Stewart Brand

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“I Think One Of The Main Things Is The Idea Of No Spectators”

December 12, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Ken Kesey responded this way when asked if psychedelics had injured him: “You don’t get anything for free.”

Buried in Timothy Leary’s original 1960s “Turn on, tune in, drop out” college lecture tour was the defrocked academic’s belief that while the mind-bending strength of LSD was needed to awaken the “beloved robots” from society’s lockstep sleepwalk, he didn’t think pharmaceuticals would long be required or even desired to liberate hearts and minds. Leary felt computer software or space exploration or some other “high” would allow people to escape conformity.

We’re 50 years on from the famous (and infamous) Trips Festival in San Francisco, the first real gathering of hippies, with Owsley Stanley providing the dosage and the Grateful Dead the volume. All those years later, America has a President-Elect reminiscent of Mussolini and a populace that’s largely turned cruel. Is that because not enough people became enlightened or due to progress and regress being constantly at war? The latter, I think.

Regardless, a golden-anniversary celebration of the seminal event will be attended by one of its original organizers Stewart Brand. He was interviewed by Gabe Meline of KQED about the occasion. Below is an excerpt from that Q&A and a piece from Brand’s 1967 Psychedelic Review article about a peyote-fueled Native American church meeting he attended.

From KQED:

Question:

You’re someone who often thinks about, and talks about, the future. This going to be thinking and talking about the past — 50 years ago. How does it feel to look back?

Stewart Brand:

Well, the Long Now Foundation, where I am President and have been mainly occupied for the last 20 years — we are focused on continuity. The Trips Festival was a continuity event. It was kind of a transitional event from one period of art in the Bay Area to another period. A lot of what it was expressing then is, I think, still very present — certainly in Burning Man, and in certain relationships that artists have to each other, and, increasingly, that engineers have to each other in the Bay Area. The interaction of engineers and artists, there was a certain amount of it at the Trips Festival and there’s certainly a lot more now. It’s part of the Bay Area’s ongoing contribution to culture and society.

Question:

You mentioned Burning Man. What other things grew out of the ideology at the Trips Festival?

Stewart Brand:

I think one of the main things is the idea of no spectators. The idea that an audience shows up to a certain kind of event expecting to do something, not just to see something. Raves came on through that. People came to the Trips Festival in outfits, and stoned, and prepared to dance. There was not much seating in Longshoreman’s Hall. There was a great big floor with scaffolding in the middle, where Ken Kesey and Ken Babbs and I were dangling. That floor was always filled with people doing stuff. It was at its best when the Grateful Dead, newly named the Grateful Dead, were playing. That’s why we did a reprise Sunday night of their amazing show on Saturday night.•

From Psychedelic Review:

The meeting is mandala-form, a circle with a doorway to the east. The roadman will sit opposite the door, the moon-crescent altar in front of him. To his left sits the cedarman, to his right the drummer. On the right side as you enter will be the fireman. The people sit around the circle. In the middle is the fire.

A while after dark they go in. This may be formal, filling in clockwise around the circle in order. The roadman may pray outside beforehand, asking that the place and the people and the occasion be blessed.

Beginning a meeting is as conscious and routine as a space launch countdown. At this time the fireman is busy starting the fire and seeing that things and people are in their places. The cedarman drops a little powder of cedar needles and little balls, goes down the quickest. In all cases, the white fluff should be removed. There is usually a pot of peyote tea, kept near the fire, which is passed occasionally during the night. Each person takes as much medicine as he wants and can ask for more at any time. Four buttons is a common start. Women usually take less than the men. Children have only a little, unless they are sick. 

Everything is happening briskly at this point. People swallow and pass the peyote with minimum fuss. The drummer and roadman go right into the starting song. The roadman, kneeling on one or both knees, begins it with the rattle in his right hand. The drummer picks up the quick beat, and the roadman gently begins the song. His left hand holds the staff, a feather fan, and some sage. He sings four times, ending each section with a steady quick rattle as a signal for the drummer to pause or re-wet the drumhead before resuming the beat. Using his thumb on the drumhead, the drummer adjusts the beat of his song. When the roadman finishes he passes the staff, gourd, fan and sage to the cedarman, who sings four times with the random drumming. So it goes, the drum following the staff to the left around the circle, so each man sings and drums many times during the night.•

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50 Great 2015 Articles Online For Free

January 4, 2016 in Misc. | Permalink

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Here are 50 ungated pieces of wonderful journalism from 2015, alphabetized by author name, which made me consider something new or reconsider old beliefs or just delighted me. (Some selections are from gated publications that allow a number of free articles per month.) If your excellent work isn’t on the list, that’s more my fault than yours.

