Stewart Brand’s Dubious Futurism
"Stewart Brand is not a scientist. He’s not an artist, an engineer, or a programmer. Nor is he much of a writer or editor, though as the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, that’s what he’s best known for. Brand, 83, is a huckster—one of the great hucksters in a time and place full of them. Over the course of his long life, Brand’s salesmanship has been so outstanding that scholars of the American 20th century have secured his place as a historical figure, picking out the blond son of Stanford from among his peers and seating him with inventors, activists, and politicians at the table of men to be remembered. But remembered for what, exactly?
Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand is the first full biographical consideration of a man who has already provided useful fodder for writers seeking to characterize the various social and intellectual movements that came out of California in the final third of the 20th century. The author, the longtime tech journalist John Markoff, has covered Brand at length before, in What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. But his new book puts Brand, the man—rather than his role as an exemplary connector of others—at the center of its story. An authorized project, Markoff’s biography draws primarily from Brand’s own words in contemporary interviews and in his detailed journals, to which the author had access. If, in the historical light of 2022, it were possible to make Stewart Brand look good, I’m sure Markoff would have managed it, which makes it all the more remarkable that he does not.
In works ranging from Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test—the book opens with Brand driving the famous Merry Prankster bus—to Fred Turner’s 2004 study From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Brand found a way to put himself behind the wheel, most often by buying the car. He pops up repeatedly in what has become the standard prehistory of Silicon Valley: organizing the San Francisco Trips Festivals, which kick-started the hippie movement, helping show off the first personal computer prototype, supplying those newly minted hippies with “back to the land” fantasies, advising the Zen governor of California Jerry Brown, telling America about early computer games, cofounding one of the first successful experiments in Internet community, and coining the phrase “Information wants to be free.” As an overlapping member of so many relevant milieus, Brand is like a transitional fossil, revealing changes and continuities. In him, academics and reporters have found a useful tool for narrating the period, helping readers ride smoothly from the 1960s to the 1980s and linking together the ostensibly disparate cultures in Turner’s title. . .
Unlike Forrest Gump, who jogged through the same period blissfully ignorant and unseduced by any particular line, Brand fervently believed in almost everything—at least for a little while. . .
[ ] If becoming a flea-bitten trust-funder tooling around the Bay on his new sailboat, driving to the woods in his new red VW bus (imported from Germany), and trailing Jack Kerouac sounds like the worst road Brand could have taken, it’s worth keeping the alternative in mind. Had he possessed the endurance or patience to join an elite military unit, he likely would have been among the first boots on the ground in Vietnam, where the US Special Forces began the war with a murderous counterinsurgency campaign. Say what you will about rich-kid beatniks, but at least they were not war criminals. . .
[. ] Brand did have the luck, however, to be fishing in a well-stocked pond with the luxuries of time and good equipment. The Trips Festival wasn’t Brand’s idea—he got it from the Merry Pranksters, who wanted to do a concert-size Acid Test—but he had $300 for a venue deposit as well as connections to concert professionals in San Francisco, including the young promoter Bill Graham. As a vehicle for Brand’s experimental art, the festival was a total bust, but as a Grateful Dead concert it was a success, and Brand reassured his father not only that he had no interest in becoming a socialist but that there was good money to be made as a beatnik.
Brand’s next big idea combined his receding interest in photography with his increasing interest in “systems thinking,” a shift from his Randianism to the faddish work of architectural theorist Buckminster Fuller. On one 1966 acid trip, Brand was struck by an idea: Why hadn’t NASA released a satellite picture of the entire planet yet? It was a puzzling question, and with its conspiratorial overtones and hippie implications, Brand recognized what we might call a “good meme.” . .Like the acid advocate Timothy Leary, Brand had a top-down approach to social enlightenment, an elitism that, more than any ideology, position, or interest, has guided his whole life.
NASA did release such a photo the next year, and Brand recycled it for another notion, as the name of his catalog. Why a catalog? One strand that runs through Markoff’s book unremarked is the fact that Brand loved shopping. He was the prototypical early adopter, prepared to pay sticker price for the latest gadgets, a habit linked to his father’s love for mail-order catalogs and even further back to a family hardware supply business. He took the same shopping approach to ideas and identities, always on the lookout for something new. Many of his peers were the same way, and for them he dreamed up the Whole Earth Catalog, a thick brochure for the reverse-engineered store of Stewart.
The form was brilliant, in its way: With no critical or creative agenda to speak of, the Whole Earth Catalog could play fast and loose with copyright, raiding the latest books for their coolest pictures and diagrams. In it, the reader found all sorts of stuff, from walkie-talkies to tepees, calculators to kerosene lamps, as well as a whole lot of what we might now call ’60s books. Brand took the large format from Steve Baer’s newsprint instructional zine Dome Cookbook, the typeface from L.L. Bean, and his famous intro (“We are as gods and might as well get good at it”) from a British anthropologist. Reviewers got $10 apiece, and Brand paid for the latest in bespoke publishing technology. His $25,000 investment ($200,000 or so today) did not break his bank. The 64-page Catalog had a cover price of $5, roughly 10 times the price of a paperback.
. . .the Whole Earth Catalog made his reputation. It allowed him to put more than $1 million in profits into a short-lived foundation that awarded small, arbitrary grants to the kinds of projects he liked—Brand, still getting family checks, didn’t need the money. When Stewart and Lois divorced, she got only $10,000 and the TV. He kept the catalog’s National Book Award and the credit, . .
Though, unlike nearly everyone else in his milieu, Brand never programmed a computer, he did find a niche near California’s tech ecosystem. As a transitional figure between the ’70s and the ’80s, he is unparalleled; for Brand, the leap from hippie to yuppie was no more than a step. After the catalog’s success, he committed himself to realizing a new ideal: the “Zen playboy.”
[. ] At one point in time, it was possible to see Brand as the goofy grandfather of a gentler, more thoughtful capitalism headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area: decentralized but still ambitious; environmentally conscious and techno-optimist; philosophical and even spiritual rather than materialistic and stultified. If Brand had died before the 2008 crash, before Edward Snowden and Uber and Facebook as a tool of genocide and Jeffrey Epstein and coal-fired Bitcoin-mining plants, he might have secured an uncomplicated legacy. Now we all know better, and Brand’s biographer can’t get around that.
At the age of 83, Brand has survived long enough to see himself as the protagonist in a real book, a significant accomplishment for a man of meager talents and what appears to be an exceptionally bad personality. Brand is lucky the book isn’t a better one, for the sympathetic Markoff—a member of the same milieu as his subject, a fellow client of John Brockman who undertook the project at the suggestion of a former Brand deputy, Kevin Kelly—strains to depict him in a favorable light, at significant cost to the work’s quality. The reader is left with a picture that’s suspiciously overexposed, a portrait that illuminates flaws in the attempt to cover them up. Sometimes that’s the most flattering thing anyone can do."
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