ALSO BY JOHN MARKOFF

Machines of Loving Grace

What the Dormouse Said

Takedown (with Tsutomu Shimomura)

Cyberpunk (with Katie Hafner)

The High Cost of High Tech (with Lenny Siegel)

PENGUIN PRESS

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Copyright © 2022 by John Markoff

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“Will, lost in a sea of trouble” republished with permission of University of Michigan Press, Poems from the Greek Anthology: Expanded Edition, translation and foreword by Kenneth Rexroth, introduction by David Mulroy (1962, 1999), permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.

Illustration credits appear on this page.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Markoff, John, author.

Title: Whole Earth : the many lives of Stewart Brand / John Markoff.

Description: New York : Penguin Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021039442 (print) | LCCN 2021039443 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735223943 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735223950 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Brand, Stewart. | Technologists—United States—Biography. | Appropriate technology—United States—History. | Whole Earth catalog (Menlo Park, Calif.) | Counterculture—United States—History. | Technology—California, Northern—History. | Futurologists—United States—Biography. | Technological innovations—Social aspects—United States. | Journalism, Technical—United States—History. | California, Northern—Biography.

Classification: LCC T40.B64 M37 2022 (print) | LCC T40.B64 (ebook) | DDC 609.2 [B]—dc23/eng/20211208

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021039442

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021039443

Cover design: Evan Gaffney

Cover images: Stewart Brand, (earth) S.E.A. Photo / Alamy Stock Photo

Book design by Daniel Lagin, adapted for ebook by Shayan Saalabi

pid_prh_6.0_139580513_c0_r0

In memory of Douglas Engelbart, whose ideas, like many things, Stewart Brand discovered early on

Contents

Prologue

1. Shoppenagon

2. On the Golden Shore

3. Acid

4. American Indian

5. Multimedia

6. Access to Tools

7. CoEvolution

8. Anonymity

9. Learning

10. Float Upstream

Epilogue

Photographs

Acknowledgments

Author’s Note

Brandisms

Notes

Illustration Credits

Index

“Throw a Brand in the river and they will float upstream.”

—Brand family wisdom

Prologue

A solitary figure huddled on a San Francisco rooftop gazing over the city’s skyline. On a wintry afternoon, sitting above his North Beach apartment, he felt as if he were vibrating. He had taken half a tab of LSD, then wrapped himself in a blanket and gone up intent on spending the afternoon doing nothing in particular.

Shaking from the chill and the chemical reaction, the man on the roof saw the world as if through a fish-eye lens and he realized that the tall buildings in the financial district weren’t perfectly parallel: they diverged slightly. In his mind’s eye he rose above San Francisco, and the planet suddenly became as a glorious globe.

Seeing Earth from space would transform the way we view our planet and ourselves, he realized. He spent the rest of the afternoon obsessing over how it would be possible to capture a photograph of the entire planet to bring home the point that all of humanity shared a single home. After a few hours, he headed downstairs, a question now in mind: “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?”[1]

Today Stewart Brand is largely known as the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, a compendium of tools, books, and other intriguing ephemera that became a bible for a generation of young Americans during the 1960s and 1970s. That, however, is only part of his legacy. Since then, in both small and large ways, he has reformed the way we look at the world. A quixotic intellectual troubadour, he has prosecuted a series of discrete visions united only by a potent sense of curiosity and a provocative optimism.

Earlier, he played an instrumental role in the emergence of the 1960s American counterculture, which exploded upon the American scene in many ways and still resonates in the political and cultural battles taking place today. He was in the thick of the events that led to the modern environmental movement during the 1970s. At various times he has dabbled in journalism, photography, activism, multimedia, social media, and business consulting.

He has also been a provocateur. A member of Ken Kesey’s band of Merry Pranksters, he helped light the spark that led to the Summer of Love and the San Francisco music scene. Among the first to catch wind of the significance of cyberspace and personal computing, in the 1980s he helped create an early online virtual community.

Although he was largely an observer of the technical community that created Silicon Valley, his various ideas and crusades around the Whole Earth Catalog, which he created in the fall of 1968, foreshadow and resonate with the techno-utopian culture that the Valley spawned. He went on to rethink modern architecture from a biological perspective and later publicly broke with the environmental movement over nuclear power and GMO food. Both as a young man and more recently, he first figuratively and then literally set out to “play God,” initially by making the claim that humans had the power of gods and then during the past decade by creating an organization to save and restore endangered species with modern biotechnology. He has done it all from a single base, Northern California. The arc of his life helped to create a very particular California sensibility, a state of mind that has gone on to spread throughout the entire world.

In February of 1966 a squandered afternoon in the company of a hallucinatory drug was not a completely unusual way to spend a day. Yet Brand was not a beatnik, nor would he become a hippie. He was far too ambitious to fit in comfortably with his peers. As often as not he has found a way to go against the grain. He has floated upstream.

When he wandered onto his rooftop, he was a lanky twenty-eight-year-old with already thinning blond hair, an aquiline nose, and a long face often painted with a toothy grin. People who met him then described him as socially awkward, overly earnest, and cerebral. Six years earlier, as a college senior, he’d discovered San Francisco’s North Beach and immediately fallen in love with its libertine world of artists and Beat poets. An aspiring photojournalist, he was living off a small family inheritance that allowed the freedom to dive deeply into San Francisco’s bohemia.

Years later, when the two met at the Santa Fe Institute, mathematician and economist W. Brian Arthur asked Brand what he did. His response was “I find things and I found things.” Many of the things that Brand has attempted in the past six decades would fail, but some have succeeded spectacularly. He has retained an uncanny ability to stumble into trends early, and sometimes to create them. One of the most important roles he has played, first for the counterculture generation and more recently for millennials, is as a model for how to live one’s life.

Steve Jobs fastened onto the Brand approach in recounting his own life in his influential 2005 Stanford commencement address. He found inspiration in the closing page of Brand’s Whole Earth Epilog. It captured the sensibility that emerged on the western edge of the continent during the sixties. The back cover of the 1974 edition of the publication was a photograph of the kind of open road a hitchhiker might find while waiting in the morning sun on a California highway. Adventure and unlimited possibilities await the traveler. At the top of the page is a photo of sunrise as seen from space, and in between are the words “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” Brand intended the photo as a way to describe living a life open to serendipity. As Jobs put it, “I have always wished that for myself.”

Telling the story of Stewart Brand’s life poses a puzzle, for he isn’t someone who can be neatly categorized. Perhaps it is so difficult to put him in a box because he has such an uncanny knack for seeing the world from outside the box. After playing a major role in the creation of the environmental movement, decades later he would push back on the antinuclear movement, defining himself as an “eco-pragmatist.” He did so because he was opposed not to environmentalism, only to environmentalists, whom he viewed as being antiscience ideologues.

Today he sees himself as a conservationist rather than a preservationist. Humans are very much a part of the natural world, he argues. They have coevolved with it and they are duty bound to care for it. His thinking has not so much changed as evolved. While he is labeled as an early techno-optimist, during the past two decades it has been the existential threat of climate change that has framed his thinking and actions.

In editing the Whole Earth Catalog, he embraced and celebrated amateurs. Brand turned to the world of cybernetics to reject hierarchy in preference to the idea of a networked world in which the center of control constantly moves to wherever is most “relevant and useful.” It was a worldview that both resonated and broke with the New Left, for Brand rejected traditional politics and focused instead on what he called direct power—a focus on tools and skills for the individual—emerging from his early libertarian sympathies.

A self-described member of an American “silent generation,” which came of age in the 1950s, Brand has acted more in the mold of the “action intellectuals,” identified by Theodore H. White in a 1967 Life article that described a “Kennedy type” of educated anticommunist intellectual who operated beyond the boundaries of the university. However, unlike White’s characters, who were largely inside-the-Beltway creatures of the Kennedy administration, Brand would become the consummate outsider, a coast away.

He has reinvented himself frequently enough that it is tempting to describe him as a Zelig, for decades turning up seemingly everywhere as new things were developing. Indeed, Brand’s thinking has evolved in many ways—from anti- to pronuclear, from environmentalism to conservationism, and from libertarianism to something closer to traditional liberalism. But the Zelig reference is the wrong way to describe him, for there has been a consistent through line that has connected his various campaigns, crusades, and inquiries over more than six decades.

In particular, Brand has been constant in his commitment to science, which he refers to as the only “true news”; in his commitment to bottom-up democracy (with a small d); and in his relentless curiosity. He has displayed an eerie knack for showing up first at the onset of some social movement or technological inflection point and then moving on just when everyone else catches up. He has retained a remarkable aversion to orthodoxy, which has on occasion made him the target for criticism from the right, and sometimes from the left.

Brand first made a cameo in the opening pages of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Since then almost two dozen books have sought to document Brand’s contribution to politics and culture. In each instance some aspect of his life has been used to make a particular point, whether the point related to Native American politics, environmentalism, innovation, architecture, computer networks, social media, or personal computing.

Recently Brand has been heralded as the first internet Utopian. Indeed, in several contemporary books he has been called out as the person responsible for the libertarian ideals that grew out of the creation of the internet. The American view of the internet—and by extension Silicon Valley—performed a 180-degree reversal in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. Facebook, Google, and Twitter went from being the nation’s darlings to being castigated as enablers of Russian subversion of American democracy. It is striking that both Franklin Foer in World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech (2017) and Jonathan Taplin in Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy (2017) open their jeremiads with profiles of Brand as a harbinger of an emergent cyberculture that originally promised digital freedom and instead has brought a post-Orwellian state of soft control and concentration of power. (It should be noted that Foer and Taplin differ on Brand’s contribution. Taplin, accurately I believe, sees Brand’s original utopianism as being subverted by a later generation of internet capitalists.)

None of these critiques actually do justice to the arc of Brand’s life. His restlessness has been his greatest strength, though it has taken its toll. His older brother Mike Brand was forever pained that his younger brother chose to leave family behind and not look back. “Stewart has always wanted to be at the cutting edge,” he reflected, “and he is trapped there.”

That has left the younger Brand isolated in some ways. The rest of the world, however, has benefited from his compulsion to stay at the edge. Throughout his life Brand has taken pride in creating new institutions. The impact of his thinking and his work has been to create what Robert Horvitz, an artist and designer who served as the art editor for the CoEvolution Quarterly, Brand’s follow-on to the Catalog, describes as a “Whole Earth Culture.”[2] The most profound aspect of Brand’s legacy can be summarized in a single symbol of the whole Earth. In the late 1960s the image symbolized a new sense of optimism and an end to fear: it replaced the mushroom cloud as the defining symbol of an era. Even today it is unique among all the political and commercial symbols that define modern life. All of the others divide us from one another. It would await Stewart Brand and a photograph on the cover of the Whole Earth Catalog to conjure the significance of a unified planetary culture; that image has been his and our polestar ever since.

Chapter 1

Shoppenagon

Preserved in a large photograph, he was a mythic presence in the living room of the cabin where Stewart Brand spent his childhood summers. David Shoppenagon was a Chippewa Indian and a popular hunting and fishing guide for the wealthier residents of frontier Saginaw, Michigan, when in 1875 he brought Stewart Brand’s great-great-grandfather, former New York congressman Lorenzo Burrows, and his family to Higgins Lake. The lake would soon become the summer gathering spot for four closely knit Saginaw families—the Barnards, Brands, Burrowses, and Morleys.

In a world that was collapsing for his people, Shoppenagon was an anomaly. Most of his compatriots had either been defeated in battle, herded onto reservations, sickened, or starved, but he had managed to coexist with an encroaching white civilization.

Shoppenagon lived more than a century after the period in which James Fenimore Cooper’s historical novel The Last of the Mohicans was set, but in many ways, he fit the story line well. A member of a dying race, he was an anachronism who offered the newcomers a window into the world their civilization was obliterating. A journalist who had been invited to tour timber country by the railroads described him as wearing a fur turban topped by a crown of eagle plumes. From his belt hung deer hooves, eagle claws, shells. A band of leather over his shoulder was covered with a rattlesnake skin.[1]

To the white families who encountered him, Shoppenagon represented the “good Indian.”[2] He became a fixture at the summer hunting camps, where he sold handcrafted items, including paddles, blankets, and baskets made by his relatives. He gave visitors Chippewa nicknames, and on occasions when he visited the home of Brand’s great-grandfather, Lorenzo’s son George, he slept in front of the fireplace on the living room floor.[3]

During the summer the Saginaw families would use the lumber trains to escape to the lake from the hot and mosquito-infested city. Established in 1875, the first campsite, known as Lakeside, remained a seasonal encampment for several years. At first they stayed in tents, which were later supplanted by small shacks and then eventually summer homes. Soon other small communities were built adjoining Lakeside, including Cottage Grove, where the Brand family, part owners of Saginaw’s flour mill, summered. (The product of a marriage between the two camps, Brand would summer at Lakeside.) Brand’s grandfather Ralph Chase Morley, heir to the Saginaw-based Morley Brothers wholesalers, ran what by 1892 had become the nation’s second-largest hardware business, as well as one of the largest horse and buggy retailers in the country. The business prospered and expanded through World War I, as the Morley Brothers were major suppliers to the US Army. Soon the Morleys opened a bank as well. They became part of a prosperous, upwardly mobile business class that built Saginaw during the great Michigan timber boom. As the frontier outpost became a thriving city, they prospered, giving their families freedom during holidays to escape to the countryside. And so each summer the Saginaw families would come with an entourage of cooks and nannies to the lake.

The family’s role in the horse and carriage business might have blinded them to changing transportation technology. Ralph Morley is said to have turned down a neighbor, Henry Ford, who offered him the opportunity to invest in his new motorcar company. Sometime later, another Morley, AJ, who had been sent to the West Coast to extend the family timber interests, turned down a similar offer to invest in a new airplane company named Boeing.[4]

Attracted by the Michigan logging boom, George Burrows arrived in Saginaw and set up a private bank in 1862, the year before the Morley brothers arrived. He would become one of Saginaw’s city fathers. He was treasurer of the company that built the city’s first streetcar line; he served as chief of the Saginaw Volunteer Fire Department and in that capacity oversaw the construction of the city’s Water Works. He became a Saginaw investor in mining and forest land, and an early venture capitalist as well, providing a loan that helped establish the Eastman Kodak company.

The Morleys were able to navigate the logging boom and the following bust, growing their hardware supply business statewide beyond logging and creating a department store as well. Yet logging remained in the blood, and the families followed it west. Members of the Morley and Barnard families went to Washington and Oregon and created what would become the Western Logging Company. Decades later they sold it to Georgia-Pacific in a deal that some family members perceived as a giveaway.

The immigrant West Coast Brands could have been the Stampers, the tough-as-nails Oregon logging family imagined in Ken Kesey’s novel Sometimes a Great Notion. Stewart Brand’s oldest brother, Mike, spent three summers in the woods in the family logging business in the Northwest and at one time hoped that he might someday be able to take over the logging operation. A decade later Stewart would follow in Mike’s footsteps.

Michigan’s Lower Peninsula had been completely logged by the end of the nineteenth century, and the Indians had almost entirely vanished as well.[*] However, for the young man who summered each year on the shores of Higgins Lake from the late 1930s into the 1950s, both towered in his imagination. Years later the photograph of David Shoppenagon on the summer cottage wall remained an influence on Brand when he reinterpreted America’s view of Indians and the role they played in caring for the land on which they lived. It would be a message that he would bring to an emerging American counterculture in the sixties, and it would have a powerful resonance with a budding modern environmental movement as well.

It would be a modest continuing family inheritance from these various commercial ventures that would give a young Stewart Brand, then fresh from the army in 1962, the ability to avoid immediately getting a job and the freedom to pursue a variety of potentially sketchy notions throughout the sixties.

The Lakeside community was rustic in the best sense of the word. Even as late as World War II there was only one radio (it belonged to Brand’s grandfather Ralph) and one phone in the camp. It was a perfect summer refuge for a boy whose connection to the outdoors began early and ran deep. At age seven he would memorize Outdoor Life’s Conservation Pledge: “I give my pledge as an American to save and faithfully to defend from waste the natural resources of my country—its air, soil, and minerals, its forests, waters, and wildlife.” Even decades later, after he’d run afoul of the modern environmental movement he had helped create, Brand could recite the pledge by heart.

He in effect ran a wild animal refuge each summer in the Michigan woods. Every Easter he would be given two baby ducklings, named Fry and Riley, which he would care for until the family left for the lake—a four-hundred-mile drive—on Memorial Day, at which point the ducks would be released into the local pond around the corner on the banks of the Rock River. Once at the lake, Brand would tame chipmunks, squirrels, and feral cats. It was not unusual to find him with a peanut tied to the line of a fishing pole as bait, carefully training a chipmunk. At one point he had one such critter so comfortable that it would ride around all day in his shirt pocket.

Brand and his siblings played in the forest and swam and sailed on a lake that a century earlier had been described by the Detroit Free Press as “the most beautiful of Michigan’s 3000 gems.”[5] A generation earlier, when their parents had first summered at Higgins, the lake had been so pristine that the vacationers drank from it directly. All of the Brand children lived for summer, when for several months, freed from the bonds of city life, they would become “free-range” kids.

It was like a Nick Adams boyhood taken from the pages of Ernest Hemingway’s short story collection In Our Time. Indeed, Brand’s childhood was in many ways parallel to Hemingway’s. Several decades earlier Hemingway had grown up in the suburbs of Chicago and summered at Windemere Cottage on Walloon Lake in northern Michigan, less than a two hours’ drive northwest of Higgins Lake. Hemingway spent his first twenty-one summers fishing and hunting at Windemere.

The Brand family lived a day’s drive from Higgins Lake in Rockford, Illinois, a heavy machinery and manufacturing center, where Stewart’s father was a partner in a small advertising agency. On Memorial Day weekend each summer, the entire family, including his mother, Julia Morley Brand, sister, Mary Clare, and brothers, Mike and Peter, would pack up and make the annual summer road trip to Higgins Lake. On occasion they would loop under Lake Michigan, and more frequently they would take the ferry from Milwaukee to Muskegon. The family would stay at the lake until September, while Stewart’s father would return to the city periodically to run his advertising agency.

Brand’s group of Lakeside friends nicknamed him Screwy Stewy—not in censure but because they were in awe of his nonstop scheming and offbeat ideas. It was Brand who would persuade them to leap off the woodshed behind the family cabin while holding only an umbrella as a parachute, explore one of the old logging camps that dotted the countryside, or undertake a fifteen-mile forced march to a nearby town in search of postcards.

Yet there was something more. His young friends could see it even before they were teenagers. To be sure, Brand was a natural leader. But what his young friends sensed was not simply leadership but an unceasing font of ideas that would sweep them along in pursuit of each new whim.

And occasionally Stewart Brand would have a great notion.

Rockford, Illinois, was the quintessential midwestern town.

The September 12, 1949, issue of Life magazine featured a photo essay taken by the legendary Margaret Bourke-White. Her subject: Rockford, which the magazine’s editors had decided was the most typical city in America.

For Brand, it was a world circumscribed by the range of his bicycle, including downtown Rockford, which Life celebrated: “Parking meters line the streets of the shopping district. A fleet of cabs line up at the station to meet the seven daily passenger trains. On Saturdays, farmers pour in from the surrounding country to shop while their children go to the movies or roller-skate across the street from C.I.O. headquarters.”[6]

The article divided American society into classes from “lower-lower” to “upper-upper.” The magazine chose a factory worker and his wife to represent the bottom of the pyramid. Their home was in a trailer park on the outskirts of town, and the magazine noted that their neighbors included “blacks who were moving in to take unskilled jobs.” At the other end of the scale, it placed an heiress of the founder of the Gunite Foundries Corporation, who continued to reside in the “old Forbes house” in a “fine old residential area.”

The Brand family fell somewhere in between. Stewart, born December 14, 1938, was the youngest, ten years younger than his sister, Mary Clare, whom the family called Clare; seven years younger than oldest brother Mike; and five years younger than his middle brother, Peter. Although Peter was closer in age to Stewart, it would be Mike whom the youngest Brand would worship and feel a kinship with. Pete went on to become an electrical engineer and then changed professions and became a physician. Clare married a career army officer. Stewart would harbor a mild suspicion that he had been an accident.

Trained as a mechanical engineer at MIT, Stewart’s father, Arthur “Bob” Brand, had moved to Rockford after college to work in the machine tool industry that then dominated the city but gravitated to the advertising business. He would become a partner in a local advertising agency. Without fail he ended his letters with the valediction “73,” the mark of a committed ham radio operator.

Not only had Stewart’s mother gone to Vassar, but her sister and her mother were graduates as well. The school was legendary for its skeptical academic mantra, “Go to primary sources,” an outlook that was repeatedly conveyed to Brand through the maternal side of his family. Julia was also an avid reader, and when the children were growing up, she would inevitably be devouring three or four books simultaneously. It was a habit that a young Brand would inherit; throughout his life, much of his outlook on the world has come from reading. If one of the children developed an interest, their mother would make sure they had all the books imaginable to pursue their subject. If Julia and Arthur Brand thought Stewart was their brightest child, they gave him few clues. He was startled once, after he’d done something particularly inept, when his father, in an exasperated tone of voice, said, “You’re supposed to be the smart one!” That was news to him.

At one point so many books had made it into the third-story room where Brand would hide away and read that his father expressed concern that the house might tip over. The family was nominally a member of the Second Congregational Church in town, but after several weeks of Sunday school, Brand complained to his mother that it was screwing up his Sunday reading, so she gave him a pass and that was the end of it.

Brand grew up believing that he was part of upper-class society in a midwestern city that defined the America of the 1950s. Julia was president of the Junior League and the family belonged to both the Rockford Country Club and the University Club. He was educated mostly in private schools; his parents had attended two of the finest colleges in the nation; and his extended family was populated by department store owners, bankers, and timber magnates.

But by opting not to join a family business and settling his family away from Michigan, Brand’s father had set out on his own and started fresh. That could be seen most clearly in the Brand family home, on Harlem Boulevard, a broad avenue divided by a grassy, tree-lined median. The home itself was a solid but modest three-story affair with a steeply pitched roof, a front porch, and a driveway running down the left side of the lot to a garage.

Harlem Boulevard ran parallel to National Avenue, a leafier and quieter six-block stretch that fronted the Rockford River, where the homes were expansive mansions. The Brand home, in contrast, felt crowded inside, with a small backyard that was shaded by a single apple tree.

At the corner of Harlem and Guard Street was the home of Mr. Pennypacker, headmaster of the Keith Country Day School, which Brand attended through the eighth grade. Next door was another equally stately home where Brand’s closest childhood friend, John Edson, lived.

Harlem Boulevard ran through what was a solidly middle-class neighborhood. Several miles up the river, however, the family had purchased a choice piece of property they called the Hill. Close to the Rockford Country Club and with the same elevated on-the-river status as the National Avenue mansions, the Hill was an integral part of the Brand family plan—one day they would build their dream home on the river, a beacon to signify completely establishing their clan as part of Rockford’s upper class.

The reality, however, was that the Brands were on a budget. At home, neither money nor sex was ever talked about. It was made clear that private educations, while a priority, were expensive. Dinners most nights were eaten at a table in the center of a crowded kitchen. With four kids there was no room to walk around the table, which was squeezed up against the stove. And the Hill would remain a pipe dream, never built.

In the early 1950s, Stewart’s oldest brother, Mike, was getting straight As and playing football at West Rockford High School when his father decided that he had become too much of a big fish in a small pond and put him on a train to Phillips Exeter Academy, the elite New Hampshire preparatory school that has educated generations of the New England establishment. While a star athlete at Exeter, Mike was already looking at other horizons beyond the predictable—which at Exeter meant heading off to the Ivy League. Instead, he applied to Stanford after reading in an article in the Saturday Evening Post that the university had rehired its football coach even after it had lost every game the previous season. That struck Mike as remarkable: “That’s the place I want to go. The place that realizes that this is a game and you don’t have to be training all year.”

Mike’s decision to attend Stanford would prove momentous for his younger brother, first and foremost in giving Stewart and his parents a reason to head west to visit the campus. On the two-day train trip from Chicago to Oakland, Stewart, along with his parents on his first real adventure, camped out in the top story of the domed observation car of the California Zephyr most of the way. As the train came through the Sierra Nevada, he was transfixed by the forests and mountains that stretched off into the distance in every direction. On the final day of the journey, the train made its way out of the mountains and through the Feather River Canyon, leaving him with a deep desire to return and explore the countryside.

It was the next day, on his arrival at the California shore, when he waded into the Pacific Ocean that his fate was sealed. First the mountains and then the ocean—it all grabbed him viscerally. Even as a twelve-year-old he realized he was not long for Illinois.

Almost a decade after Mike Brand was sent to Exeter, Stewart followed in his footsteps. Arriving on campus in the fall of 1954, he immediately found his way to a tall spruce tree with a grand view of the campus. Rear Window, the Alfred Hitchcock thriller starring Jimmy Stewart, had appeared that year, and Brand, now enamored with the idea of photojournalism, would use the spruce as a regular perch to survey the Exeter campus, occasionally with camera in hand.

In the weeks after he arrived at Exeter, there was no evidence of a homesick sixteen-year-old boy away from his family for the first time. He was studying math, history, French, English, and chemistry and waiting tables at his dormitory. His first-year roommate was a brilliant teenager named Gordon Park Baker. The son of a New York City attorney and a biochemist, Baker would go on to study math at Harvard and then philosophy at Oxford. The two became close enough that Brand would invite Baker to visit him in his spruce hideaway.