  • “Who Runs the Streets of New Orleans?” (David Amsden, The New York Times Magazine) As private and public sector missions increasingly overlap, here’s an engaging look at the privatization of some policing in the French Quarter.
  • “In the Beginning” (Ross Andersen, Aeon) A bold and epic essay about the elusive search for the origins of the universe.
  • Ask Me Anything (Anonymous, Reddit) A 92-year-old German woman who was born into Nazism (and participated in it) sadly absolves herself of all blame while answering questions about that horrible time.
  • “Rethinking Extinction” (Stewart Brand, Aeon) The Whole Earth Catalog founder thinks the chance of climate-change catastrophe overrated, arguing we should utilize biotech to repopulate dwindling species.
  • “Anchorman: The Legend of Don Lemon” (Taffy Brodesser-Akner, GQ) A deeply entertaining look into the perplexing facehole of Jeff Zucker’s most gormless word-sayer and, by extension, the larger cable-news zeitgeist.
  • “How Social Media Is Ruining Politics” (Nicholas Carr, Politico) A lament that our shiny new tools have provided provocative trolls far more credibility than a centralized media ever allowed for.
  • “Clans of the Cathode” (Tom Carson, The Baffler) One of our best culture critics looks at the meaning of various American sitcom families through the medium’s history.
  • “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration” (Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic) The author examines the tragedy of the African-American community being turned into a penal colony, explaining the origins of the catastrophic policy failure.
  • “Perfect Genetic Knowledge” (Dawn Field, Aeon) The essayist thinks about a future in which we’ve achieved “perfect knowledge” of whole-planet genetics.
  • “A Strangely Funny Russian Genius” (Ian Frazier, The New York Review of Books) Daniil Kharms was a very funny writer, if you appreciate slapstick that ends in a body count.
  • “Tomorrow’s Advance Man” (Tad Friend, The New Yorker) Profile of Silicon Valley strongman Marc Andreessen and his milieu, an enchanted land in which adults dream of riding unicorns.
  • “Build-a-Brain” (Michael Graziano, Aeon) The neuroscientist’s ambitious thought experiment about machine intelligence is a piece I thought about continuously throughout the year.
  • Ask Me Anything (Stephen Hawking, Reddit) Among other things, the physicist warns that the real threat of superintelligent machines isn’t malice but relentless competence.
  • “Engineering Humans for War” (Annie Jacobsen, The Atlantic) War is inhuman, it’s been said, and the Pentagon wants to make it more so by employing bleeding-edge biology and technology to create super soldiers.
  • “The Wrong Head” (Mike Jay, London Review of Books) A look at insanity in 1840s France, which demonstrates that mental illness is often expressed in terms of the era in which it’s experienced.
  • “Death Is Optional” (Daniel Kahneman and Noah Yuval Harari, Edge) Two of my favorite big thinkers discuss the road ahead, a highly automated tomorrow in which medicine, even mortality, may not be an egalitarian affair.
  • “Where the Bodies Are Buried,” (Patrick Radden Keefe, The New Yorker) Ceasefires, even treaties, don’t completely conclude wars, as evidenced by this haunting revisitation of the heartbreaking IRA era.
  • “Porntopia” (Molly Lambert, Grantland) The annual Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas, the Oscars of oral, allows the writer to look into a funhouse-mirror reflection of America.
  • “The Robots Are Coming” (John Lanchester, London Review of Books) A remarkably lucid explanation of how quickly AI may remake our lives and labor in the coming decades.
  • “Last Girl in Larchmont” (Emily Nussbaum, The New Yorker) The great TV critic provides a postmortem of Joan Rivers and her singular (and sometimes disquieting) brand of feminism.
  • “President Obama & Marilynne Robinson: A Conversation, Part 1 & Part 2” (Barack Obama and Marilynne Robinson, New York Review of Books) Two monumental Americans discuss the state of the novel and the state of the union.
  • Ask Me Anything (Elizabeth Parrish, Reddit) The CEO of BioViva announces she’s patient zero for the company’s experimental age-reversing gene therapies. Strangest thing I read all year.
  • “Why Alien Life Will Be Robotic” (Sir Martin Rees, Nautilus) The astronomer argues that ETs in our inhospitable universe have likely already transitioned into conscious machines.
  • Ask Me Anything (Anders Sandberg, Reddit) Heady conversation about existential risks, Transhumanism, economics, space travel and future technologies conducted by the Oxford researcher. 
  • “Alien Rights” (Lizzie Wade, Aeon) Manifest Destiny will, sooner or later, became a space odyssey. What ethics should govern exploration of the final frontier?
  • “Peeling Back the Layers of a Born Salesman’s Life” (Michael Wilson, The New York Times) The paper’s gifted crime writer pens a posthumous profile of a protean con man, a Zelig on the make who crossed paths with Abbie Hoffman, Otto Preminger and Annie Leibovitz, among others.
  • “The Pop Star and the Prophet” (Sam York, BBC Magazine) Philosopher Jacques Attali, who predicted, back in the ’70s, the downfall of the music business, tells the writer he now foresees similar turbulence for manufacturing.

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“We Sat Around A Big U-Shaped Table Like That Scene In 2001 — In That Conference Room On The Moon”

September 24, 2015 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

Speaking of the think tank that helped Steven Spielberg create the world of tomorrow for 2002’s Minority Report, Wired reconvened some of the principals of that very productive two-day retreat to mark the tenth anniversary of the film. It sounds like it was a fascinating experience if a harried and discombobulating one. An excerpt:

Alex McDowell (production designer, Minority Report):

It was two full days at the Shutters Hotel in Santa Monica.

Jaron Lanier (computer scientist, virtual reality pioneer):

We pretended to be a conference of dental technicians or something boring.

Douglas Coupland (novelist, author of Generation X and Microserfs):

We sat around a big U-shaped table like that scene in 2001 — in that conference room on the moon.

Joel Garreau (principal of consulting firm The Garreau Group, in 1999 a reporter at the Washington Post):

I don’t think many of us knew what the fuck we were getting ourselves into.

Peter Schwartz (futurist, co-founder of scenario-planning firm Global Business Network):

We would ask questions: What about advertising? What about transportation? What about newspapers? What about food?

Stewart Brand (editor of Whole Earth Catalog):

They had graphic artists there who could immediately draw things that were being described.

Harald Belker (automotive designer):

We were supposed to just watch and listen and see what people had to say.

