View source for Stewart Brand

__NOTOC__
Stewart Brand is best known as the creator of the [[Whole Earth Catalog]], which was an expression of hippy counter-culture and back-to-land communalism. Brand however went on to play a role in the digital revolution, and can be considered a member of the [[Hacker Generation]]. He thus personally exemplifies how the hacker movement can be seen as having grown out of the hippy counter-culture; see for example [[Fred Turner]]'s book [[From Counterculture to Cyberculture]].

==Stewart Brand's Early Activities as a Multimedia Artist==
Stewart Brand grew up in a technically oriented environment: his home town in Illinois specialized in making machine tools, his father was a ham radio operator and his college-educated mother a space buff. Stewart Brand obtained a degree in biology in 1960 from Stanford University, where he encountered systems theory in a biology class taught by Paul Ehrlich, a specialist in butterfly ecology (who later wrote The Population Bomb). American biology at that time was under the influence of [[Cybernetics]] and information theory.

Upon graduation from Stanford, Brand was drafted into the U.S. Army, where he began training infantry and ended as an army photographer. While stationed in New Jersey, Brand spent off-duty weekends visiting the lower-Manhattan loft of a young painter named Steve Durkee, thus coming in contact with the bohemian art world of Manhattan. Returning to civilian life in 1962, he studied design at the San Francisco Art Institute and photography at San Francisco State College. 

Around 1962 Steve Durkee teamed up with San Francisco–based poet Gerd Stern and multimedia technician Michael Callahan to form an art troupe they called USCO, short for "The US Company." Brand collaborated periodically with USCO, for example contributing photographs to a 1963 event called "Verbal American Landscape," in which three slide projectors showed, in random sequence, photographs of individual words found on road signs and billboards. Over the next few years, USCO was to transformed the "happening" into a psychedelic celebration, using strobe lights, projectors, tape decks and stereo speakers to transform the audience's consciousness.

Brand also developed his own multimedia piece, called "America Needs Indians," consisting of sound tracks, three slide projection systems, and four Native American dancers. 

In 1963 Brand met author Ken Kesey, then host of a burgeoning psychedelic scene on the San Francisco peninsula. Brand stayed behind in the fall of 1964 when Kesey and the Merry Pranksters took their legendary tour across the country in an old school bus painted with Day-Glo colors, as chronicled in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, but renewed contact when the Pranksters returned. During the year 1965, Kesey and the Pranksters staged about a dozen "Acid Tests" in various venues in California. Toward the end of 1965, Brand and Ramón Sender Barayón, a composer of electronic music, imagined a new event to take the San Francisco psychedelic scene public. Together with Kesey and promoter Bill Graham they organised the Trips Festival, a multi-media festival held in the Longshoreman's Hall in San Francisco for three nights on a weekend in January 1966, which heralded the start of the Haight-Ashbury era.

==Whole Earth==
Later in 1966, Brand initiated a public campaign to have NASA release a rumored satellite image of the entire Earth as seen from space, which he thought might be a powerful symbol. He conceived and sold buttons which read, “Why Haven’t We Seen A Photograph of the Whole Earth Yet?” During this Earth-photograph campaign Brand met Richard Buckminster Fuller, who offered to help him in his projects.

As youth from all over America converged on San Francisco for the 1967 "Summer of Love," many of the original hippies fled to get "back to the land." Thus in 1968 Stewart Brand was thinking in terms of how to provide tools and information for these new rural communities. Using the most basic of typesetting and page-layout tools, he and a small group created issue number one of the [[Whole Earth Catalog]].

The first oversize Catalog and its successors considered many sorts of things as "tools." In addition to actual tools for gardening, carpentry, masonry, and welding, it included equipment for camping, specialized clothing, and early synthesizers and personal computers. It also included less material "tools" such as books, maps and professional journals. Brand invited "reviews" of the best of these items from experts in specific fields, and information was also provided on where these things could be bought. The Catalog was also a major vector of early environmentalism, and introduced many readers to the potential of alternative energy production through solar, wind, small-hydro and geothermal power.

The influence of the Catalog extended far beyond the rural back-to-the-land communities which were its ostensible target audience. The Catalog's publication coincided with a great wave of "do it yourself" experimentalism associated with the "counterculture". The highpoint 1972 edition sold 1.5 million copies and won a U.S. National Book Award. 

The original Whole Earth Catalog was published every six months from 1968 to 1972. In 1971 Stewart Brand decided that the Whole Earth Catalog had served its purpose, and co-organized with Scott Beach a“Demise Party” at the San Francisco Exploratorium to celebrate its end (although the self-proclaimed "Last" Whole Earth Catalog was in fact published in 1972). At this event Stewart Brand turned over $20,000 in cash to the audience of 1,500 guests and invited them to decide what to do with it. Debate lasted till dawn, at which point the money was entrusted to Fred Moore who promised to reconvene the remaining guests to conclude the deliberations.

Single numbers of the Whole Earth Catalog were published periodically over the next two decades, including notably the Whole Earth Epilog (1974), and the Next Whole Earth Catalog (1981), which was the peak edition.

==Brand and the Early Computer Hackers==
In 1968, Brand helped design and implement Douglas Engelbart's demonstration of “Augmented Human Intellect” at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. In this presentation, which has been described as the "Mother of All Demos,” Engelbart demonstrated for the first time ever in public the key features of the personal computer interface to come, including the mouse-keyboard-screen combination we now take for granted. Moreover, he showed that computers could be used for complex group communications over long distances and for the enhancement of individual and collective learning.

