life
by Ozan Varol · 13 Apr 2020 · 389pp · 112,319 words
Team Human
by Douglas Rushkoff · 22 Jan 2019 · 196pp · 54,339 words
Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy
by Nathan Schneider · 10 Sep 2018 · 326pp · 91,559 words
The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving
by Leigh Gallagher · 26 Jun 2013 · 296pp · 76,284 words
Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software
by Nadia Eghbal · 3 Aug 2020 · 1,136pp · 73,489 words
Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History
by Kurt Andersen · 14 Sep 2020 · 486pp · 150,849 words
The Googlization of Everything:
by Siva Vaidhyanathan · 1 Jan 2010 · 281pp · 95,852 words
Program Or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age
by Douglas Rushkoff · 1 Nov 2010 · 103pp · 32,131 words