Coupland:

It was a big deal back then to have that real-time feedback.

Schwartz:

What about weapons? Surveillance — how did it work? One that moved very quickly was the gesture control of computers. That really began with Jaron. There was pretty quick agreement about what you saw onscreen.

Lanier:

We were doing these glove technologies that could be combined with displays. That was totally commonplace during that time as a demo thing — not as a consumer product. My recollection is that I brought in a working one. I could just pack one in the trunk.

Coupland:

I put together a whole book for it — a 2080 style book. We were told it was 2080, but then it ended up being 2050.•

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“It Will All Go Better With Genetically Engineered Plants. And Animals. And Farmers.”

April 24, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

I’m in favor of genetically modified foods, even if I have concerns about Monsanto and its ilk. Even without human-made climate change, we eventually would face a temperature shift threatening to agriculture. Let’s get started now (carefully and intelligently) on these experiments, especially since there are going to be more mouths to feed. 

In 2010, David Honigmann of the Financial Times had lunch with Stewart Brand, a strong proponent of GMOs, which were meeting with resistance in Europe, particularly France. An excerpt:

Food, I say, is central to French culture. He scoffs. “Socialised agriculture is OK?” He takes some fig jam with his cheese. France, I say, is full of small farmers, not dominated by agrochemical combines. “That’s fair.” None the less, he insists that “it will all go better with genetically engineered plants. And animals. And farmers.

“We’ve had 12 or 13 years of genetically engineered food in this country and it’s been great. My prediction is that in a couple of years we’ll see a soyabean oil that has Omega 3 fatty acids to cut down heart disease. Who would refuse that, any more than people refuse to take medicine?”

In the long run, he insists, opposition will die out. “IVF is the big example. I remember when that was an abomination in the face of God’s will. As soon as people met a few of the children, they realised that they were just as good as the ‘regular’ ones. My hope is that, unlike nuclear, which involves almost a theological shift, getting gradually used to genetic foods will be a non-issue.”•

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“Travel To The Earth’s Surface And Back Would Be Relatively Hard. Is That Correct?”

April 22, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In a book which sprang from the Whole Earth Catalog successor, CoEvolution Quarterly, Stewart Brand included his 1975 discussion about space colonization with physicist Gerard O’Neill. The interviewee’s take on the economics of space travel was ridiculously hopeful for the time (and still in ours) but not theoretically impossible in the long run if we last. An excerpt: 

Stewart Brand:

If “in wildness is the preservation of the world,” then in what is the preservation of the space colony?

Gerard O’Neill:

Making it wild, I think. The long-term plan, really dream, that I would have is a situation in which, in 50, 100, 150 years, it would be so cheap to replicate large communities that you would be building quite large ones, many, many square miles in land area for each one, and they would be very thinly populated. And so the natural development it seems to me, is toward a situation where you have a great many wild species involved, and as wild an environment as you choose to make. I would imagine one on which there is a lot of forest and park area and wild areas, and a relatively small amount which is manicured and put into the form that people like to have for their dwellings.

Stewart Brand:

Now you’re restating your question, whether a planet’s surface is the best place for a wilderness?

Gerard O’Neill:

Maybe so. But this situation that I was just describing, this possibility if pursued, is one that could occur both on the Earth and in the communities of course. Because the existence of the space communities as a place to which many people might choose to move would also be perhaps the only realistic non-violent way in which the Earth’s population might really decrease.

Stewart Brand:

I’m trying to imagine the trapped feeling that one might have. Travel between communities would be relatively easy. Travel to the Earth’s surface and back would be relatively hard. Is that correct?

Gerard O’Neill:

It would be interesting to compare it in terms of real income. Passage between the colonies and the Earth probably corresponds to passenger travel back and forth between Europe and the United States in, say, the 1700’s. It’s the kind of thing that Benjamin Franklin did to go and negotiate treaties in France. It was not the sort of thing that the ordinary guy was able to accomplish.

The cost of going back and forth to the Earth – I made some rough estimates on what that might be with the technology of let’s say 20 – 30 years from now, still nothing far out like nuclear power or anything like that – and came out to about $3,000 per person for a round trip. Among the colonies it should be very easy, very cheap. From one community to another, even 5,000 miles away would probably be as little as $100 or something like that. A few dollars in energy costs is enough to launch a vehicle over that kind of distance.•

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“Climate Change Will Be Deemed Intolerable For Humans Long Before It Speeds Up Extinction Rates”

April 21, 2015 in Excerpts, Old Print Articles, Science/Tech | Permalink

There aren’t many things that can kill most of the life on Earth, though there are some (climate change for one) that can claim a heartbreaking part of it.

Recent discussion about the existential threat of global warming has led Stewart Brand to fret that perhaps all these apocalyptic daydreams may be stunting the progress of conservationists. He contends in a new Aeon essay that there’s no onrushing Sixth Extinction, as it’s been called, and though he acknowledges great concern for defaunation and ecosystem functioning, he believes humans will act with drastic measures if necessary before we bury ourselves in a global Easter Island. He further argues that biotech might allow us to reverse species endangerment and increase biodiversity.

It’s a great piece, the kind Aeon spoils us with regularly. While I agree climate change isn’t likely to extinct all of Homo sapiens in the foreseeable future, even in a century or two, it could possibly reduce population with a viciousness. Brand’s gut feeling aside, there’s no guarantee we’ll make intelligent political decisions to protect our tomorrow and that of other fauna and flora. We certainly haven’t demonstrated such big-picture fortitude yet. And bioengineering our way out of trouble means plenty of unintended consequences, no matter how careful we are. Aggressive environmentalism and conservation is still the key, which is something I imagine Brand would concur with.