While at Exeter, Brand would be awarded a scholarship that would have paid most of his college tuition if there was a family need, but his father was too proud to accept any aid and so it would remain an honorary award. However, he soon learned that he had a financial safety net to call on. In the fall of 1954, within a week after taking the train to Boston and then on to Exeter, he posted a short airmail letter to his mother: “I hate to write for money but now it’s necessary. They charge heavily for books and athletic equipment. Send whatever you think is adequate.—Stew”

Adequate. It would establish a pattern that would repeat itself throughout college and even after the army when, fascinated by the Beats, he settled in San Francisco. And it would continue in the 1970s, which he spent trying to reinvent himself. Stewart Brand was wealthy in an “as needed” way. Whether it was several thousand dollars in family stock from his grandfather Ralph Morley or the occasional check for $100 or $500 from home, it meant freedom to be “lazy” and follow his interests wherever they led. Those supplements changed the world.

Brand’s father had decided on Exeter for Mike and Stewart because of its well-known Socratic teaching approach, known as the Harkness method, in which a small group of students sit around an oval table with a teacher who, rather than engaging in dry lectures, encourages participation. Initially, Brand was overwhelmed by the capability and the intelligence of his fellow students—a sense of inferiority underscored by the fact that he had dropped back a grade when he arrived, repeating his junior year of high school. His challenge was further complicated by the fact that his brother Mike had been not only a prize student but also captain of both the football and the basketball teams. But Exeter taught him how to study and learn independently. Never an academic star, he compensated with a polymath’s intense interest in many subjects. Moreover, he soon learned an even more useful coping mechanism that would become an operating manual for him throughout his adult life. Brand figured out that the best way to compete was not to follow the crowd but to instead chart his own iconoclastic path. It was simple—go where the others weren’t, and you had the field to yourself. But it was a strategy that had downsides. At Exeter, and more intensely beyond, Brand often saw attachment as a functional need, not an emotional one. Again and again he would insist on moving forward to the next great thing—project or person—without looking back or reminiscing.

When he arrived at Exeter, Stewart Brand was a bright and curious young man who was a perfect match for the school’s Harkness method, which made it possible for students to build close bonds with their instructors. Exeter offered a deeply personal education, giving the students a close set of faculty connections right up to the principal, William Gurdon Saltonstall, who took a deep interest in his young charges.

Brand’s Exeter education not only equipped him with a set of skills that gave him the capacity to learn independently, it also exposed him to members of an American elite and allowed him to get close enough to see their character. During the height of the Joseph McCarthy Red Scare era, Robert Oppenheimer, just a year after he had been stripped of his security clearance over suspicions of communist sympathies, came to spend a week at Exeter and to give a campus lecture on science and society that Brand described as “one of the most brilliant and sincere speeches I have ever heard.”

Soon afterward, Brand’s faculty mentor tracked him down and invited him to tea with Oppenheimer. Too intimidated to ask questions, Brand remained captivated by the physicist. He appeared to be a normal, even an innocuous, figure until Brand looked at his eyes. “He has the wisest and friendliest, and most sincere eyes I have ever seen,” he wrote in his journal. Above all, he was struck by Oppenheimer’s utter humility.

At Exeter, Brand’s passion for conservation continued to sharpen, but with an idiosyncratic twist. His roommate had read a New York Times profile of a watershed conservation activist in western Massachusetts and planned to visit the man as part of his research for a history paper. Brand decided to accompany him on the visit. They traveled by train to meet with the director of the Upper Hoosac Valley Water Association. His roommate’s paper focused on watershed conservation, and Brand wrote a paper profiling the activist as an example of leadership.

At Exeter, he would read Sweet Thursday and Cannery Row, John Steinbeck’s lightly fictionalized accounts of marine biologist Ed Ricketts. In Rockford, Brand had become close to a high school science teacher who would take him bird-watching. That had sparked an early interest in biology. Now it was deepened; Brand was captivated by Steinbeck’s portrait of an iconoclastic scientist and philosopher. He decided he wanted to be Ricketts, or someone very much like him. Reading Steinbeck from rural New England only intensified the siren call of California.

The summer after his first year at Exeter, Brand tacked a handwritten note that read “Gone Fission” on his bedroom door. He had been lent the family Pontiac station wagon, and the day after he arrived home from the East, he headed to California with Rockford friends John Edson and Hank Taylor. Edson’s relatives had a small cabin on a mining claim on the Feather River—the same river Brand had glimpsed on his train ride to California—which seemed a perfect spot to search for gold. The idea of a summer road trip caught their collective imagination, and because they would be passing through much of the West on their way, Edson decided that they could take some time and hunt for uranium as well.

Brand had spent the spring of his first Exeter year meticulously planning the adventure, studying US Geological Survey (USGS) maps for hours as he traced an ideal route that included a detour through Fort Sill, the vast army base near Lawton, Oklahoma, where his brother Mike was serving in an army artillery unit. From there they would swing south to stop and see Carlsbad Caverns, and then on to the Grand Canyon before heading north to Reno and then the Feather River claim. In addition to the fishing and camping gear they brought, he purchased a Geiger counter at Radio Shack and talked his father into lending the trio two field telephones. On Brand’s initiative, they also acquired a set of scarlet felt hats. “If all three of us have them,” he wrote, “we would have a uniform and we could spot each other easier in the canyon.”

Before they were ready to get on the road, there was one final argument. When John and Hank saw that Brand was bringing a .22 rifle on the trip, they were alarmed. Both boys were committed fishermen, but neither of them was a hunter—if anything, they were antigun. Brand overruled them and the rifle went along.

They crossed the Mississippi before midday and stopped that night at a farm outside of Springfield, Missouri. The farmer offered them food and water and a place to sleep outside under the stars. The next night they made it to Fort Sill, where they spent several days with Brand’s brother.

When they arrived at Bright Angel Lodge, on the Grand Canyon rim, they read about the trail to the bottom and decided to take a look. Captivated by Higgins Lake Indian lore, Brand had ordered a pair of moccasins before the trip began that he was proudly wearing as the three of them skipped down the trail. Oblivious to the soaring temperature, they hadn’t bothered to think about the wisdom of carrying some water.

It was almost ten miles and a 4,400-foot drop in elevation to the Colorado River. After an hour or so, they realized it was getting really hot and they were barely halfway down. The boys turned around and headed back uphill, but now the sun was in full force. The trio struggled to find the shade of a boulder above the trail and huddled under it. Edson and Taylor were on the edge of delirium. Finally, two rangers leading a string of burros passed them. Seeing their distress, one ranger said, “You stupid kids. Here’s my canteen. Go ahead and drink it up. I’ll get something at the bottom.”

Back in the lodge they drank endless cups of water and celebrated with two scoops of strawberry ice cream. Recovered, in the middle of the night they hopped in the car and headed off. The road through the Arizona desert was unbelievably straight—“You could see the main street of a town 20 miles away,” Edson wrote. California, here we come.

By the end of June, they had established themselves at the mining claim on the Feather River. There was a cable across the river, and they used it to get some of their luggage to the cabin, fashioned from a train caboose that had rolled down the hill from the railroad bed up above. Getting the rest of the equipment across required a lot of wading back and forth carrying loads from the car.

After several days, they determined a routine. Brand organized a more elaborate cable car system for getting across the river, and they cleaned the cabin and then spent their days alternating between fishing, panning for gold, and exploring. They met an old miner who lived on the other side of the river and had just two remaining teeth. He was very proud, however, because, as he said: “And they meet.”

An early sweep of the surroundings with the Geiger counter revealed that they weren’t going to strike a nuclear-age bonanza, so they settled on fishing and hunting for gold nuggets. Several days after their arrival Edson and Taylor had panned two small gold nuggets each, and the fishing wasn’t much better. Three weeks after they had set up camp, they packed up and headed home, this time through the Donner Pass.

Back at Exeter after his summer adventure, Brand, now an upperclassman, took control of his room in Williams House before his new roommate arrived, quickly claiming the bed that was under the light, the desk by the windows and the radiator, the better bureau, and the larger closet.

His new roommate, Ben Mason, was nice enough, Brand thought, but an “athletic type” who lacked the intellectual qualities of Gordon Baker. He soon discovered that Mason was different in other ways as well. Returning to their dorm room one evening, the two got into a prolonged argument about the purpose of college. Brand mentioned that he was tired of people who decided to go to college just to be collegians, crowding out those who were actually seeking an education. Mason responded that the only reason to go to college was to make friends, ready oneself for a successful career, and have a good time. Indeed, he took pity on people like Brand who did not realize the value of friends, a good time, and money and who wasted their time studying as an end in itself.

Brand didn’t acknowledge it, but Mason’s dismissal flattered him. While for the most part a B and C student, he had thrown himself in with the campus intellectuals. It wasn’t quite clear that they saw Brand as one of their ranks, but if Mason did—well, that was something.

The summer Brand was fourteen a forest fire broke out at one end of Higgins Lake and a crew was sent from the state prison in Jackson to control it. Brand took it upon himself to volunteer to help fight the blaze and was accepted as a member of the crew. It wasn’t a big fire—midwestern fires were not like the conflagrations in the West. Afterward, however, he was as proud as he had ever been.

As he considered life after Exeter, it occurred to Brand that forestry and firefighting could make for a career out west. He soon stumbled upon the University of Idaho, which offered a PhD in his newly chosen vocation. Coincidentally, his Rockford friend Hank Taylor had similar thoughts, and the two struck upon the idea of studying forestry together in Idaho.

The plan was foiled, however, when Taylor’s mother accidentally opened a letter from Brand about the plan. She promptly let his mother know, and letters immediately came from both his father and his brother counseling him that he might be setting his sights too low.

Additionally, his parents enlisted the aid of Darcy Curwen, a legendary Exeter English instructor who had taught Mike and was a friend of the family. Curwen had studied at Harvard and had been offered a one-year appointment in the history department but had come to Exeter to teach instead. Brand was transferred into Curwen’s English class, and it was largely his new teacher who convinced him that he should set his sights higher.

“Well, you know, if you really want to get a graduate degree in firefighting, you can do that after you get an undergraduate degree somewhere else,” Curwen told him.

The idea hadn’t occurred to Brand and he began casting around for better schools—still in the West—adding Reed College, Whitman College, and Stanford University to his list of possibilities.

His brother Mike wrote him a letter suggesting he take a look at Reed but noted in passing that there was talk that the school had communist tendencies. Brand immediately sent an inquiry to Reed noting that “the college had a reputation of being ‘pink,’ ” and that many of its students seemed “a shade odd.” An admissions counselor quickly assured Brand that Reed’s student body was no “odder” than those attending Oberlin, Swarthmore, Haverford (to name a few colleges with programs similar to Reed’s), or “your own eastern private colleges and universities.” The college’s reply seemed to put Brand’s mind at ease, and he tentatively decided to apply. However, after discussing it with Curwen that evening, he changed his mind. The next morning he sent a letter to Stanford applying for admission.

Chapter 2

On the Golden Shore

One evening in September of 1956, Stewart Brand arrived in the Bay Area long after the sun had gone down. Accustomed to the open roads of the West, he suddenly found himself with nowhere to easily pull off. He spent his first night at college in the back of his station wagon in a campus parking lot.

After graduating from Exeter, Brand had returned home to Rockford just long enough to pack. For the second summer in a row, he had loaded the family station wagon and driven west. This time the car was his, a present the previous Christmas.

Freshly minted from two years at an eastern prep school, Brand was something of a square peg when he arrived at Stanford. He didn’t know all the dance steps and didn’t quite fit in. He was a little too earnest and a little too talkative.

He was also full of ambition. Stewart Brand went to college wanting to make his mark. To do so, he followed an unusual path—in a sea of 1950s conformity, he charted his own course.

Brand’s long-standing love of the natural world had deepened at Exeter after reading John Steinbeck’s lightly fictionalized accounts of the iconoclastic marine biologist Ed Ricketts, and he had arrived in New Hampshire intending to study biology. But Darcy Curwen woke him up to writing as well, and so early on at Stanford, he began thinking about becoming a journalist.

Stewart’s landing at Stanford was softened by his connection to an old acquaintance of his brother Mike’s, a man named Dick Raymond, and his wife, Ann Meilstrup. Raymond was an entrepreneur who had befriended Mike Brand and his wife after Mike left the army to work for Tektronix, the upstart electronics firm in Portland, Oregon. Meilstrup, a painter, had been a childhood friend of Mike’s wife, Gale. By the time Stewart arrived at Stanford, the Raymond family had moved to the Midpeninsula, the suburban stretch between San Francisco and San Jose, and Dick Raymond had gone to work for the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), a think tank that then was part of the university. Although SRI was a major military contractor, it was actively trying to grow a civilian consulting business and hired people like Raymond to develop new business.

Raymond had attended college at Miami University in Ohio and then obtained a Harvard MBA. He referred to himself as an economic consultant who specialized in land use, recreational economics, and community development, but his entrepreneurial spirit was expansive. (A serious runner, often putting in more than one hundred miles a week, he helped create Shoe Goo to extend the life of his running shoes, and in 1973 he started a company to sell it.) His clients at SRI ranged from the city of Menlo Park to the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair—he had convinced the fair organizers that the buildings, including the Space Needle, should be permanent.

Dick and Ann had moved to the tiny neighborhood of Ladera, in Portola Valley. Decades before Silicon Valley would blossom and transform Portola Valley into a woodsy and elegant retreat for technologists and venture capitalists, it was a rustic community in the hills west of Stanford that had a distinct bohemian tinge. Ladera was located on Alpine Road, just a short drive from Perry Lane—described by writer Ed McClanahan as “the lunatic fringe on Stanford’s stiff upper lip”[1]—where Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters first took root in the early sixties, and around the corner from where the Grateful Dead took up residence in an old mansion in the midsixties.

Prepped by Mike, the Raymonds met Brand the morning after he arrived at Stanford and promptly drove him to Brooks Brothers in San Francisco to buy clothes for his new college career. They spent the rest of the day exploring the city. Ann sensed a spirit of mischief in Brand, which she shared. Not that much older than the college student who would frequently come to their home for dinner, she would become like an older sister.

Stanford in the 1950s was not yet the elite international institution it would become. The insular campus had little contact with the towns that surrounded it, in marked contrast to the University of California at Berkeley, across the bay, which spilled noisily and publicly out of its official boundaries. By decree, the Stanfords, its founders, mandated that the area around the school should be dry, and liquor was still not sold close to campus in the 1950s.

There were only hints of the school that would become instrumental in the creation of Silicon Valley, but during his freshman year Brand got a first intimation of what later became a key part of the region’s lore. In his dorm, students were playing with an illicit technology that preceded a gadget, later perfected by a group of outlaw hobbyists, that would become known as a blue box—a simple electronic device that allowed you to make free phone calls from a pay phone. When Brand was at Stanford, placing a transistor in contact with the telephone handset and grounding it against the hinges of the phone booth produced a dial tone and—presto!—you were able to make a free phone call. Schooled in basic electronics by his ham-radio-operator father, Brand obtained a stack of the necessary transistors from Zack Electronics, a local supply store, and passed them out freely. He was ahead of his time: thirteen years later Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak would famously meet Captain Crunch (John Draper), an early hacker, who taught them how to build blue boxes, which they then sold in Wozniak’s dormitory at Berkeley.

From the start his regular letters home were peppered with optimism and superlatives: “The class this year looks the best ever”; “the top man in the philosophy department”; “the liveliest guy in the classics department”; “experience excellent”; “a damn good man.” His first-quarter courses included French, English, Western civilization, biology, and ROTC, the military officer training program that was then on most college campuses. When the first essay test was assigned in Western civ, he watched as his classmates found the experience terrifying. “Hearing these complaints, I suddenly began to appreciate Exeter a great deal,” he wrote in his journal. “For two years now I have regularly been having objective-essay tests covering a large area and limited to 50 minutes. Consequently, I was right at home with the first test, and I think I may have done fairly well. I wonder in what else I have a head start on the other guys here.”

It took just three days to realize his optimism might have been misplaced. His first essay came back with a C grade, leaving him mortified. “Big Exeter hero: know how to study, how to take essay exams. Hah!” he noted.

He decided that he was too reflective most of the time and needed to find a way to “hurry up” his mind. But competing against his goal of learning to be a better scholar were an increasing number of distractions as he got deeper into his first year of college. For the first time in his life, he was dating (Exeter didn’t become coed until 1970), although it was awkward in that particular way that 1950s college life made almost inevitable. Colleges practiced what was known as in loco parentis control of their students, and for Stanford women (far outnumbered by men) it meant they were locked in their dormitories at night. Brand’s Pontiac made it possible to drive to San Francisco for a dinner date and a movie or to head up into the redwoods behind campus. At one point he even obtained a portable record player and placed it in the back seat of the car.

Brand was coming of age in a world where the operating assumption was that women were at school to meet someone and marry. For many of the men on campus in the 1950s, female students were distinguishable mostly by qualities exclusive of brainpower. (One of Brand’s chemistry professors illustrated the difference between qualitative and quantitative methods by explaining, “Qualitatively you might say a certain girl is shapely; the quantitative terms would be 36–24–36.”) That traditional worldview did not immediately leave Brand.

At the end of his first quarter, encouraged by his parents, he went through fraternity rush. Mike had been a member of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity, and as a legacy, Stewart had a high likelihood of being accepted as a pledge. Brand found the whole process odd and hypocritical. But there was something more to it than just that.

“The thing is I really don’t want to commit myself anywhere till I have a better idea who I am,” he wrote his parents. “I’m changing, I know that much and am enjoying it, but I’m not too certain of direction yet.” Ultimately, it was a nonissue. The Phi Delts weren’t interested in him either, nor were any of Stanford’s eating clubs.

Instead, he found common ground with some outsiders—specifically Stanford’s foreign students. Beginning in his freshman year he became increasingly involved in the Institute for International Relations (IIR), putting him in contact with students who were often far less provincial than the typical upper-middle-class Stanford freshman.

His classmates would later remember him as a tall, straitlaced and earnest, even “square” young man with close-cut hair. Though he came across as square, his intensity caught the attention of Vartan Gregorian, an Iranian-born Armenian who had arrived as a twenty-two-year-old freshman the same year as Brand. The two were both deeply involved in the IIR, and although they were not close, Vartanian would remember Brand for his military posture on campus. He could frequently be seen in his dress ROTC uniform, something that would permanently impress the young Armenian, who graduated from Stanford in just two years and then obtained a PhD before eventually heading the New York Public Library, Brown University, and the Carnegie Corporation.

The IIR was Brand’s window into the upper echelons of the Stanford administration, and it also gave him a more intimate view of the faculty. For a while he became excited about organizing the students to evaluate the faculty. He was promptly shot down by the dean of students, who told him, “Well, that’s admirable initiative. . . . But I’m not sure you realize that the faculty is actually the best judge of who’s the best faculty.” Brand cringed and backed down. It was something he would regret for years afterward.

Reading was almost always the portal through which Brand veered off in new directions. In the spring quarter, he was thrilled by a powerful Western civ lecture on population, food, and conservation. Things were bleak, but the lecturer speculated that there might yet be hope—South America might have enough unused capacity to support a burgeoning human population. After class, he cornered his professor and was told to read Our Plundered Planet. Written by Fairfield Osborn in 1948, it was one of several books that would touch off a Malthusian revival and had influenced Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford biologist who would be Brand’s adviser at Stanford during his senior year.

Eventually, Brand would become far more optimistic about technology and the human condition. But he left that class on fire, writing at the end of the day: “All these things grab me right by the ambition. South America, conservation, biology. I came out of class with my eyes on the stars.”

In rapid succession, two more events—one later that evening and another the following day—conspired to create a new certainty that he was ready to set off on a path to become a scientist. The campus film that night was Our Mr. Sun. Produced the previous year and directed by Frank Capra, it was the first of what became known as the Bell System Science Series. Blending clever animation with authoritative presentations by scientists, the films would captivate American schoolchildren on rainy days for decades to come.

“It was educational, exciting, and—yes—inspiring,” Brand wrote afterward. “Maybe I’m doomed to be a scientist. Can’t get rid of those damned stars!”

The next day he attended a lecture by Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World, who argued that in the future, biology would become the world’s dominant science. Inspired, Brand decided that the path was inescapable. Huxley was also the author of The Doors of Perception, which recounted his experiences with psychedelics (in his case, mescaline) as tools to unlock an otherwise barricaded path to spiritual ascendance. It was a book that became a bible for many who experimented with psychedelics, and one that Brand would initially find valuable—and then ultimately find useless.

In the spring of 1957, he was finally baptized as a true Californian. Lying in the grass outside of his freshman dormitory, he felt the earth shake for half a minute while the sky held still. California was in the midst of a long quiet period without major earthquakes. This one measured just 5.3, but it was strong enough to kill one person and to injure forty.

He had been lying on his back under a sunny sky, talking with friends. It was a moment of an unsettling loss of trust in the stability of the ground that he had always taken for granted. He was struck by the calm sky over a suddenly very uncalm earth. It gave him a new perspective on the Golden State.

From family lore about logging in the Northwoods, to fighting fires at Higgins Lake, to Hollywood movies that captured the spirit of adventure in the West, Brand had long been looking to prove his character in a way that would be unlikely to be within the bounds of his comfortable and cloistered Stanford education. Although the family had sold Western Logging to Georgia-Pacific, Ed Morley was still running Tree-O, a small “highball” logging firm that was logging near Sweet Home, Oregon, and Brand successfully wrote his way into a job there. Highball meant moving at a fast clip, the kind of work that would provide exactly the kind of test that Brand was looking for.

With another freshman, a Stanford gymnast, he showed up in July in Sweet Home, a small logging boom town set along the banks of the Santiam River northeast of Eugene. With a third young logger, they rented a motel room, splitting the thirty-five-dollar-a-month rent (one got the bed, another the cot, and the last a mattress on the floor, though the gymnast friend quit after a couple of weeks, making things a bit less crowded).

Each day would start when the first alarm went off at 4:55 a.m., and they would be in bed and fall asleep each night a little after 9:00 p.m. They were paid $2.25 an hour. Brand was hired as a choker setter—the logger who attached a special cable end to a skyline that would pull the log up to a central area. The job required wrangling a cable through brush on a steep hillside, tying it to the downed tree, and then getting the hell out of the way.

The Tree-O logging operation was conducted on terrain so steep, it might have been illegal because of the danger of causing erosion and landslides, but Brand came away from the summer without serious injury as well as a certainty that someone had to write a Moby-Dick about logging. The characters were so extraordinary, so violent, amazing, and wonderful—surely the logging world was at least as interesting as whaling.

But who could do it, and how? “God, I don’t know if I can do fiction,” Brand wrote. “The only thing I can do is non-fiction. What am I going to do?” The dilemma hung over him for years until, after leaving the army, he read Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion. Kesey nailed it, Brand decided. (Kesey never logged but knew the world well—partly thanks to extensive research in the local bars.)

At the end of August, Brand spent a last day taking photos of the logging operation and then headed to Higgins Lake for a family vacation. On one of his last nights at the lake he was reading in the cabin when he heard his brother Pete outside.

“Stew, come on out! The Northern Lights are back. There’s red, green, and purple. Get Mom.”

He wrapped himself in a blanket and went out and lay on the boat dock on the lake. The night air was cold, and a three-quarter moon hanging above reflected off the ripples a breeze blew in on the lake. The moon was surrounded by the sheets of light that made up the aurora borealis, which stretched across the entire sky. The sky was completely alive. At one point a single shaft of light stabbed toward an apex in the north and then the lights subsided.

He stayed on the dock for a long time that night. He would later recall it as a night apt for visitations from God, he thought, maybe for murdering kings. At the least, it was a night for wonder and reflection.

In October 1956, Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary, crushing a revolt against the Communist regime. Brand was studying military history in his ROTC class, being trained as a soldier with the nuclear standoff between the United States and the USSR as backdrop. In March he wrote a gloomy three-page entry in his journal speculating on a surprise Soviet attack on the United States, acknowledging that up until then he had never considered that America might lose the war and “become a distant but very important industrially [sic] province of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. . . . That I would become part of the Communist Civilization. That my life would necessarily become small, a gear with its place on a certain axle of the Communist machine. Perhaps only a tooth on the gear.”

If it came to war, he would fight, he decided, but not for the president or even for democracy but rather for his “individualism and personal liberty. If I must be a fool, I want the freedom to be foolish in my own way—not somebody else’s. I will fight to avoid becoming a number—to others and myself.”

At Stanford he read both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and was seduced by Ayn Rand’s romantic view of free-market capitalism as well as her view of businessmen as heroic.

It is tempting to read a great deal of significance into Brand’s journal entry. However, in the mid-1950s taking a stance against communism was, to put it mildly, very much in vogue. In high school, like many Americans, he was a fan of the TV series I Led Three Lives, which celebrated “counterspying” on communist infiltrators in America. He was also part of a generation too young to have ever known the Soviets as an ally. But Brand was anything but a textbook anticommunist. Growing up in a relatively liberal family, he feared and reviled Joe McCarthy and his methods. Within a few years, as an army lieutenant, Brand would have to make a personal decision about whether he actually did want to fight against communism, not in America but in Asia—and when he was faced with that decision, he chose not to.

Nevertheless, his stated fear of communism, described in his journal soon after he’d read Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer, was revealing. Hoffer was a German immigrant and a San Francisco longshoreman who had become an acclaimed social philosopher, and Brand was channeling his warnings about the dangers of mass movements and their threat to personal freedom.

In February of 1958, one of Brand’s classmates, a crew-cut tennis player named Thomas Cordry III, picked up a high school girl who lived across the street from him in Palo Alto and shot her in the head with a .22 rifle. He then drove her body to the police station, confessed, and turned himself in. He told the police that he had been beset with the “urge to kill” for some time and had planned to rape her and bury her body, before changing his mind.

