Stewart Brand

Stewart Brand (born December 14, 1938) is an American writer, editor, and impresario who founded the Whole Earth Catalog in 1968, the online community the WELL in 1985, the corporate consultancy the Global Business Network in 1987, and the Long Now Foundation in 1996. A Stanford-trained biologist, Merry Prankster, and organizer of Ken Kesey's Trips Festival, he is the figure most often credited with carrying the values of the 1960s San Francisco counterculture, communalism, personal liberation, and a faith in "tools," into the personal-computer and internet culture of Silicon Valley, a passage documented by Fred Turner in From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (2006).¹²

From the Counterculture to the Whole Earth Catalog

Brand graduated in biology from Stanford University in 1960, studying under the ecologist Paul Ehrlich, and served as a U.S. Army infantry officer. In the mid-1960s he joined Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, helped stage the Acid Tests, and produced the three-day Trips Festival in San Francisco in January 1966. In 1966 he ran a public campaign asking why no photograph of the whole Earth from space had yet been published, selling buttons that read "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?"; he put a NASA image of the planet on the cover when he launched the Whole Earth Catalog in the autumn of 1968.¹²

The Whole Earth Catalog, subtitled "Access to Tools" and published from 1968 to 1972 with occasional later editions, was a large-format compendium reviewing books, machines, and ideas for self-sufficient living, organized under headings that began with "Whole Systems," cybernetics, and general systems theory. It opened with the line "We are as gods and might as well get good at it," won the National Book Award in 1972, and became, in Turner's account, a template for a decentralized, tool-using community that later technologists adopted. Steve Jobs took the farewell line on the back cover of the October 1974 edition, "Stay hungry. Stay foolish," as the closing exhortation of his 2005 Stanford commencement address. Brand also assisted Douglas Engelbart in staging the December 9, 1968 demonstration in San Francisco later called "the Mother of All Demos," which premiered the mouse, hypertext, and windowed computing.²³

The WELL, Global Business Network, and Digital Utopianism

In 1985 Brand and Larry Brilliant founded the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, or WELL, a dial-up teleconferencing system based in the San Francisco Bay Area that became one of the most influential early online communities and a seedbed of internet culture and the digital-rights movement; the writer Howard Rheingold drew his 1993 book The Virtual Community from it. Brand had earlier coined or popularized the slogan "Information wants to be free" at the 1984 Hackers Conference, which he helped organize, capturing the tension he described between information's wanting to be expensive and wanting to be free.¹⁴

In 1987 Brand co-founded the Global Business Network in Berkeley with the futurist Peter Schwartz, Jay Ogilvy, Napier Collyns, and Lawrence Wilkinson, a consultancy that brought the technique of scenario planning, developed earlier at Royal Dutch Shell, to corporations and governments and that linked countercultural futurism to corporate strategy. Through these ventures and his magazine CoEvolution Quarterly, Brand moved in the circles that produced Wired magazine and the Bay Area's networked-economy boosters of the 1990s, and Turner's history identifies him as the connective figure between the New Communalist counterculture and the libertarian techno-utopianism of that decade.⁴⁵

The Long Now Foundation and Long-Term Thinking

In 1996 Brand co-founded the Long Now Foundation with the computer scientist Danny Hillis and the musician Brian Eno to promote what they called "long-term thinking" across a horizon of ten thousand years; Eno coined the name to evoke a "long now" set against the short now of quarterly and weekly time. Its flagship project is the Clock of the Long Now, a monument-scale mechanical clock designed by Hillis to keep time for ten thousand years, a prototype of which is under construction inside a mountain in West Texas on land owned by Jeff Bezos, who funded the build. Brand set out the rationale in The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility (1999).⁶

Brand's later projects extended the foundation's long-horizon framing into biotechnology and environmental politics. He co-founded Revive & Restore, a Long Now project pursuing the genetic "de-extinction" of species such as the passenger pigeon and the woolly mammoth, and in Whole Earth Discipline (2009) he argued for nuclear power, genetic engineering, and geoengineering as environmental tools, declaring again that "we are as gods and have to get good at it."¹⁷