From Brand:

Anyone who doubts the reality of global warming need only talk to a few field biologists. Everyone doing field research is discovering how sensitive the organisms they study are to slight changes in average temperature, in the length of the growing season, in rainfall patterns. But just because organisms are sensitive to change doesn’t mean they are threatened by it. Any creature or plant facing a shifting environment has three choices: move, adapt or die. …

Move, adapt or die. When organisms challenged by climate change respond by adapting, they evolve. When they move, they often encounter distant cousins and hybridise with them, sometimes evolving new species. When they die, they leave a niche open for other species to migrate or adapt into, and a warming climate tends to open the way for more species rather than fewer. In the same Nature essay, Thomas wrote: ‘Global-diversity gradients dictate that more warm-adapted species are available to colonise new areas than cold-adapted species retreating from those areas as the climate warms.’

Throughout 3.8 billion years of evolution on Earth, the inexorable trend has been toward an ever greater variety of species. With the past two mass extinction events there were soon many more species alive after each catastrophe than there were before it.

There is no reason to be sanguine about climate change. It is the most serious problem currently facing humanity and nature. It might lead to the loss of some species that we lament greatly, but it will also usher in new species, and unless there is extremely ‘abrupt’ climate change, net biodiversity is unlikely to decrease dramatically. Abrupt-change scenarios have been dropping out of the climate models lately, thanks to ever-improving data and growing knowledge about climate dynamics. My own prediction is that climate change will be deemed intolerable for humans long before it speeds up extinction rates, and even if radical steps have to be taken to head it off, they will be taken.•

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“Imagine A World Where Whole Epochs Will Pass, Cultures Rise And Fall, Between A Telephone Call And A Reply”

April 12, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’ve just started reading Imagined Worlds, the 1997 Freeman Dyson entry in the Jerusalem-Harvard Lecture series. It’s something of a summation speech of Dyson’s remarkable–and sometimes perplexing–career, even though he is thankfully still with us and still thinking. If you’re vaguely familiar, it’s the book with the tag line “Imagine a world where whole epochs will pass, cultures rise and fall, between a telephone call and a reply.” Telephone calls, remember those?

I mention it because Imagined Worlds is one of the 76 choices Stewart Brand included on his 2014 Brainpickings reading list of books to “sustain and rebuild humanity.” The first 20 choices:

  1. Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations by David R. Montgomery
  2. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
  3. The Odyssey by Homer translated by Robert Fagles
  4. The Iliad by Homer translated by Robert Fagles
  5. The Memory of the World: The Treasures That Record Our History from 1700 BC to the Present Day by UNESCO
  6. The History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor
  7. The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories edited by Robert B. Strassler
  8. The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War edited by Robert B. Strassler
  9. The Complete Greek Tragedies, Volumes 1-4 edited by David Grene and Richmond Lattimore
  10. The Prince by Machiavelli, translated by George Bull, published by Folio Society
  11. The Nature of Things by Lucretius
  12. The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World by Peter Schwartz
  13. The Way Life Works: The Science Lover’s Illustrated Guide to How Life Grows, Develops, Reproduces, and Gets Along by Mahlon Hoagland and Bert Dodson
  14. Venice, A Maritime Republic by Frederic Chapin Lane
  15. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages by Harold Bloom
  16. The Map Book by Peter Barber
  17. Conceptual Physics by Paul G. Hewitt
  18. The Encyclopedia of Earth: A Complete Visual Guide by Michael Allaby and Dr. Robert Coenraads
  19. The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov
  20. Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon

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“There’s No Jurassic Park Scenario Going To Play Out”

November 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In a new Edge discussion about de-extinction, John Brockman asks Stewart Brand about the dangers inherent in the reintroduction of bygone birds and bears into the world, which, you would think, would have some unintended consequences. An excerpt:

“John Brockman:

What are the dangers, if any?

Stewart Brand:

The dangers of de-extinction mostly get interpreted in ecological or conservation terms, and mostly by people who are mistakenly worried that nature is really, really fragile. We saw this when a year ago we had a TEDx de-extinction that Ryan organized that had twenty-five scientists holding forth on various aspects of a wide number of projects that are going on—everything from the European aurochs to the Spanish bucardo to the gastric brooding frog in Australia.

Our projects are not the only one. Then the news went out: “De-extinction might happen”, and it was great because it went out in a way that people understood it as a scientific issue. They understood we weren’t going to have dinosaurs. There’s no Jurassic park scenario going to play out. But immediately you would see in these wonderful comment lines after every place online, where the trolls emerge and start fretting, and the hand-wringing would be around, let’s see: what if you bring it back and it turns out to be insanely invasive? And, passenger pigeons, there used to be five billion and suddenly there’s five billion birds crapping on everything, it’ll be like kudzu. Well, actually it’s not an invasive. They were in North America for 22 million years. The invasive in this story is us, and we’re the ones who shot them all to death. If we’ve got an invasive to worry about it’s the human one, which is fair. Nature will accommodate these birds coming back. Nature’s not broken.

Another common comment is that there’s obviously no habitat left for these birds, or for the woolly mammoths, because the world has changed since their day. Again, time machine notions of if you were suddenly thrown into the 15th century or the 24th century, you wouldn’t be able to function because you wouldn’t know how to call a cab. It’s not like that in nature, and things blend in and take time in. Nature is not broken just because humans have been farming for 10,000 years. It is very robust.

