"Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road." -- Stewart Brand
Stewart Brand (born December 14, 1938 in Rockford, Illinois) is an American writer, best known as editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He founded a number of organizations including The WELL, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation. He is the author of several books, most recently An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.
"In terms of weapons, the best disarmament tool so far is nuclear energy. We have been taking down the Russian warheads, turning it into electricity. 10 percent of American electricity comes from decommissioned warheads.""Likewise, with solar, especially here in California, we're discovering that the 80 solar farm schemes that are going forward want to basically bulldoze 1,000 sq. mi. of southern California desert. Well, as an environmentalist, we would rather that didn't happen.""There's no unemployment in squatter cities. Everyone works. One-sixth of humanity is there. It's soon going to be more than that.""When a fantasy turns you on, you're obligated to God and nature to start doing it - right away."
Brand attended Phillips Exeter Academy, before studying biology at Stanford University, from which he graduated in 1960. As a soldier of the U.S. Army, he was a parachutist and taught infantry skills; he was later to express that his experience in the military fostered his competence in organizing. A civilian again, in 1962 he studied design at San Francisco Art Institute, photography at San Francisco State College, and participated in a legitimate scientific study of then-legal LSD, in Menlo Park, California.
Brand has lived in California ever since. Today, he and his wife, Ryan Phelan, live on Mirene, a -long working tugboat. Built in 1912, the boat is moored in a former shipyard in Sausalito, California. He works in Mary Heartline, a fishing boat about away. Otis Redding is said to have written “ The Dock of the Bay” on a table Brand acquired from an antiques dealer in Sausalito.
Through scholarship and by visiting numerous Indian reservations, he familiarized himself with the Native Americans of the West. Native Americans have continued to be an important cultural interest, an interest which has re-emerged in Brand's work in various ways through the years. He was married to Lois Jennings, an Ottawa Native American and mathematician.
By the mid 1960s, he was associated with author Ken Kesey and the "Merry Pranksters," and in San Francisco, with his partner Zach Stewart, Brand produced the Trips Festival, an early effort involving rock music and light shows-and one of the first venues in which the Grateful Dead performed in San Francisco. About 10,000 hippies attended and Haight-Ashbury emerged as a community. Tom Wolfe describes Brand in the beginning of his book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
In 1966, Brand campaigned to have NASA release the then-rumored satellite image of the entire Earth as seen from space. He distributed buttons...for 25 cents each...asking, "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?" He thought the image of our planet might be a powerful symbol. In 1968, a NASA astronaut made the photo and in 1970 Earth Day began to be celebrated. During a 2003 interview, Brand explained that the image "gave the sense that Earth’s an island, surrounded by a lot of inhospitable space. And it’s so graphic, this little blue, white, green and brown jewel-like icon amongst a quite featureless black vacuum." During this campaign Brand met Richard Buckminster Fuller, who offered to help him in his projects.
In late 1968, Brand assisted electrical engineer Douglas Engelbart with The Mother of All Demos, a famous presentation of many revolutionary computer technologies (including the mouse) to the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco.
Brand surmised that, given the necessary consciousness, information, and tools, human beings might reshape the world they had made (and were making) for themselves into something environmentally and socially sustainable.
During the late 1960s to early 1970s about 10 million Americans were involved in living communally. In 1968, using the most basic of typesetting and page-layout tools, Brand and cohorts created issue number one of The Whole Earth Catalog. Brand and his wife Lois travelled to communes in a 1963 Dodge truck that was the Whole Earth Truck Store which moved to a storefront in Menlo Park, California. That first oversize Catalog, and its successors into the 1970s and later, reckoned that many sorts of things were useful "tools": books, maps, garden tools, specialized clothing, carpenters' and masons' tools, forestry gear, tents, welding equipment, professional journals, early synthesizers and personal computers, etc. Brand invited "reviews" of the best of these items from experts in specific fields, as though they were writing a letter to a friend. The information also made known where these things could be located or bought. The Catalog's publication coincided with the great wave of experimentalism, convention-breaking, and "do it yourself" attitude associated with the "counterculture".
The influence of these Whole Earth Catalogs on the rural back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s, and the communities movement within many cities, was widespread, being experienced in the U.S. and Canada and far beyond. A 1972 edition sold 1.5 million copies and in the U.S. won a National Book Award. Many people first learned about the potential of alternative energy production (e.g., solar, wind, small-hydro, geothermal) through the Catalog.
To continue this work and also to publish full-length articles on specific topics in natural sciences and invention, in numerous areas of arts and social sciences, and on the contemporary scene in general, Brand founded the CoEvolution Quarterly (CQ) during 1974, aimed primarily at educated laypersons. Brand never better revealed his opinions and reason for hope than when he ran, in CoEvolution Quarterly #4, a transcription of technology historian Lewis Mumford’s talk “The Next Transformation of Man,” containing the statement: "... man has still within him sufficient resources to alter the direction of modern civilization, for we then need no longer regard man as the passive victim of his own irreversible technological development."
Content of CQ often included futurism, or risqué topics. Besides giving space to unknown writers with something valuable to say, Brand presented articles by many respected authors and thinkers, including Lewis Mumford, Howard T. Odum, Witold Rybczynski, Karl Hess, Christopher Swan, Orville Schell, Ivan Illich, Wendell Berry, Ursula K. Le Guin, Gregory Bateson, Amory Lovins, Hazel Henderson, Gary Snyder, Lynn Margulis, Eric Drexler, Gerard K. O'Neill, Peter Calthorpe, Sim Van der Ryn, Paul Hawken, John Todd, J. Baldwin, Kevin Kelly (future editor of Wired magazine), and Donella Meadows. During ensuing years, Brand authored and edited a number of books on topics as diverse as computer-based media, the life-history of buildings, and ideas about space colonies.
