John Markoff discusses his biography of Stewart Brand at The Well

January 30, 2023 10:54 AM

"He has stood his ground, but it ended a number of close friendships including his association with Amory Lovins." Stewart Brand, who is now 84, is currently working on a book about maintenance. [excerpt]. He is best known for founding The Whole Earth Catalog and coined the phrase, "Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive." The discussion on The Well (an early version of Metafilter) has plenty of delightful gossip about Norbert Weiner, Buckminster Fuller, and others.

Participants in the discussion note that "How Buildings Learn" is probably his best book.

See also Fred Turner's book.

Via Howard Rheingold, who I also love and deserves his own FPP.

posted by mecran01 (10 comments total)

It's only been eight months since our last Stewart Brand FPP (previously), and commenters then mostly followed the tone of the article, which was mostly a poorly thought-out hatchet job that unfairly blamed Brand for nearly all of our venture capital/tech bro/Silicon Valley culture.

This archive is more balanced with plenty of people who know SB, are aware of his work throughout the decades, and provide a whole hell of a lot more context. Thank you for that, mecran01.

I still expect to be in the minority here in my belief that Brand's influence since the 1960s has had more positive effect on the world than negative. I'll be interested, as always, to read differing opinions.
posted by seasparrow at 12:15 PM on January 30, 2023 [6 favorites]

The Malcolm Harris piece is discussed at length by Markoff in that Well discussion.

Markoff:
Let me break my response to Tom’s questions based on the
Malcolm Harris Nation review into two parts, one about the review
and one about Stewart.

Reviews of “Whole Earth” generally fell into two categories,
reviewers who were writing about the book were virtually uniformly
positive, on the other hand in reviews where the reviewers had
issues with Stewart, I was usually collateral damage. For example,
the New York Times reviewer, a Princeton environmental historian,
couldn’t get Stewart’s about-face on nuclear power out of his craw,
and the book suffered according.

The Malcolm Harris review is an outlier, but I find it fascinating
for reasons that may not be obvious to most of you. Both Harris and
I grew up in Palo Alto and we both attended Palo Alto High School
about four decades apart. Next month Harris is publishing a book
titled “Palo Alto” which purports to be a takedown of global
capitalism. The book is interesting for a number of reasons, one
being that it is the second of these self-loathing compilations (the
first written by actor James Franco who also graduated from Palo
Alto High School at roughly the same time as Harris — is a
collection of short stories). Both describe a place that I don’t
recognize.

The immense accumulation of wealth that happened beginning in the
1990s in Silicon Valley seems to have bred a generation of
upper-middle class white kids who have both a dark view of the world
and their own homes.

The Harris attack on Brand is poorly written and poorly reasoned,
wrong on many points of fact and without any real understanding of
the era that he writes about.

Harris clearly sees himself as a young Christopher Hitchens, while
lacking the intellectual chops, sense of irony or humor to pull it
off. A bit of interesting history about his ethical background can
be found by anyone who wants to look at his behavior as an Occupy
Wall Street activist.
Link

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about Brand. He had an inheritance, and used it to float around and start a lot of projects, some of which changed the world.
posted by mecran01 at 1:32 PM on January 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

“Information wants to be very expensive, and information wants to be free.”

That's The Sphinx level of inane. If someone misquotes you and makes you sound smarter, for the love of Mike don't correct them.

the environmental movement -- which he played a role in creating

big lol there. He was there to hawk the t-shirts

follow in his shift on the value of nuclear power. He has stood his ground ...

He stood his ground on changing his mind? Amory Lovins has lived by his words for decades, and has done the work. Brand? Another brightsiding techbro for whom no problem is beyond the mighty power of the startup. Changes his mind as often as he changes his shirt, but is always, always right.
posted by scruss at 3:14 PM on January 30, 2023 [4 favorites]

Context of the question about Harris's review, from Tom Valovic:

John as long as we’re talking about the article in The Nation, I
wonder if you could comment on it. In my own view, the article was
too harshly written and painted a picture of Brand that we can
charitably call less than flattering. But in reading your own book,
I found myself struggling to find aspects of his earlier life that
made him stand out as someone with a fierce dedication to even a few
quasi-idealistic principles, someone to admire perhaps for
courageously attempting to change the contours of contemporary
thought based on a set of foundational values. Interesting? Yes
very. Inspiring? Perhaps a different story.