What are the real dangers? The real dangers are it won’t work.”

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“I Would Be Willing To Make A Very Strong Commitment That It Could Be Done In 15 Years”

August 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In the earlier post about Freeman Dyson’s outré dreams for space colonization, I mentioned he thought too restrained the planetary-settlement plans of fellow Princeton physicist Gerard K. O’Neill. Here’s a bit from a 1975 interview Stewart Brand conducted with O’Neill on the topic:

“Stewart Brand::

What would it take for you to become a fulltime space colonizer?

Gerard O’Neill:

Well, if the president came to me and said, ‘Here is X-billion dollars, we’re going to go ahead with the thing and we want you to be involved with it.’ That would sure fetch me.

Stewart Brand:

Suppose NASA said ‘Here’s 5 years of personal salary to administer the growth of this program?’

Gerard O’Neill:

That’s not enough. I have a deep suspicion of governments, and really – although I’m not politically active-I know enough about politics to be very suspicious of it; I think I would have to see a really substantial committed kind of program going. I don’t mean at the spending level of billions of dollars, but I’d like to see something where there’s a very solid commitment to continue in the same sense as there was in the Apollo program.

Stewart Brand:

Of the level of Kennedy saying, ‘We’re going to be on the Moon in this decade’ For some politician to make this go, he’s going to have to say ‘by the year so-and so.’ What year is that?

Gerard O’Neill:

Arthur Kantrowitz, the president of AFCO-Everett was out visiting us a few days ago. He happens to be quite enthusiastic about this work, and he says that his answer for things of that kind is to say, ‘You’ll have the result ten years after you’ve stopped laughing,’ which is I think, a pretty good answer. The most responsible answer I could give is to say that if I really had the responsibility for getting it done by a certain time and the authority to do it in what I would consider the right way, then I would be willing to make a very strong commitment that it could be done in 15 years from time-zero. Whatever that time-zero is.

Stewart Brand:

This is Model One with an extra-territorial population of what?

Gerard O’Neill: 

Yes, Model One. Roughly 10,000 people. If you look at the growth rates that you could get from that first one, then you’d probably be talking about a quarter of a million people by the year 2,000. Because you’ll be going up very fast after you get the first beachhead.

Stewart Brand:

And your graph I saw in Washington suggested a net population decrease on the planet’s surface by…

Gerard O’Neill:

I think the turn-over there is about 2018. Now that was based – first of all, I don’t make it as a prediction – it was indicated as a technical possibility, and it was based on a time-zero of essentially now, which is certainly unrealistic politically, and a completion date of 13 years, so that would put Model One in place by 1988. Maybe you could even do it from now, technically, but it’s probably more reasonable to say 13-20 years from a time of decision.

Stewart Brand:

Do you think there’s no way to get the toothpaste back in the tube at this point…. that the idea is inevitable?

Gerard O’Neill:

There are other possibilities. Civilization could tear itself apart with energy shortages, population pressures, and running out of materials. Everything could become much more militaristic, and the whole world might get to be more of an armed camp. Things of this kind might just not be done because no nation would dare to divert that much money away from military efforts. or without war, it could be that the world will become poor, to the point where it can’t afford to try things like this.

Of course, if neither of those possibilities occurs, then I do think there is some sort of inevitability about it. With that, of course, you can’t associate a time-scale. It could be a long time.

Stewart Brand:

Who resists the idea in any large way? If anyone.

Gerard O’Neill:

Well there was a while when I thought that elderly and famous professors of physics were the greatest opponents. . . In fact of all the mail I’ve gotten only about 1% has been in opposition to it.

Stewart Brand:

And what’s your short roster of planetary problems that will be solved by this particular technique? Energy, population. . .

Gerard O’Neill:

Well, yes, but by phrasing the question in that way it’s difficult for me to answer except with a prediction or promise, and that’s something that no decent scientist likes to make. I think it’s very wrong to assume that something like this is going to promise happiness to all people, because people manage to make themselves unhappy in almost any circumstances.”

 

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“Information Wants To Be Free. Information Also Wants To Be Expensive.”

May 30, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

From a brief post at Priceonomics, a correction to the oft-quoted Stewart Brand phrase “Information wants to be free”:

“But that’s not what the quote said. Or rather, that’s only half the quote. Here’s the full quote said by Stewart Brand in 1984:

‘On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life.

On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. 

So you have these two fighting against each other.”

In a later book, Brand shortened the statement to: ‘Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive…That tension will not go away.'”

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“Information Took The Place Of LSD”

March 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Give me more and more information. I love it, even if I can’t remember it all. But in an Aeon essay, Douglas Hine argues that a surfeit of information infuses us with a sense of ennui. An excerpt:

“This line from counterculture to cyberculture is not the only one we can draw through the prehistory of our networked age, nor is it necessarily the most important. But it carried a disproportionate weight in the formation of the culture and politics of the web. When the internet moved out of university basements and into public consciousness in the 1990s, it was people such as Brand, Kevin Kelly (founding editor of Wired) and John Perry Barlow (founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation) who were able to combine the experience of years spent in spaces such as the WELL with the ability to tell strong, simple stories about what this was and why it mattered.

Information took the place of LSD, the magic substance whose consumption could transform the world

The journalist John Markoff, himself an early contributor to the WELL, gave a broader history of how the counterculture shaped personal computing in his book What the Dormouse Said (2005). As any Jefferson Airplane fan can tell you, what the Dormouse said was: ‘Feed your head! Feed your head!’ The internet needed a story that would make sense to those who would never be interested in the TCP/IP protocol, and the counterculture survivors gave it one – the great escapist myth of their era: turn on, tune in, drop out. In this new version of the fable, information took the place of LSD, the magic substance whose consumption could transform the world.

