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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from Anne Herbert
  • I thought of her while reading the recent Stewart Brand biography, where she gets a few perfunctory mentions.
from Robert Heinlein
  • This particular quote has achieved a kind of meme status in tech, it defines our version of machismo. There's nothing obviously wrong with it either. That and the Whole Earth Catalog are my models for valorizing general competence and capability. Heinlein's military background is obvious; Stewart Brand was also in the army and acknowledges that experience as important. It's a stance I guess.
from Heidegger on the Connection between Nihilism, Art, Technology and Politics
  • Speaking of tools and Burning Man – wasn't the project of Stewart Brand and various alt-tech hippies exactly that, trying to transform the very concept of tool use into something more humane?
from Palo Alto
  • Note: gave up on this book halfway through when I decided author was a particularly tedious kind of leftist, and his review of the Stewart Brand biography was so bad as to put him on my permanent ignore-list.
from Protocols/Protocol Kit
  • Applies Christopher Alexander ideas to protocols for urban spaces. Brings in a lot of ideas about agency and Stewart Brand's pace layers. I have to say I am not sure what work the concept of "protocol" does here. CA patterns are already all about interactions between people and their environment, protocols seems to be a subset of these interactions, the ones that can be legibilized and formalized.
from pace layers
from hope
from LWMap/Being a Robust Agent
  • One of my heroes, Stewart Brand, famously promoted something akin to this stance with his Whole Earth Catalog mottos: "Access to Tools" and "We are as Gods and Might as well get Good at It". Tools for what? It doesn't matter, whatever you might want to do (in this case, "you" was a subset of hippies and people interested in alternative ways of living).
from Many Dimensional Man
  • 1977 book by James Ogilvy, heavily blurbed by Stewart Brand. Full title: Many Dimensional Man: Decentralizing Self, Society, and the Sacred. Very much about agency; and obviously taking off from Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man. sacred
from Weird Studies/Object Memory
  • They mentioned How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand which seemed kind of out of place. There's nothing woo about Brand's theory, the "learn" is mostly metaphorical, he's talking about how buildings are adapted by their owners and occupants over time. But he does sort of freely agentify buildings when necessary, so OK.
from Kevin Kelly
  • A technology writer who covers some of the same themes I do. Kelly was the editor of Wired and before that associated with Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog and sort of incarnates the more libertarian techno-optimist strain of thinking from that quarter.
from Hacker Stance
from Long Now
  • A unique and strange organization started by Stewart Brand and Danny Hillis, which operates a bar in San Francisco and is building a 10000-year mechanical clock in the southwestern desert. I'm a member.
from Weird Studies/Unabomber
  • Ah Stewart Brand comes up (incorrectly credited with inventing the term "personal computer"). And they cite Le Guin's Almost Coming Home which I really want to reread.
from Morozov
  • When, in November, the publisher Stewart Brand was asked about who carries the flag of counterculture today, he pointed to the maker movement. The maker era might not be upon us yet, but the maker movement has arrived. Many promoters of the maker movement believe that personal manufacturing will und...
from Whole Earth (book)
  • book by John Markoff, a biography of Stewart Brand. I'm a long-time Brand fan so this book is filling in the parts of his story I dont know (like his early student days at Stanford and prep schools).
from Whole Earth Catalog
  • See Stewart Brand. The Catalog was a major early influence on me, particularly in its stance that one could be interested in anything and pursue anything. There was a Whole Earth Bookstore in Evanston, IL where I grew up, which is where I found both the catalog and Ted Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines. When I went off to MIT I managed to fall in with a bunch of Whole Earth-friendly fellow students who were into alternative energy and other alternatives; later I got to actually share an office with SB himself in the early days of the Media Lab.
from deep laziness
  • Stewart Brand defined hackers as "lazy engineers". C-Lab Columbia Laboratory for Architectural Broadcasting
    • JI: Earlier, you refer to yourself as a hacker, which typically connotes short-circuiting a system, be it a government or a computer. What’s your definition of a hacker?
    • SB: Lazy engineer. The aspect of hacking that appeals to me is looking for the fiendishly clever shortcut. A ‘real’ engineer will do the homework – do the calculations, run the prototypes – all the necessary stuff to make something work. A hacker is usually looking for an easy solution. The code still has to run – it has to do whatever it is you’re attempting. But a hacker tries to find a way to do it with minimal effort, which is considered good; or with great cleverness, which is considered extra good. Fun is finessing an outcome. Stuff like that is just being lazy, and lazy is not necessarily bad.
    • I was trained in the army to be a lazy officer. The worst officer is stupid and industrious. The best officer is brilliant and lazy. I don’t think I would be accused of industry.
from Stances, a Catalog