From the vantage point of six decades, a single senseless killing in a world in which mass murder with military-grade automatic weapons is routine seems almost quaint. In the winter of 1958, however, the murder stunned the Stanford campus and forced Brand to look more closely at his classmates. He sent newspaper clippings describing the killing home to his father with a reflective letter about the shortcomings of his generation. He concluded that Cordry’s evil was lurking just below the surface in many of his fellow students and that the only thing keeping such insanity at bay was a binding web of friendships and family. It occurred to him that there was a basic flaw in the American way of life—the nation was moving so fast that it was getting much harder to form meaningful relationships. Even he had felt the pressure to accelerate. Toward the end of his first quarter at Stanford, he had summarized his frustrations in an essay titled “Stewart Brand, Slow Thinker.” The world was divided into fast and slow thinkers, he wrote, and the way to make the transition would be through diligence and focus: “By the end of this year, you may expect to hear an extraordinary freshman who has his studying down to a science, who cools his tests with an easygoing competence, who inspires all those who hear him with his brilliant conversation, who is accustomed to making decisions with the speed and accuracy of a well-oiled calculating machine. This will be Stew Brand, fast thinker.” Decades later he would still be thinking of the slow/fast dichotomy and its impact on society. It would be a perspective that would become instrumental in the formation of the Long Now Foundation, an organization dedicated to promoting long-term thinking.

Mike Brand had counseled his brother not to focus on selecting individual courses but rather to find the best professors. One of those he recommended was a charismatic professor of religion, Frederic Spiegelberg.

Brand had been more or less agnostic through his late teens, but at Stanford he had become seduced into a loose Christian mysticism by listening to Huxley and several of his professors as well as falling under the spell of Nikos Kazantzakis, the Greek novelist, socialist, and spiritual seeker. However, when Spiegelberg walked into the huge lecture hall early in the quarter and announced in his booming voice, “We study the East, not for escape, but that we may find ourself [sic],” Brand was duly smitten.

Spiegelberg, a German Jewish immigrant who’d arrived at Stanford in 1941, would become a significant bridge between Eastern and Western thought in America. In Germany he had studied with both Martin Heidegger and Paul Tillich, modern philosophers who had explored existentialism, phenomenology, and Christianity, and he carried the seeds of their thought with him to America. In 1949 he traveled to India on a Fulbright scholarship, visiting ashrams and meeting notable religious figures, including Ramana Maharshi and Sri Aurobindo. With Alan Watts, he helped establish the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco in 1950, a powerful catalyst that introduced Zen Buddhist and other Eastern mystical ideas into the San Francisco community of Beat poets. The academy became a magnet for a remarkable group of artists during the 1950s: not only were Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg regular attendees but other important Beats such as Michael McClure and David Meltzer also fell into its orbit.[2]

During one of his lectures, Spiegelberg shook Brand by casually commenting, “I don’t actually read the news. I think the important news shows up with contemporary poets, and so I read the Beat poets and I’m very interested in what Allen Ginsberg has to say, what Michael McClure has to say, what Gary Snyder has to say.” Remarkably enough, all those people were living in North Beach, the San Francisco neighborhood an hour’s drive north of the campus. Finding the Beats would eventually open a window into a world that Brand had never encountered in the Midwest. The quirky San Francisco bohemian community lit him up intellectually. Still, there was no direct path to enlightenment. That would require a couple of years and a bit of serendipity.

Stanford had been dubbed “the Farm” for a reason. Mrs. Stanford had designed the school intending to separate the students from the outside world, a sort of prep school insularity, and Brand could feel the inward-looking culture of the university closing in around him—so much so that at times it felt more like prison than palace.

Decades before the western exit from campus led to the roost of Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists and the world’s most expensive real estate, Sand Hill Road offered the quickest route from Stanford to the Pacific Ocean and the California coast. It was a gateway to the fog-shrouded Santa Cruz Mountains and a way out through La Honda and the ribbon of Highway 1 running along the luminescent coastline down to Big Sur and Slates Hot Springs. This was a California that offered everything Brand hadn’t found in midwestern Illinois or even at Higgins Lake. Sand Hill Road became his get-out-of-jail pass.

He first discovered Big Sur at an IIR foreign policy retreat held at Slates Hot Springs (now more commonly known simply as Big Sur Hot Springs). Located a little more than an hour’s drive south of Monterey on Highway 1, the springs were owned by the Murphy family, who had purchased the land in 1910 and had originally intended to create a European-style health spa once the highway was completed. The spa, however, wouldn’t materialize until the early sixties, when one of the Murphys’ renegade sons was able to persuade the family to transform the hot springs into a New Age retreat.

Brand rhapsodized about his first weekend in a letter home. There were “jungles of redwood canyons,” “velvety spring nights,” “the magnificent steep Big Sur coast: sand, cliffs, waterfall and buried jade,” he wrote to his mother.

Brand’s encounters in Big Sur would introduce him to two distinct and peculiarly Northern California communities—Big Sur writers like Henry Miller and John Steinbeck, and a pioneering group of San Francisco photographers exemplified by Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham, known as f/64. Several years later, in the early 1960s, he became deeply immersed in both worlds, bathing himself in the Beat culture of North Beach through his friendships with Beats like the poet Gerd Stern, and Jean Varda, the European-born collage artist who had introduced Miller to Big Sur.

Brand was the student organizer for the IIR weekend, and he was attempting to be the unofficial trip photographer as well. On Saturday evening, hanging out in the lodge, the Stanford students were introduced to one of the two sons of the Murphy family. Their father was John Steinbeck’s best friend, and their grandfather had delivered Steinbeck. It had even been rumored that Michael and Dennis Murphy (both Stanford graduates) were the models for the two brothers in Steinbeck’s autobiographical novel East of Eden (something that Dennis would deny).

That evening the Stanford students drank from an “inexhaustible supply of Gallo wine.” Brand wanted to photograph Dennis Murphy, who was becoming a national celebrity based on his bestselling first novel, The Sergeant, “but he and the wine had weaved a spell I was afraid to break,” he wrote afterward. “No matter,” he decided. “I got a lot out of the evening without pictures.”

Brand’s school year ended on a spooky note. In addition to contemplating a career as a journalist, he continued to fantasize about life as a novelist. That spring he wrote a short story about logging using the characters he had met in the Oregon woods the previous summer. The story revolved around an imaginary fatal grisly accident that befell one of the loggers on a small-scale crew like the one he had worked for.

Immediately after finishing the story, he opened a letter from Frankie Brawn, his boss in the logging crew from the previous summer—and the man he had killed off in his story—asking for any photos he had taken of one of the loggers who had worked with Brand that summer. Three weeks earlier—just when he had dreamed up the plot for his story—the logger had been involved in a bad accident and had taken two days to die. Brand couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow he had been to blame.

In the summer of 1958, Brand boarded the Arosa Kulm, a converted troop transport that was one year away from the junkyard, and headed for Europe to spend time with a Swiss family in Lausanne as part of the Experiment in International Living student exchange program, which sent students abroad to live with families and be immersed in a foreign culture. He spent much of the passage feeling seasick and wrote home inquiring if it would be possible to consider coming home by plane—it was hardly any more expensive, he noted.

His group of exchange students reached port in Le Havre, France, and went first to Paris to see the sights of the city. The next day he headed to Lausanne by train.

Much of the summer was taken up with language lessons and getting to know the city. There were also bike trips and climbing adventures in the Swiss countryside. The locals got something out of it too: Brand had brought his Frisbee and helped introduce them to the sport.

Throughout the summer he had a lot of contact with the coeds who were in the program, but like his Stanford dates, the encounters were entirely cerebral. And so in August he returned to Paris with a fellow exchange student and headed to a seedy neighborhood known as Pigalle for consummation of a less noble sort. To steel themselves for the challenge of picking up two prostitutes, they had consumed a large quantity of beer—more than Brand had ever had, and when it came time to lose his virginity, all he could think about was the stale taste in his mouth. There was no excitement and everything was over almost before it began. “No fanfare, nothing romantic,” he wrote later in his journal, “just a Paris whore at Pigalle.” Afterward he decided that it had been a learning experience, although it was not clear what the lesson had been.

Back at school, he continued in his volunteer role at IIR. That brought him in closer contact with a tall blond woman who was a new regular at foreign student events. Joan Squires was younger than Brand, but years more worldly. The daughter of an American business executive based in India, she was horrified by being abruptly thrust into a largely nonintellectual upper-middle-class American environment at Stanford and spent her first year desperately trying to transfer to Radcliffe. Failing to find an intelligent community interested in more than beer and football, she took refuge with Stanford’s foreign students and in doing so met Brand.

They were an unexpected pair. Brand, remarkably straitlaced, still had a Boy Scout quality about him. At the same time, he was intensely curious and clearly trying to escape his midwestern skin. Squires was a revelation. He found in her a mature world traveler who looked him directly in the eye and at the same time was “scary nice.” And while she was two years behind him, her Western civilization professor, Peter King, and his wife, Fox, had clued her in to the North Beach cultural scene, and she already knew the world of City Lights Books, the Co-Existence Bagel Shop, the Hungry i nightclub, the Beat poets, and artists like Varda. When Brand first joined her in exploring North Beach, she worried that her friends might think him hopelessly square, the leader of a Boy Scout troop in a hipster world, but he evolved with lightning speed. This, it seemed, was water he could take to.

Before he could immerse himself any deeper, however, Brand still had to finish school and his military commitment. Although both his brother Mike and his brother-in-law were in the army, the Marine Corps sounded tougher. However, the Marine Corps demanded a three-year commitment, and so he decided to enlist in the army after graduating.

ROTC “summer camp” was in Seattle. Brand planned to attend with Jeff Fadiman, a classmate and friend who also intended to join the army. Fadiman, who was a nephew of Clifton Fadiman, the public intellectual and early television personality, was a couple of years older than Brand, but the two became close friends and drinking buddies. Fadiman was a larger-than-life figure who had spent several years abroad. Although he was an anti-Soviet, unlike Brand he considered himself a leftist. Like Brand he was thinking about becoming a writer.

Before joining Fadiman in Seattle, Brand went home to visit his parents and ran into John Edson, then a premed student at Harvard. One evening the two of them sat for a long time near the Edson family garage and discussed their common conviction that humanity, fueled by population explosion and the development of advanced weapons such as intercontinental ballistic missiles, was running out of time. They speculated about whether fascism could reemerge and agreed that some sort of cataclysm was likely inevitable.

Brand—relying on the evolutionary biology he had been studying—said he thought there were three likely outcomes: (1) Humanity would find itself in an “evolutionary cul-de-sac” in which the collective intelligent action that underlay civilization would also ultimately be its undoing; (2) the collapse would occur, but a reduced “post–Homo sapiens” species would survive using intelligence to offset Malthus; (3) humanity would evolve quickly enough based on technology—“books”—to offset the coming crisis.

Edson thought there was little possibility of the third path, making it inevitable that the species would die off. At first Brand reluctantly agreed, concluding that destruction was both inevitable and imminent. “Like the weather, we can do nothing about it.”

Then he hesitated. It didn’t make sense that there was no way out. Pursuing the weather analogy, he said, “When it begins to storm, we go inside.”

“But people won’t move until they get wet or until they feel the pinch, and it will be just chaos,” his friend replied.

That left Brand wondering about personal responsibility. The alternative might be to just dig a hole, go off in the woods, and hide. But that left him feeling unsatisfied. Wasn’t that sort of thinking the very cause of the destruction? he wondered. He believed in the priority of independent and individual decision making, but “Fuck you, Jack, I’ve got mine” was a morally bankrupt philosophy as far as he was concerned.

That still left the question: What could one person do? Together they decided that there was some value in messengers and that they had crucial and unique knowledge about the human condition and a duty to warn the world. The next day Brand wrote: “Suppose, just suppose, I put all this down in a book. If done well, that book would be read by the entire world. They would hate me; I would have destroyed myself. But would it save the world? Or only prolong the agony?” He added that “the judgment, the decision, is a God-like one. Who are John and I to settle the fate of the planet?”

It was the first sign of a complicated call to activism that Brand would exhibit in an on-again, off-again fashion throughout his life: his education in biology colliding with his romanticism. He had been reading Kazantzakis, whose novels included The Last Temptation of Christ and Zorba the Greek, and flush with mystical and romantic notions about the role of faith and salvation, he now wondered whether the world might not be ready for a new religion, one in which God was directly aided by man to save the species—the ultimate existential act. A decade later Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog would begin with the premise “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”

The next evening Brand went to see the Gregory Peck movie Pork Chop Hill, about a fierce battle for an insignificant military objective. The hill is seized at great cost, only because the US military decides to reinforce the troops when it resolves that it will show tenacity to the Chinese.

When he got home, he sketched some ideas for a book that he would title The Last Generation.

“I wanted to act on the feelings and thoughts I had merely talked about before,” he wrote in his journal. “The only other act possible to me was to dig a hole. Perhaps I can still do that.”

He added, “I do not believe that this book will be any help at all.” And then he crossed out his last sentence.

In the early 1950s two professors shared the title of “most popular” Stanford faculty. One was Frederic Spiegelberg. The other was Harry Rathbun, who taught a course on business law heavy in its emphasis on personal ethics and values. Like Spiegelberg, Rathbun was a charismatic figure whose classrooms were regularly filled to the point of overflow. Brand’s brother Mike and Michael Murphy, who would later cofound the Esalen Institute, had taken classes from both men and come away transformed by the experience. Now, in the winter quarter of his senior year, it would be Stewart’s turn. Thinking it might be good preparation for the course, before classes began that fall he attended a two-week retreat in the Santa Cruz Mountains that focused on Rathbun’s particular flavor of Christian mysticism.

Rathbun’s life had been transformed when he and his wife, Emilia, attended a 1935 wilderness retreat in Canada led by Henry B. Sharman, a wealthy retired Canadian theologian exploring the historical records relating to the teachings of Jesus. After returning to Palo Alto, the Rathbuns began conducting Sharman-style study groups for Stanford students in their home. The sessions were later expanded to include a retreat at a center that was established in the mountains about twenty miles southwest of campus near the then sleepy beach town of Santa Cruz. The Rathbuns were intent on building a new religion that would draw not only from the teachings of Jesus and Sharman but from Quaker values as well (the Rathbuns were members of the Palo Alto Friends Gathering).[3] The sessions were known as the Sequoia Seminars and ultimately, in the 1970s, they would spin off a series of cultlike groups—including the Creative Initiative Foundation, Beyond War, and Women Building the Earth for the Children’s Sake—that attracted a broad, largely upper-middle-class following centered in the emerging Silicon Valley. In many cases people who joined these groups would sell their homes and personal belongings and dedicate their lives completely to these New Age communities.

Among those deeply affected by the Sequoia Seminars was Myron Stolaroff, an executive at Ampex, one of the pioneering technology companies on the Midpeninsula. On a lark in 1954, Stolaroff attended the Seminar and had his first mystical experience. As he was lying on the floor of the lodge where the group met, listening to Gregorian chants, meditating, and looking through the glass skylight at moonlit redwood trees, he felt a deep pain in his chest that left him in an ecstatic state. Heretofore a secular Jew, Stolaroff concluded that the experience was evidence that God had touched him.[4]

It was also at the Sequoia Seminar that Stolaroff, along with Stanford electrical engineer Willis Harman, first met Gerald Heard. An Anglo-Irish writer who had begun his career at Cambridge and Oxford as an academic, Heard had become a committed pacifist in the 1930s and had immigrated to Los Angeles at the same time as Aldous Huxley. In California he’d become a devotee of a Hindu religious order and continued to write books ranging from spiritual essays to science fiction novels featuring UFOs. He also developed a reputation as a mystic. (It was Heard, also a close friend of Rathbun’s, who introduced Huxley to Eastern thought.) Heard led a wide-ranging discussion group at one of the Sequoia Seminar retreats, and later Stolaroff, who by then was in charge of instrumentation marketing at Ampex, became a regular visitor at Heard’s home in the Pacific Palisades when he was on business trips to Los Angeles.

It was during one of his visits in 1956 that Heard carried on enthusiastically to Stolaroff about a new drug called LSD. The idea shocked the young engineer. He couldn’t figure out why such a famous mystic would need a chemical substance to assist him in reaching a heightened sense of illumination. Nevertheless, Heard was fervent about the chemical and told Stolaroff about an unusual man who would occasionally come from Canada and administer the drug to both him and Huxley.

The man was Al Hubbard. Short and stocky, with two passports and a murky history of connections to both law enforcement and intelligence agencies, Hubbard was without question one of the most curious folk characters in America during the 1950s and 1960s. A true believer in the power of assisted enlightenment, he was in effect the West Coast Johnny Appleseed of LSD, avidly scattering psychedelics into a small community of technologists around Stanford, accelerating a swirling set of social, political, and technological forces that would all take shape during the next decade.

By 1961 Stolaroff and Harman would establish a research group in Menlo Park to study the relationship between creativity and LSD. One of their first subjects would be a young Stewart Brand.

Brand’s early flirtation with libertarianism and anticommunism, coupled with his interest in Eastern ideas and mysticism, had collided with his increasing interest in human ecology. He staked out an intellectual position in which humans had a moral responsibility to care for the species and the Earth, a thread that would echo through Brand’s thinking and acting for the rest of his life. Now, sitting with the two dozen Sequoia Seminar participants on the floor of the meeting house amid a redwood grove with a view of the Santa Cruz mountains, he argued that humanity had evolved to the point that, because of human self-awareness, each individual could contribute to and influence the species. It wasn’t just a question of the actions of an individual, he said; the question of survival is one that confronts an entire species.

“We are faced continually by choices,” he told the group. “Yet we never have complete knowledge of what the alternatives consist or involve. We choose out of partial knowledge and frequently are wrong. This, I maintain, is excusable and certainly educational. The only evil is not to choose. There is our responsibility.” He ended by citing The Little Prince. In the novel the fox notes, “You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”

In the immediate aftermath of the Seminar, on the day he began his senior year, Brand wrote to his parents that he had been transformed:

I know that the experience, unlikely as it might appear, did occur, for the evidence pervades my actions and thought. At Seminar, essentially, one hauls out one’s self and ponders what to do with it. Some people turn the old self in for a new one. I haven’t done that, but I made enough discoveries about me, altering in some places, and learned enough possibilities, exciting ideas, and practical methods that perhaps it amounts to the same thing. A money’s worth was got, I am sure.

A month later he was still thinking about the relationship between humans, freedom, and their environment. What was unique about humanity was the freedom to choose (which path to follow). “Evolution is the final empiricist,” he wrote in his journal. “If a species works it survives; if not, not.”

As a junior, Brand had moved off campus to a cottage in Menlo Park. At the time, he had proudly written to his mother that he would be the master of his world. “Essentially, I am alone to study and to sleep,” he wrote her somewhat defensively. “You can’t believe the pleasure it gives to come home (home!) to the serenity of this place after the peopled, frenetic days at campus.” Unstated, in the back of his mind at least, was that living by himself would provide greater potential for social conquest. Despite his brief summer interlude in Paris, he remained for all practical purposes a virgin and increasingly unsatisfied with his isolation. All of this had been tremendously amplified by a bitter falling out with Joan Squires, whom he felt had shifted her attention to others. Brand sent her an angry letter, describing her as a “bitch.” He quickly realized that while the outburst might have felt satisfying at the time, it was a huge mistake. He tried to justify it as irrelevant, that their relationship had already soured beyond repair—“even good though it was, it was probably lost anyway”—and doomed to circumstances beyond his control. “Love,” he concluded, “I am sure, is primarily a matter of timing.” Yet recognizing that he had done something stupid and costly, he sat in front of his cottage in Menlo Park and cried. Later it would become apparent that interest in a romantic relationship was more on his side than hers. Joan Squires was looking for a friend, not a lover.

Eventually he would concede that, far from successful, his time living by himself had been “sad and lonely.” As a result, during his last year at Stanford he took on the position of student adviser to twenty-one freshmen who were living off campus. With a friend, Eric Field, an engineering graduate student, he moved into a small house on an alleyway on campus near fraternity row. (Jeff Fadiman, who was spending the year in Europe and Africa, was also a close friend of Field’s.) Brand’s mentoring responsibilities were minimal, and Field, a handsome man with piercing blue eyes and a small-plane pilot’s license, jump-started Brand’s social life. The two would frequently double-date, and dinners cooked in their cottage for guests were a regular event, though several nascent relationships fizzled out for one reason or another.

As unsuccessful as his social life was that year, his academic fortunes were the opposite. Inspired in part by Fadiman, he continued to think about becoming a journalist and threw himself into a course on writing for magazines. As part of his coursework, he attended a photojournalism conference in Monterey. Wearing a badge and listening to professionals talk about their craft felt as if he were crossing the threshold into a more adult world.

Charles Eames, the famed designer, was the featured speaker at the event, and he came armed with a broad selection of magazines he had purchased at a newsstand on his way to the conference. His dazzling comparisons of the photographs in the magazines awed Brand. The best photography was so evocative you could practically smell the place in the picture, Eames told the audience. Inspired, Brand left the conference certain that he wanted to capture the world in pictures more than words. Nevertheless, he started the other way around. Brand began his search for freelance work by successfully pitching the New York Times Magazine an article on the little-known Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, or CASBS, then an independent research organization hidden in the hills just west of the campus.

In an era of dramatic investment and growth for the social sciences, the Center had been established by the Ford Foundation in 1954 with the intent of breaking down the stovepipes that separated the social sciences and creating a more integrated “behavioral science.” Brand spent several months making regular visits and conducting telephone interviews with scientists who had previously been involved with the CASBS, such as the University of California at Berkeley anthropologist Sherwood Washburn and Gregory Bateson, the British social scientist once married to Margaret Mead. More than a decade later, Brand’s brief intersection with both men would prove to have a defining impact on his thinking.

By the end of the school year, he had a 3,100-word article titled “Fruits of a Scholar’s Paradise.” The piece gave a half dozen examples of collaborative social science as practiced at the Center. The first of these came from a biology seminar that had been created in 1956 by Washburn, which gave rise to a new theory arguing that it was interaction with tools that drove human evolution. “By the seminar view,” he wrote, “the first tool-using creature was not at all like us, and he became what we are through a process of interaction with such cultural advances as tools.”

The theory did not endure, but Brand would come in contact with similar concepts in his time spent with a young Stanford professor named Paul Ehrlich, a population biologist. He would become highly influential for Brand during the next decade, partly for his 1968 book The Population Bomb, a pessimistic look at the future of humanity, which Brand initially took as gospel.

Brand poured his heart into researching and writing the Center profile, but in the end, the Times editors passed. Casting a wider net drew no better results. Horizon sent him a rejection notice, and both Harper’s Magazine and the Atlantic Monthly declined to offer assignments.

Despite his lack of immediate success, Brand’s discovery of Washburn attracted him to the concept that would be first described as “coevolution” by Ehrlich four years later. A little more than a decade later Brand would also become close to Bateson, and a conversation between them, titled “Both Sides of the Necessary Paradox,” appeared first in Harper’s Magazine before being reprinted in Brand’s first book, II Cybernetic Frontiers, along with his Rolling Stone article about computer hacker culture. Years later, Brand would return to the thinking of several others he encountered during this time, among them cyberneticist Warren McCulloch, and the MIT engineers Claude Shannon and Robert Fano, who pioneered theories regarding the measurement and transmission of information. For the moment, however, he was just another freelancer without takers.

He had fallen in love with the idea of becoming a biologist when he read Cannery Row and its portrayal of Ed Ricketts. At Stanford, marine biologist Donald Abbott would become Brand’s Ed Ricketts.

“Classes this quarter look the best ever,” he’d written home during the term he’d first encountered Abbott. “At long last, I’m getting what I was looking for in biology: ecology, ‘the interrelation between living organisms and their environment. . . .’ This is the ‘living whole, not the dead parts.’ ”

In ecology, the competitive exclusion principle, named for Georgy Gause, the Russian biologist and pioneering ecologist, was the proposition that two species competing for the same resources cannot coexist as constant populations. However, Abbott told his students, the territory on the hillside behind campus was shared by two tarantula species, apparently in violation of the Gause principle.

Brand had found an opportunity to do original research.

Fieldwork meant trips to the hills to check on tarantula activity. Brand would lie in fear on a cot perched next to a tarantula burrow, collecting data. On Abbott’s advice, he captured samples of the two species and sent them to Bruce Firstman, an evolutionary biologist who specialized in scorpions and spiders. Firstman wrote back, identifying the two species and warning Brand to be careful in handling one of them in particular—an earlier research paper done at Stanford twenty-five years earlier had shown that the venom from the tarantula could kill a mouse more quickly than that from a black widow.

Ehrlich, his senior thesis adviser, was impressed with his research and suggested that he should publish it—a potential path to graduate work in biology. However, as Brand toyed with the possibility, another bit of serendipity arrived.

In addition to becoming a freshman adviser his senior year, Brand was appointed as a student member of the President’s Advisory Committee. Shortly before one of the meetings he was chatting with William McCord, a newly arrived sociologist, and asked him if he was teaching anything interesting during the current quarter. McCord responded that yes, he was: a graduate seminar on personality. That sounded interesting to Brand, and two days later he had persuaded the professor to let him join. Soon thereafter he arrived for the class and found that almost all of the personality types for study had been assigned to other students. Only one was left, the anomic personality—“one publicly disapproved of or actively punished by society.”

