We are as Gods Concepts

Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right

by Jennifer Burns · 18 Oct 2009 · 495pp · 144,101 words

than regulation, as solutions to the environmental crisis. The survivalist Whole Earth Catalog, a hippy-techno-geek bible, was an important node of this movement. “We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” the catalogue announced, striking a vaguely libertarian note with its intention to support “a realm of intimate

Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History

by Thomas Rid · 27 Jun 2016 · 509pp · 132,327 words

what was worth getting and where to get it. The purpose was to promote tools for education, inspiration, and shaping the environment—because, Brand wrote, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”37 Brand’s vision was to turn the catalog itself into a tool. The CATALOG—he usually

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand

by John Markoff · 22 Mar 2022 · 573pp · 142,376 words

directly aided by man to save the species—the ultimate existential act. A decade later Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog would begin with the premise “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” The next evening Brand went to see the Gregory Peck movie Pork Chop Hill, about a fierce

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. The contributor’s fee was ten dollars for about two hundred words plus a byline. It was all tied together by Brand’s introductory sentence: “We are as gods and might as well get used to it.” (In a second printing of the first edition it was edited to read “get good at it

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of technology and tools to improve the quality of human life. It showed a consistency that stretched back to the opening sentence of the Catalog: “We are as Gods and might as well get good at it.” However, his thinking on the ideal of self-sufficiency that had helped inspire the back-to-the

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been irrational, anti-scientific and very harmful,” he asserted, also bashing Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth for their opposition to GMO foods in Africa. “We are as gods and HAVE to get good at it,” he concluded. Almost four decades after Earth Day, this was a new Stewart Brand. John Brockman had chosen

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Whole Earth Catalog four decades earlier. In the fall of 1968, he had set out by arguing, “We are as Gods and might as well get good at it.” Whole Earth Discipline opened with his new epigraph: “We are as Gods and HAVE to get good at it,” underscoring his belief in the existential threat of climate change

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, one of those who had partied with Brand at the Trips Festival more than half a century earlier, stood at the microphone and challenged his “We are as gods” hypothesis. “Idiot savants,” Coyote proposed instead. “We’re highly developed, we have these great skills, this technological cleverness, which is completely untethered to wisdom. My

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are an example of efforts to save entire species. The project would complete the arc defined by the opening sentence in the Whole Earth Catalog: “We are as Gods and might as well get good at it.” At the age of seventy-three Brand set out to make good on his original promise, orchestrating

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used to gain more than linear leverage in a positive direction. However, there is an important difference between the “We are as gods and better get good at it” in the 1968 Catalog and the “We are as gods and have to get good at it” in Whole Earth Discipline four decades later. In the preface to the

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was what Brand told a group of students at the Parsons School of Design on the first Earth Day in 1970: “When we realize that we are as gods, then we will know that we have to assume a god’s responsibilities, and that we are able to. Many good things are very simple

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and by making their research materials available. Jason Sussberg and David Alvarado of Structure Films shared research materials with me while they prepared a documentary, We Are as Gods, about Brand’s life. While doing interviews, research, and writing, I had the benefit of a number of thoughtful friends and colleagues including Adam Fisher

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Magazine, October 30, 1994 “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” —San Francisco, March 1966 “We are as Gods and we might as well get used to it.” “We are as Gods and we might as well get good at it.” —First and second printings of the first Whole Earth Catalog, October 1968

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, Go Back and Start Over. Drop out of specialization. Develop rudimentary skills good for any situation.” —“Stay Loose,” Earth, December 1971 “When we realize that we are as gods, then we will know that we have to assume a god’s responsibilities, and that we are able to. Many good things are very simple

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sentence: We rolled our own cigarettes.” —Journal, May 21, 2004 “The most proficient knot is one that can be easily untied.” —Journal, September 6, 2005 “We are as gods and we HAVE to get good at it.” —Epigraph to Whole Earth Discipline, where Brand endorses nuclear power and GMO foods, 2009 “Living on a

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, September 16, 1984, 16. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 14 Yale Joel, “Psychedelic Art,” Life, September 9, 1966, 19. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 15 Kate Daloz, We Are as Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on the Quest for a New America (New York: PublicAffairs Books, 2016), 92. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 16