The trouble is that information doesn’t nourish us. Worse, in the end, it turns out to be boring.”

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“The Main Article In The Spring Issue Deals With Space Colonies”

February 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

A 1979 CoEvolution with an R. Crumb cover.

A 1979 CoEvolution with an R. Crumb cover.

The earlier post about Ken Kesey mentioned Stewart Brand’s 1974-84 periodical, The CoEvolution Quarterly. The Spring 1976 issue, which focused, much to Lewis Mumford’s consternation, on space colonies, was written up in the Harvard Crimson. An excerpt:

“THE MAIN ARTICLE in the Spring issue deals with space colonies. It runs 48 pages, featuring 76 famous people or friends of Stewart Brand (guiding light of The Catalog and editor of The Quarterly) writing on what they think about the possibilities of building cities in space. The article includes not only such popular scientists as Carl Sagan, Lewis Mumford, and Buckminister Fuller, but also Richard Brautigan and poet Gary Snyder.

It seems rather pointless and maybe just a little silly to discuss cities in space when New York is in such a predicament, and to Brand’s credit, he publishes viewpoints radically dissimilar from his own, which is that these cities can’t come soon enough. Mumford states that, ‘I regard space colonies as another pathological manifestation of the culture that has spent all its resources expanding the nuclear means of exterminating the human race. Such proposals are only technological disguises for infantile fantasies.'”

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“Kesey Runs Laughing After The Tractor”

February 7, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Film | Permalink

In 1976, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest opened to tremendous critical acclaim, but author Ken Kesey, who adapted his own novel for the film version, felt ripped off financially and planned on suing the film’s producers Michael Douglas and Saul Zaentz. Kesey was simultaneously having a feud with Whole Earth Catalog legend Stewart Brand. From John Riley’s People profile from that year about the litigious writer who was at the time running his own cattle farm in Oregon:

In 1959, at a VA hospital in California, Kesey volunteered as a subject for early unpublicized experiments on the effects of LSD. That experience, plus a subsequent job there as night attendant in a psychiatric ward, enabled him to write convincingly about the fictional Randle McMurphy and the other cuckoos nesting in the pages of his first novel.

A more celebrated brush with bedlam was Kesey’s life with the Merry Pranksters—the name given a group of young drug-takers he teamed up with in the mid-’60s. In the Pranksters’ short-circuited philosophy of life, a person was “either on the bus or off the bus”—a doper or a drag. No one was more emphatically “on the bus” than Kesey himself, who owned the actual 1939 International Harvester vehicle in which the Pranksters tripped across the U.S.A. (Tom Wolfe described the bizarre journey of these psychedelic sharpshooters in his 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.)

But things change. These days Kesey, now 40, has turned from raising Cain to raising cattle and is a member of the PTA in Pleasant Hill, a small farming community five miles from Eugene.

A recent visitor finds Kesey, in greasy coveralls, heaving bales of hay to his 30 head of beef. One, a crazy Angus steer named Sonofabitch, has broken through a casually constructed fence to reach the lush grass near some blueberry bushes. Soon the animal returns, bawling, and farmer Kesey watches the bucolic scene with apparent contentment. He signals his 9-year-old daughter, Sunshine, to drive the Ford tractor back toward the converted red barn that is their home. He chases down a calf named Frivol. Then, cradling the long-legged creature in his powerful arms, Kesey runs laughing after the tractor.•

 

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“Blink, Blink, Blink, Found”

July 5, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A short passage about the recently deceased computer pioneer, Douglas Engelbart, from the landmark 1972 Rolling Stone tech article, “Spacewar,” written by Stewart Brand, who attended the “Mother of All Demos”:

“In one direction this means the automated office, replacing paper, desk and phone with an interactive console – affording the possibility of doing the whole of city work in a country cottage. The basic medium here is the text manipulation system developed at Doug Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center, which, as Doug puts it, allows you to ‘fly’ formerly unreachable breadths and depths of your information matrix of your knowledge, Ask for item so-and-so from your file; blink, there it is. Make some changes; it’s changed, Designate keywords there and there; done. Request a definition of that word; blink, presented; Find a quote from a document in a friend’s file; blink, blink, blink, found. Behind that statement add a substatement giving cross-references and cross-access; provided. Add a diagram and two photos; sized and added. Send the entire document to the attention of these people; sent. Plus one on paper to mail to Washington; gzzaap, hardcopy, with an addressed envelope.”

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“Horse-Sized Ducks Are Out Of The Question—Mechanical Problems. A Horse That Quacks, Maybe.”

March 22, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Catalog editor who knew what the Digital Age would bring decades before it arrived, is today heavily invested in the de-extinction movement. He just did an excellent Ask Me Anything on Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

What species do you think would be the most valuable to bring back and why?

Stewart Brand:

“Most valuable” is an essential question, evolving as we speak. For some it would mean “most loved” or “most missed.” The ivory-billed woodpecker ranks high there. I’m interested in “most ecologically enriching.” That often means “keystone species” or “ecosystem engineer.” High ranked there is the woolly mammoth, maker of the “mammoth steppe” in the far north. Also the passenger pigeon, who enriched the entire eastern deciduous forest.

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Question:

What proportion of these species will face a major habitat problem when they’re brought back? I imagine that at least a few will be back under display-only circumstances.