It was perfect! A door had opened giving Brand license to explore the North Beach beatniks Spiegelberg had alerted him to. Despite Brand’s nasty letter, he was still friends with Joan Squires, and she helpfully pointed him to Pierre Delattre, a local minister who ran the Bread and Wine Mission on Grant Avenue and who had recently gained national visibility after he appeared in a New York Times article on the changing nature of the community.

Four days later Brand knocked on the door of the Bread and Wine Mission. There were no signs indicating he was at the right address, but a young man his age answered the door and told him that Delattre was traveling in Oklahoma.

“What’s going on at the Bread and Wine these days?” Brand inquired.

It had largely been converted into the publishing headquarters for two magazines, Beatitude and Underhound, the young man replied. Brand’s eyes lit up. The previous week he had attended a campus lecture by Spiegelberg on “neo-existentialist” poetry, where he had enthused about Beatitude as an example of the future of the art form.

Soon thereafter Brand found himself volunteering to help with the production of Beatitude #13. Assembling copies of the magazine, he chatted with a photographer who had shot the cover photo for the current edition and found himself talking with a young woman who like himself was passionate about Kazantzakis. Several hours later he left with Al, the young man who had met him at the door. They made their way down Grant Avenue to sell copies of the fresh-off-the-press magazine at the Co-Existence Bagel Shop, which along with the Caffe Trieste and the Coffee Gallery formed the spiritual core of the North Beach community.

It felt a bit as if he had fallen into a well and ended up in a movie. While they were in the bagel shop the editor of Beatitude wandered in and asked if anyone knew what the Today show was; he had been invited on the program for an interview. At the same time, sitting inside the coffee shop were a reporter and a photographer (both in ties) from Argosy magazine, preparing an article on the Beats. Brand watched as a young local couple explained to them how the “Beat” myth got started, what happened on weekends when the tourists showed up, how the police were cracking down, and how they (the locals) thought the whole thing was a laugh. The girl noted that she had recently shown up in a photograph accompanying a San Francisco Chronicle article, described as a dope peddler caught in a raid, even though she was a happily married and productive resident of North Beach.

Brand loved it. The kids he was hanging out with weren’t Beats except on the weekends when the tourists showed up. They didn’t speak like hipsters—hipster lingo belonged to the jazz musicians who were only part of the scene. They were all young and in various artistic fields, “alert, educated people with clear, intelligent, enthusiastic eyes,” as he wrote to his parents that night. Beards? Well, he had seen someone who hadn’t shaved that morning, but everyone else was smooth cheeked, perhaps making the scene a little more palatable in Rockford.

After dinner in Chinatown, he and Al wandered around the neighborhood with the Argosy journalists, and Brand got a quick education on the real world of journalism, photojournalism, and freelancing. They parted company at nine p.m., with Brand getting an invitation from Al to come back the next day for an insider’s tour of “The Beach.”

As he walked back to his car, he was floating. Passing by a San Francisco Victorian, he heard jazz coming from the garage. He stopped for a while and listened.

He had found his new home.

At the end of the quarter, Brand wrote a final paper for his graduate seminar in which he proposed a typology for the members of the “Bohemian Village.” “Bohemia isn’t a place,” he wrote. “It’s a state of mind.” There were the “rational,” who could be further broken down into “seekers” and “rebels.” There were also the “irrational,” who could be split into “Joiners,” “Defiant Ones,” and “Kick-hounds.” It was clear that Brand was preparing to throw his lot in with the rational bohemians.

He continued to explore North Beach during his final spring quarter, which also brought the possibility of a serious relationship with a young woman who was looking for the kind of commitment that Brand was unwilling to give. A troubled, sweet Stanford graduate student who struggled with depression, Marty had already tried suicide several times before she came into Brand’s orbit, and he could not figure out how to navigate the chasm between the devotion she was looking for and the enjoyment he got from their connection.

In June his parents arrived for graduation. He wore his ROTC dress uniform to the commencement and that evening celebrated with his parents and Marty. Later he insisted that she share a hotel room and they made love. At the time Brand described it in his journal as “my loveliest graduation present.” Later he would come to see it in a different, more realistic light. He came to refer to it as a “charity ball.” In the morning, they returned together for a farewell breakfast with his parents.

After graduation, while he waited to begin army basic training at Fort Benning, in Georgia, Brand took a summer job as a greeter for a foreign student exchange program, the Committee on Friendly Relations Among Foreign Students. For $250 a month his job was to meet incoming students at the airport and help them get settled. Much more exciting, he house-sat in North Beach while the owners were away in Mexico. It was summer living in grand style: three bedrooms, completely furnished with a hi-fi, and his only responsibilities were to feed the four cats and water the plants.

Best of all, Peter and Fox King took him under their wing. Not the Johnny-come-lately beatniks on Grant Avenue who were delighting, intriguing, and offending a national media, the Kings were a path to Jean Varda, a central figure in the Beat community, and to Frederick Roscoe, the owner of Discovery Books, a North Beach used bookstore that was the neighborhood counterpoint to Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s more famous City Lights Books.

The day after Brand moved in, King invited him along on a boat-launching party organized by Varda across the Bay in Sausalito. To Brand, Varda represented a cultured, intellectual European world that he had only glimpsed at Stanford. Not only a friend of Henry Miller’s but also the writer Anaïs Nin, Varda lived on the Vallejo, an aging ferry he shared with artist Gordon Onslow Ford, who had been a member of the 1930s Paris surrealist group surrounding André Breton. A year later Onslow Ford would move out and Alan Watts joined Varda on the Vallejo. In 1967 the boat would be the location of the “Houseboat Summit” attended by Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Watts, where they famously discussed the impact of LSD on society.

Varda was a completely social animal who regularly threw memorable parties for a diverse group of Bay Area bohemians and hangers-on. That day’s festivities centered on a World War II surplus lifeboat he’d converted into a sailboat rigged in the style of a Chinese junk with a prepsychedelic, “eye-rattling” paint job. It took almost two dozen people to drag the boat thirty feet onto the mudflats and wait for the tide to float it. There were artists, actors, modern furniture makers, dancers, and writers. Many of the men were bearded and all of the women were pretty and striking, Brand wrote in a letter to his parents. The conversation was fascinating. “Better than the best I found at Stanford,” he noted.

Among the first he met were a young couple, Jack and Jean Loeffler. (Loeffler had looked up into the rigging and seen a skinny guy with blond hair curled around the top of the mast taking his picture.) Loeffler was a jazz musician who, when drafted into the army, had become a member of the 433rd Army Band. (At one point, the band was asked to play “The Stars and Stripes Forever” while positioned just seven miles away from an atom bomb test.) After departing from the army, Loeffler made his way to North Beach, where he did a variety of things, including serving twice as a caretaker at Big Sur Hot Springs—once before the legendary journalist Hunter S. Thompson had the job and once after.

That summer, Brand was truly on his own for the first time. It was an uneven learning experience. One evening he invited Stephen Durkee, a young painter, and his wife, Barbara, whom he had met through the Kings, over for dinner. Stephen was a rising star in the New York art scene, creating pop art–style paintings on large canvases. In 1956 he had moved into a Fulton Street studio converted from a small factory that had once been a facility for manufacturing sails for ships. Durkee, who would eventually cofound a commune in New Mexico and ultimately convert to Islam, was at the peak of his artistic popularity, being described as a member of a new generation of painters including Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, and Robert Indiana. His studio had previously been occupied by Robert Rauschenberg and before that by Cy Twombly.[5]

With a flourish, Brand served them beef tartare. It was only after dinner that Barbara, who was a wealthy Stanford graduate, learned that he’d made the meal from hamburger he had purchased at the local grocery store. She was aghast, but it was too late to do anything about it.

His relationship with Marty sputtered along that summer, framed by the dark places she would regularly collapse into. Eventually, she drifted away, and several months later, after he had left North Beach, Brand learned that she had been found dead in her bed at the San Francisco YWCA from an overdose of potassium cyanide. She left a note leaving her body to medical research, adding “nobody need be notified.”[6]

When he read a postcard from a mutual friend passing on the news, Brand slammed his fist into a wall.

In September he took a final solo camping trip before reporting for officer basic training at Fort Benning. His destination was Hidden Lake, a small marshy depression on the north side of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County. As he drove across the Golden Gate Bridge in the late afternoon, the good feelings began to push away thoughts of the struggles he had had during his Stanford years. His clearest impressions were warm Palo Alto days and the smell of grass that stretched in every direction on campus. He discovered a grove of redwood trees, pulled over, and sat down on the matted needles in the sunshine to read The King Must Die, Mary Renault’s coming-of-age novel portraying the early life of Theseus, the king and founder of Athens and the slayer of the Minotaur. Now it was time to leave his own Athens and face his own trials.

Chapter 3

Acid

W ith a brother who had served in the military as an artillery officer and a sister who had married a West Point graduate who would become an army general and distinguish himself in Vietnam, Stewart Brand thrived in ROTC at Stanford. He had enjoyed studying military history and the close-order marching drills. He had worn his uniform with pride a decade before the Vietnam War era, when the military would be banished from American campuses by the antiwar movement.

As graduation approached, Brand faced a choice of whether to pursue graduate studies in biology or to try to make a career as a freelance photojournalist. If he had decided on biology, he could have briefly gone into the military and then stayed in the reserve for years and years to come. Instead, he chose to become a young army officer, committing to the military for two years. At Fort Benning, he set out to acquire an army ranger badge and in doing so came face-to-face with his greatest failure, one that would haunt him for the remainder of his life.

In college Brand had briefly flirted with pacifism, attracted by Gandhi’s moral purity. He soon decided that while he remained opposed to indiscriminate mass killing, he would be willing to kill another individual with his bare hands. (“I gladly learn the skills,” he wrote Eric Field. “One day a hitchhiker may turn on me.”) His feelings were derived in part from his early libertarian stance, but they would remain complicated by the pride he took years later from his military training. Despite a deep hatred for a faceless army bureaucracy, his decision not to reenlist and serve in Vietnam would also trouble him for decades after leaving the military. It created a personal quandary that was ultimately wrapped up in his failure to become an army ranger.

During World War II the rangers had been constituted as an American force set up along the lines of the British Commandos. An elite corps of soldiers, they were supposed to be the first to fight and to take on the most difficult assignments in battle. Brand decided he wanted to be among their ranks.

Afterward he would tell himself that if the Army Airborne School had come before ranger training, he would have passed both. And if he had become an army ranger, his life would have been very different. The rangers were first deployed in Vietnam as long-range reconnaissance patrols in 1965. If Brand had made the cut and stayed in the military, assignment to Southeast Asia would have likely been his path. It wasn’t—because of the vicious cold of a Georgia winter.

The chill began a month before he entered ranger training. The soldiers spent entire days outside, much of the time moving in weak sunlight or sitting on bleachers that were hidden from the sun but not a persistent wind. Even with underwear, long underwear, a shirt with a quilted lining, and a field jacket, the cold penetrated deeply enough to hurt. Each day was followed by an identical one that was just as unbearable. As the month went on, Brand was filled with a growing dread that what he was undergoing would be nothing compared to the ranger training to come. He would not only be cold, but he would be perpetually wet as well, forced to plunge into icy rivers and climb “frosted” mountains.

Few things can make a person question their intentions more than a fear of extreme cold getting even colder, and with each passing day Brand tried harder to figure out why he was putting himself through the torture. Obviously the objective was to learn to fight and kill. But was becoming a killer truly in accord with his principles? That left pride, “but it has dwindled seriously,” he wrote in early December, “and shivers.”

Officer training had taken just a month. He was given a brief respite, a trip home for Christmas that underscored the fact that his fervor for the military life was fading. Training was fine for what it was, and he still enjoyed it. But without a war it seemed increasingly pointless. Fantasies that he might become the next Norman Mailer and write great fiction were fleeting without real battle, and this was still peacetime.

“With no war,” he wrote in his journal, “it wouldn’t do for a book. For that I dismiss it. Not book-worthy, not noteworthy. I am a character in search of an author, situation, plot, and other characters. . . . I scarcely exist.”

Briefly at home in Rockford, he felt a new sense of alienation from his parents’ life. His father, he decided, was a good soul, but definitely quirky. He was a man with a menagerie of fears—crowds, heights, and being laughed at or belittled. He had never liked his parents’ endless round of holiday cocktail parties, and that Christmas he felt completely estranged. Simultaneously he discovered that he had new coping mechanisms for tolerating the banal seasonal small talk that was part and parcel of middlebrow Rockford. “I’ve found my way and I recognize this other as alien to it,” he wrote.

When Brand returned to Georgia for ranger training, both the cold and a new dread were waiting. It was no longer a matter of simply enduring low temperatures and cold winds. There would be freezing-cold water as well. And more runs. Seemingly endless runs. When he broke, after just two weeks of a two-month course, it was his mind, not his body, that failed.

Brand pulled off a surprising initial triumph, somehow persuading the officers running the training program to let him bring his camera on the runs and even to the pool where the trainees were forced to jump into 37-degree water from a high diving board while blindfolded, wearing their gear and ammo belts.

He was fitter now, honed by basic training. He survived the run in formation, wearing a uniform and army boots, by throwing his mind into the struggle, ignoring as much as possible the aches in his legs and the knot in his stomach. During each five-mile run, he could feel his vision narrow, and as the pain approached his absolute limit, he focused on what he would get when it all stopped—chow and mail. Though he always made it to the end, each run again triggered that voice inside asking why he was putting himself through this torture.

A week into training he had to face a round of pitiless water trials. It was not just diving into the water—you had to swim a couple of laps in all your gear. He learned to bite the air while he held his head as far out of the water as possible. He found ways to keep his mind together while doing an agonizingly slow sidestroke. Once out of the water, he would go into convulsions, knowing that in a few minutes he would be back under. He couldn’t think of a single reason not to quit.

For a week he made it through each crisis through sheer stubbornness and fear of shame. Then it was announced that later that month training would include swimming across ice-rimmed rivers and sleeping in frozen clothes. Someone mentioned that a squad leader had abruptly quit that morning, presumably because of the knowledge of what was scheduled to come.

Brand was silent, but during a bayonet drill moments later, it dawned on him that all of this was a hardship imposed for no reason. He told himself, “Well, I could just quit. Huh. I guess I’ll just quit.” This had nothing to do with the learning and lore he had come for—it was simply pain inflicted with no reason, or worse, against reason.

During his map class, he wrote down a list of arguments on both sides, knowing that he had already made his decision. He created two columns. One was labeled “Learning” and the second “Pain.” On one side were the survival skills he was acquiring; on the other, a list of things that he was forced to endure—running, cold, wet, lack of sleep, etc. Then he added a series of arguments in each column. On the pain side, he noted, “What is a Ranger in the life of writer-photographer?”

After lunch, he saw his commanding officer and walked up and told him he was leaving. “I don’t go along with the principle of hardship for its own sake,” he said.

Just like that, he was gone. What Brand worried about most was the phone call to tell his mother he had quit.

Parachutes are an interesting metaphor for lots of things in life. They can offer soft landings, they can give the wearer a godlike perspective on the world, they can fail you just when you need them most—or they can bail you out. In Brand’s case the parachute bailed him out.

As quickly as he left the rangers, he began parachute training. Just as the dread of the cold had undone him, his love of climbing now became his greatest asset. The parachute courses began with a series of successively higher tower jumps and concluded with five real jumps from a C-123 military transport plane. Sensing a new opportunity to pursue his goals in photography and journalism, once again he persuaded his superiors to let him take his camera along.

Jump school quickly brought his confidence back. When it finally came time to load into the C-123, Brand had a smile on his face, and it wouldn’t leave him the entire time—not when he crowded into his seat, not during takeoff, not when the first five cadres jumped out the back of the plane, nor when he followed his group out into the air. He was the last one in his group to go out the door. He felt the side of the plane rush by and briefly closed his eyes, then looked up and glimpsed his parachute opening above him. There was a very strong wind, and the force of air below made him intimately aware of just how quickly he was descending. As his landing point rushed up, he tensed, put his feet together, hit the ground with a bang, and rolled to make it look better.

The five jumps were spread over several weeks, and only on the final one did he perfectly nail his landing. It was a windless day and he touched the ground so gently that he calmly fell backward and watched the bright-green chute settle directly on top of him. He stood up under it, his arms wide open, still grinning.

In November at Fort Benning, even before he completed his officer training, Brand received an assignment as a basic training drill instructor with the Second Training Regiment at Fort Dix, in New Jersey. The real work of basic training instruction was done by the sergeants—the lieutenants simply stood around and attempted to look respectable.

Brand would spend the remainder of the two-year commitment attempting to use his skills with a camera and typewriter to garner a more interesting posting, hopefully to Europe as a military photographer, or perhaps a public affairs position that would allow him to continue to write and take pictures.

While haggling with the career management officials about where he would be posted, he worked on an article describing his experience titled “First Jump.” His efforts to sell it were unsuccessful. Adding to the hurt, the army censors who read the article were unimpressed with his prose. A coldly worded edit from the Pentagon information office went so far as to single out one of Brand’s favorite phrases as “ineffective and should be removed.”

He next approached editors at Argosy and True with a proposal for an article on the Fort Benning Pathfinder Navigation training program. “I’m afraid at this time that we are full up on war pieces,” an Argosy features editor responded. True was no more welcoming.

One disappointment followed another: An opportunity to run a weekly TV program at Fort Benning would involve a return to the South, where he had felt as if he were living in an American apartheid. He applied to the Army Information School, but the company commander saw that he had been a biology major and he was summarily rejected. At the Pentagon he spent two days walking the halls trying to make his case for a public information officer posting in Germany, only to be told that an officer with two years’ active duty could not get an overseas assignment except to Korea, which he had been warned was a hideous posting. He offered to commit to three years of active duty to get to Germany, but an army rule prevented that as well. The First Army Headquarters on Governors Island and the Fort Dix public information office were interested in taking him but were helpless to effect a transfer.

He soon found his days filled with fury at the dull-wittedness of the army’s functionaries, followed by a growing sense of futility. In March of 1961 he wrote to a friend, “I exist in a limbo: a training company. Neither leading nor commanding, nor held responsible for anything I can personally control, my job is to sign things, so when fate fucks up, I hang.”

It all seemed so distant from his vision of the nobility of service. One morning he watched two dim and childish sergeants taunting recruits by thrusting a burning tear gas bomb in the face of anyone slow in putting on their gas mask. One trainee lacerated himself in a barbed wire fence in which he had become entangled when trying to escape the gas. Brand later watched as the sergeants ate meat and cake for lunch while the recruits quarreled over sparse C rations.

That evening his immediate superior pounded on his door and ordered him to get his car off base immediately because he had not properly registered it while running errands. Furthermore, he told Brand that he had given him the same order the day before. That was news to Brand, but he was given no chance to defend himself. That night he went to bed thinking, “To hell with all of it!”

Soon after arriving at Fort Dix, he had won a fifty-dollar US Savings Bond prize in a Popular Photography contest and, searching for a way out of his funk, he began spending every evening in the base amateur photo lab. In short order he struck up a genuine romance. Pamela Balme, a regular at the lab, was a WAC, a member of the Women’s Army Corps, who was a nurse at the base hospital. Their first date was at an Edward Steichen photography exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and it ended in his bed in the Fort Dix billet. The following weekend they drove to her parents’ home in Poughkeepsie and found their way to a “leafy dell” on a blanket with a gallon of fresh hard cider. (“The blood moved. And Spring was,” he wrote pretentiously to his friend Jeff Fadiman.)

Attempting to offset his army frustrations, Brand had renewed his friendship with the Durkees, one of the couples he had met the previous summer around the Kings’ dinner table in North Beach. Soon after arriving in New Jersey, he had helped them set up a painting studio in an abandoned church they had purchased for $6,000 in Garnerville, a tiny hamlet located an hour north of New York City. Two years later the church would serve as a launching pad for a group of artists interested in exploring electronic technologies to create a new kind of multimedia art, and Brand would for several years become an affiliate.

Now, however, he lived for the time he was able to steal away from military duty and began spending his weekends with the Durkees in Greenwich Village.

There were occasional bright spots, such as a three-week assignment to lead troops in a war-gaming exercise at Fort Drum, an army base set along the Canadian border in upstate New York. It was one of the few times he was actually able to serve as a commander. At one point he loaded up with training hand grenades and ran from side to side of the lines behind his troops, tossing the faux bombs as he went. It was the most fun he had had since joining the military.

Back at Fort Dix, however, he continued to run afoul of authority. He was reprimanded after being caught sleeping in a hut on a firing range when he was supposed to be the officer in charge. He also got in hot water for putting his camera in his desk drawer in the orderly room, accused of failing to safeguard his personal gear. His requests for more stimulating assignments only succeeded in further marking him as a troublemaker and someone who tried to avoid responsibilities.

He wrote a bitter letter to his brother-in-law, Donald Sampson, the army commandant, telling him that he was even considering applying to go to Korea and asking him for assistance in getting the army to consider his plea. He was intrigued by Japan, he wrote, and he would get to visit on R & R. Sampson was scheduled to be in Washington, DC, and Brand asked if he could meet him there to get his aid in pressing his case. He signed the letter “Unorthodox, Individual, Troublemaker.” Despite the trip, he was even turned down on his request to be transferred to Korea. His brother-in-law was unable to help him. The reason was simple. “Policy.” Nothing would come of his appeals for the next half year.

He had been counting on a month-long leave to fly to Europe, buy a VW bus, and travel with Helmi Klee, a pretty young German woman he had met in San Francisco the previous summer. At the last minute his base superiors restricted his leave to just ten days, and then deemed him essential personnel and chose to not let him travel at all, forcing him to cancel his trip. (Klee was gracious enough to purchase the car for him and ship it to the States. She named it Red Skin, which stuck, at least for a while, until Brand repainted it in San Francisco.)

That summer things got worse. He and Pamela Balme were able to get away only infrequently. They especially treasured the weekends they spent in Greenwich Village staying at the Durkees’ loft. One weekend they had the place to themselves and were just finishing a corn-on-the-cob dinner when the phone rang. The caller asked if Barbara was there. Brand said she wasn’t, and the caller said, “Stephen has a couple of my sketches and paintings he was going to give me advice about. He didn’t tell me he was leaving.”

Without suspicion, Brand responded that if he wanted to come by to pick up his stuff, that was fine. They unlocked the downstairs door and a few minutes later the caller appeared on the landing of the loft accompanied by two other men, all in street clothes. One identified himself as a major in the army’s Criminal Investigation Command and asked if they could look around.

The visitors searched the apartment, going through some of Brand’s possessions. It became obvious that they had done their research before showing up. Eventually the friendlier of the three gave Brand some fatherly advice: be discreet with WACs and stay away from condemned Greenwich Village lofts. Brand offered them coffee, but they suddenly seemed as if they were in a hurry to leave. He was left with a creepy feeling that they had left a microphone to eavesdrop on them.

Afterward, Brand’s commander persuaded the higher-ranking officers at Fort Dix not to discipline him for “fraternization,” and Balme was still accepted into Officer Candidate School. When she left for officer training in the fall, the two continued to exchange friendly letters, but they never met again. The army’s obsession with keeping the two separated rankled Brand, however, and deepened his growing animosity toward the military’s bureaucracy.

Envious of Balme’s challenging assignment, Brand decided that he would give the army’s Green Berets a try—new skills, restored pride, risky individual work with foreign partisans, the opportunity to wear a cocky beret, and perhaps a great source of material should he pursue a journalism career. The idea was promptly shut down when he was told that he couldn’t apply until he had eighteen months of troop training.

Later during the summer, he saw Question 7, a movie that dealt with dissent and political repression in East Germany. Afterward, he reread what he had written about communism and choice as a college sophomore and decided that it held up well, though he now suddenly saw it in a new light. Right here in America he was experiencing regimentation, pettiness, fear, and institutionalized stupidity—all of the attributes he hated about communism.

“I want to say a curse on both your houses,” he wrote in his journal. “I want to simply disengage, retreat, hide, and tell everyone else to do the same because that’s the only way left, and maybe if everyone does it, no wars will be fought for lack of soldiers.”

A moment later he vacillated. There were good things in America. What he was looking for was a cause worth fighting for. “Pray, what cause is that?” he wondered.

By that fall, Brand was sleepwalking through his day job as an officer and had come to feel like a cooperating prisoner. In October his dismay had crystallized to the point that he wrote in clear printed letters in his journal: “I detest the Army.” Each weekend he would head in a different direction—to Boston to spend time with his brother Peter, then teaching at MIT; to Philadelphia by himself to see a play; to Virginia for a weekend with Jeff Fadiman.

Between Stanford and the army, Fadiman had spent a year in Europe trying his hand at freelance journalism. What that year had amounted to, however, was a running tally of his female conquests in different cities, a number of them described in jaunty letters he sent to Brand. At one point he’d had two girlfriends in Europe simultaneously and one of them was a Danish communist. Serving in the army as an intelligence officer, he was paranoid that his bosses would discover his dalliance. At the same time, now back in America, Fadiman was quite lonely, and so he welcomed the opportunity to double-date for the weekend with Brand in the Virginia countryside.

That fall, after months and months of failing to convince the brass he was worthy of working as a military photographer, Brand finally found a connection who might be able to pull strings in his favor. His savior was Henry Grossman, a young professional photographer who would go on to fame for his photographs of President Kennedy and the Beatles, but who was serving his time as an infantryman at Fort Dix when Brand met him in the base darkroom. Leaving Fort Dix for DC, Grossman said he would see what he could do for Brand. A few weeks later he sent him a note on White House Press Room stationery saying that he had spoken with Vice President Johnson’s military aide and several other military public information officers with Brand in mind. It was a single ray of hope in an increasingly gloomy winter.

