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__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. He thus personally exemplifies the roots of the hacker movement in the hippy counter-culture. ==Education and Early Experiences as a Multimedia Artist== 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). Upon graduation from Stanford, Brand was drafted into the U.S. Army, where he ended up an army photographer. While in the Army, Brand spent off-duty weekends visiting New York, where he came into contact with the bohemian art world of Manhattan. On returning to civilian life in 1962, Brand settled in San Francisco, where he collaborated periodically with an art troupe called USCO, short for "The US Company," which went on to transform the "happening" into a psychedelic celebration, using strobe lights, projectors, tape decks and stereo speakers. In 1963 Brand met author Ken Kesey, then host of a burgeoning psychedelic scene on the San Francisco peninsula. Together with Kesey and promoter Bill Graham, Brand helped organised the Trips Festival, a multi-media event 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. ==The Whole Earth Catalog== Later in 1966, Brand initiated a public campaign to have NASA release a rumored satellite image of the entire Earth as seen from space. He 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." Brand created a mobile "truck store" which he drove around northern California with the intent of distributing goods and information to the back-to-the-land communalists. In July of 1968, he developed the forerunner of the Whole Earth Catalog, in the form of a six-page mimeographed list of books. Later that year in Menlo Park with a small staff he put together the first expanded version of the Whole Earth Catalog, which was published in January 1969. Printed in oversize format on unfinished paper, it ressembled an underground newspaper rather than a glossy mail-order catalog. The Catalog considered many sorts of things as "tools": in addition to actual tools, it included equipment for camping, clothing, early synthesizers, and less material items such as books, maps and professional journals. 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). However, the Catalog was soon revived, and 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. 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, including computer games played on a time-sharing computer, a prototype computer which was a forerunner of the personal computer, and ARPANET, the forerunner of internet. The piece also described the work of Resource One, a San Francisco experiment in providing community groups with shared time on a mainframe computer. ==CoEvolution Quarterly== In 1974, to carry on the work begun with the Whole Earth Catalog, Brand founded the Coevolution Quarterly (CEQ), a journal which published full-length articles on specific topics in natural sciences, invention, arts and social sciences. (The term "coevolution" was inspired by the ideas of Gregory Bateson.) The journal continued to 2001 after a change of name to Whole Earth Magazine. ==The Hacker Conference and The WELL== In 1983-85 Brand served as Editor-in-Chief of the Whole Earth Software Catalog and founded a magazine called 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 first “The Hackers Conference,” at which Brand pronounced his famous dictum "Information Wants To Be Free." In 1984-85, Brand and Larry Brilliant founded the [[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 explored global futures, scenario thinking and business strategies 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. 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] *An excerpt from John Markoff's "What the Dormouse Said": http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/06.01.05/dormouse-0522.html [[Category:People]]
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