'Whole Earth' by John Markoff
The first Whole Earth Catalog (1969) was an ambitious compendium, a guide to all the materials its editor, Stewart Brand, thought would be essential to sustaining the ‘60s counterculture into the ‘70s and beyond. For a couple of years, many found this hippie answer to Sears & Roebuck to be a crucial resource, a learning tool.
The Many Lives is a good subtitle for Whole Earth but The Education of Stewart Brand would do just as well. John Markoff’s biography of the Catalog’s founder-editor puts its subject on a lifelong journey of learning that took him from Exeter to Esalen, from Stanford to the U.S. Army Ranger School. Brand accrued knowledge if not always wisdom at each step on the way and never entirely disavowed any of his diverse experiences. Like any old growth tree, he grew outward without losing his core. He also learned that some of ideas wouldn’t blossom and modified the libertarianism of his youth to fit the reality of politics and governance without losing sight of the anti-authoritarianism that had always inspired him. Although the psychedelic experience expanded his insights, Brand soon broke with LSD evangelist Ken Kessey after detecting a whiff of the cult leader in the Merry Prankster’s tour bus.
If The Whole Earth Catalog had been Brand’s last hurrah, he could be safely relegated to a paragraph in the history of ‘60s America. But his legacy continues to underlie the present-day and he isn’t done yet. Not only did Brand predict, in a 1972 essay for Rolling Stone, that “computers are coming to the people,” his Whole Earth Catalog influenced Steve Jobs, who called it “Google before Google.” Home to an abundance of academic research institutes as well as a tradition of uninhibited thinking, the San Francisco Bay area where Brand lived for many years proved seminal for the technology behind personal computers and the internet. Brand was the futurist-consultant for many of Silicon Valley’s founders but, by the mid-‘90s, “his heart was increasingly elsewhere.” Brand’s book How Buildings Learn (1994) influenced a generation of urban designers intent on constructing livable communities.
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Brand spoke at rallies on the first Earth Day (1970) but came to support a pragmatic approach to conservation and slowing climate change, including shifting his no-nukes stance to accommodate nuclear energy as a clean alternative to fossil fuels. Rather than reject technology, as do some environmentalists, he champions the idea that technology holds the answer to climate change. Brand’s eclectic interests include collaborating with Brian Eno, among others, on the Clock of the Long Now, a mechanical chronometer designed to keep time accurately foe 10,000 years. An investment in optimism?
Brand was the scion of modest wealth and privilege who always believed —as part of his upbringing in ethos of the old WASP elite—that with privilege comes responsibility. Through a variety of for-profit and nonprofit ventures, Brand sought to shift society in positive directions. Even in the ‘60s he was always a reformer, not a revolutionary, who tried to nudge the elites toward thinking more broadly and with a longer view.
