Stewart Brand

Last updated

Stewart Brand
Stewart Brand (49624956948).jpg
Brand in 2020
Born (1938-12-14) December 14, 1938 (age 85)
Rockford, Illinois, United States
Alma mater Stanford University
Occupations
  • Writer
  • editor
  • entrepreneur
Known for Whole Earth Catalog
The WELL
Long Now Foundation
Spouse(s)Lois Jennings (1966–1973)
Ryan Phelan (1983–present) [1]
Website sb.longnow.org

Stewart Brand (born December 14, 1938) is an American project developer and writer, best known as the co-founder and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog . He has 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 Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto .

Contents

Life

Brand was born in Rockford, Illinois, and attended Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. He studied biology at Stanford University, graduating in 1960. [2] As a soldier in the U.S. Army, he was a parachutist and taught infantry skills; he later expressed the view that his experience in the military had fostered his competence in organizing. [3] 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 with the International Foundation for Advanced Study, in Menlo Park, California. [4] In 1966, he married mathematician Lois Jennings, an Ottawa Native American. [5]

Brand has lived in California since the 1960s. He and his second wife live on Mirene, a 64-foot (20 m)-long working tugboat. Built in 1912, the boat is moored in a former shipyard in Sausalito, California. [6] He works in Mary Heartline, a grounded fishing boat about 100 yards (90 metres) away. [6] One of his favorite items is a table on which Otis Redding is said to have written "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" (Brand acquired it from an antiques dealer in Sausalito). [6]

USCO and Merry Pranksters

By the mid-1960s, Brand became associated with New York multimedia group USCO and Bay Area author Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. Brand co-produced the 1966 Trips Festival, an early effort blending rock music and light shows, with Kesey and Ramón Sender Barayón. The Trips Festival was among the first Grateful Dead performances in San Francisco. An estimated 10,000 hippies attended, and Haight-Ashbury soon emerged as the epicenter of an emerging counterculture, with the Summer of Love in 1967. [7] Tom Wolfe includes Brand in his 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test . [8]

NASA images of Earth

Earth from space, by ATS-3 satellite, 1967 ATSIII 10NOV67 153107.jpg
Earth from space, by ATS-3 satellite, 1967
Earthrise, by William Anders, Apollo 8, 1968 NASA-Apollo8-Dec24-Earthrise.jpg
Earthrise , by William Anders, Apollo 8, 1968

In 1966, while on an LSD trip on the roof of his house in North Beach, San Francisco, Brand became convinced that seeing an image of the whole Earth would change how we think about the planet and ourselves. [9] [10] He then campaigned to have NASA release the then-rumored satellite image of the entire Earth as seen from space. He sold and distributed buttons for 25 cents each, [11] asking, "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?" [12] During this campaign, Brand met Richard Buckminster Fuller, who offered to help Brand with his projects. [13] In 1967, a satellite, ATS-3, took the photo. Brand thought the image of our planet would be a powerful symbol; it adorned the first (Fall 1968) edition of the Whole Earth Catalog . [14] Later in 1968, NASA astronaut Bill Anders took an Earth photo, [12] Earthrise , from Moon orbit, which became the front image of the spring 1969 edition of the Catalog. 1970 saw the first celebration of Earth Day. [11] 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."

Douglas Engelbart

In late 1968, Brand assisted electrical engineer Douglas Engelbart with the Mother of All Demos, a presentation of many revolutionary computer technologies (including hypertext, email, and the mouse) to the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. [15] [16]

Brand surmised that given the necessary consciousness, information, and tools, human beings could reshape the world they had made (and were making) for themselves into something environmentally and socially sustainable. [17] : 42 

Whole Earth Catalog

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, about 10 million Americans were involved in living communally. [18] In 1968, using the most basic approaches to typesetting and page layout, Brand and his colleagues created issue number one of the Whole Earth Catalog , employing the subtitle "access to tools". [17] : 48  Brand and his wife, Lois, traveled to communes in a 1963 Dodge truck known as the Whole Earth Truck Store, which moved to a storefront in Menlo Park, California. [17] [ page needed ] That first oversized Catalog, and its successors in the 1970s and later, reckoned a wide assortment of things could serve as useful "tools": books, maps, garden implements, specialized clothing, carpenters' and masons' tools, forestry gear, tents, welding equipment, professional journals, early synthesizers, and personal computers. Brand invited "reviews" (written in the form of a letter to a friend) of the best of these items from experts in specific fields. The information also described where these things could be located or purchased. The Catalog's publication coincided with the great wave of social and cultural experimentation, convention-breaking, and "do it yourself" attitude associated with the "counterculture".

