About
    • 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.
Search
Full
Page Tree

Stewart Brand/Politics

27 Jul 2026 - 27 Jul 2026
Open in Logseq
    • Libertarianish – not an ideologue of markets, but an advocate of expansive freedom that includes the free market. He did a stint with the Jerry Brown administration.
    • But accused cleaves to power. The whole history of the sixties and divergent parts of the counterculture. That story has been told and I don't have much to say about it.
    • I imagine he views both governments and markets as technologies by which systems constitute and manage themselves. This is sane and pragmatic. I would agree 100%. Brand has spent his life building institutions to do just that on a global scale. His politics, such as they are, is how pragmatically to do what needs to be done.
    • That all sounds great until it comes to the messy business of actual politics and governance and power. There will be opposition, there will be sides.
    • This is in the context of accusing him of something with this inclusion of Musk.
    • Who am I to tell Stewart Brand how to act in any way? I really have no standing, and if he wants to ally with Musk, to be on the same side as this while extolling a kind of virtuous ethic of care, of caring for all the earth and all of time... I just can't see it.
    • Musk is an outright white supremacist and all-around terrible person. Polarization. Oh never mind.
    • Tone: I just don't get it, except really I think I do, you sold out your own values to hang with the rich and powerful.
    • Well I can think that all I want, but what purpose would be served by telling him publically? I don't want to fight with the guy, or even criticize, if I do criticize it is from the deepest most loving parts of myself and I'm not kidding about that.