B rand was back at Fort Dix in January after a long-delayed European holiday spent mostly in Switzerland, and in the space of a single phone call his outlook on the world changed. Seemingly out of the blue, he was told to report to the Pentagon on a one-month assignment for a tryout as a photographer in the press office.

Working at the Pentagon was everything that Fort Dix wasn’t. As a member of the audiovisual staff in the office of the chief of information, he reported to Hubert Van Kan, a cigar-chomping colonel whose hobby was building models of Civil War cannons and who was also a skilled editor. Brand’s assignments were a mixed bag, mostly run-of-the-mill publicity shots. Early on, he was sent to the White House to photograph the president’s brief meeting with a visiting group of WACs. When Kennedy arrived, he walked straight toward Brand, who backpedaled furiously, missing his opportunity to shake hands with his commander in chief. (The White House photographer, however, captured a photo of a young Second Lieutenant Brand looking on eagerly while JFK spoke with a group of swooning and giggling military nurses.)

He found an apartment not far north of the White House in one of the city’s few integrated neighborhoods. Fadiman was living four blocks away. At work at the Pentagon, Brand set about taking photos and sometimes writing stories as well.

Washington wasn’t San Francisco. He found none of the beauty, none of the people, none of the happiness he had experienced there, nor anything resembling a bohemian sensibility. But Camelot was in full swing, and even beyond the Kennedys there were ideas, culture, elegance, and style. To take advantage, he recalibrated and set about “going posh.” Brand decided he would frequent the galleries, museums, theaters, and sophisticated homes that he now had access to, and he began to entertain frequently at his apartment. He also began to build up an arsenal of photographic gear and related instructional books.

After a promising start, he mostly sat at his desk, waiting. A photographer’s life was much better than that of a basic training instructor, but a bureaucracy remained a bureaucracy, he realized, and often his major occupation was nothing. He seethed. Then suddenly he received an assignment to hop on a helicopter to photograph a session at the Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center and School at the University of Virginia. Then to North Carolina to take photographs for a book called Special Forces, which was published by the Pentagon, and next a trip to Germany to take part in the production of a propaganda film. Such bursts of excitement were few and far between, however.

Brand had managed to twice extend his original assignment to DC, but in April of 1962 he was called back to Fort Dix. He returned with glowing letters of commendation for his work in the information office but also with a growing realization that he was a bad fit for the military. He was promoted from second to first lieutenant, but while he still occasionally thought about extending his military stay, for the most part his fantasies focused on returning to San Francisco.

Before going back to New Jersey, he had several long talks with Colonel Van Kan about his future in the military. There was a clear sense in the halls of the Pentagon that the war in Vietnam was gathering steam. In January US military helicopters had ferried South Vietnamese troops into battle against the Viet Cong for the first time. Joining the Special Forces would require a return to Fort Benning to repeat the ranger training course—hopefully, this time in warmer weather. Another possibility was to reenlist and serve as a photographer accompanying the troops in Vietnam. The rub was that both options would require a new three-year obligation to which he was unwilling to commit. There was some romance in the idea of going to Southeast Asia as a military photographer, but by the time he was forced to make a decision he had become embittered by his experience as a drill instructor at Fort Dix. He had come to believe that the army as an institution was corrupt, and he rejected it.

Still, he was torn. He had admired what he had seen when he photographed the Green Berets in North Carolina. The idea of Special Forces troops assisting righteous rebels in the Third World appealed to him. However, California was again beckoning, and he walked away from the idea of a military career. In April he headed back to Fort Dix and to the drudgery and mindlessness of the army training regimen for what he thought would be another half year. The “monkey gods” had won again, as he wrote a friend, if only temporarily.

Forced to return to his life as a desk-bound platoon leader and a basic training instructor, Brand attempted to draw a sharp line between army life and the civilian world he was preparing to reenter. He was supposed to be residing at the bachelor officer quarters, the monastic rooms that contained a cot and a desk for each officer. But he described living on the base as living in an “Olive Drab Chamber Pot.” Instead, he rented an apartment in a rural barn three miles from New Hope, Pennsylvania, almost an hour up the Delaware River from Fort Dix. His landlords, the Crookses, were an open and friendly Quaker family who were happy to take in a soldier as a renter. Mr. Crooks was a designer and illustrator, and his wife would frequently drop by with a daffodil or a fresh-baked loaf of bread.

Far from the highway, Brand’s place in the country was set among dense hedges overlooking a meadow where Black Angus cattle wandered. A relic of the eighteenth century, the barn was 215 years old with eighteen-inch-thick stone walls. Mr. Crooks had restored it as his studio with an apartment. Soon after arriving, Brand made a quick inventory of the wildlife that surrounded his barn, noting pheasants, rabbits, squirrels, roosters, and hens, as well as birds ranging from cardinals to a brown thrasher.

Time away from the base was precious and he spent some of it with the Durkees, who were completing their move upstate to the converted church in Garnerville. On the weekends when he wasn’t away in New York, he took a photography job for a rural playhouse in Bucks County.

On base he tried to put his head down and serve his time without complaint, but his discontent bled through, darkening his last months. He found a Greek poem translated by the San Francisco writer and poet Kenneth Rexroth and used it to sign off on his letters to friends:

Will, lost in a sea of trouble,

Rise, save yourself from the whirlpool

Of the enemies of willing.

Courage exposes ambushes.

Steadfastness destroys enemies.

Keep your victories hidden.

Do not sulk over defeat.

Accept good. Bend before evil.

Learn the rhythm which binds all men.

—Archilochos

Living in New Hope meant getting up before four a.m. and commuting to the base to take reveille in the dark. Each morning he would stand in front of his troops, his voice calling out, “Present arms! Order arms!” And then his sergeants would respond, “All present and accounted for! All present and accounted for! All present and accounted for!” He would respond, “Sergeants, march your troops to breakfast!” “Sir!” and off they would go. Several times he was late, and on those occasions the sergeants would fake his voice in the darkness.

Brand’s reputation as a malcontent eventually reached his brother-in-law, Donald Sampson, who by that time had become the commander of Fort Lewis in Washington. Sampson had fought in Korea and would go on to proudly serve in Vietnam as well. He had made several efforts to help his younger brother-in-law with a favorable posting but drew the line at pulling rank, and now Brand was afraid that Sampson had come to view him with contempt. Nevertheless, he remained disenchanted with the small-minded military bureaucracy that ruled his life.

His growing frustrations with military discipline were compounded by Colonel John Szares, a heavily decorated officer who had fought in both World War II and Korea. He arrived at Fort Dix and took charge of the junior basic training officers. Szares took a dislike to Brand in their first meeting and, after an intense confrontation (partly about Brand’s devotion to photography), declared war.

Brand’s youthful turn to anticommunism has been described as a source for his later libertarianism and the making of the do-it-yourself attitude that permeated the Whole Earth Catalog. However, for Brand communism was always a rather abstract threat. In contrast, Szares was both the real and immediate human face of oppressive bureaucracy.

Decades later Brand would come to have a gauzy view of his time in the military, retrospectively finding the discipline bracing and his training to be among the best learning experiences of his life. While he was a soldier, however, his discontent was palpable. He wrote Stephen Durkee, “The death merchant, the pain merchant, the bully grown bigger, who in his inadequacy and cowardice and sickness turns against man, killing not indiscriminately but with careful deliberation all he knows is best in man. He is the great misuser—using his life to murder life, his intelligence to murder intelligence, his freedom to murder freedom.” He concluded, “I learned that in this culture the enemy will often work from behind a committee, which he can manipulate to his ends without taking any of the responsibility—a position of purest hypocrisy.”

When he had first returned to Dix in April, he stayed away from photography, indignant that the army seemed so intent on frustrating his passion. Gradually, however, he returned to the base darkroom when he could and also built his own darkroom in his apartment in New Hope.

Feeling the need for professional education, Brand attempted to use a short vacation leave to sign up for a photography workshop with Ansel Adams in Yosemite Valley but was told that the class was full for the year. Instead, he was accepted into a weeklong summer workshop in Denver run by Minor White, another well-known photographer who, along with Adams, was helping create a photography department at the San Francisco Art Institute. Brand asked the base higher-ups for permission to attend and was immediately crushed, his application promptly “returned without action due to shortage of CO grade officers during this period.”

Driving home to New Hope after his application was rejected, he was full of bottled rage. He felt trapped. But perhaps there was one last thing to try. The army’s bureaucracy had a soft underbelly—you just had to find it. And now Brand did.

There were, in some cases, allowances made for education. With nothing left to lose, he applied for early release from the service to begin classes at the San Francisco Art Institute and San Francisco State College in the fall. Magically, this time he succeeded. He was freed from the army to start classes and to register for the reserve at the Presidio in San Francisco.

This might have ended much differently. If he had finished ranger training or if the army had let him work as a photojournalist, he might have stayed on. And in that case, in all likelihood, he would have found his way to Vietnam at the very beginning of America’s war in Asia.

Instead, at the end of August Brand set out to return to the Promised Land for good. He packed his VW bus and headed back to California.

Brand’s admission to San Francisco State College and the Art Institute had been aided by Gerd Stern, the Beat poet, who wrote a series of introductory letters. Stern had left San Francisco for rural New York and was living near the Garnerville church where the Durkees were setting up shop. He was busy creating elaborate mechanical/electronic sculptures and Brand had connected with him.

Stern owned a converted navy laundry barge that was moored at Waldo Point on the Sausalito waterfront. The barge, named the Holland, was thirty feet by one hundred feet, in ill repair, and Stern was actively trying to sell it; in the meantime, he offered to rent it to Brand. (The Holland later became the stuff of legend when Allen Ginsberg claimed that he’d lent Stern a forty-thousand-word, single-spaced letter written by Neal Cassady that was supposedly the inspiration for Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. In a 1968 interview in the Paris Review, Ginsberg accused Stern of losing the letter by tossing it off the deck. For years Stern denied the charge, and eventually the letter was discovered in an attic and sold at auction in 2017.)

Though it was infested with fleas, the Holland was an ideal home for Brand. It had a romantic fireplace, a fine kitchen, a huge bed, and a view out into Richardson Bay. The deal was that he would rent his friend’s houseboat for several months while he looked for an apartment in San Francisco. Soon after arriving, he battled the fleas to a standoff by piling eucalyptus branches in all of the corners of the barge.

Brand leaped back into California living. He never became a great sailor, but he refused to cease trying. He bought a Sunfish, a small single-handed sailing dinghy that he knew well from his childhood at Higgins Lake, and launched it directly from the deck of the barge.

But San Francisco Bay was not Higgins Lake, and he occasionally found himself in trouble. On a beautiful fall morning, he decided to go out for a quick sail before breakfast. Exhilarated by the sight of the Golden Gate Bridge, he rode a fifteen-foot swell under it and kept going. When, hours later, he turned to head home, he was greeted by an epic ebb tide that swept him farther and farther away from the bridge. The sun was setting and he began to worry. He turned around and with a good wind he figured that he would soon sail to shore, but while he sailed fast over the water, the tide kept him from moving forward.

He hailed a nearby sailboat and asked for a tow. They threw him a line and he took down his sail and ran the line through a loop of metal on the bow of his boat. To his horror, the nose of his boat dived into a wave and kept going under. He released the line and came back to the surface and watched the other boat sailing off and waving “good luck!”

Now his sail was down, and the current was still carrying him toward Hawaii. He saw one last boat motoring in, and he hailed it. This time he got aboard the other boat before he tied a line to his Sunfish. When he finally got back to the barge, he collapsed. He was exhausted and sunburned, but he had survived.

Brand’s classes at both San Francisco State and the Art Institute were electrifying. He took a black-and-white photography course on the view camera and another on color photography, a design course, a class on medieval art, and a poetry course taught by Kenneth Rexroth, the translator of the poem Brand had used to sign off on his letters.

Before he left the East Coast, he had presented himself as a potential freelance journalist both to the New York Times and to an editor at Horizon. Now he began pitching Bay Area publications with ideas for photographic spreads and accompanying articles. He found no takers.

At the same time, he began exploring Northern California, taking long hikes and wandering the coast in his VW, still named Red Skin. Lynda, a friend from DC who had ended up being a regular romantic visitor at his New Hope farmhouse retreat, showed up on her way back from a trip to Japan. He had looked forward to the idea of a serious relationship, but post-Asia they weren’t able to easily reconnect, and she left after just five days. Shortly afterward, the cat he had acquired ran off as well.

All lives are shaped by serendipity, but in California Brand seemed to have an uncanny sixth sense for being in the right place at the right time. Henry Miller’s Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch had been published the same year Brand discovered Big Sur with the foreign students during his sophomore year at Stanford. Now, five years later, he arrived just two weeks after the publication of Jack Kerouac’s autobiographical novel Big Sur, in which he describes several visits to Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s cabin set above the Pacific.

Certainly Brand didn’t know what to expect when he wheeled his VW bus south from Sausalito to Big Sur just two weeks after the publication of Kerouac’s novel. Nonetheless, his timing was remarkable. Whether it was “consciousness expansion” or “intelligence amplification,” something was afoot in Northern California at the beginning of the 1960s that would be instrumental in both the creation of the sixties counterculture and, in the 1970s, the formation of Silicon Valley. The spectrum extended from the spiritual, mystical, and chemical—“instant mystic”—paths to mind expansion, to the pragmatic access-to-tools philosophy that Brand pioneered in the Whole Earth Catalog and that would be best expressed by Steve Jobs in the 1980s when he described the personal computer as a “bicycle for the mind.” Brand’s Big Sur weekend would point him in a radical new direction, a path that ultimately contributed not only to the emergence of the counterculture in Northern California but also to the birth of a new environmental movement.

The human potential movement can be dated to the fall of 1962 in Big Sur, at what would soon be named the Esalen Institute. (The name derived from the Esselen, who populated the Big Sur region before Spanish colonization.)

Esalen’s founders, Michael Murphy and Richard Price, had distributed the first brochure for their new institute immediately before Brand arrived on his visit. Its cover featured an infinitesimal calculus equation from Bertrand Russell and was titled “The Human Potentiality,” a notion that came from a 1960 lecture in which Aldous Huxley had argued that it might be possible to unleash the latent 90 percent of the untapped human intellect.[1]

That was very much the theme of the first Big Sur Hot Springs seminar that Brand stumbled into in September of 1962. At that point, the weekend was confined to an academic discussion led by Willis Harman, who had the previous year helped launch the International Foundation for Advanced Study, to explore LSD and human creativity, in Menlo Park. It was one of several spin-offs from the Sequoia Seminars, in which a number of the founders had participated. The foundation had begun offering an LSD experience as part of the experiment they were running to determine whether the psychedelic drug fostered creativity. For $500 (the equivalent of more than $4,500 in 2021), the foundation would take you through a carefully guided LSD trip.

Harman’s assistant in organizing the Esalen seminar in September was Jim Fadiman—Jeff’s younger brother, who had briefly met Brand when visiting DC. Fadiman had been an undergraduate at Harvard, where he studied social relations, but he focused most of his energy on being an actor. After graduating in 1960, he spent a year in Paris, and while he was there, Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (who would later become Ram Dass), along with Huxley, passed through on their way to deliver an academic paper on psychedelics in Copenhagen. In Paris, Alpert, who had been Fadiman’s professor at Harvard, told him, “The greatest thing in the world has happened to me and I want to share it with you,” and he proceeded to pull a small bottle out of his pocket and introduce his former student to LSD.

Forced back to America a year later by the threat of the draft, Fadiman moved to California and began graduate work at Stanford. Ultimately he would become the bridge between East Coast and West Coast groups who were independently experimenting with psychedelic drugs. He would also go on to carry the torch for LSD for many years, becoming the public face of the microdosing scene that swept through Silicon Valley beginning in 2011.

Fadiman arrived at Stanford as a distinctly unhappy graduate student in 1961. In school only to avoid the military, he was feeling that it was a waste of his life; he would rather have been in Europe. Having recently been introduced to psychedelic drugs, he now saw the world as a much different place. Full of self-pity, he began leafing through the Stanford class catalog looking for something that might be interesting to study. He found a small section of cross-disciplinary classes, including one being taught by Harman, called “The Human Potential.” The class was to be a discussion of what was the highest and the best that human beings could aspire to. Fadiman was intrigued.

That morning he walked across campus to the electrical engineering department to visit Harman. The man he introduced himself to looked like a straight and conservative engineering professor. When Fadiman asked if he could enroll in the interdisciplinary course, Harman replied that it was already full for the quarter and perhaps he should think about it for the next quarter.

“I’ve taken psilocybin three times,” Fadiman said quietly.

The professor walked across the room, shut his office door, and said, “We’d better talk.”

In the end, Fadiman became Harman’s teaching assistant. He also soon became the youngest researcher at the newly founded International Foundation for Advanced Study.

Brand had been intrigued when he initially encountered the younger Fadiman on the East Coast. Now he was wild with enthusiasm. “I went into the seminar clothed in all of the scientific skepticism I could muster,” he wrote to Stern after the weekend, “listened to the nine or so people who had had LSD enlightenment, and came away with only one doubt: where could I scare together the $500 necessary for the month-long process in Menlo Park.”

He’d likened it to skydiving with his body, but he added that these people were skydiving through the universe with their minds. “When they spoke about what they saw and felt,” Brand rhapsodized, “it was poetry they spoke.”

Stern’s barge soon proved to be less of a paradise than it had first appeared. For one thing, a faulty sewage system was not easily repairable; and for another, the fleas proved daunting. When Fox King’s mother moved back to Europe, and her apartment, located just down the hill from Peter and Fox’s, opened up in the heart of North Beach, Brand jumped at his chance to move to the city. The Kings had been an important avenue from Stanford to a much wider world, including among many others Jean Varda, who continued to hold his Sunday afternoon parties and cruises on the Bay. With a sweeping view of the city from their window facing north, the Kings held regular dinner parties that might include four people or twenty.

Brand’s apartment at 570B Vallejo Street was just around the corner from the Kings and a half block up the hill from Grant Avenue, which was the true heart of North Beach in the same way Haight Street would become the center of the Haight-Ashbury district just a few years later. The apartment was within walking distance of the San Francisco Art Institute. Jacques Overhoff, a sculptor Brand had met through the Kings and Jean Varda, lived nearby, and a year after Brand moved in, Gary Snyder came to live close by in North Beach.

To be at the corner of Grant and Vallejo just steps from Caffe Trieste and just up the hill from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books was to be at the center of the cool part of San Francisco—even if the prime of the Beat era was past. Pierre Delattre’s Bread and Wine Mission was now gone, as was the Co-Existence Bagel Shop (which had never actually sold bagels), but there were beatniks, bums, businessmen, Chinese, Italians, WASPs, grocery stores with vegetables out front, old buildings, a hill, good weather, and a park. For Brand, best of all it was an affordable neighborhood that was deeply multicultural.

Returning to North Beach in the fall of 1962 proved to be remarkable timing. The Beats were fading, and it would be four years before the emergence of Haight-Ashbury and the hippies and five years before the Summer of Love, which broadcast the arrival of the counterculture to the world. Brand had placed himself at the center of one of the most creative places in the country just at the moment when a great rupture from mainstream culture was about to occur.

The Vallejo Street address was actually two apartments, and he rented them both for forty dollars a month, affording him a guesthouse on the third floor. The building itself was dilapidated, and it was soon condemned, making his stay there continually precarious. Downstairs there was a storefront fish shop named Friscia Fresha Fisha, run by an Italian who, when washing down the street in front of his shop, would gently harass any attractive woman walking past with a squirt from his hose. Brand could walk to Adolph Gasser’s, the city’s premier photographic equipment store, and he immediately turned one of the apartment’s rooms into a darkroom.

As soon as he moved in, he carved a low window in the wall at floor level that looked out into the bushes from the bedroom/sitting room. There was a sofa left by Fox King’s mother that he disliked, and so he built a high platform bed above it. He painted the main room black for effect. He added a light in the garden that permitted him to sit and watch the cats play and occasionally catch a glimpse of the ankles of the stewardesses who lived in an apartment behind his.

In addition to regularly joining the Kings at their table, he hosted his own dinners. One night he invited his high school friends—now married—Joanna and John Edson to supper. The Edsons had moved to San Francisco so John could complete his residency at San Francisco General Hospital, and Brand had suggested that they look for housing in the Mission District.

“Isn’t that all Mexican?” Joanna had replied. Despite having left Rockford and studied at college in the East, her midwestern provincialism was still intact. (She and John ended up renting a house in the Sunset District, then a largely white working-class neighborhood.) In response, on their second night in the city, he invited them for a Mexican dinner at his apartment that he prepared with his girlfriend of the moment, a young Mexican named Rose, who had become a regular visitor first to the barge and then for several months afterward in San Francisco.

Joanna was a Republican, she had just had her first child, and when she walked into Brand’s apartment, she was dumbstruck. Right next to the door, half as high as a fireplace and touching the floor was a window that looked out on a garden lit with spotlights. And the room! She knew he was a photographer and had an inkling of the aesthetic of capturing lights and darks, but she had never been in a completely black room before.

Michael Murphy became a regular visitor at Brand’s guest apartment in North Beach. After Stanford, where he had undergone a mystical conversion in Spiegelberg’s class, Murphy had taken a vow of chastity, traveled to India, and spent the next eleven years in meditation and study as a committed virgin. Now he was reentering the world, trying to fuse East and West.

That fall, shortly before an Esalen seminar on “Human Potentialities,” Jack Loeffler, Brand’s friend from the Varda cruises who was then working as caretaker and morning chef at Slates Hot Springs, introduced Murphy to peyote. During his peyote experience, Murphy met Erica Weston, photographer Edward Weston’s granddaughter. The two soon began a love affair they carried on as guests in Brand’s second apartment. Murphy would later recall that Brand would on occasion politely ask them to keep the racket down. The two men would become good friends, and Murphy would be a frequent guest when he came to San Francisco, where over Irish coffees they would fantasize about Murphy’s plans to build Esalen.

Run by psychologists and engineers who were collecting data to find a link between the drug and creativity, the LSD experiment in Menlo Park included both an extensive preparation and a debriefing. The first step was to write an extended personal biography. Brand had gone through similar exercises at both Exeter and Stanford, and now a month before his daylong initiation he threw himself into an explanation of where he had come from and where he was going. He described his family and his time at school. His army experience had left him with still-raw emotions. He called it his first strong personal experience with depravity. “I learned that bureaucracy is terrified of the truth, any truth, and I learned to use it as a weapon,” he wrote. “I learned of the rage and shame that despotism brings, and I learned the joy of resistance.” He explained that he was interested in taking LSD as a learning experience in the hope that it would enhance his judgment and appreciation of beauty, especially as the latter related to his photography. He added that his philosophy was rooted in biology, principally evolution and ecology, and could best be described as “pragmatic.” He didn’t pray or think of religion often, although he noted that he had gone through the Sequoia Seminar several years earlier and thought the anecdotes about Jesus were “good stuff.” He had recently dived into Zen Buddhism, and he had been reading about its influence on art; he wrote that his increasing interest in Zen assumptions, approaches, and values was one of the reasons he wanted to try psychedelics.

When, in March of 1961, Stolaroff and Harman set up the International Foundation for Advanced Study on a quiet street in downtown Menlo Park, just two miles from the Stanford campus, they weren’t the only ones exploring the therapeutic uses of LSD on the San Francisco Peninsula. Experiments were going on at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Menlo Park, and the Palo Alto Mental Research Institute had already begun introducing local psychiatrists and psychologists and even poets such as Allen Ginsberg to psychedelic drugs.

But the foundation was something new. Engineers rather than medical professionals led the project, and the clinic was intent on charging a fee for each experience. They worked with several psychologists, including Fadiman, as well as the mysterious Al Hubbard, who was a member of the board of directors. Fadiman, finishing his PhD in psychology at Stanford, was teaching at San Francisco State, and his research at the foundation focused on the changes in beliefs, attitude, and behavior that resulted from taking LSD.

Other participants included Charles Savage, a physician who had conducted medical experiments for the US Navy in the early 1950s, exploring the use of psychedelics as a truth serum, and Robert Mogar, a psychologist at San Francisco State College who helped design and administer psychological tests. Toward the end of the studies Robert McKim, a professor of industrial design at Stanford University, joined the project to help explore the relation between technical design and psychedelic drug use. Don Allen, a former Ampex engineer, and another man worked as “counselors.” A significant portion of the experimental subjects were engineers who worked at different companies on the Midpeninsula—a group of people who were believed to be very “uptight.”

Before long the group published a glowing research report based on a survey of its first 153 subjects. The results were in the realm of the kind of advertisements found on late-night TV. Fully 83 percent of those who had taken LSD found that they had lasting benefits from the experience, including an increase in their ability to love and to handle hostility as well as enhanced communication skills, interpersonal relations, self-esteem, and understanding of themselves and others. They also reported a 66 percent decrease in anxiety, and 83 percent believed that they now had a new way of looking at the world. The researchers also noted a high correlation between “greater awareness of a higher power, or ultimate reality,” and a general claim that the benefits were permanent. What wasn’t entirely clear—and was the ultimate point of the experiments—was whether psychedelics could be used in a directed way to improve rational cognitive abilities.

Among the first 153 subjects (ultimately more than 350 people would participate) was Stewart Brand. (Not long after Brand’s original LSD experience, the US government began to add restrictions limiting experiments, and so the researchers specifically chose scientists, engineers, architects, and other researchers as their test subjects.) Simultaneously promoted by another group of researchers in Milbrook, New York, including Leary and Alpert, LSD and other psychedelics would eventually have a dramatic impact on a societal scale. They also had an equally dramatic personal impact on Stewart Brand.