A few year later, in 1972, Brand wrote an article for Rolling Stone called “Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums,” describing the latest developments in the computer sub-culture of that time, and beginning with the line: "Ready or not, computers are coming to the people." The piece described long-haired graduate students at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory playing the legendary computer game Spacewar on a PDP-10 time-sharing computer, and then described the work of Alan Kay on the Dynabook, a forerunner of the personal computer, at the Xerox PARC, and as well as the ARPANET; the forerunner of internet. The piece then described the work of Resource One, a San Francisco experiment in providing community groups with shared time on a mainframe computer. For Brand, both PARC and Resource One were making computers into tools for transformation in the Whole Earth tradition, and the Hackers, scouting a leading edge of do-it-yourself technology, were cultural revolutionaries for whom computers would make us more empowered, co-operating individuals.

==CoEvolution==
The first editions of the Whole Earth Catalog were heavily influenced by the ideas of [[Buckminster Fuller]], which fit well with the independent spirit of the back-to-the-land movement. In the 1972 edition, however, Stewart Brand promoted the thinking of [[Gregory Bateson]], which better reflected the reality of needing to work within the system to move society as whole towards more cooperative forms. In 1973 Brand interviewed Bateson for an article published in Harpers, entitled “Unbinding—Conversations with Meta-naturalist Gregory Bateson.” This article and the one mentioned above about computer hackers were combined and expanded in Brand's 1974 book Two Cybernetic Frontiers, which had the first use of the term “personal computer” in print.

In 1974, to carry on the work begun with the Whole Earth Catalog, Brand founded the [[CoEvolution Quarterly]] (CEQ). This quarterly journal published full-length articles on specific topics in natural sciences, invention, arts and social sciences, and on the contemporary scene in general. The term "coevolution" in the name was inspired by the ideas of [[Gregory Bateson]]. The journal continued to 2001 after a change of name to Whole Earth Magazine.

==Brand's further Participation in the Digital Revolution==
In 1976 Brand veered away from his more terrestrial concerns by editing a book on Space Colonies. He came back into the limelight in 1983-85 as Editor-in-Chief of the Whole Earth Software Catalog and a founder of the magazine the Whole Earth Software Review. The magazine was introduced just as the offer of specialized books and journals about consumer software was exploding, and it failed, but was later merged with the Coevolution Quarterly to form the Whole Earth Magazine.

1984 Brand initiated and co-organized (with Kevin Kelly and Ryan Phelan) “The Hackers Conference,” which since 1986 has been an annual event. At the first Hackers Conference Brand pronounced his famous dictum "Information Wants To Be Free." The full quote is as follows:

: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.

In 1984-85, Brand and Larry Brilliant founded the [[WELL]] ("Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link"), a computer teleconference system for the San Francisco Bay Area, which evolved into a prototypic, world-wide online community. It still exists and has 9,000 active users.

In 1986, Brand was a visiting scientist at the Media Laboratory at MIT. He wrote about this experience in his 1987 book, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT.

From 1990 to 1994 Brand was a Member of the Board of Directors of the [[Electronic Frontier Foundation]], an organization that supports civil rights and responsibilities in electronic media.

==Global Business Network, Santa Fe Institute and How Buildings Learn==
In 1988 Brand was co-founder of the Global Business Network with Peter Schwartz, Jay Ogilvy, Napier Collyns, and Lawrence Wilkinson. The Global Business Network explores global futures, scenario thinking and business strategies informed by the sorts of values which Brand has always found vital. GBN has explored business strategy for multinationals such as Ford, Bechtel, Shell, Morgan Stanley, Hewlett Packard, Swedbank, Dupont and Federal Express, along with government clients such as DARPA. Many of GBN’s scenario techniques may be found in the book The Art of the Long View. Brand founded and ran the “GBN Book Club” from 1988 to 1999. 

From 1989 to 2004 Brand was a Member of the Board of Trustees of the Santa Fe Institute, an interdisciplinary center studying the sciences of complexity. 

In 1994 Brand wrote How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built, which is used as a textbook for some architecture and preservation classes.

==The Long Now== 
In 1995 Brand co-founded with Danny Hillis The Long Now Foundation, to foster long-term responsibility. The core projects are building a 10,000-year Clock (designed by Hillis) and laying the groundwork for a 10,000-year Library. In 1999 he wrote The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility, a series of essays exploring the meaning and uses of a 10,000-year “now.” In 2001 he co-founded with Kevin Kelly the Long Bets website, to foster public accountability for predictions. In 2003 he organized the Long Now’s “Seminars About Long-term Thinking” (SALT), a monthly series of public talks in San Francisco.

==Environmental Heresies==
While continuing to hold the same basic values that inspired the Whole Earth Catalog, in 2005 Brand criticized the international environmental movement he helped inspire. His article entitled Environmental Heresies in the May 2005 issue of the MIT Technology Review suggested that environmentalists should embrace nuclear power and genetically modified organisms as technologies with more promise than risk. As these technologies are unavailable as tools to ordinary people but are instead wielded by a military, corporate, and academic elite, some see Brand's recent statements as philosophically incompatible with his earlier work.

==Links==
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Brand
*http://sb.longnow.org/Bio.html
*Excerpts from Fred Turner's 2006 book "From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism": [http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/turner06/turner06_index.html chapter 2] and [http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/817415_chap4.html part of chapter 4]

[[Category:Whole Earth]]