Editor and writer, born in Rockford, Illinois, USA. He studied at Stanford, and became associated with the Merry Pranksters, a west-coast group of bohemian writers and intellectuals. He then became the founding editor of the counterculture The Whole Earth Catalogue series (196871), and later editor-in-chief of The Whole Earth Software Catalogue (19835). He became a research scientist at the Media Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1986, and published an account of its work the following year.
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Stewart BrandStewart Brand (born December 14, 1938 in Rockford, Illinois) is an author, editor, and creator of The Whole Earth Catalog and CoEvolution Quarterly. 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. Brand was also one of a group of "futurists" consulted in the planning stage of the feature film Minority Report.
Life and work
During Brand's childhood, his father worried that school was not stimulating Stewart to independent, creative thinking.
Brand has lived in California in the years since. 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. In a 2003 interview, Brand explained that the image "gave the sense that Earth’s an island, surrounded by a lot of inhospitable space. It was during his Earth-photograph campaign that Brand met Richard Buckminster Fuller, who offered to help him in his projects.
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.
In 1968, using the most basic of typesetting and page-layout tools, he and cohorts created issue number one of The Whole Earth Catalog. 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 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. (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: "... 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. 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.
In 1986, Brand was a visiting scientist at the Media Laboratory at MIT. 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. 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."
Brand still stands behind his original insights.
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), "Information Wants To Be Free. 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 1968 CoEvolution 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 Now
User Comments Add a comment…