The Whole Earth Catalog had widespread influence within the rural back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s, and the communities movement within many cities throughout the United States, Canada, and Australia. The 1972 edition sold 1.5 million copies, winning the first U.S.  National Book Award in the Contemporary Affairs category. [19]

Steve Jobs ended his 2005 commencement address at Stanford University by acknowledging both Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog, quoting its farewell message: "Stay hungry. Stay foolish". [20] [21]

CoEvolution Quarterly

To continue this work and also to publish full-length articles on specific topics in the natural sciences and invention, in numerous areas of the arts and the social sciences, and on the contemporary scene in general, Brand founded CoEvolution Quarterly in 1974, aimed primarily at educated laypeople. [22] 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", in which he stated that "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". [23]

The content of CoEvolution Quarterly often included futurism or risqué topics. Besides giving space to unknown writers with something to say, Brand presented articles by many respected authors and thinkers, including Mumford, Howard T. Odum, Witold Rybczynski, Karl Hess, 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, Kevin Kelly, and Donella Meadows. In the 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.

He founded the Whole Earth Software Review , a supplement to the Whole Earth Software Catalog, in 1984. It merged with CoEvolution Quarterly to form the Whole Earth Review in 1985. [24]

California government

From 1977 to 1979, Brand served as "special advisor" to the administration of California Governor Jerry Brown. [25] [26]

The WELL

In 1985, Brand and Larry Brilliant founded the WELL ("Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link"), a prototypical, wide-ranging online community for informed participants the world over. [27] The WELL won the 1990 Best Online Publication Award from the Computer Press Association. [28]

All Species Foundation

In 2000, Brand helped launch the All Species Foundation, [29] [30] which aimed to catalog all species of life on Earth. [31] The project ceased functioning in 2007, transferring its mission to the Encyclopedia of Life . [29]

Global Business Network

Brand speaking at the Frontiers Conference, 2010 Frontiers Cocnert Nov 2010-0491 (5155112565).jpg
Brand speaking at the Frontiers Conference, 2010
Brand in 2020 Stewart Brand (49624953803).jpg
Brand in 2020

During 1986, Brand was a visiting scientist at the MIT Media Lab. Soon after, he became a private-conference organizer for such corporations as Royal Dutch Shell, Volvo, and AT&T. In 1988, he became a co‑founder of the Global Business Network, which explored global futures and business strategies informed by the sorts of values and information that Brand has always found vital. The GBN become involved with the evolution and application of scenario thinking, planning, and complementary strategic tools. For fourteen years, Brand was on the board of the Santa Fe Institute (founded in 1984), an organization devoted to "fostering a multidisciplinary scientific research community pursuing frontier science". He has also continued to promote the preservation of tracts of wilderness.

Whole Earth Discipline

The Whole Earth Catalog implied an ideal of human progress that depended on decentralized, personal, and liberating technological development—so‑called "soft technology". However, in 2005, Brand criticized aspects of the international environmental ideology he had helped to develop. He wrote an article called "Environmental Heresies" [32] in the May 2005 issue of the MIT Technology Review , in which he described what he considered necessary changes to environmentalism. He suggested, among other things, that environmentalists embrace nuclear power and genetically modified organisms as technologies with more promise than risk. [33]

Brand later developed these ideas into a book and published Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto in 2009. The book examines how urbanization, nuclear power, genetic engineering, geoengineering, and wildlife restoration can be used as powerful tools in humanity's ongoing fight against global warming. [34]

In a 2019 interview, Brand described his perspective as "post-libertarian", indicating that at the time when the Whole Earth Catalog was being written, he did not fully understand the significance of the role of government in the development of technology and engineering. [33] In his environmental position, he self-describes as an "eco-pragmatist". [35]

Long Now Foundation

Brand is co‑chair and president of the board of directors of the Long Now Foundation and chairs the foundation's Seminars About Long-term Thinking. This series on long-term thinking has presented a range of speakers, including Brian Eno, Neal Stephenson, Vernor Vinge, Philip Rosedale, Jimmy Wales, Kevin Kelly, Clay Shirky, Ray Kurzweil, Bruce Sterling, and Cory Doctorow.