During 1984 The Whole Earth Software Review (a supplement to The Whole Earth Software Catalog) was founded. It merged with CQ to form the Whole Earth Review in 1985.
During 1985, Brand and Larry Brilliant founded The WELL ("Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link"), a prototypic, broad-ranging online community for intelligent, informed participants the world over.The WELL won the 1990 Best Online Publication Award from the Computer Press Association .
During 1986, Brand was a visiting scientist at the Media Laboratory at MIT. Soon after, he became a private-conference organizer for such corporations as Royal Dutch/Shell, Volvo, and AT&T. During 1988, he became a co-founder of the Global Business Network, which explores global futures and business strategies informed by the sorts of values and information which Brand has always found vital. GBN has become involved with in the evolution and application of scenario thinking, planning, and complementary strategic tools. In other connections, Brand has been part of the board of the Santa Fe Institute (founded during 1984), an organization devoted to "fostering a multidisciplinary scientific research community pursuing frontier science." He has continued also to promote the preservation of tracts of wilderness.
The Whole Earth Catalog implied an ideal of human progress that depended on decentralized, personal, and liberating technological development ... so called, "soft technology." However, during 2005 he criticized aspects of the international environmental ideology he helped develop. An article by him entitled Environmental Heresies, published in the May 2005 issue of the MIT Technology Review, describes what he considers necessary changes to environmentalism. In the article he suggested, among other things, that environmentalists embrace nuclear power and genetically modified organisms as technologies with more promise than risk.
Brand later developed the ideas from the 2005 article into the book Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. The book examines how urbanization, nuclear power, genetic engineering, geoengineering, and wildlife restoration can be used as powerful tools in the humanity's ongoing fight against global warming.
Brand is co-chair and President of the Board of Directors of the The Long Now Foundation. Brand chairs the foundations Seminars About Long Term Thinking SALT. This series on long term thinking has presented a large range of different speakers including: Brian Eno, Neal Stephenson, Vernor Vinge, Philip Rosedale, Jimmy Wales, Kevin Kelly, Clay Shirky, Ray Kurzweil, Bruce Sterling and many others.
A few of Brand's aphorisms (on which he has elaborated) are that "Civilization’s shortening attention span is mismatched with the pace of environmental problems", "Environmental health requires peace, prosperity, and continuity", "Technology can be good for the environment" and (perhaps most famously) "Information wants to be free":
Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine - too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property', the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better."
—spoken at the first Hackers' Conference, and reprinted in the May 1985 Whole Earth Review. The quotation is an elaboration from his book, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, published in 1987.
The Whole Earth Catalog began with the words “We are as gods and we might as well get good at it.” and his book Whole Earth Discipline begins with "We are as gods and HAVE to get good at it." Brand wrote The WELL's sign on message, "You own your own words, unless they contain information. In which case they belong to no one."
Stewart Brand is the initiator or was involved with the development of the following:
The Whole Earth Catalog in 1968
CoEvolution Quarterly in 1974
The Whole Earth Software Catalog and Review in 1984
Whole Earth Review in 1985
Point Foundation
Global Business Network (co-founder)
The WELL in 1985, with Larry Brilliant
The Hackers Conference in 1984
Long Now Foundation in 1996, with computer scientist Danny Hillis— one of the Foundation's projects is to build a 10,000 year clock, the Clock of the Long Now
II Cybernetic Frontiers, 1974, ISBN 0-394-49283-8 (hardcover), ISBN 0-394-70689-7 (paperback)
The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, 1987, ISBN 0-670-81442-3 (hardcover); 1988, ISBN 0-14-009701-5 (paperback)
How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built, 1994. ISBN 0-670-83515-3
The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility, 1999. ISBN 0-465-04512-X
Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, Viking Adult, 2009. ISBN 0670021210
As editor or as co-editor
The Whole Earth Catalog, 1968-72 (original editor, winner of the National Book Award, 1972)
Last Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools, 1971
Whole Earth Epilog: Access to Tools, 1974, ISBN 0-14-003950-3
The (Updated) Last Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools, 16th edition, 1975, ISBN 0-14-003544-3
Space Colonies, Whole Earth Catalog, 1977, ISBN 0-14-004805-7
As co-editor with J. Baldwin: Soft-Tech, 1978, ISBN 0-14-004806-5
The Next Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools, 1980, ISBN 0-394-73951-5;
The Next Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools, revised 2nd edition, 1981, ISBN 0-394-70776-1
As editor-in chief: Whole Earth Software Catalog, 1984, ISBN 0-385-19166-9
As editor-in-chief: Whole Earth Software Catalog for 1986, "2.0 edition" of above title, 1985, ISBN 0-385-23301-9
As co-editor with Art Kleiner: News That Stayed News, 1974-1984: Ten Years of CoEvolution Quarterly, 1986, ISBN 0-86547-201-7 (hardcover), ISBN 0-86547-202-5 (paperback)
Introduction by Brand: The Essential Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools and Ideas (Introduction by Brand), 1986, ISBN 0-385-23641-7
Foreword by Brand: Signal: Communication Tools for the Information Age, editor: Kevin Kelly, 1988, ISBN 0-517-57084-X
Foreword by Brand: The Fringes of Reason: A Whole Earth Catalog, editor: Ted Schultz, 1989, ISBN 0-517-57165-X
Foreword by Brand: Whole Earth Ecolog: The Best of Environmental Tools & Ideas, editor: J. Baldwin, 1990, ISBN 0-517-57658-9
Articles
Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums. Rolling Stone Magazine, December 7, 1972.
We Owe it All to the Hippies. Time Magazine (Special Issue), Spring 1995, vol. 145, no. 12.