Stewart Brand:

Thanks for this question, because it comes up a lot, usually in Tragic mode—“The poor passenger pigeons will suffer because their old habitat is gone!” In most cases habitat for revived species will as good as ever or much improved from when they went extinct. The eastern woodlands have grown back ferociously since the late 1800s, when they were most deforested and the passenger pigeon was hunted to death. The north Atlantic has plenty of fish for the great auk, when it returns. Woolly mammoths will relish the boreal forests of the north, and commence turning them back into more biodiverse grasslands.

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Question:

What will you do with the animals once you bring them back to life? Put them in the wild? Zoo?

Stewart Brand:

The sequence is: lab, zoo, wild. You need the zoo for captive-breeding to generate a large enough population, with enough genetic variability, to be able to prosper in the wild. The tricky bit is that zoos are cushy for animals compared to the wild. Managing a toughening-up boot camp for lazy passenger pigeons will be interesting. “Listen up, bird. This is a falcon. He is not your friend.”

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Question:

What are the possible negative effects from your research? Has anyone/any group expressed concern regarding possible negative outcomes?

(Not looking for negatives, just wondering. I’m personally stoked about the research you all have been doing!)

Stewart Brand:

I think one valid negative is the question of whether species-revival technology can be used for species-creation. Suppose someone wants to create a duck-sized horse, for example. Or a one-eyed, one-horned flying purple people eater. Norms will emerge, I suppose. 

I should add that horse-sized ducks are out of the question—mechanical problems. A horse that quacks, maybe.

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“Those Days Are Long And Irretrievably Gone”

October 2, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

That brilliant Stewart Brand knew forty years ago that the coming connectivity of computers would eventually bring dark days to newspapers and record stores. And the virtual businesses that are replacing them aren’t adequate to support the old model. The excellent indie band Grizzly Bear is living the new normal. From Nitsuh Abebe in New York:

“For much of the late-twentieth century, you might have assumed that musicians with a top-twenty sales week and a Radio City show—say, the U2 tour in 1984, after The Unforgettable Fire—made at least as much as their dentists. Those days are long and irretrievably gone, but some of the mental habits linger. ‘People probably have an inflated idea of what we make,’ says [Edward] Droste. ‘Bands appear so much bigger than they really are now, because no one’s buying records. But they’ll go to giant shows.’ Grizzly Bear tours for the bulk of its income, like most bands; licensing a song might provide each member with ‘a nice little ‘Yay, I don’t have to pay rent for two months.’’ They don’t all have health insurance. Droste’s covered via his husband, Chad, an interior designer; they live in the same 450-square-foot Williamsburg apartment he occupied before Yellow House. When the band tours, it can afford a bus, an extra keyboard player, and sound and lighting engineers. (That U2 tour had a wardrobe manager.) After covering expenses like recording, publicity, and all the other machinery of a successful act (‘Agents, lawyers, tour managers, the merch girl, the venues take a merch cut; Ticketmaster takes their cut; the manager gets a percentage; publishers get a percentage’), Grizzly Bear’s members bring home … well, they’d rather not get into it. ‘I just think it’s inappropriate,’ says Droste. ‘Obviously we’re surviving. Some of us have health insurance, some of us don’t, we basically all live in the same places, no one’s renting private jets. Come to your own conclusions.'”

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“It’s a fear, it is near”:

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“It Made Me Perpetually Impatient”

August 19, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

I know a good deal about the tech legend Stewart Brand–creator of the Whole Earth Catalog and author of the seminal piece of tech journalism “Spacewar,” etc.–but I didn’t realize that he was present in 1968 at Doug Engelbart’s “Mother of All Demos.” In a new Wired interview with Kevin Kelly, in which he acknowledges bio-hackers and calls for the de-extinction of bygone life forms, Brand remembers the effect Englebart’s demo had on him:

“Kevin Kelly: There was an event in San Francisco in 1968 that has come to be called ‘the mother of all demos’—when Stanford’s Doug Engelbart showed off a computer with a mouse and graphical interface. You were there. What significance did that event have for you?

Stewart Brand: It made me perpetually impatient. I saw a bunch of things demonstrated that clearly worked, and I wanted some right now, please! That demo gave a really accurate look at what was coming and made it seem so easy. But decades would go by, and it just kept not coming.

Kelly: Does that give you pause that maybe all kinds of things that look to be around the corner today—drones, magic glasses, self-driving cars—are just premature promises?

Brand: The lesson was that this is exponential technology. I don’t mean that just in terms of power or capacity—driven by Moore’s law—but also in that it starts out slow as consumers find ways to put it to use.”

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“The Mother of All Demos”:

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“This Latest Generation Knows That The Net Is Going To Transform The ’90s”

June 23, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Time magazine heralded the advent of the Digital Age in its March 1, 1995 issue, which included an essay by Stewart Brand called “We Owe It All to the Hippies.” The piece argued, quite rightly, that the impetus for our booming tech sector came from the counterculture, courtesy of dropouts, phreaks, and hackers. An excerpt:

“In the 1960s and early ’70s, the first generation of hackers emerged in university computer-science departments. They transformed mainframes into virtual personal computers, using a technique called time sharing that provided widespread access to computers. Then in the late ’70s, the second generation invented and manufactured the personal computer. These nonacademic hackers were hard-core counterculture types — like Steve Jobs, a Beatle- haired hippie who had dropped out of Reed College, and Steve Wozniak, a Hewlett-Packard engineer. Before their success with Apple, both Steves developed and sold ‘blue boxes,’ outlaw devices for making free telephone calls. Their contemporary and early collaborator, Lee Felsenstein, who designed the first portable computer, known as the Osborne 1, was a New Left radical who wrote for the renowned underground paper the Berkeley Barb.