Brand is the subject of the 2021 documentary film We Are As Gods . [36]

Works

Stewart Brand is the initiator or was involved with the development of the following:

Publications

Books

As editor or co-editor

See also

Related Research Articles

A back-to-the-land movement is any of various agrarian movements across different historical periods. The common thread is a call for people to take up smallholding and to grow food from the land with an emphasis on a greater degree of self-sufficiency, autonomy, and local community than found in a prevailing industrial or postindustrial way of life. There have been a variety of motives behind such movements, such as social reform, land reform, and civilian war efforts. Groups involved have included political reformers, counterculture hippies, and religious separatists.

<i>Whole Earth Review</i>

Whole Earth Review was a magazine which was founded in January 1985 after the merger of the Whole Earth Software Review and the CoEvolution Quarterly. All of these periodicals are descendants of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog.

<i>Whole Earth Catalog</i> American counterculture publication

The Whole Earth Catalog (WEC) was an American counterculture magazine and product catalog published by Stewart Brand several times a year between 1968 and 1972, and occasionally thereafter, until 1998.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Mother of All Demos</span> 1968 computer demonstration by Douglas Engelbart

"The Mother of All Demos" was a landmark computer demonstration of developments by the Augmentation Research Center, given at the Association for Computing Machinery / Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (ACM/IEEE)—Computer Society's Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, by Douglas Engelbart, on December 9, 1968. The name The Mother of All Demos has been retroactively applied to the demonstration.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kevin Kelly (editor)</span> American magazine editor (born 1952)

Kevin Kelly is the founding executive editor of Wired magazine and a former editor and publisher of the Whole Earth Review. He has also been a writer, photographer, conservationist, and student of Asian and digital culture.

<i>CoEvolution Quarterly</i>

CoEvolution Quarterly (1974–1985) was a journal descended from Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog. Brand founded the CoEvolution Quarterly in 1974 using proceeds from the Whole Earth Catalog. It evolved out of the original Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog. Fred Turner notes that in 1985, Brand merged CoEvolution Quarterly with The Whole Earth Software Review to create the Whole Earth Review.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The WELL</span> Virtual community

The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, normally shortened to The WELL or, alternatively, The Well, is a virtual community that was launched in 1985. It is one of the oldest continuously operating virtual communities. By 1993 it had 7,000 members, a staff of 12, and gross annual income of $2 million. A 1997 feature in Wired magazine called it "The world's most influential online community." In 2012, when it was last publicly offered for sale, it had 2,693 members. It is best known for its Internet forums, but also provides email, shell accounts, and web pages. Discussion topics are organized into conferences that cover broad areas of interest. User anonymity is prohibited.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James T. Baldwin</span>

James Tennant Baldwin, often known as Jay Baldwin or J. Baldwin, was an American industrial designer and writer. Baldwin was a student of Buckminster Fuller; Baldwin's work was inspired by Fuller's principles and, in the case of some of Baldwin's published writings, he popularized and interpreted Fuller's ideas and achievements. In his own right, Baldwin was a figure in American designers' efforts to incorporate solar, wind, and other renewable energy sources. In his career, being a fabricator was as important as being a designer. Baldwin was noted as the inventor of the "Pillow Dome", a design that combines Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome with panels of inflated ETFE plastic panels.

The Point Foundation was a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco and founded by Stewart Brand and Dick Raymond. It published works related to the Whole Earth Catalog. It was also a co-owner of The WELL.

Whole Earth may refer to:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fred Turner (author)</span>

Fred Turner is an American academic. He is the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University, having formerly served as department chair.

