Stewart Brand
Stewart Brand
Stewart Brandis an American writer, best known as editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He founded a number of organizations, including The WELL, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation. He is the author of several books, most recently Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth14 December 1938
CountryUnited States of America
want information
Information wants to be free.
fashion drama technology
Science is the only news. When you scan a news portal or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same cyclical dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness; even the technology is predictable if you know the science behind it. Human nature doesn't change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly
unhappy way
How can I throw my life away in the least unhappy way?
dark age statistics
Historians will consider this a dark age. Science historians can read Galileos technical correspondence from the 1590s but not Marvin Minskys from the 1960s.
use tools ends
Tool - something with a use on one end and a grasp on the other end.
internet free-speech
Redefine the possible.
california southern desert
Likewise, with solar, especially here in California, we're discovering that the 80 solar farm schemes that are going forward want to basically bulldoze 1,000 sq. mi. of southern California desert. Well, as an environmentalist, we would rather that didn't happen.
computer humans convenient
Do what's good for humans, modeled on how humans already do things; ignore what's convenient for computers.
environmental world poverty
Many of my contemporaries in the developed world see subsistence farming as soulful and organic, but it is a poverty trap and an environmental disaster.
running government ideas
When the government tries to run innovation, sometimes it does it well and sometimes it doesn't. So setting up a situation where the market runs innovation, which is a cap-and-trade idea, may well have more flexibility.
technology garden guilt
We have wished, we eco-freaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion-guilt-free at last!
song men games
The amusements of broadcast consist mainly of songs, stories, and games, just as in tribal life. The songs and stories are mostly about courtship, the games mostly played by men, just as in tribal life.
building
A building is not something you finish. A building is something you start.
want able cigarette
Carbon tax has the advantage of basically being able to subsidize one set of activities that you want with another set of activities that you don't want. It's like a cigarette tax.