Stewart Brand
|
Stewart Brand speaking September 5, 2004 |
Stewart Brand (born
December 14,
1938 in
Rockford, Illinois) is an
author,
editor, and creator of
The Whole Earth Catalog and
CoEvolution Quarterly. His intent with the
Whole Earth Catalog was to enable people to find virtually any sort of information useful to themselves, in the belief that humans would then develop a new, positive and sustainable culture and technology for themselves; in this way, his ideas were forerunners of the
Internet. Hence, Brand later co-founded the online community The
Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (The WELL) with
Larry Brilliant. Brand is noted as an editor who published writings by many of the now-acknowledged innovative thinkers of today, early in their careers. He is one of the co-founders of the Global Business Network. Brand was also one of a group of "futurists" consulted in the planning stage of the feature film
Minority Report.
During Brand's childhood, his father worried that school was not stimulating Stewart to independent, creative thinking. His parents' response was to send him to
Phillips Exeter Academy. From there, he went on to study biology at
Stanford University, graduating in 1960. In 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 the year 1962 he studied design at
San Francisco Art Institute, photography at
San Francisco State College, and was a participant in a legitimate study of the then-legal drug
LSD, in Menlo Park.
Brand has lived in California in the years since. Through scholarship and by visiting numerous
Indian reservations, biologist-artist Brand 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.
By the mid '60s, he developed an association with author
Ken Kesey and the "
Merry Pranksters," and in
San Francisco, Brand produced the
Trips Festival, a pioneering effort involving rock music and light shows.
In 1966, Brand initiated a public campaign to have
NASA release the then-rumored satellite image of the entire Earth as seen from space. He thought the image of our planet might be a powerful symbol. In 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." It was during his Earth-photograph campaign that Brand met
Richard Buckminster Fuller, who offered to help him in his projects.
 |
Earth from Space |
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. The fact that he had builders, designers, and engineers as friends surely influenced his reasoning.
In 1968, using the most basic of typesetting and page-layout tools, he and cohorts created issue number one of
The Whole Earth Catalog. That first oversize
Catalog, and its successors into the '70s and later, reckoned that many sorts of things were useful "tools": books, maps, garden tools, specialized clothing, carpenter's and mason's tools, forestry gear, tents, welding equipment, professional journals, early synthesizers and personal computers -- the list was broad and nearly endless. 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 felt 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. (See also
renewable energy.)
To carry on 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 in 1974, aimed primarily at the savvy, educated layperson. Brand never better revealed his outlook 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 the
Quarterly often wandered through the risky edges of futurism, or the risqué byways of modern life. Besides giving space to unknown writers with something valuable to say, Brand presented articles by many highly respected authors and thinkers, including
Lewis Mumford,
Howard T. Odum,
Witold Rybczynski,
Karl Hess,
Christopher Swan,
Orville Schell,
Ivan Illich,
Ursula K. Le Guin,
Gregory Bateson,
Amory Lovins,
Hazel Henderson,
Gary Snyder,
Lynn Margulis,
Peter Calthorpe,
Sim Van der Ryn,
Paul Hawken,
John Todd,
J. Baldwin,
Kevin Kelly (future editor of
Wired magazine), and
Donella Meadows. In 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.
In 1977-79, Brand served as "special advisor" in the administration of California Governor
Jerry Brown. In 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.
In 1986, Brand was a visiting scientist at the
Media Laboratory at MIT. Soon after, he took up the role of 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 explores global futures and business strategies informed by the sorts of values and information which Brand has always found vital. GBN has taken a leadership role in the evolution and application of scenario thinking, planning, and complementary strategic tools. In other connections, Brand has sat 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 continued also to promote the preservation of tracts of wilderness.
Brand still stands behind his original insights. Well aware that there are plans afoot to mine the Moon for minerals, as a biologist he has been keenly aware that minerals are not the only need that Earth's life forms have, by any means. In a 2003 interview, he said "this [Earth] is all we've got and we've got to make it work. There's no back up." However, more recently in 2005 he has started to criticize the international environmental movement he helped inspire. An article by him entitled
Environmental Heresies appeared in the May 2005 issue of the
MIT Technology Review that spells out what he sees as necessary changes to environmentalism.
A few of Brand's more recent aphorisms (on which he has elaborated) are: "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 his most famous), [
1] "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 printed in the May 1985
Whole Earth Review. It later turned up in his book,
The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, published in 1987.)
Stewart Brand is the founder of the following institutions:
The Whole Earth Catalog in
1968CoEvolution Quarterly in
1974, with proceeds from The Whole Earth Catalog.
*
Point Foundation*
Global Business Network (co-founder)
*The
WELL in
1985, with
Larry Brilliant*
Hacker's Conference*
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 NowII Cybernetic Frontiers, 1974, ISBN 0394492838 (hardcover), ISBN 0394706897 (paperback)
*
The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, 1987, ISBN 0670814423 (hardcover); 1988, ISBN 0140097015 (paperback)
*
How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built, 1994. ISBN 0670835153
*
The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility, 1999. ISBN 046504512X
As editor or co-editor
The Whole Earth Catalog (original
editor, winner of the
National Book Award,
1972)
*
Whole Earth Epilog: Access to Tools, 1974, ISBN 0140039503
*
The (Updated) Last Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools, 16th edition, 1975, ISBN 0140035443
*
Space Colonies, Whole Earth Catalog, 1977, ISBN 0140048057
* As co-editor with
J. Baldwin:
Soft-Tech, 1978, ISBN 0140048065
*
The Next Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools, 1980, ISBN 0394739515;
*
The Next Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools, revised 2nd edition, 1981, ISBN 0394707761
* As editor-in chief:
Whole Earth Software Catalog, 1984, ISBN 0385191669
* As editor-in-chief:
Whole Earth Software Catalog for 1986, "2.0 edition" of above title, 1985, ISBN 0385233019
* As co-editor with
Art Kleiner:
News That Stayed News, 1974-1984: Ten Years of CoEvolution Quarterly, 1986, ISBN 0865472017 (hardcover), ISBN 0865472025 (paperback)
*
Introduction by Brand:
The Essential Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools and Ideas (Introduction by Brand), 1986, ISBN 0385236417
*
Foreword by Brand:
Signal: Communication Tools for the Information Age, editor:
Kevin Kelly, 1988, ISBN 051757084X
* Foreword by Brand:
The Fringes of Reason: A Whole Earth Catalog, editor:
Ted Schultz, 1989, ISBN 051757165X
* Foreword by Brand:
Whole Earth Ecolog: The Best of Environmental Tools & Ideas, editor: J. Baldwin, 1990, ISBN 0517576589
* Phil Garlington, "Stewart Brand,"
Outside magazine, December 1977.
* Sam Martin and Matt Scanlon, "The Long Now: An Interview with Stewart Brand,"
Mother Earth News magazine, January 2001 [
2]
* "Stewart Brand" (c.v., updated October 2001) [
3]
* Massive Change Radio interview with Stewart Brand, November 2003 [
4]
*
Whole Earth Catalog, various issues, 1968-1980.
*
CoEvolution Quarterly (in the 1980s, renamed
Whole Earth Review, later just
Whole Earth), various issues, 1974-2002.
*
Edge.org*
Global Business Network*
Stewart Brand bio at "The Well"*
Listen to MP3 of Stewart Brand interviewed by Jennifer Leonard*
Cities & Time, seminar by Stewart Brand at the Long Now Foundation*
"Environmental Heresies" in the MIT Technology Review