The Midpeninsula Free University (MFU) was one of the largest and most successful of the many free universities that sprang up on and around college campuses in the mid-1960s in the wake of the Free Speech Movement at University of California, Berkeley and the nationwide anti-war Teach-ins which followed. Like other free universities, it featured an open curriculum—anyone who paid the nominal membership fee ($10) could offer a course in anything—marxism, pacifism, candle making, computers, encounter, dance, or literature. Courses were publicized in illustrated catalogs, issued quarterly and widely distributed. It had no campus; classes were taught in homes and storefronts. Its magazine-style illustrated newsletter, The Free You, published articles, features, fiction, poetry, and reviews contributed by both members and nonmembers. The MFU sponsored, Be-Ins, street concerts, a restaurant, a store, and was actively involved in every aspect of the flourishing counterculture on the Midpeninsula, including the anti-war movement at Stanford University.

The Portola Institute was a "nonprofit educational foundation" founded in Menlo Park, California in 1966 by Dick Raymond. The Portola institute helped to develop other organizations such as The Briarpatch Society and Bob Albrecht's People's Computer Company. It was also the publisher of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog beginning with the first issue in 1968. The first issue of The Whole Earth Catalog notes that the catalog is one division of The Portola Institute and that other activities of the Institute include: "computer education for all grade levels, simulation games for classroom use, new approaches to music education, Ortega Park Teachers Laboratory." Raymond and Brand later collaborated to form the Point Foundation.

The Whole Earth Software Catalog and The Whole Earth Software Review (1984–1985) were two publications produced by Stewart Brand's Point Foundation as an extension of the Whole Earth Catalog.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ruth DeFries</span> American geographer

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Hackers Conference</span>

The Hackers Conference is an annual invitation-only gathering of designers, engineers and programmers to discuss the latest developments and innovations in the computer industry. On a daily basis, many hackers only interact virtually, and therefore rarely have face-to-face contact. The conference is a time for hackers to come together to share ideas.

<i>Whole Earth Discipline</i> 2009 book by Stewart Brand

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto is the sixth book by Stewart Brand, published by Viking Penguin in 2009. He sees Earth and people propelled by three transformations: climate change, urbanization and biotechnology. Brand tackles "touchy issues" like nuclear power, genetic engineering and geoengineering, "fully aware that many of the environmentalist readers he hopes to reach will start out disagreeing with him".

The Electronic Information Exchange System was an early online conferencing bulletin board system that allowed real-time and asynchronous communication. The system was used to deliver courses, conduct conferencing sessions, and facilitate research. Funded by the National Science Foundation and developed from 1974-1978 at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) by Murray Turoff based on his earlier EMISARI done at the now-defunct Office of Emergency Preparedness, EIES was intended to facilitate group communications that would allow groups to make decisions based on their collective intelligence rather than the lowest common denominator. Initially conceived as an experiment in computer-mediated communication. EIES remained in use for decades because its users "just wouldn't let go" of it, eventually adapting it for legislative, medical and even spiritual uses.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ecomodernism</span> Environmental philosophy