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, 213 relentless curiosity of, 2, 6, 17, 37, 91, 290, 301, 323 as role model and symbol, 3, 188–89 vertigo episodes of, 337–38 “We are as gods” hypothesis of, 2, 39, 165, 232, 294, 347–48, 358, 360, 361–62, 364 see also specific projects and publications Brand family: Higgins Lake camp

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celebration of, 236–37 toll on SB of, 174, 183–84, 185, 189, 192–93 transformative impact on readers of, 173, 189, 198, 253–54 “We are as gods” hypothesis of, 2, 39, 165, 232, 294, 347–48, 358, 360, 361–62, 364 Whole Earth Catalog supplements, 169–70, 177, 180, 182, 191, 218

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller

by Alec Nevala-Lee · 1 Aug 2022 · 864pp · 222,565 words

fifty subscribers, he sold tens of thousands by the end of the following year. The book’s tone was set by its famous opening sentence: “We are as gods and might as well get used to it.” Brand began with two pages on Fuller, whose technological philosophy influenced the emphasis that the Catalog placed

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Catalog, 439. “Techniques and tools”: Ibid. “I dunno, Whole Earth Catalog”: Ibid. “with manufacturers”: Stewart Brand to RBF, April 10, 1968, quoted in Wong, 454. “We are as gods”: Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1968, 3. “access to tools”: John Markoff, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (New York: Penguin, 2022

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

the Catalog, and to their lives. Consider the Catalog’s opening statement. On the inside cover of every edition, Brand deﬁned the Catalog’s purpose: We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far, remotely done power and glory—as via government, big business, formal education, church—has [sic

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brief product and book reviews, Signal looked very much like the Whole Earth Catalog. On page 2, readers could ﬁnd the old statement of purpose (“We are as Gods, and might as well get good at it . . . ”). And on page 3, they could ﬁnd a picture of Stewart Brand, kicked back in his ofﬁce

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own fates and, by vanguard example, of the fates of mankind. By 1968 more than a few communards believed, as Stewart Brand put it, that “We are as gods and we might as well get good at it.” In his 1968 volume The Young Radicals, Kenneth Keniston looked out on the fractures within the

Team Human

by Douglas Rushkoff · 22 Jan 2019 · 196pp · 54,339 words

wettiko Jack D. Forbes, Columbus and Other Cannibals (New York: Seven Stories, 2011). 69. in this new spirituality we would be as gods John Brockman, “We Are As Gods and Have to Get Good at It: A Conversation with Stewart Brand,” The Edge, August 18, 2009. 70. The Soviet–American citizen diplomacy program Jeffrey

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)

by Adam Fisher · 9 Jul 2018 · 611pp · 188,732 words

. On the other hand, if somebody like Alan Kay couldn’t make it happen, how can I make it happen? BOOK TWO THE HACKER ETHIC We are as gods and might as well get good at it. —STEWART BRAND What Information Wants Heroes of the computer revolution By the mideighties, the technologists who were

The Speed of Dark

by Elizabeth Moon · 1 Jan 2002 · 445pp · 129,068 words

pursue every hint of a cure of conditions we have or acquire… I don’t know that. Only if it doesn’t interfere with who we are as God’s children, I suppose. And some things are beyond human power to cure, so we must do the best we can to cope with them

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us

by Will Storr · 14 Jun 2017 · 431pp · 129,071 words

was blocks from Engelbart’s lab. Open the cover of this esoteric bazaar of products and philosophies and you’d see its mission statement. Declaring ‘we are as gods and might as well get good at it’, it hailed a future in which ‘a realm of intimate, personal power is developing – power of the

The Techno-Human Condition

by Braden R. Allenby and Daniel R. Sarewitz · 15 Feb 2011

strange land, homeless because we have been turfed out by our very successes. As Stewart Brand put it in his first Whole Earth Catalog (1968), "We are as gods and might as well get good at it." So far, we fail that test, and we do so for reasons that the philosopher Martin Heidegger

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a combination of humility and presumption, can bring about nothing in itself other than self deception and blindness in relation to the historical moment. 12 We are as gods. This became stunningly clear in 1945, in the New Mexico desert, when a human sun burst into being for the first time. Robert Oppenheimer, standing

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possibility of nuclear winter, in the way a two-year-old gets used to a loaded .357 magnum lying on the floor within easy reach. We are as gods? No, for we have created the power but not the mind. And as technological evolution continues to outpace the grasp of human intent, we have