Brand’s clinical exposure to LSD was a very different process from what would become commonplace several years later when acid became a recreational drug for college students. He showed up at the foundation at eight a.m. on December 10, 1962, for an all-day session. He had been told to bring photos of his family and other objects of interest to him. During the day the two guides who led him through his LSD experience would ask him to look at certain things and then record his reactions.

At the start of the day he was given a dose of carbogen, a mixture of carbon dioxide and oxygen that was used as a benchmark at the clinic to determine how the subject might react to psychedelic drugs.

The effect was immediate: as Brand later described it, he went to a “very interesting” other universe for what he thought must have been “seven eternities.” When he came back, everyone who was watching him was still sitting there, but their cigarettes were just a little shorter. Brand thought carbogen (which he presumed forced his brain to take in too much oxygen and “flame out”) was just great, and he later concluded that, in comparison, LSD was a disappointment.

Brand took a goblet containing LSD at 8:41 a.m. He then lay in a quiet, darkened room listening to classical music through headphones. He was given a second goblet at 10:00 a.m. and a final dose by injection at 2:00 p.m. He didn’t know it at the time, but the injection was an effort by the researchers to generate a reaction in a patient who seemed particularly blocked or unable to open up.

Subjects’ reports of their psychedelic experiences tended to be, well, psychedelic—and sometimes arbitrary and inane, particularly to an outsider. In his report Brand broke the session down into different periods, which he described as “purple attics,” “purple helixes,” “vacuum cleaners,” and “cement.”

In the first period there were cartoonlike pictures that played through his mind in sync with the music playing in his headphones. “I recall the notion of gaily pursuing cobwebs through a succession of angular attics, of feeling the music was too spectacular and superficial, and of intimations that Being was large and take-able for granted but out of my then range of vision,” he wrote. “Bodily sensations were pleasant chills and a neck-ache. I recall chuckling with feelings of things that had no humor.”

After the second goblet of LSD, the experience changed. He asked for simpler music. He looked at a rose that had been placed in the room to create a peaceful ambiance and found it enjoyable but not profound. He became talkative. He began to race through various “scopes of being” and imagined his body at various scales at different locations on Earth.

In the afternoon he was asked to sit up, a change that made him very uncomfortable. He began to feel he could separate people from their masklike faces. Staring in the mirror, he saw his visage as battered and tough. He was asked to look at murals and yin-yang symbols, but he found nothing interesting or very deep. He walked to the bathroom and found the experience dizzying and humiliating—it appeared to him that he was holding a child’s penis.

After the injection of LSD, everything transformed into what he described as “vacuum cleaners” and “cement”: a roiling series of images that passed through his head before he began to feel as if he could barely move. Asked how he felt, he replied, “Very ‘thing.’ ” He was shown a picture of Christ and suspected that he was being manipulated.

In the afternoon Jim Fadiman joined the session and asked Stewart to look deeply into his eyes. Brand did and then vomited; when he looked at his vomit it was purple.

When the session ended, he was taken to Fadiman’s house, which he greeted with pleasure and the relief of escape. After Brand sat down, Fadiman displayed a series of images: an indistinct woman on a record album cover, a statue of the Buddha, a transparent picture that in his head turned into a mask made of two stones and a carrot, and yet for inexplicable reasons reminded Brand of himself. Fadiman showed him several more pictures, including a dark, hellish scene with a satanic child silhouetted against the backdrop. As Brand peered at it, it dissolved into a peaceful valley.

Dinner turned out to be a bizarre experience in which he was intensely aware of his chewing and swallowing. Brand found that he was traveling down into the plate among the potatoes. He watched as a potato crumb lit by the candle on the table became a heroic version of himself.

Later that night, after he thought the effects of the drug had worn off, he walked outside and looked up at a full moon. He stood frozen as it receded, transforming itself into three separate dancing images.

To the Menlo Park foundation researchers, Brand had proved a tough nut to crack. Their analysis was that he was stuck in here-and-now concepts and resistant to fully “letting go.” They saw him as the model of the uptight, intellectual guy who depended on logical analysis for emotional defense. Even the LSD injection “booster” had been unable to shake his defenses. Although he had been pushed into more inner-generated symbolism, he still kept “one foot on the ground.”

It would only be later, during several follow-up sessions, that the Menlo Park psychologists noticed he softened, becoming less defensive, less concerned about how he was perceived, and more accessible and easier to be with.

Not surprisingly, the next morning Brand was in an odd mood. By the time he returned to the clinic for debriefing, that mood had turned decidedly blue. He stayed deeply depressed for several days until he accompanied Fadiman to a Japanese dinner in North Beach prepared by Fox King for a small group of friends. Over the meal, he said to Fadiman that he wished he had tried to look into the therapist’s eyes again after he had vomited.

“Try it right now,” Fadiman said.

As Brand stared at Fadiman over the single candle set on the table, he found that tears were forming in his eyes. Fadiman told him to let them come. Finally he told Brand to close his eyes and to “stay with it.”

Brand continued to focus on his feelings, and then he realized that Fadiman was crying too. Their eyes locked for a few more moments, and when Brand rejoined the party, he felt rejuvenated.

At the end of the evening, with the other guests watching, Brand took off his clothes and dived into the spooky blue light of a backyard swimming pool.

Chapter 4

American Indian

Comfortably settled in North Beach, still digesting his LSD experience while taking photography and design classes, Stewart Brand quickly got two big breaks from Dick Raymond. The Palo Alto architects who had designed Stanford’s new student union building were unhappy with the publicity photos that had been shot. Raymond recommended Brand, and as a result, he received his first professional photography assignment in California. The fee was just $140, but it put Brand over the moon. “Dick Raymond for Knighthood,” he wrote in a thank-you note.

His Stanford assignment also paid off in a more subtle but ultimately more dramatic way.

At the same time that Mike Murphy was concocting Esalen, two Stanford computer scientists, Douglas Engelbart and John McCarthy, were embarking on pioneering technologies that would completely transform the world during the next half century. While McCarthy, who had coined the term artificial intelligence, was trying to build a thinking machine at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), Engelbart was attempting to create a system that extended the human intellect—intelligence augmentation—on the other side of campus. It was AI versus IA. One man worked to replace computers with humans, the other to extend humans’ intellectual reach. This philosophical divide would create the defining paradox in the world of computing that persists to this day.

One day, while rambling among his old haunts on campus, Brand wandered into the computer center in Pine Hall. There he saw two young men playing an early version of Spacewar!—the first video game. Spacewar! had been written the previous year at MIT by Steve Russell, a young computer hacker who worked with McCarthy and had followed him to Stanford to help establish the AI research laboratory. At that point, it required a mainframe computer and a rare computer graphics terminal. The program displayed two small joystick-controlled spaceships capable of firing projectiles at each other, all while whirling around a sun that generated gravitational pull toward the middle of the monitor.

Perhaps Brand’s recent LSD experience had left him more highly attuned, but whatever the case, it was obvious to him that the two young men were having what he would later describe as an “out-of-body experience.” There was something to that: Spacewar! was quite likely the first glimmer of what would later be known as cyberspace—that virtual landscape that would begin to emerge at the end of the sixties with the creation of the ARPANET, the Pentagon-funded network of computers. Brand filed the “out-of-body” idea away for a possible story. Almost a decade later he would return to explore what he’d noticed.

Struggling to begin his career with great ambition but few resources and no job, Brand battled intermittent bouts of depression that would become increasingly challenging during the next decade. In the fall of 1962 he accompanied Fadiman back to Big Sur Hot Springs to attend a weekend seminar given by Gerald Heard, the British-born writer who had turned Stolaroff and many others on to LSD and who had been a significant influence on Murphy and Price when they were beginning to organize Esalen.

Brand, however, would have none of Heard’s “human potential” proclamations, nor what seemed like Esalen’s deep embrace of them. He left before the weekend was over, afterward writing Murphy, “I fled Heard the other weekend because I picked up the old-lady musty smell of a cult. . . . To be surrounded by true believers is murderous. If your retinue (and revenue) take your every fingernail clipping seriously, it’s all too easy to join them in their error.” He also issued a stark alarm about the coming wave of LSD, warning Murphy that its looming impact on the culture would range from subverting politics to the “biggest baddest witch-hunt since McCarthy.”

Brand’s second break came in the spring of 1963 when he attended a Sierra Club wilderness conference with Raymond, who took his protégé around and introduced him to all of the players in the national wilderness movement, including Ansel Adams. It was the second time Brand had met the famous photographer, having once dropped in unannounced at Adams’s workshop in Carmel to ask his advice on conservation photography. Adams had then told him, “As we grow older, mirrors become windows.” More than a decade later Brand would prominently print that insight in an early edition of the CoEvolution Quarterly.

In the early sixties Raymond had established a consultancy in recreational land use, and with Zach Stewart, an up-and-coming San Francisco architect, he obtained a small contract with the Warm Springs Indian tribes in Oregon to develop their reservation for tourism. Stewart had grown up in the state of Washington and gone to Reed and Yale before studying architecture at Stanford. He was close to the San Francisco Zen scene, and some years later he would design a home for Gary Snyder at Kitkitdizze in the Sierra foothills. He was a charismatic, razor-smart, ultraconfident, fast-talking creative design type whose ideas went far beyond conventional architecture. He was also prickly and controlling, characteristics that would eventually undermine his partnership with Brand.

Established by treaty in 1855, the Warm Springs Indian Reservation occupied more than a thousand square miles along the Deschutes River in north-central Oregon. Raymond introduced Brand to several of the tribal elders at the conference and suggested that they hire him to photograph an upcoming wild horse roundup on the reservation to help create a brochure marketing Warm Springs to tourists. Raymond, perpetually thinking big, encouraged Brand to consider the idea of producing a photographic book documenting the lives of the three tribes (Warm Springs, Wasco, and Paiute) that occupied the reservation.

One of the representatives at the conference was Delbert Frank, a member of the tribal council that represented the three tribes on the reservation. When Frank extended an invitation to make the pilgrimage to the Oregon reservation, Brand quickly accepted.

American Indians were then struggling against federal policies that were the culmination of centuries of being perceived as obstacles to national progress. In the 1950s there was a growing push to extinguish all remnants of Native life in the United States.[1] With Let Us Now Praise Famous Men as a template, Brand envisioned attacking the stereotype of the Indian “problem,” replacing it with a vision of the Indian “contribution,” which stressed that Indians understood how to live in harmony with their land and that their values resonated with his childhood conservation pledge—to protect the land, water, and wildlife.

At the beginning of May he drove to Oregon in a recently acquired pickup truck, camping along the way. He arrived at the reservation after two days on the road, carrying with him a signed copy of Ansel Adams’s masterpiece This Is the American Earth as a gift. It was still several weeks before the roundup, and he occupied himself with meeting the tribespeople and taking pictures of the eastern Oregon landscape. He had arrived on the reservation with a set of preconceptions about “Indians,” but he soon realized that the people he met were not like anything he was familiar with from his midwestern upbringing.

After several days, Frank returned from a business trip and the two men quickly bonded. Frank was bitter about the college-educated prodevelopment Indians who opposed him in the tribal council, pointing out that while he had been in San Francisco at a conference, they had struck a deal with a Portland-based architectural firm for the design of a posh hot springs resort catering to white tourists.

Frank gave him his charter—to produce a brochure that would, by highlighting the Warm Springs Indians and their land, advance his notions of “wise” development of the tribal land.

Brand fell increasingly under Delbert Frank’s spell as they toured the reservation. They drove to a meeting about Indian fishing rights on the Columbia River at the Dalles Dam, which had been completed a half decade earlier, in 1957. The village of Celilo, once a legendary fishing community, was now submerged in the twenty-four-mile-long reservoir created behind the dam. Lost with it were ancient petroglyphs; as they drove, Frank shared memories of a large mysterious face carved in the rock.

When the Warm Springs roundup began in mid-May, one of the first things Brand realized was that while the mythic icon of the American cowboy was as a loner and an individualist, these cowboys were part of a collective endeavor. They were also a window into a world of contemporary Indians that Brand hadn’t realized existed. For several days he tracked them as they went about roping and branding the wild horses. With Frank’s blessing, the Indian cowboys gradually opened up to him. They were suspicious about the plans to develop the reservation for recreation, worried that this might just be the first step in taking their land away. “A white man wants to conquer everything,” one of them told him. “If white men had this land, there wouldn’t be any wild horses. There wouldn’t be much of anything else.”

Brand was transformed when he returned from Warm Springs; everything he looked at now had a different context. He came away with an understanding that America needed the Indians—and he had the images to prove it. The brochure he talked about with Delbert Frank would never be produced, but for Brand that was irrelevant: he had found a calling.

When he arrived back in North Beach, a young poet who was staying in his apartment thrust a copy of Ken Kesey’s landmark first novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, into his hands. Brand saw that many of the things he had found on the Warm Springs Reservation were echoed in Kesey’s story of an Oregon psychiatric hospital as narrated by Chief Bromden, a half Indian who pretends to be deaf and mute. It also was an echo of his frustrating struggle against the irrational army bureaucracy at Fort Dix. “As Kesey writes it, the battle of McMurphy versus Big Nurse is identical to Indians versus Dalles Dam or me versus the Army,” he noted in his journal.

Published only a year before Brand discovered it, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest had made Kesey famous. He had come from Oregon to Stanford for graduate studies and entered the school’s prestigious creative writing program. Like Brand, he had recently taken LSD. Kesey, who was three years older than Brand, had been introduced to the drug when, to supplement his income, he had participated in government studies at the Menlo Park Veterans Administration Hospital.

On a whim, Brand mailed some of the photographs he had taken in Oregon to Kesey, who was in the process of moving over the hill to the small mountain community of La Honda because his cottage on Perry Lane in Menlo Park was being torn down. Brand added a short note: “Pictures were taken this May on the first stage of a brochure job for the Warm Springs Indians. They’re spelling out what they plan to keep, not lose any more of. See you sometime.” Several days later Kesey called and invited Brand to visit.

Dorothy Ostwind, a Stanford graduate student, was hanging out with Kesey and several of his friends one afternoon when a red VW camper drove across the bridge leading to the property. She watched a tall, thin blond man get out of the bus, struck immediately with how serious he seemed, that he was clearly on a mission. The next thing she noticed was that his van was full of books—in fact, it was like some kind of 1960s bookmobile.

Kesey’s band of Merry Pranksters, which would later be immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, was just starting to form. An eclectic mix of outsiders, poets, journalists, and camp followers would come out to see Kesey in the redwoods to hang out, get stoned, and play. In Ostwind’s eyes Brand was different. He came across as “quiet, self-contained, and intense.” She was immediately attracted to him and they would soon begin dating.

Brand’s mission that day was to explore a joint photojournalism project with Kesey for Esquire magazine. Days before, news had exploded about an “LSD Paradise” that Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were creating in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, intended as a research center under the auspices of the International Federation for Internal Freedom (a group Leary and Alpert also had created). The plan was to bring together a small number of physicians, psychologists, artists, and writers to study the effects of psychedelic drugs. The Mexican press got wind of the community, and the news filtered into American newspapers.

Esquire had written to Kesey asking for an article about the experiment. He was already planning to make the trek to Zihuatanejo in July, but because he was in the throes of finishing his next novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, he hadn’t responded to the magazine editor’s note. He told the young photographer he was open to the idea of a “word-picture” collaboration.

Brand then used his connection with Jim Fadiman to introduce himself to Leary and get his own invitation to join the Mexican experiment. Leary wrote back telling him he was quite welcome but that he should expect to sleep in a hammock—the hotel was jammed.

Brand then wrote his own query letter to Esquire, concluding, “About LSD nobody is objective. Ditto experimental communities. From inside the experience, I think will come the only pictures—and words—worth much. (How much?)”

Esquire loved the idea, but the authorities were not cooperative; within weeks the Mexican government had evicted Leary and Alpert from the country. Soon thereafter Brand learned that his apartment on Vallejo Street had been condemned and the landlord was putting the building up for sale. He avoided immediate eviction, but it would make his stay there increasingly precarious. For solace he turned to the I Ching, which fortified him: “The town may be changed but the well cannot be changed.” It counseled: “Strength in the face of danger does not plunge ahead but bides its time. . . . Thus, the superior man eats and drinks, is joyous and of good cheer.”

As it turned out, the condemnation order was rescinded and the potential sale temporarily delayed. Brand would ultimately find three more years of grace and nominal rent in a space that he could make over as he wished and that served as a crash pad for a steady stream of friends.

Brand and Minor White both shared a fascination with the I Ching. White had previously studied with Alfred Stieglitz and become close to Edward Weston as a student and a friend when he moved to San Francisco, which put Brand within range of one of the greatest American photographers of the period. As he went deeper into the craft, his interest began to drift from photojournalism toward artistic photography.

During the summer of 1963 he began a long and circuitous process of finding ways to avoid his army reserve duty, which was supposed to be fulfilled with regular exercises at the Presidio military base. In August he wrote the commanding general a letter asking to be moved to inactive reserve status because of the nature of his civilian job—freelance photographer.

It took the army a month to respond that he was not eligible for transfer to an inactive reserve unit. Thus began a multiyear cat and mouse game in which the military always seemed to be a step behind and unwilling to enforce any of its threats. The reality, he would later learn, was that the military lived in dread of the possibility that veterans might ignore a call-up.

Brand continued to take advantage of the Northern California outdoors, sailing on the Bay, kayaking in the surf near Bolinas, and picking up sport parachuting, jumping from a small airfield in Calistoga, a village nestled in the upper Napa Valley. He began working on a script for a film about skydiving.

At the end of the summer his interest in design and his class at the San Francisco Art Institute appeared to pay off. For a class project he came up with a new approach to packaging a six-pack of cans. He thought he might have a breakthrough idea and turned to his brother Mike for advice on how to commercialize it. Mike’s polite response was that he might not want to leave his day job. At that point, of course, Brand didn’t have a job, but he would soon get one.

His instructor referred him to Gordon Ashby, who was also teaching at the institute as well as running a design practice from an office near Fisherman’s Wharf. Ashby was a young designer who was a protégé of Charles and Ray Eames. A model maker and a specialist in three-dimensional design, Ashby in the early 1960s had worked in their Los Angeles design studio, where he had led the creation of a pathbreaking museum exhibit for IBM, originally installed at the California Museum of Science and Industry in Los Angeles. Mathematica: A World of Numbers . . . and Beyond revolutionized museum design with its interactive exhibits, setting a standard that was later emulated by museums like the Exploratorium in San Francisco, the Tech Interactive Museum in San Jose, and the Museum of Science in Boston.

IBM had contracted with Ashby to create a sequel titled Astronomia, which was scheduled to open at the Hayden Planetarium in New York in June of 1964. He was looking for someone to go to libraries and observatories to do the basic research for an exhibit that would capture the history of modern astronomy.

During the summer Brand interviewed at Ashby’s studio. The designer’s first impression was of an intense young man who had the “potential to be somebody” and someone who “wanted to know about everything.” Brand’s photographic expertise also seemed a good match, and so Ashby hired him to do the background research, write the exhibit copy, and collect artifacts as well as contribute with design ideas, eventually paying him a part-time wage of $5 an hour, or $600 a month.

Astronomia allowed Brand to set his hours and travel the country while also doing his Indian research. He applied for a library card at the University of California at Berkeley and began reading everything he could find about the history of astronomy. He was particularly affected by Arthur Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers, which traced the history of modern cosmology back to Mesopotamia, with an emphasis on serendipitous discovery. Brand decided Koestler’s framework was a good metaphor for his own life—not a carefully plotted arc of ambition, or even a narrative, but rather doing one different thing after another, each of which seemed like a good idea at the time and which, hopefully, would evolve into something profound.

He also read Koestler’s The Act of Creation, which concluded that invention and discovery shared the pattern of blending unrelated concepts into a new one, a process Koestler termed bisociation. This, too, made sense to Brand: true progress was made not by pursuing straight lines but by unanticipated incorporation. Koestler had a powerful influence on Brand, long before Gregory Bateson’s thinking on cybernetic theory would further his understanding of the power of paradox.

Having IBM and the Hayden Planetarium as sponsors opened doors. Brand was able to fly around the country negotiating for loans of artifacts that would take them away from their home institutions for five years. He visited the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, the Smithsonian in DC, Caltech, Mount Palomar, and others. He designed and built an elaborate portable photographic copy stand intended to fold into a suitcase to allow him to safely work with fragile materials.

Brand’s function was not merely to visit archives and libraries. He was charged with commissioning a replica of Galileo’s first telescope. Another exhibit he designed offered a cosmic interpretation of the importance of perspective. When he wasn’t traveling, he would spend the weekends sport parachuting until a jump in which nearly everything went wrong—his chute didn’t open as planned, and he barely missed a power line as he approached the ground—spooking him enough to put the sport aside. (He was saved by his reserve parachute.) A daredevil who was fond of heights, he would have an even closer call three months later, permanently ending his life as a thrill seeker.

Three blocks away from Fisherman’s Wharf and just six blocks north of Vallejo Street, Water Street was a tiny block-long alleyway of small homes, offices, and the warehouse for Friscia Seafoods, the firm that ran the storefront shop below Brand’s apartment. Off the beaten path, Water Street, where Zach Stewart had his design studio, was still a magnet for North Beach bohemian creativity. When Brand wasn’t haunting the library in Berkeley, he became a regular at Gordon Ashby’s studio, just a block away on Vandewater, another alleyway.

Brand was also actively pursuing photography and enjoying the North Beach Beat scene. When Gerd Stern returned to the city to prepare a new kind of artistic happening at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art—which was then located at the Civic Center—Brand was pressed into service.

Gerd Stern, whose endorsement had helped Brand get to California to pursue his photography studies, had been a flamboyant character in San Francisco during the 1950s. His second wife was Ann London, whose father managed a luxury hotel in San Francisco, and as young socialites they regularly appeared in Herb Caen’s gossip columns in the Chronicle.

San Francisco was a breath of fresh air for Stern, who had completely struck out in New York, where the art community ignored him. He had been reading an early manuscript of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, which he had borrowed from the poet M. C. Richards, who had gotten it from the composer John Cage. The notion that it was the medium rather than the content that defined society fascinated him, and he was intent on moving away from his poetry of words to create collages of dynamic objects, images, light, and sound.

Stern had persuaded the San Francisco museum’s director to let him use the museum auditorium to put together a performance to help raise funds for Contact Is the Only Love, an octagon-shaped, seven-foot-high, neon-lit piece of art. When it was complete, it had a speaker on each side, and an endless audio loop would play what Stern called the Verbal American Landscape, or VAL. A motor-driven cam switch mounted on a truck tire would force the sound to ping-pong back and forth from speaker to speaker.

Stern knew Ramon Sender, a young composer who the previous year had launched the San Francisco Tape Music Center with Pauline Oliveros and Morton Subotnick to explore electronic music. Sender introduced him to Michael Callahan, a local college student and electronics wizard who was working as a technician at the center, and together they began assembling a crazy quilt of televisions, projectors, and audio equipment to produce two evenings of a twin bill: Who R U? and What’s Happening? Stern enlisted Brand and Ivan Majdrakoff, an art instructor at the San Francisco Art Institute, to wander the streets of San Francisco taking photographs of “words”—every street sign and billboard they could find.

Stern dubbed the San Francisco event “an experiment in simultaneous communications,” and he quoted McLuhan in the show handbill: “Patterns of human association based on slower media have become overnight not only irrelevant and obsolete but a threat to continued existence and sanity.” It would be for all intents and purposes the birth of modern multimedia.

The event itself was a remarkable San Francisco happening. Attendees included Herb Caen, Allen Ginsberg, and the mayor of San Francisco. Stern used four projectors, one of which was operated by Brand. In addition to the four screens, Stern had placed a panel of sociologists onstage with four telephones. They would listen to and interact with four separate groups that were holding conversations in “isolation booths” in different parts of the exhibit space, those conversations amplified, mixed, and transmitted to the stage in syncopation with images while the entire event was simultaneously broadcast via closed circuit and displayed on a television set.

Critically, the event bombed, to put it mildly. The next day the Chronicle’s music critic declared: “Some colossal flops have taken place in the public halls of San Francisco in my time, but Gerd Stern’s show called ‘Who R U?’ and ‘What’s Happening?’ is the only one I can recall that laid so vast and horrendous an egg as to score a kind of success.”[2]

After the Stern disaster, Brand took off for a monthlong stay on the East Coast over Christmas and New Year’s. There for Astronomia work, he also wanted to visit New York friends, such as the Durkees and Henry Grossman. Having organized his Warm Springs Reservation photography into a portfolio, and eager for funding for his book project, he planned to show it to United Nations officials. After Christmas he headed to DC, where he hoped to make contact with Stewart Udall, the secretary of the interior.

Out for a walk one chilly January afternoon on the towpath near Georgetown, he decided to do what he frequently did—climb up and take a look around. In this case his vantage point was the Chain Bridge, which spanned the river between McLean, Virginia, and DC. At first he slid effortlessly, his palms resting lightly on the steel on the ledge created by the bridge’s supporting girder surface at his back. Every five yards or so there was a brace to grab on to and swing around. He simply inched along with his heels rocking over the riveted surface of the ledge. Then, after he had swung around the second brace, he stopped to rest and consider his situation. He looked down at the brown water covered with floating ice, and his legs began to vibrate from foot to hip. He forced himself to make a start and edged away from his handhold, then lost courage and his legs started trembling even harder. Suddenly he felt like he couldn’t see. He barely made the next handhold and stopped again, still shaking.