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References

  1. ↑ "Bio..." Retrieved May 20, 2014.
  2. ↑ "Brand (Stewart) papers – Online Archive of California". Online Archive of California.
  3. ↑ Stewart Brand. "Big Think Interview with Stewart Brand – Big Think". Big Think.
  4. ↑ Markoff, John 2022 Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand. New York:Penguin, pp. 77–79
  5. ↑ Brand 2009, p. 236
  6. 1 2 3 Lewine, Edward (April 19, 2009). "On the Waterfront". The New York Times. Retrieved November 2, 2009.
  7. ↑ Brand, Stewart. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: The Legacy of the Whole Earth Catalog. Stanford University Libraries via Google. Event occurs at 32:30. Retrieved November 7, 2009.
  8. ↑ Wolfe, T., The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), pp. 363 ff.
  9. ↑ "Lunch with the FT: Stewart Brand". www.ft.com. Archived from the original on December 10, 2022. Retrieved May 22, 2020.
  10. ↑ "The Guardian Profile: Stewart Brand". The Guardian. August 3, 2001. Retrieved May 22, 2020.
  11. 1 2 Brand, Stewart. "Photography changes our relationship to our planet". Smithsonian Photography Initiative. Archived from the original on May 30, 2008. Retrieved November 6, 2009.
  12. 1 2 Brand 2009, p. 214
  13. ↑ Leonard, Jennifer. "Stewart Brand on the long view". Archived from the original on December 12, 2007. Retrieved February 5, 2013.
  14. ↑ "The front cover of the Fall 1968 edition of the Whole Earth Catalog showing the AST-3 image of 10 November 1967".
  15. ↑ Fisher, Adam (December 9, 2018). "How Doug Engelbart Pulled off the Mother of All Demos". Wired. Retrieved December 12, 2018.
  16. ↑ O'Mara, Margaret Pugh (2019). The Code : Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America. New York. p. 128. ISBN   978-0-399-56218-1. OCLC   1057306457.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  17. 1 2 3 Kirk, Andrew G. (2007). Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism. University Press of Kansas. ISBN   978-0-7006-1545-2.
  18. ↑ Turner, Fred. (2006). From counterculture to cyberculture : Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the rise of digital utopianism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN   0226817415. OCLC   62533774.
  19. ↑ "National Book Awards – 1972". National Book Foundation. Retrieved March 9, 2012.
    There was a "Contemporary" or "Current" award category from 1972 to 1980.
  20. ↑ "'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says". Stanford University. June 14, 2005. Retrieved March 1, 2021.
  21. ↑ Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine : "Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address". Stanford University. 2009. Retrieved March 1, 2021.
  22. ↑ Kirk, Andrew G. (2007). Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. pp. 88–90, 100, 165–166. ISBN   978-0-7006-1821-7.
  23. ↑ Mumford, Lewis "Enough Energy for Life & the Next Transformation of Man" CoEvolution Quarterly issue 4, 1974-12-21, pp 19–23.
  24. ↑ Turner, Fred (2008). From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. pp. 129–130.
  25. ↑ "Governor of California, BallotPedia, https://ballotpedia.org/Jerry_Brown_(California)
  26. ↑ Markoff, John 2022 Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand. New York:Penguin
  27. ↑ Fred., Turner (2006). From counterculture to cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the rise of digital utopianism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN   0226817415. OCLC   62533774.
  28. ↑ Katie Hafner, The WELL: A Story of Love, Death and Real Life in the Seminal Online Community:(2001) Carroll & Graf Publishers ISBN   0-7867-0846-8
  29. 1 2 Kelly, Kevin. "Biography". Kevin Kelly. Archived from the original on May 18, 2019. Retrieved July 28, 2019.
  30. ↑ Hitt, Jack (December 9, 2001). "The year in ideas: A to Z; The All-Species Inventory". The New York Times. Retrieved July 28, 2019.
  31. ↑ "A Call for the Discovery of All Life-Forms on Earth". All Species Foundation. Archived from the original on February 2, 2007. Retrieved July 28, 2019.
  32. ↑ "Environmental Heresies". MIT Technology Review.
  33. 1 2 3 Wiener, Anna (November 16, 2018). "The Complicated Legacy of Stewart Brand's "Whole Earth Catalog"". The New Yorker . ISSN   0028-792X . Retrieved May 18, 2019.
  34. ↑ Stewart Brand (2009). Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. Viking. ISBN   978-0-670-02121-5.
  35. ↑ Sabin, Paul (March 25, 2022). "Stewart Brand's Long, Strange Trip". The New York Times.
  36. ↑ Marsh, Calum (September 6, 2022). "We Are as Gods review: Turn On, Tune in, Drop Out". The New York Times. Retrieved January 30, 2024.
  37. ↑ "An Ecomodernist Manifesto". ecomodernism.org. Retrieved April 17, 2015. A good Anthropocene demands that humans use their growing social, economic, and technological powers to make life better for people, stabilize the climate, and protect the natural world.
  38. ↑ Eduardo Porter (April 14, 2015). "A Call to Look Past Sustainable Development". The New York Times. Retrieved April 17, 2015. On Tuesday, a group of scholars involved in the environmental debate, including Professor Roy and Professor Brook, Ruth DeFries of Columbia University, and Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute in Oakland, Calif., issued what they are calling the "Eco-modernist Manifesto."
  39. ↑ "Authors an Ecomodernist Manifesto". ecomodernism.org. Retrieved April 17, 2015. As scholars, scientists, campaigners, and citizens, we write with the conviction that knowledge and technology, applied with wisdom, might allow for a good, or even great, Anthropocene.
  40. ↑ "Bio". sb.longnow.org.
  41. ↑ PDF Archived May 18, 2005, at the Wayback Machine

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