Stewart Brand

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search
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.

Brand is best known for the Whole Earth Catalog (a compendium of tools, texts and information). The Catalog sought to "catalyze the emergence of a realm of personal power" by making soft technology available to people eager to create sustainable communities. Brand went on to found a number of organizations, including the WELL or Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (an early online community); the Global Business Network (a futurist consulting firm); and the Long Now Foundation (dedicated to encouraging long-term thinking). He is the author of several books and many articles, ranging in focus from the psychedelic rituals of Native Americans to a systems analysis of "buildings in time." Today, he and his wife live on a tugboat in Sausalito, California.

Contents

[edit] Life and work

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 scientific study of the then-legal drug LSD, in Menlo Park, California.

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. Tom Wolfe describes him in the opening to his book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

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, Apollo 17, 1972

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 (CQ) 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 CQ 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, 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. 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 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.

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 the original insights put forward in the Whole Earth Catalog even though his thinking on important issues has changed. For example, the Catalog advanced a vision of human progress that depended on decentralized, personal, and liberating technological development — so called, "soft technology." However, in 2005 he criticized aspects of 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. In the article he suggested, among other things, that environmentalists embrace nuclear power and genetically modified organisms as technologies with more promise than risk. Specifically relating to atomic energy, Brand argued for a centralized global distributor of nuclear fuel without demonstrating any concern[neutrality disputed] for the possibility such an arrangement might become totalitarian. As these technologies are unavailable as tools to ordinary people but, rather, are wielded by a military, corporate, and academic techno-elite, some[who?] see Brand's recent statements as philosophically incompatible with his earlier work.

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.)

[edit] Works

Stewart Brand is the founder or was involved in the development of the following:

[edit] Publications

[edit] Books

[edit] As editor or as co-editor

[edit] Articles

[edit] References

  1. ^ "Information Wants to be Free ..."
  • 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 [1]
  • "Stewart Brand" (c.v., last updated September 2006) [2]
  • Massive Change Radio interview with Stewart Brand, November 2003 [3]
  • Whole Earth Catalog, various issues, 1968-1998.
  • CoEvolution Quarterly (in the 1980s, renamed Whole Earth Review, later just Whole Earth), various issues, 1974-2002.

[edit] Further reading

  • Turner, Fred From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. University of Chicago Press. 2006. ISBN 0-226-81741-5. 

[edit] External links

Sister project Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Stewart Brand
v • d • e
Whole Earth
Editors
Stewart Brand · Kevin Kelly · Howard Rheingold
Origins
Later publications
Technology and Computers
Inspirations
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Brand"
Personal tools