  • The Stewart Brand stance

    • comprehensive designer
    • we are as gods and might as well get good at it
    • access to tools
from Francisco Varela
from How Buildings Learn
  • book by Stewart Brand, on how buildings are modified after they are built.
from hacking
  • Morozov is anti-hacker, at least, anti the way it melds countercultural rebellion and tech. Like, he really hates Stewart Brand. This is so weird to me. I mean, he has some valid critiques, and hacking has come to be a bit too self-congratulatory a cultural marker. But still, these are the people who Manipulate Technology to Make Lives Better. If they do it within a context of capitalism, its because that is the world we live in.
from conflict theory

  • Stewart Brand (very sort of)

    • I vaguely remember a quote from him, something about how peace would never replace war because "conflict was too interesting". Not his most original thought, but it made an impression on me when I first came across it. Oddly I always think of him as the one sixties figure who was too smart to engage in the political conflicts of the time, preferring instead to map out creative alternatives.
from One Weird Trick
from Weird Studies/Getting Religion
  • PF hates the phrase "making meaning". OK that's odd. From the secular, immanent-frame position..."the meaning of life is your pursuit of that meaning, what you make of it". More than any one person can shoulder. Not that easy to be a god (don't tell SB). Asking everyone to be Atlas.
from anti-purpose
  • I have a Lisp library Wu Wei (Lisp) that I named for no very good reason, but I do think there is a deep relationship between wu-wei and the characterization of hackers as "lazy engineers" by Stewart Brand (see deep laziness)
from Morozov
  • I wonder what Stewart Brand thinks of Morozov (my guess – he's a pest who has been trying to piss him off for at least a decade)
Twin Pages

Stewart Brand

30 Oct 2021 - 26 Apr 2026
Open in Logseq
    • Best known as the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand has been involved in all sorts of interesting projects, from Doug Engelbart's radically innovative computer systems to George Church's efforts to revive extinct species.
    • He was an early influence on me through the Catalog, which I found as a teenager at about the same time I found Ted Nelson's Computer Lib, which shared a similar sixties alternative esthetic. Big books that quite obviously were made differently from normal books, and that were saying something different, something that could only be expressed in this ungainly and rough form.
    • I leave the interpretation of my role to others. …. My client is civilization and my approach is that of a hacker: to figure out the shortcuts that make things happen.
    • Stewart was a visiting something-or-other at the Media Lab when I was a graduate student, and an unofficial advisor to the Vivarium Project. I am quoted a couple of times in his book about the Media Lab.
    • The theory of shearing layers, an idea from architecture that he popularized in his book How Buildings Learn might be his most significant intellectual contribution. It's currently percolating through the software design community.
      • – source Hexen Tarot Deck
    • Stewart Brand’s Dubious Futurism | The Nation really shitty article by Malcolm Harris (author of Palo Alto ). Note: On Floating Upstream | Los Angeles Review of Books takes a similar critical tack but is much more nuanced.
      • 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.
      • I guess the underlying motive is politics; Brand is not left-wing enough for this guy?
      • Born into an ownership-class family in Rockford, Ill...
      • Say what you will about rich-kid beatniks, but at least they were not war criminals
      • What else do you need to know about a man who habitually induced his Whole Earth Catalog coworkers to play a game with padded swords just so he, with his experience and size, could beat the crap out of them? Arrogant, lazy, pretentious, and mean: Between the lines, it sure sounds like this guy sucks. This admittedly uncharitable lens brings Whole Earth into sharper focus.
      • Honestly I don't know how to respond to this. Brand has always seemed like the most generous of men. WEC was devoted to promoting other people's projects. "Prtentious" maybe, but who isn't? Lazy? I wish I had his output. Arrogant? He made "stay humble" a slogan.
      • 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.
      • Why am I quoting this article at length? It's just really bad, juvenile name-calling. I'm embarassed for The Nation (used to be a subscriber) and Harris is on my do-not-read list. Note Morozov also seems to delight in Brand-bashing but at least he usually has something interesting to say, unlike this.
      • Stewart Brand Saw the Future | The New Republic A somewhat more serious critique
        • Brand has surely been right in believing that to register the full dimensions of Earth, and the whole span of historical and evolutionary time, would be the start of wisdom. The trouble is that this enthusiast of new beginnings so often mistook such preliminary awareness for a meaningful conclusion. The revolution in consciousness promoted by Brand forever toggled between two vastly different scales: the planetary, and the individual. Its great shortcoming was that it never learned, or seriously studied, how best to integrate the two scales—that of the liberated individual, on the one hand, and the imperiled planet, on the other—through human institutions on an intermediate scale. There was only the dead end of the commune, or the default of the corporation. And so a kind of smog of dissipated insight hangs over Brand’s life and that of the boomers. You might even say it covers the earth.
        • No Brand did not singlehandedly fix the Earth by creating the appropriate kind of institutions. Maybe he just vaguely gestured in a good direction. But that is more than most of us have done.