One hesitates to call him an opportunist as the article in the
Nation seems to be saying. And the question still remains (as I
alluded to earlier) how can someone with obviously bedrock core
conservative values position themselves to be widely perceived as
someone leading the deep social and cultural transformation of the
60’s and 70’s?

I certainly, for a time at least, had that perception until in
writing Digital Mythologies, my research turned up countervailing
evidence. In this sense, Brand seems part chameleon, changing his
value systems to suit opportunities and situations. How else to
explain why he ended up working for the CIA and an oil company (an
issue I brought up earlier which I’m still hoping you’ll address at
some point.)

posted by grobstein at 4:02 PM on January 30, 2023

Great stuff. I had a Well account way back in the olden days before the internet when it was basically a BBS. I remember setting up and holding an interview about virtual reality with Howard Rheingold inside of a MOO that was then projected on a big screen at a festival in Austria in I believe ‘92. Good times.
posted by misterpatrick at 4:56 PM on January 30, 2023 [3 favorites]

re: sailboat essays: the saga of the sailor who tried to cheat the round-the-world race was made into an interesting existential film, Horse Latitudes.
posted by ovvl at 6:18 PM on January 30, 2023

I'm glad to have been reminded of the Nation piece that has been much maligned here, for little other apparent reason than those who rate Brand highly seem to disagree with it. Certainly Markoff is a more sympathetic portrait painter, and why not, if that's the type that already appeals to you. It's rather like Brand proclaiming there must be no politics in his catalog, as if his apparent transparency wasn't an embodiment of a very discernible type of politics.

For me, it seems more than plausible that someone can be a hugely influential figure (especially in the well-minted, soi-disant marketplace of ideas) and at the same time an absolutely hateful charlatan with all the depth of a long smear. In a world of Elon Musk and our current herd of callow, trustafarian tech bros, I don't quite understand why anyone might insist on Brand's influentiality as if it somehow trumps the possibility of his personal, moral and intellectual bankruptcy. We often make a lot of not much, as Glass Onion so beautifully showed.

But hey. I'm one of many who has spent their whole life living in both the intended and unintended shadows of ambitious and media-savvy - and most of all wealthy - boomers who never paused to doubt their entitlement to reshape the world according to their contemporary whims. Guess what? My mileage varies. But it does seem absurd to celebrate the upsides of the coterie of which Brand is an exemplar without thoroughly recognising the downsides for what they are, too. That and perhaps recognising who has their finger on the scales that weigh the pluses and minuses, and who it benefits to tilt it in his favour
posted by onebuttonmonkey at 8:08 AM on January 31, 2023 [2 favorites]

I didn't know until this minute that there was any hate for Brand.
People here are saying that he refused to change his mind, and then that he changed his mind, that he did undescribed but awful things, that he said stuff and had opinions.
I remember his list of things he was wrong about, and how impressed I was that he was honest and open-minded. He was at 'the mother of all demos' with Doug Englebart. He published the Whole Earth Catalogs. He convinced the hippies that technology is okay, so the US isn't even more luddite.
I think it's tempting to use social media to diss anyone who's done a lot of things, and certainly it's popular.
Stewart Brand was hugely influential, and I think his influence was overwhelmingly good.
posted by AugustusCrunch at 6:32 PM on January 31, 2023 [1 favorite]

In keeping with the theme of "my childhood heroes may have had some flaws I didn't know about", here is THE NATION on the latest Buckminster Fuller biography.
posted by wittgenstein at 6:22 AM on February 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

> Participants in the discussion note that "How Buildings Learn" is probably his best book.

Writing a book as good as 'How Buildings Learn' is a decent achievement for a lifetime.
posted by madhadron at 10:47 PM on February 1, 2023