He saw people walking on the towpath but realized there was no way they could save him. In despair, he tried singing, tried talking to himself, tried incantations—“Light,” “love,” “look,” and “here and now, boys.”

His shaking diminished, he edged out again, this time with his eyes fixed on the icy trees on the horizon, his mind focusing on “doing it,” to keep moving.

And he made it to the next brace. There was a rhythm to this, he realized, a sort of chant, and, playing it in his head, he swung around the next brace without slipping. Keeping his momentum and then repeating until he didn’t need to edge any farther, he finally lowered himself down and then jumped onto the wet path.

His skydiving mishap several months earlier had been a premonition, he decided. After his encounter with the bridge, his love of climbing permanently vanished, replaced by panic attacks in the face of even modest exposure to heights, such as on ski lifts. Yet not all was lost. Brand decided that even though he had been paralyzed in fear, he had learned something: keep moving—he who hesitates suffers. Momentum builds and will help. This was his bridge, narrow and high, and if he fell, he died.

Back in San Francisco at the beginning of 1964, Brand took a research trip to Southern California with Gordon Ashby. While they were there, visiting Caltech and the Mount Wilson Observatory, they paid a visit to the offices of Ashby’s mentor Charles Eames.

Eames had been an inspiration since Brand’s student days, when he had heard him speak about magazines and design at Stanford. His studio was consumed by a deadline for the design of the IBM pavilion for the 1964 World’s Fair. As Brand wandered around the office the designers grabbed him. Because the theme was the IBM marketing slogan “Think,” they were eager to collect photographs expressing the idea. The result was a cameo in the exhibit, a prominent picture of Brand, deep in thought and nibbling on a pencil.

When he wasn’t researching for Ashby, he threw himself into the American Indian world. His photographic portfolio from the Warm Springs Reservation became his calling card. He made phone calls and sent off a stream of letters to possible funders ranging from publishers to foundations. He also burrowed into the San Francisco Public Library, exploring Indian culture in tandem with pursuing the history of astronomy. Not long after he was back, he stumbled across an odd volume titled America Needs Indians!. Published in 1937, it consisted of a hand-lettered cover with a roughly drawn abstract graphic of something that might adorn an Indian woven blanket. Written under the nom de plume of either Iktomi Lila Sica or Iktomi Hicala—both author names appeared in different places in the book—it assessed (sometimes sarcastically) the condition of modern American Indians in a manner that spoke directly to Brand’s efforts. (Eventually it became apparent that Iktomi was a man named Ivan Drift, likely one of a small group of white Americans who were so taken with the Indian experience that they went native.)[3]

In any case, the name America Needs Indians!, so evocative of what Brand had brought away from his visit to Warm Springs, stuck. Determined to capture the contrast between an older civilization and his modern one and at the same time find a way to create a new fusion of the two worlds, he enlisted the Loefflers as his research assistants and began planning a summer to capture the Indian experience in pictures and words on the reservations in the Southwest. The project would take many forms, ranging from a multibook set of photo essays to an immersive museum exhibition, before crystallizing as one of the first true multimedia slide shows.

At the end of January, Brand, Dorothy Ostwind, the Loefflers, Kesey and his wife, Faye, as well as Mike Murphy and Erica Weston, assembled at Big Sur Hot Springs, where Jim Fadiman was helping lead a seminar, Existentialism & Mysticism. During the weekend Brand spent several hours relaxing and chatting with Kesey in the pools. Although Brand would orbit around the edges of Kesey’s world for almost three more years, becoming close friends with several of the Merry Pranksters and taking part in a number of their adventures, ultimately he would hold Kesey at arm’s length and never become a full-fledged or “on the bus” Prankster. It was a standoffishness that would be reciprocated. The two men would share a role as bridges between the Beat era of the 1950s and the hippie culture in the 1960s, but Brand was alarmed by Kesey’s insistence that you had to buy into the notion of the revolution in consciousness that he saw happening. If you agreed, you had to be there with your entire mind and your body. Brand decided that if someone told you that you were either on the bus or off the bus and that meant total commitment, you should get off the bus.

Eventually he did.

The two men would remain friends until Kesey died in 2001, but Kesey shared some of Brand’s reticence. After Brand had left the Pranksters and had spent time working in Governor Jerry Brown’s office in Sacramento as an informal adviser, Kesey was quoted as saying, “Stewart recognizes power. And cleaves to it.”[4]

It was probably unfair; after all, Brand would remain on the periphery of the Brown administration, just as he had with the Pranksters. However, the remark stung, and decades later he would still fret that there might be truth in the assertion.

Part of the plan for the Big Sur weekend had been to take his portfolio to show Ansel Adams at his Carmel studio, but Adams had been called away, so Brand spent the day with the Loefflers. A practicing Zen Buddhist, Loeffler was a deep mystic and a confirmed nomad who had found his way into the world of peyote several years earlier. Peyote can be consumed in a variety of ways, as tea, mush rolled into balls, dried buttons; in this case, the Loefflers chose the edible variety. (Throwing up was not uncommon, but the Loefflers had no such distress.) The trio then wandered around Cannery Row looking for a studio space for the Durkees, who were then considering returning to California.

At the end of the day, Dorothy Ostwind and Brand went back to North Beach, where they discussed the idea of her moving in upstairs on Vallejo Street. Although they had had a passionate weekend, Brand was deeply hesitant about a stronger commitment and was actively scheming to set her up with his friend Jim Fadiman. It worked. His two friends were soon madly in love, and the following year Brand would serve as their wedding photographer at Esalen.

The next week Loeffler took Brand’s Warm Springs photographic portfolio to Adams and asked for his endorsement. Afterward, he called Brand to say that the legendary photographer had been impressed with his work and told Loeffler he would approach Stewart Udall to ask for $5,000 for their project as well as suggest that the Sierra Club consider publishing Brand’s book.

After he got off the phone, Brand was ecstatic but also frightened by the weight of responsibility in measuring up to the praise. In any case, there was no turning back. The next week he received a letter from Adams apologizing for missing him over the weekend and adding a rave review.

“Your pictures are extraordinarily good!” Adams wrote. “I am very happy about them! You have accomplished something!!! And there is every indication that this is only the beginning.”[5]

Gordon Ashby’s studio on Water Street was a lively scene, and the street would occasionally be closed off for block parties. He intentionally cultivated an open-door policy at his studio and kept boxes of colored chalk around so neighborhood children could use the alleyway as a free-form canvas. He kept the glass door open to let the public walk in and out and even permitted them to use his equipment—including cameras and projectors and a wide range of design tools.

Although Brand was a novice, he had quickly impressed Ashby as having an unusual kind of creativity. As they worked together, Ashby gave Brand more responsibility and let his young protégé create his own exhibit ideas.

As the Astronomia project progressed, Ashby began acquiring almanacs. Some of them were intended to be used as artifacts in the exhibit itself and others were simply reference tools. He gathered a range of books that were used by laypeople to learn about everything from the weather to the stars. One afternoon, as Brand and he stood contemplating his growing array of historical documents, Brand mused, “What we need now is a new kind of almanac.” It would be the first inkling of the Whole Earth Catalog. It was also an example of how many of Brand’s notions would bubble for years before they emerged.

As Brand schemed with the Loefflers to begin America Needs Indians! research, his plans for a summer expedition began to take shape. They would “go native,” living in tepees they built. They would start by visiting the Washoe in Nevada. Brand was particularly attuned to the peyote scene and was planning to make contact, with Loeffler’s aid, with the Native American Church, a religious movement that used peyote as a sacrament. From there they would head south, visiting the Hopi, Navajo, Zuni, Jicarilla Apache, and Papago Indian reservations. There was also a tantalizing rumor to be chased down: Loeffler had heard of an Indian tribe, somewhere in northern Nevada or perhaps southern Utah, that had had no contact with whites.

Brand kept searching for funding, with no tangible results. He tried to hold a seminar at Esalen on the project, bringing together big names, including Adams, Udall, and even Buckminster Fuller; he tried to exploit a Ford Foundation grant Raymond had gotten to explore the possibilities of suburban utopias; he wanted to display a roomful of his relevant photographs to kick-start his America Needs Indians! research project. But nothing worked.

In the spring he and the Loefflers created Brand & Loeffler Design as a cover to permit them to buy equipment and supplies wholesale. Brand’s VW bus was a reliable expedition vehicle, and they added a 1951 International Harvester truck to their fleet and began to convert it into a camper. Conceived by Zach Stewart and fashioned over several weeks in the alleyway outside of Ashby’s studio, it had a bit of a covered wagon feel to it, all the more so because the resulting camper top pivoted on an axis, making it possible to unroll it and sleep under the stars.

One small irritant was that the US Army still failed to realize that Brand had no wish to serve in a reserve status. They rejected his letters asking for deferrals and instructed him that his reserve assignment was scheduled to begin on May 7. In response, a guest who was living upstairs wrote back that she had received the letter in his absence and that he would be out of town on a work assignment for the next five months. The wolf was once more held at bay.

It would be four years before Carlos Castaneda published The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, but already in the spring of 1964 Brand was intensely interested in the world of peyote and the expanded consciousness that could result from it. He had begun experimenting with marijuana and mescaline while he was in the army, and Jim Fadiman had plunged him into the world of LSD. Now Loeffler, who had also introduced Michael Murphy to peyote, was offering him a gateway to a deeper understanding of the American Indian experience.

Unlike a generation of college students who were to follow in the late 1960s, he never really became a “stoner.” He rarely purchased psychedelics, and he walked away from the scene completely just as the baby boomer generation was entering it. For a time, however, he was consumed with the notion that psychedelics might offer some deeper understanding of himself and the world around him. Several years later he wrote a friend, “I vote Yes on drugs. Yes with huge capital letters that spill over into everything else. Yes with my eyes open.” But by the time psychedelics had become a recreational activity on campuses across the nation, he had explored them thoroughly and moved on to different tools.

The previous summer he had gone to Berkeley and introduced himself to Michael Harner, who was then the acting director at the Lowie Museum of Anthropology on the UC campus. In 1960 and 1961, Harner had begun conducting personal experiments with ayahuasca, a powerful Amazonian traditional spiritual medicine. Indeed, he had delved deeply enough into the herbs that he decided he would become a shaman himself, leading others in chemically augmented rituals.

Brand plied Harner with questions, including: ‘Was there a relationship between psychedelics and cultural evolution?” In the discussion that followed, a bond quickly developed, and he and Harner became close friends.

That spring the anthropologist had a PhD candidate named David Perry, who was a Pomo Indian. His grandfather had lent the Lowie Museum his shaman’s kit, which included two large quartz crystals. It was Harner’s responsibility to return the kit to his student to give back to the Pomo tribe. Harner was, however, a stickler for Native traditions and he decided it was necessary to perform an appropriate ceremony to return the “power” to the crystals.

He enlisted the support of the Loefflers and Brand in conducting the ritual, to take place at sunset at a spot where a spring flowed into the ocean at Drake’s Beach, a lonely stretch near Point Reyes in Marin County, almost two hours north of San Francisco. At the last minute the group piled into two cars and raced over to the coast. The ceremony required a variety of herbs, including bay leaves and angelica root. Because they were in a hurry, they reached out of the car windows as they drove, grabbing bushes, tearing their hands in the process.

When they arrived at the coast just before sunset, the beach had an eerie sense about it. There was a strange light, a strong wind blowing debris off the cliffs, and the surf was phosphorescing. Their tardiness meant everything being done at a manic, double-time pace, giving the event a Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday feel. Just as the sun set, Perry rushed out into the surf and began striking one of the crystals on a rock. Back on shore, Harner whispered to Brand, “If it breaks, he dies.”

Brand and Loeffler were assigned the task of building a fire. As they began to stoke it, the wind picked up, racing through the driftwood, creating a potential disaster as it ignited an expanding circle of nearby debris, spreading the fire all over the beach. Soaked up to his waist, Perry returned to shore and said ominously, “Bear Doctor is here, and we’ve got to get out of here.” Jean Loeffler had already begun to feel increasingly uncomfortable, and with this warning, she completely freaked out.

At that point in his life, Brand was still prone to suggestions about the existence of magic and decided that if this guy told them to get the hell out of there, then they should get the hell out of there. They struggled to put the fire out and then fled back down the beach to where the cars were parked. They drove north to a country inn, feeling as if they had just escaped certain death.

As they sat trying to recover, the two anthropologists asked Jack Loeffler to come outside. In the parking lot, they told him that David had seen an “owl shaman” on the cliff above the fire and he had shot a dart at David, but that it had missed and struck Jean, putting her at risk of death as fog entered her veins.

“Well, for chrissake don’t tell Jean!” Loeffler replied.

Two weeks later Brand attended a symposium at San Jose State College that featured most of the current star LSD researchers. Alpert, Bateson, Frank Barron, Sterling Bunnell, Robert Mogar, Charles Savage, and William Van Dusen all spoke, at times with abundant fervor, on the state of the science and the present legal situation for the drug. Alpert described the drug as like handing someone the key to a jet airplane but argued that it should be given away for free—to applause from the audience.

The view from Rockford, Illinois, however, was less rosy.

Brand’s enthusiasm for avant-garde experimentation and bohemian life in San Francisco did not sit well with his parents, who continued to subsidize him with occasional checks to help meet expenses. Shortly after the LSD conference, which he had described with great excitement in a phone call home, he received a letter from his father. Bob Brand began by noting that his son seemed to be a candidate for a “Letter.” His mother and he had been disturbed by their conversation, “and I think it is no less my responsibility to give you some words of experience on the subject of what I call the Half People and the consequences of associating with them,” he began. These were the people who congregated in places like Greenwich Village, Beacon Hill, and North Beach and visited watering places in Provincetown and Big Sur. They have talent in diverse fields, such as art, music, and theater, his father admitted, and as a result, their groups tended to have more than the average percentage of “homos, perverts, lesbians, and the like.” He cited Van Gogh as an example—someone whose work would command a fortune but sadly only after his death. Largely penniless, they tended to become expert moochers—charming and flattering “but leeches all the same,” he continued. On the other hand, his son already had a substantial amount of property and would have considerably more in the future, making him a capitalist, with responsibility for “the protection, good use, and growth of this wealth.” Anything less would be unfair and ungrateful to those who had passed that wealth on to him and those who might receive it in the future.

“I would shuck the Big Sur crowd and get with people more worthy of your talents because I suspect your present friends are playing you for a Live One,” he wrote, just getting warmed up.

The real message was about narcotics, hallucinogens, “and all that jazz.” Brand’s father pointed out that a local youngster had just blown his hand off trying to make a rocket. “Sure, it is exciting, but so is setting your building on fire, or throwing stones at summer-house windows,” he added, indicating that he had still not forgotten a twenty-year-old infraction. What was he to say when his friends asked, “What is Stew doing now?” He wanted to be proud of his son, not making up explanations that didn’t quite explain things. He closed on a sad and defensive note: “Now you and your friends can read this letter aloud, have great fun over it, which will degrade me thoroughly. 73, Dad.”

The problem, Brand decided, was that he and his father lived in different parts of the country. The next day he sent his father a five-page single-spaced letter, standing his ground and defending the honor and integrity of his friends. It was a full-throated rebuttal, an argument for his “creative” lifestyle that included an itemized list of his friends and their achievements. California was simply the future and you had to be there to understand that, he wrote. A recent issue of Look magazine on California had pointed out that what was happening today in the Golden State would appear a year later in the rest of the country.

He refused to give an inch on drugs either. He cited the research from the symposium he had recently attended, detailing how knowledgeable authorities were no longer discussing total control of psychedelics on the grounds that they should not—and in fact, could not—be controlled. Moreover, unlike other drugs, psychedelics were not addictive.

“If,” Brand wrote, “the nature of my friends, and my work, and my writing do not give evidence that my judgment is similar to yours, and based on the same values, and worthy of trust where mutual knowledge is lacking, then I’ll be sorry to see the communication diminish.”

He was telling his parents that he hoped they understood where he was headed, but that whatever they felt, he was on his way.

In the second half of May 1964, Ashby and Brand went to New York to install the Astronomia exhibit at the Hayden Planetarium. It was an opportunity to spend time with the Durkees and Gerd Stern at the Garnerville church as well as visit DC, where he had struck up a friendship with Sharon Francis in Stewart Udall’s office. An ardent environmentalist and an outdoorswoman, Francis loved the idea of Brand’s Indian project and arranged for an audience with the secretary. Eventually, she became a dedicated supporter of Brand’s America Needs Indians! crusade. Thanks to her backing, Brand spent the evenings in Udall’s offices after everyone had left, sending out fundraising letters for the project. (He took advantage of a giant eight-foot-long bathtub that had been installed by a previous interior secretary and took to cooking his evening meal in the office as well.) Eventually he was discovered and thrown out, but not before he was able to get Udall’s enthusiastic backing and a small financial commitment as well as interest in his project from Udall’s wife.

During the evenings he also began work on the draft of an essay sketching out his case that “America needs Indians.” It would remain unpublished, but it would be the first inkling that Brand was playing with the ideas that he would publicly articulate two years later. Indeed, while eventually he would claim that the inspiration for the Whole Earth photo first came to him during his 1966 rooftop LSD trip, in reality, the fundamental concepts were already fully developed during the time he spent in DC that spring.

Indian culture, he wrote, was linked to the idea of wilderness, which was both an ecological condition and a state of mind. He felt that Kennedy’s assassination—and the haunting image of the riderless horse leading his funeral procession seen by millions of Americans on television—marked a transition into a new era. The shape of that epoch was still unexplored: “We will see what has been entered with the publication of the first hazy image from the moon of our Earth—glowing disk, mandala of unity, inescapably ourself,” Brand wrote.

Where did this come from? Most likely it was a mixture of what he had learned from his time in Oregon on the Warm Springs Reservation, reading Marshall McLuhan—and quite possibly the draft text of an inauguration speech that would be given by President Johnson in January of 1965. Brand had read an early copy in Udall’s office, and he had underlined this passage:

Think of our world as it looks from that rocket that is heading toward Mars. It is like a child’s globe, hanging in space, the continent stuck to its side like colored maps. We are all fellow passengers on a dot of earth.[6]

The Millbrook Mansion was located across the Hudson River and about an hour north of Garnerville, where the Durkees were setting up shop in their converted church. Brand would visit Millbrook on at least three occasions. After his first visit, he described it as “a lovely glimpse of how it might be,” an intentional psychedelic community composed of twelve adults and ten children “without romanticism.” Ultimately, however, he became disillusioned. In July the Pranksters had visited the imposing Victorian manor but departed quickly with an overriding sense that the Millbrook crowd was boring and elitist. Brand was ultimately put off by the way Leary treated women. While at Millbrook he heard about how Leary had callously abandoned a series of women and concluded that he was a cad.

Garnerville offered something more positive. USCO—Company of Us—was an artists’ collective started by Durkee, Stern, and Michael Callahan that focused on the brand-new multimedia technology and art. In the early days, the trio referred to themselves as “Weirdo,” “Beardo,” and “Techno.” During his East Coast research trips, Brand spent several weekends in Garnerville. At one point, after playing word games with Durkee and Stern, he wrote in his journal:

Contribution of Stephen, Gerd, and myself.

Take the NO out of NOW

Then

Take the OW out of NOW

Then

Take the THEN out of NOW

Then

Later Stern would use this “electronic mantra” in a variety of art pieces, first for USCO and, after various other mechanical and painted forms, even refrigerator magnets. It would also resonate with Ram Dass’s book Be Here Now, which Durkee and Brand would assist with several years later.

Secretary Udall had recommended Brand to Alvin M. Josephy Jr., a leading historian of Indian history, who was an editor for American Heritage Publishing. When they met in New York, Josephy, who would become a supporter and a friend, offered Brand a long tutorial in American Indian history and culture, punctuated by a note of optimism. Numb and conquered for more than a century, the Indians were currently going through rapid change, Josephy told him. They were developing a nationalistic spirit, exemplified by the National Congress of American Indians, which represented eighty-five tribes and was beginning to be a potent and interesting force. Before they parted, Josephy alerted Brand to the next National Congress of American Indians convention, which was scheduled to be held in Sheridan, Wyoming, at the end of July.

It would prove a fateful detour later that summer.

The installation of the Astronomia exhibit was marred by an incident that would embarrass Brand for decades. The exhibition showed many historical artifacts that Ashby and Brand, using IBM’s influence, had been able to borrow from museums and laboratories all over the world. Ashby had made certain that everything was insured.

One of the gems of their collecting efforts had been a collection of original glass photographic plates that had been created in the early nineteenth century by Joseph Ritter von Fraunhofer, a Bavarian physicist who had invented an astronomical instrument known as a spectroscope that splits a light source into its constituent wavelengths. Fraunhofer discovered the dark absorption lines in the spectrum of the sun that were known as Fraunhofer lines.

As Brand worked on the exhibit one afternoon, he carefully set the plates on the floor and turned around to work on the glass enclosure where they would be displayed. He then took a step back, and as his heel bore down, the stack shattered; a shock went up his spine as he realized what he had done. They were irreplaceable and he was mortified. But there was nothing to be done. They were gone.

In the end his misstep was not fatal to the project. The Astronomia exhibit, which opened on June 30, 1964, earned favorable commentary from luminaries such as Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan. IBM was also pleased, and so toward the end of his time in New York City, Brand used its sponsorship of the project as a pretext to visit one of its marketing executives to see if IBM would be interested in supporting his Indian photography. He took Gerd Stern along and predictably got nowhere. “IBM bombed. I could see him saying no no, Indians scruffy, IBM clean: the subject stopped him,” Brand wrote Ashby afterward.

In early July the Loefflers met Brand at Pyramid Lake in northwest Nevada and the trio spent several days exploring the hot springs, including a creek that ran with warm water; you could sit under a thundering waterfall in a pool that was a perfect temperature. For Brand it was his first visit to the desert, and he quickly fell under its spell.

A week later, following the Loefflers, who had gone ahead, he made his way through the Black Rock Desert. (It would be more than a quarter century before it was discovered by the people who created Burning Man.) The Black Rock Desert playa is one of the flattest places on Earth, covering approximately two hundred square miles with no inhabitants but “Basques and buckaroos.” There was an extraordinary quality to the playa, an “extreme planetary surface weirdness,” as he thought of it. It was in wandering this desert that Brand discovered a new kind of solitary freedom. In a sense, it was like Big Sur, which itself was an extreme version of the West Coast that he had set out to immerse himself in. The Pacific Ocean and the high desert equally captured his spirit. Here was Brand’s version of “lighting out.” The smell of rain on sage in the deserts of the Southwest was the smell of freedom.

Loeffler had introduced him to peyote near Pyramid Lake, and then later in the summer Brand joined peyote meetings with the Navajos in New Mexico and Arizona. Within a short amount of time, he would delve deeply enough into the world of peyote rituals to attain the status of a roadman, the leader of the peyote meeting. (Several years later his first published article would be “The Native American Church Meeting,” which appeared in a quasi-academic journal called Psychedelic Review in November of 1967.)

To Brand, peyote was more manageable than LSD. It felt as if it increased his ability to perceive the world around him without hallucinations. It also altered his view of technology. The way Indians viewed time, he decided, was different from the way whites experienced it. After the near-calamitous beachside ceremony to return power to the crystals of the Pomo shaman’s kit, Brand had written in his journal, “If you would know an Indian feeling, try this: Move slowly.”

Now his peyote experiences ratified his conclusion that for whites, time was a rapid sequence, whereas Indian time was land time. It was geological and astronomical. It was much slower.

Brand found that he loved car camping in the desert; like Edward Abbey, for Brand it was a way of being solitary and—for a bit, at least—away from all human contact. Now, spending a week in the desert largely alone, Brand thought about the great technological strides that America had made in the past century and decided that he had no idea what the country was “progressing” toward. He concluded that there was no meaning in technological advancement as an end in itself. He had been reading McLuhan, and here, far from the noise of the city, he realized that Indian time is livable only to the extent that it was possible to avoid or transcend the barrages of electronic culture. Things were becoming clearer.

The young explorers roamed in the desert for weeks. They made it as far north as a small Mormon outpost, Kanab, Utah, before turning south and heading to Santa Fe, where they stayed with friends of the Loefflers’.

In Santa Fe, Brand had a series of epic dreams involving a quest that involved several men and women in a forested mountain wilderness searching for something lost. What it might have been he couldn’t quite put his finger on, though he had been reading Tolkien in the desert, so the theme was perhaps unsurprising. Both Jack Loeffler and the actor Max von Sydow appeared in the dream. Von Sydow, who as a young actor had a striking resemblance to Brand, was with an attractive woman. In one dream the actor gestured at something as it emerged for an instant large and white in the distance and Brand joined in the quest.

Toward the end of July, Brand left the Loefflers in Arizona and drove north to Wyoming just prior to the National Congress of American Indians convention. He camped on the edge of town and set about photographing those gathering for the event.

The convention received a smattering of national attention, being described in newspapers as a “powwow.”[7] More than a thousand attendees from tribes around the country had been expected, but actual attendance was relatively sparse. On the first day only twenty-two delegates representing eleven tribes, from the Dakotas, Montana, Washington State, Oregon, Utah, Oklahoma, North Carolina, and Washington, DC, registered.

It was in the midst of the presidential election campaign between Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater, and Stewart Udall used the convention as an opportunity to flay Goldwater for his position on Indian welfare. Brand was able to briefly reintroduce himself to Udall and set about making contacts with the various Indians who were attending.