As they followed the mantra ‘Turn on, tune in and drop out,’ college students of the ’60s also dropped academia’s traditional disdain for business. ‘Do your own thing’ easily translated into ‘Start your own business.’ Reviled by the broader social establishment, hippies found ready acceptance in the world of small business. They brought an honesty and a dedication to service that was attractive to vendors and customers alike. Success in business made them disinclined to ‘grow out of’ their countercultural values, and it made a number of them wealthy and powerful at a young age.

The third generation of revolutionaries, the software hackers of the early ’80s, created the application, education and entertainment programs for personal computers. Typical was Mitch Kapor, a former transcendental-meditation teacher, who gave us the spreadsheet program Lotus 1-2-3, which ensured the success of IBM’s Apple-imitating PC. Like most computer pioneers, Kapor is still active. His Electronic Frontier Foundation, which he co- founded with a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, lobbies successfully in Washington for civil rights in cyberspace. In the years since Levy’s book, a fourth generation of revolutionaries has come to power. Still abiding by the Hacker Ethic, these tens of thousands of netheads have created myriad computer bulletin boards and a nonhierarchical linking system called Usenet. At the same time, they have transformed the Defense Department-sponsored ARPAnet into what has become the global digital epidemic known as the Internet. The average age of today’s Internet users, who number in the tens of millions, is about 30 years. Just as personal computers transformed the ’80s, this latest generation knows that the Net is going to transform the ’90s. With the same ethic that has guided previous generations, today’s users are leading the way with tools created initially as ‘freeware’ or ‘shareware,’ available to anyone who wants them. Of course, not everyone on the electronic frontier identifies with the countercultural roots of the ’60s. One would hardly call Nicholas Negroponte, the patrician head of M.I.T.’s Media Lab, or Microsoft magnate Bill Gates ‘hippies.’ Yet creative forces continue to emanate from that period. Virtual reality — computerized sensory immersion — was named, largely inspired and partly equipped by Jaron Lanier, who grew up under a geodesic dome in New Mexico, once played clarinet in the New York City subway and still sports dreadlocks halfway down his back. The latest generation of supercomputers, utilizing massive parallel processing, was invented, developed and manufactured by Danny Hillis, a genial longhair who set out to build ‘a machine that could be proud of us.’ Public-key encryption, which can ensure unbreakable privacy for anyone, is the brainchild of Whitfield Diffie, a lifelong peacenik and privacy advocate who declared in a recent interview, ‘I have always believed the thesis that one’s politics and the character of one’s intellectual work are inseparable.’ Our generation proved in cyberspace that where self-reliance leads, resilience follows, and where generosity leads, prosperity follows. If that dynamic continues, and everything so far suggests that it will, then the information age will bear the distinctive mark of the countercultural ’60s well into the new millennium.”

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As mentioned in the article, the Osborne I, the first portable computer:

More Stewart Brand Posts:

 

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“Some Buildings Flow With Time…They Flow With Us”

May 26, 2011 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Stewart Brand adapted his 1995 book, How Buildings Learn, into a 1997 BBC TV sepcial.

More Stewart Brand Posts:

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“Music Researchers Could Swap Records Over The Net With ‘Essentially Perfect Fidelity'”

November 19, 2010 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

From Stewart Brand’s prophetic December 7, 1972 “Spacewar” article in Rolling Stone, about the potential ramifications of the Internet:

One popular new feature on the Net is AI’s Associated Press service. From anywhere on the Net you can log in and get the news that’s coming live over the wire or ask for all the items on a particular subject that have come in during the last 24 hours. Project that to household terminals, and so much for newspapers (in present form). Since huge quantities of information can be computer-digitalized and transmitted, music researchers could, for example, swap records over the Net with ‘essentially perfect fidelity.’ So much for record stores (in present form).•

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Urban Studies: Stewart Brand On The Efficacy Of The Slum

March 2, 2010 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The Dharavi Slum in Mumbai bustles with life despite the poverty. Some slums in India are home to one million people per square mile. (Image by Kounosu.)

For most of the past decade, New Urbanists have been touting the slum or squatter city (especially the massive ones in India) as the key to understanding the future of urban dwelling. Whole Earth Catalogue founder Stewart Brand makes a cogent argument for this type of thinking in “How Slums Can Save the Planet,” a new article in Prospect. It’s well worth reading, especially since Brand has been spookily prescient in the past.

A billion people currently reside in squatter cities and by all estimates, that number is likely to grow at a rapid pace in the coming decades. And that’s good news for the planet, since cities are far more green than rural areas, thanks to their population density. While there is danger in well-fed Westerners being too sanguine about the lives of slum denizens–the poverty there still is crushing despite the ingenuity of the people–there’s much for all urbanites to learn from these bustling quarters. An excerpt:

“One idea that could be transferred from squatter cities is urban farming. An article by Gretchen Vogel in Science in 2008 enthused: ‘In a high-tech answer to the ‘local food’ movement, some experts want to transport the whole farm shoots, roots, and all to the city. They predict that future cities could grow most of their food inside city limits, in ultraefficient greenhousess. A farm on one city block could feed 50,000 people with vegetables, fruit, eggs, and meat. Upper floors would grow hydroponic crops; lower floors would house chickens and fish that consume plant waste.’”

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