He also met a young Indian woman there, Lois Jennings, a half-Ottawa mathematician employed by the Office of Naval Research who was working at the registration desk when he arrived. Her mother, who was active in Indian politics, had persuaded her to attend during her summer vacation. Short and bespectacled, she had raven hair and what Tom Wolfe would later describe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test as a radiant smile.

Jennings was in many ways the perfect “Indian maiden,” as Brand would later describe her. She was also a genuine “hidden figure,” the description for the women who did mathematical calculations by hand who were essential for the early space program. The daughter of a federal government economist, with a brother who would become a nuclear physicist at MIT, Jennings had majored in math in college, even taking an introductory course in programming high-speed computers.

She was someone who did not fit neatly in any single category. She would say, “Among whites, I’m an Indian, among Indians I’m an Ottawa, among Ottawas I’m Thunder clan, among Thunder clan, I’m Wasaquam [her mother’s birth name], among Wasaquam, I’m Lois.”

When she came to the Sheridan convention, Jennings was a relatively unhappy and underpaid specialist in debugging software, who in addition to doing calculations for a classified US Navy missile program was tasked with making the office coffee when she came in to work in the morning.

Her first impression of Brand was a young man who had still not completely found himself, but she was attracted to him and made several visits to his VW encampment on the outskirts of town for evening trysts. After Brand left Wyoming to head back to Arizona, they would stay in touch, occasionally by letter and more frequently by phone. A mutual infatuation grew slowly; it would be almost nine months before Jennings would visit and almost two years before she would move to California to live with Brand.

After Sheridan, Brand drove back to the Southwest and rendezvoused with the Loefflers. Udall, with the prompting and assistance of Sharon Francis, had sent letters recommending that the Sierra Club consider publishing Brand’s Indian book, arguing that the Indians had a great deal to teach whites about conservation.

Brand had made a particularly good connection to the Native American Church in meeting Hola Tso, a church vice president, who invited him to participate in an all-night ritual. “There is not really so much irony . . . in my contemplating Marshall McLuhan’s super-up-to-date Understanding Media in a windblown ponderosa forest several hours before participating in an Indian peyote meeting,” Brand wrote. “Indians munch peyote, sing, and listen more attentively to the voice that print culture’s din has made nearly inaudible.”

The Native American Church ceremony was more devout than anything he had ever encountered. There were strict rules about when you could stand and when you could leave and in which direction you walked. Brand found himself praying with great emotion.

After the peyote was consumed, singing commenced and continued until dawn. The leader leaned on an ornamental staff and with his free hand shook a gourd rattle in time with a drummer. To Brand, their singing reminded him of Gregorian chants.

Afterward, still high on peyote, Brand drove the Indian roadman home. At his house he accepted Brand’s request for membership in the church. It would eventually come complete with a membership card.

The America Needs Indians! project was beginning to take clearer shape in Brand’s mind; it was becoming less of a traditional book and more of an exercise in multimedia. Brand had seen a preview at the Eames’s studio in Los Angeles of their multimedia exhibition for the 1964 World’s Fair, which encompassed fourteen large and eight small screens and a seating arena that was hydraulically lifted into a domelike projection screen. He was also aware of Zach Stewart’s vision of a “sensorium”—an elaborate immersive visual experience inside an enclosed dome. In the desert Brand had imagined a domelike inflatable “airhouse,” much like an oversize Navajo hogan, with a ten-foot-high tunnel entrance. On one side of the tunnel would be a photo of a cigar store Indian and on the other side would be an “Uncle Sam Needs You” poster. Inside the tunnel a sound collage of pop music, advertising, news reports, and traffic noises would assault the senses as an unsettling contrast between traditional Indian and urban white cultures.

Once inside the dome, with a high ceiling fifty or sixty feet overhead, the visitor would be guided through a maze of eight-foot-high curved panels presenting a stream of murals accompanied by localized looping soundscapes. In a peyote exhibit, there might be sounds from a ceremony: drumming, rattling, and singing. Stewart Udall’s or Margaret Mead’s voice might accompany another photograph.

His idea was to complete the traveling exhibition first and then publish a book of the photographs. He imagined that he might persuade the Department of the Interior to cover the costs of travel in the United States and maybe even overseas as well.

He talked about the idea with Zach Stewart by phone from the desert. Stewart had partnered with Dick Raymond on the Warm Springs Reservation project because he had a deep interest in Indians and Indian rights. His great-grandfather had been the Indian commissioner for the Oregon Territory. But he also tended to blow a fuse, and when he learned that Brand had submitted a bill for his photos to the Warm Springs Indians, he had tossed him out of his office. He was deeply skeptical of the growing San Francisco drug scene, and his tendency to micromanage, coupled with his antidrug stance, would eventually drive a bitter wedge between the two men. Early on, however, they more or less papered over their differences, and Stewart agreed to partner with Brand on the new project.

By September, America Needs Indians! was in full swing. Brand left the Loefflers and drove back to San Francisco, where he was welcomed at the home of Dan Osborne, Zach Stewart’s business partner. But the next day he was feeling out of sorts, once again in an urban world, far away from Indian lands and the cactus of the Southwest.

“I found myself upside down in my own skin,” he wrote to the Loefflers in early October. He said he felt uncool. A meeting with Stewart was full of hostility, even though they basically agreed. Eventually, they began to outline the America Needs Indians! presentation on a long scroll of architectural paper. Their project would ultimately become one of the first multimedia exhibitions defining an emerging American counterculture, but their partnership wouldn’t last.

Chapter 5

Multimedia

In January 1965, Stewart Brand headed east on yet another fundraising tour for America Needs Indians! (now an ambitious traveling sensorium). As before, he made little progress. An approach to Stewart Udall’s wife, Lee, for $5,000 to underwrite a multimedia gallery aimed at undoing Indian stereotypes was met with a polite handwritten note: “Stewart, I’m afraid you are slightly out of our class. Our yearly operating budget is $8,000!” (The secretary of the interior did offer a consolation prize: a $1,000 contract to photograph an Indian Jobs Corps camp near Winslow, Arizona.) The Bureau of Indian Affairs had initially shown interest, but it turned out it wasn’t as interested in countering Indian stereotypes as it was in marketing the bureau’s work. His approaches to New York publishers, made with the blessing of Josephy turned out to be a distraction and a dead end.

Being in Washington also meant that he spent more time with Lois Jennings. What had begun as a casual affair had continued as a series of extended phone calls, and Brand was waking up to the fact that there was much more to this young woman than he’d initially realized. In March, before heading west, he wrote both in his journal and in a letter to a friend: “Lois was disappointed today about the Atlas-Centaur exploding on its pad. She feels that each one of those shots brings us closer.” He added, “She is right. She is an unexpected amount of girl. I salute Lois Jennings, 23, half-breed Ottawa, for being the least hung-up girl I have loved.”

Brand returned to the Southwest in the middle of March and began eagerly interviewing Indians about their herbal pharmacies. He also plunged into archaeology that predated the modern Indians, planning a trip to the remote Crack-in-the-Rock Pueblo north of Flagstaff, which had seen human habitation for a thousand years before being abandoned in the thirteenth century.

In Santa Fe, he again met with the peyote church Indians he had studied with in the previous year. In Taos, he watched as a local medicine man diagnosed a pinched nerve in a tribe member’s back. “Purified his hand in cedar smoke, and reached in and un-pinched the nerve,” he wrote Durkee.

On the advice of Minor White, he visited Walter Chappell, a photographer who had previously been part of the Big Sur circle of photographers that included Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham. In Taos, Chappell had begun to photograph Indian ceremonial life, and his work would become associated with the Taos Pueblo. Brand spent an afternoon lost in his photographs. That night an Indian dancer and drummer arrived, and he sat entranced while Chappell improvised on the piano as they sang and danced until dawn. Several days later Brand gave Chappell a ride to Oraibi, a Hopi village on a daylong drive west of Taos. That night, under a full moon, he left the photographer on the mesa and drove on for miles in the moonlight with his headlights off, held spellbound by the desert and the moon.

When he arrived in Winslow, however, the spell was broken. He discovered he was unexpected, and it took the better part of the day to learn that his prized consultancy had been abruptly canceled by a remote and faceless Washington bureaucracy. For several days he despaired, forlornly wondering, “What do I do with my life now?”

Trying to make sense of his situation, he decided he would spend a week in the desert anyway. Jack and Jean Loeffler had established themselves with the Navajos in northern Arizona in the fall of 1964. They had found an older abandoned three-forked stick hogan, a traditional Navajo dwelling, and asked the tribe if they could occupy it. Someone had probably died there, which was why it was abandoned, so the answer from the Indians was “We wouldn’t do that but take your chances.” The Loefflers were elsewhere, so Brand headed for the abandoned dwelling, tucked away in one of the most remote areas of the reservation, where in the early 1960s few spoke English. Once there he took the mattress out of his VW van, laid out his camera gear, lit the interior with a kerosene lantern, and set up for a weeklong retreat.

For the first several days he simply did chores and luxuriated in the silence. He heard nothing but the wind against the hogan’s walls, the occasional snowflake hissing on the stove, and outside, the wind moving through stubby trees. Finally, prompted by an unusual mixed message from the I Ching one night, he took the “medicine”—LSD.

Suddenly not only did the hogan feel like some kind of protective being, but Navajo Mountain, to the north, transformed itself into an immense deity with outstretched arms—a kind of Jolly Green Giant, very big, strong, kind, and laconic. For a while he became the mountain; later he just appreciated it from his distance, watching as it aged eons in a short time. He strolled outside, feeling like a pilgrim of some sort. Later he returned to the hogan and made coffee and walked naked around the stove, waving the cheese he was holding as if conducting an imaginary orchestra.

He had what he had long sought in psychedelics—a transformative experience. In Menlo Park he had felt claustrophobic restrictions; now, release. The experience was sharpened, he wrote in his journal, because his situation felt so dangerous. He was far away from help and on his own.

In the morning he looked up at the smoke hole and saw several inches of new snow, which felt redemptive. The loss of Udall’s support now seemed as if it were only a speed bump. Things would be all right in the world. He quickly packed his van and, skittering on the slushy mountain roads, hightailed it back to California.

In the spring there was an early screening of America Needs Indians! at the home of Zach Stewart’s architecture partner, Dan Osborne. Brand’s stated goal was to give his audience the experience of peyote without actually taking the sacrament. The presentation itself, however, had more breadth, making a visual argument that was highly critical of his own white culture. He had gathered his photographs from his travels to Indian reservations during the past year and juxtaposed them with images he had drawn from middle America. Brand had been introduced to the photography of Edward Curtis by Josephy, and some of those images were integrated into the presentation. Inspired by his USCO friends, American Needs Indians! played on multiple slide projectors and two screens married to a soundtrack that included Indian chanting and drumming as well as music. Ultimately, the performance would expand to include a movie projector and slide carousels holding seven hundred slides.

In Hippies, Indians, and the Fight for Red Power, historian Sherry L. Smith points to America Needs Indians! as the seed of a shift in the American perception of the value of preserving American Indian culture. She describes how Brand’s visual essay touched off a political campaign that changed government policy—“As more and more people accepted Brand’s premise, political support for policy transformation followed.”[1] America Needs Indians! would serve as a bridge between the cultures. Behind his simple message was the unstated assumption that the Indians’ situation was fragile, their existence was threatened, and the nation should both learn from Indian values and do something to protect them.[2]

Brand could barely contain himself. He had added the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” to the soundtrack. “We wound up dancing with the projectors—images popping out of the darkness all over the room,” he wrote Stern. Afterward, Mike Harner joked that the Irish coffee must have been spiked with LSD.

Fresh off his opening success, Brand took the multimedia presentation public. A round of last-minute telephone calls offering invitations to a performance on a chilly evening in the courtyard of the San Francisco Art Institute drew more than two hundred people. The follow-up show, sponsored by the UC Berkeley anthropology department, generated another full house, with people turned away.

America Needs Indians! would be shown almost a dozen times during the remainder of 1965, but as Brand and Stewart tried to work together, their partnership frayed. Brand continued to find Stewart to be a controlling micromanager with an out-of-scale ego. And Stewart in turn remained outraged by the fact that Brand dabbled in psychedelics. The architect frequently chastised his younger partner for what he belittled as offbeat ideas.

“A peculiar and unpalatable attitude keeps creeping into America Needs Indians!,” Stewart wrote Brand while traveling in the Southwest. “It is a cross between pontification and unreality—a kind of lecturer’s ‘I know something you don’t’ approach.” He concluded by suggesting that Brand memorize Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince—a children’s book that conveys the lesson that life is only worth living when it is lived for others, not for oneself.

Despite continuing friction, the high point of their collaboration came in September 1964 when the show (now including Indian dancers and Chappell accompanying them on piano) had a four-night run at the Committee, a popular North Beach nightspot, for a three-dollar admission charge. Several months later, the show received a rave review in the Chronicle: “The picture show was terrific. The slides and films were used at the start primarily to bring out all manner of startling parallels, contrasts, and switches between the culture of the American Indian and the white majority.”[3]

Since leaving the army, Brand had driven across the country a number of times in his trusty VW bus, and that summer he and Jennings lived as nomads, often camping in an Airstream trailer, making their way as far east as Oklahoma and stopping at various encampments and celebrations. They headed first for northwestern New Mexico to meet up with the Durkees. Their rendezvous point was the mountaintop where Jack Loeffler was working as a fire lookout. The night they arrived almost everyone ate peyote, except for Loeffler, because he was trying to remain a conscientious employee, and Jennings, who had been put off by the peyote rituals that had taken place in her family basement when she was a teenager.

The Durkees had driven in from New York, where they were living because Stephen felt he had to be there to make it commercially as an artist. However, Barbara hated it there and wanted to return to the West. New Mexico was a revelation, and they would return the next summer with big plans to begin building a communal new world.

When Brand came back to San Francisco at the end of August, he was still under Kesey’s spell. He had missed the legendary August 7 La Honda party orchestrated by journalist Hunter S. Thompson, where the Hells Angels motorcycle gang shared LSD with the Pranksters. However, he was present at other events with Angels and Pranksters that fall and at one point wrote in his journal: “I feel more freedom and joy nowadays with Kesey and the Hells Angels than anywhere. Perhaps in part because it’s not given, provided there. You have to find it.”

After the North Beach shows, Brand got wind of a Me-Wuk Indian festival being held for the first time in the foothills of the Sierras. He drove to the town of Tuolumne on the outskirts of Yosemite Valley to attend what would be the first of the Me-Wuk Acorn Festivals, since then held annually for the next fifty years and counting.

When he attended the festival, he was planning to capture more material for his multimedia show. He found exhibitions, food, music, and dancing. However, what caught his eye most was a series of games, including some very physical rugby-like games involving a ball being played by teenage Indians of both sexes.

He also learned about the hand game, played widely by American Indians since before recorded history. It pits two tribes over a pot of money, and one side attempts to guess the location of a marked “bone.” He was even more impressed watching the teenage boys and girls play together. In white America teenage sports were almost universally separated by gender. At the festival he saw boys and girls playing, grappling, touching each other, and having a great time. The sight sparked an insight that would germinate several years later.

The following month, Kesey and the Pranksters rolled out of La Honda, heading for a big rally in Berkeley organized by an antiwar coalition known as the Vietnam Day Committee and a planned march to the Oakland Army Terminal. Kesey, who was not on the list of announced speakers, was invited onstage by Realist editor Paul Krassner and deflated the audience by arguing that the demonstrators were wasting their time. Tom Wolfe captured his address in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test: “They’ve been having wars for ten thousand years and you’re not gonna stop it this way. . . . Ten thousand years, and this is the game they play to do it . . . holding rallies and having marches . . . and that’s the same game you’re playing . . . their game. . . .”[4]

In the crowd, Brand found himself in agreement. Although he had left the army disillusioned by its faceless bureaucratic irrationality, his ongoing anticommunist outlook continued to keep him separate from the early antiwar movement, which had a significant socialist and communist participation in the mid-1960s. As a former army officer, he felt he had knowledge the protesters didn’t have. Moreover, his brother-in-law, Donald Sampson, had gone to fight in Southeast Asia. Brand wasn’t for the war (he considered himself to be on the “psychedelic side” in the political dispute over Vietnam), but he had a basic sympathy for the enlisted men, and he bridled when he heard that protesters were calling them baby killers.

Shortly after the Vietnam Day protest in October, he wrote to the Loefflers approvingly that Kesey had “sicced” the Hells Angels on the Vietnam Day protesters. During the October march, the Angels had attempted to disrupt the protest, leading to the arrest of some of the gang members.

Brand viewed the protests through the prism of the ecological theory he had studied at Stanford, pointing to the vigor and even chaos found at the edge of a tide pool in his letter: “The labels blurred into reality and Vietnam is here at last. The borderline of living paradox is the new frontier and the domain of the new mountain men.”

This made sense. Brand’s understanding of his progress as being the result of chance and collision, of unplanned navigation, was rooted in libertarian preferences, not a concern with day-to-day, or even year-to-year, social concerns.

As the Vietnam War raged on and protests tore the country apart, Brand did his best to stay above the fray. When he set out to become a publisher in the fall of 1968, just months after Chicago police beat and tear-gassed protesters, he decreed the new publication would have nothing to say about the Vietnam War, and he stuck to what he believed was a no-politics editorial policy for the first three years he published the Catalog.

Brand invested two years into creating America Needs Indians!, but in the end it remained a largely unfinished effort. Other photography projects fell by the wayside. His partnership with Stewart would come to an ugly and abrupt end that winter when Brand came to Stewart’s architectural studio to claim the slides to show America Needs Indians! at what would become the first full-scale public Acid Test held by the Pranksters at the Big Beat nightclub in Palo Alto. Stewart, enraged at the idea of Brand going off on his own to participate in a drug-based sensorium, exploded, and the two men came close to blows. Brand took the carousels and left. While the men would collaborate once more a month later, they would hold deep personal grudges for decades. (Stewart sent angry letters for almost a decade, even to Brand’s mother, demanding repayment of a small amount of expense money the architect claimed he had advanced the project. Brand would later say Stewart was one of only two people he had worked with in his entire life for whom he retained an active hatred.)

In Palo Alto the Big Beat nightclub, which planned to target the “go-go dancing scene,”[5] was scheduled to open in mid-December. Just before it did, Kesey rented it for one night as a kind of shakedown cruise for something radically different—a new kind of experience designed to erase the line between the audience and band.

The first Acid Test had been held just after Thanksgiving at the Soquel, California, home of Ken Babbs, a Marine Corps veteran and a Merry Prankster friend of Kesey’s. Members of a band named the Warlocks, soon to become the Grateful Dead, performed. A second test followed soon after in San Jose. Brand brought his America Needs Indians! extravaganza to the third Acid Test, and it left a lasting impression. Phil Lesh, the bass player for the Dead, would remember it decades later: “To many of us—white kids who had grown up watching Westerns in the fifties—these revelations struck like lightning bolts.”[6]

In the fall of 1965, Mike Hagen, one of Kesey’s young Pranksters, arrived at Brand’s place in North Beach and excitedly told him the Pranksters were planning to put together a supersize Acid Test that would eventually be named the Trips Festival. Brand thought it was a great idea. He also knew that the Pranksters were disorganized and that, left to their own devices, they would never make it happen, so he got on the phone and began making calls.

There was already a nascent music scene in San Francisco at the Matrix nightclub, and a group known as the Family Dog had put on some early rock concerts at the Longshoremen’s Hall—a cavernous, six-sided building with a high ceiling—earlier that year. Brand was able to reserve the venue for a January weekend for a $300 down payment on the condition that the hall would be completely cleaned up after each evening’s show.

The immediate challenge was how in the world he was going to advertise his happening. His second call was to Jerry Mander, a partner in Freeman, Mander & Gossage, a high-profile San Francisco ad agency with an office in a converted firehouse near the San Francisco waterfront. Mander and Brand had crossed paths frequently in North Beach, and Mander had watched several performances of America Needs Indians!. He had been impressed when Brand ended the performances by picking up a slide projector and waving it around while chanting wildly, mimicking the sound of a Native American chant he had learned from attending peyote gatherings during his travels in the Southwest.

In Mander’s mind Brand was a pioneer in exploring the new electronic communications and entertainment world that was being touted by Mander’s advertising partner Howard Gossage—a close friend of Marshall McLuhan’s.

“We have something we want to talk to you about,” Brand told Mander, and the advertising exec invited him over. Brand, Kesey, Ramon Sender, and a young man named Ben Jacopetti, who ran an alternative theater group in Berkeley, showed up at the agency a couple of days later, explaining that they had no idea how to market their event.

“I know a guy who knows how to sell tickets,” Mander said. He turned and called Bill Graham.

Graham, a German-born refugee from the Nazis who had grown up in New York City, had come to San Francisco in the early 1960s to be closer to his sister. He had worked briefly as a statistician for Southern Pacific Railroad before going to work as a promoter for the radical theater group the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Mander knew him as an aggressive guy who would drive around town in his Karmann Ghia convertible putting up event posters in bookstores and record shops. Graham showed up, loved the idea, and agreed to come on board.

That was how, several weeks later, while on Christmas vacation from a teaching job she had taken on a reservation in Montana, Lois Jennings would barrel through the financial district as a passenger in Graham’s Karmann Ghia as part of an unsanctioned parade led by the Pranksters during the afternoon before New Year’s Eve. The caravan tossed out handbills as they rolled along. (In San Francisco, getting a parade permit was virtually impossible, but if you kept moving and passing out handbills, it was possible to cause quite a stir while staying one step ahead of the authorities.)

Brand was in full Prankster mode. He maneuvered his VW bus—a sticker on its side read “Love Generator”—through the confetti and toilet paper and old calendars that, per San Francisco tradition, were raining down on the last working day of the year, giving a running commentary from a loudspeaker on top of his bus to the financial district crowd, whom a reporter described as “secretaries and vice presidents and clerks.”[7] When the caravan turned the corner onto Montgomery, Brand’s loudspeaker blared: “You’re urban folkniks. Help us litter up this street. There’s a message for you on each of these snowflakes. Read them. Hey, there’s a pigeon landing on a window up there! What’s wild is we’re all in this parade. It’s all a big trip.”[8]

The group arrived several blocks away in Union Square, where they took out three giant helium balloons with a long cloth banner spelling “N-O-W.” One of the Pranksters, a young woman whose Prankster name was Mountain Girl, spray-painted “Trips” on the balloons, and they were launched into the sky.

Two years later, in 1968, Brand and Jennings would achieve international celebrity when they appeared in the opening pages of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe’s adrenaline-fueled re-creation of Kesey’s and the Pranksters’ exploits. Wolfe described a mythic figure, the “half-Ottawa Indian” with her hair thrown back, a radiant smile with a jumble of poorly formed teeth. (After being recruited into helping promote the event, Jennings would miss the actual event because she had to return to teach school after the holidays.)

The Pranksters were known for their costumes, and Brand and Jennings had taken to wearing Native American regalia as they went about advertising the upcoming festival. “I remember that we went around to all the hotels with promotional literature for the festival, and the people in the lobby kept saying, ‘Oh, the travel desk is over there,’ ” Brand would recall later.[9] In a way, they weren’t altogether wrong.

There was a series of dress rehearsals for the Trips Festival in December and early January. Bill Graham had organized a benefit for the San Francisco Mime Troupe at the Fillmore Auditorium in December, the night before the Pranksters held the second public Acid Test at Muir Beach. Then the Pranksters held an even larger Acid Test at the Fillmore on January 8. Two thousand people showed up to hear the newly minted Grateful Dead play. At the time, the Fillmore was simply a rundown music venue in a black working-class neighborhood that had been built a half decade after the San Francisco earthquake as a dance hall.

That night, amid all the cacophony, Stewart Brand had an unusual encounter with Neal Cassady. Iconic as the quintessential Beat during the 1950s, Cassady was, like Brand, also a bridge between the Beats and the Hippies. The film documentary The Other One: The Long Strange Trip of Bob Weir[10] documents how Cassady was essential in shaping the Grateful Dead’s worldview and by extension the values of the emerging counterculture. His life captured the free spirit ideal that Brand would later express succinctly in the Whole Earth Epilog: “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” Already a larger-than-life character in the fifties, portrayed as Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel, On the Road, he was the towering figure of the Beat generation. He was twelve years older than Brand, and two years later he would die in Mexico, alone, from a drug overdose after being found comatose on a lonely stretch of railroad tracks on a cold and rainy night.

In the sixties, with Kesey and the Pranksters, Cassady was a speed freak, a wild man, never stopping, speaking in scat verse, carrying a small sledgehammer that he would hypnotically flip in the air over and over. He was the default driver of the Pranksters’ bus, and was known for shifting the gears manically as he drove.

The night Brand and Cassady crossed paths at the Fillmore, among all the chaos, they found a quiet alcove where it was calm. When Brand approached him, Cassady was standing motionless, staring down at the band and the dancers. Brand discovered a Cassady who was not dialing his way wildly through multiple personalities, who was sensible, who was interactive. He was surprised as he realized that there was a “reflective Neal” hidden inside all the time, something other than the manic hipster the Pranksters celebrated. In between the music, the two men chatted quietly. What Brand found was a friendly, thoughtful man who was aware of what was happening.

“It looks like the publicity for your Trips Festival is going pretty well,” Cassady said.[11] It was indeed.

A few weeks later, Peter Coyote was riding high. The year 1966 was only three weeks old, but the twenty-five-year-old Grinnell College English-lit major had already arrived in San Francisco, had joined the Mime Troupe, and was dating a stripper from the raunchy section of the city’s North Beach neighborhood. Like many youthful hipsters in the Bay Area, he had seen the flyers advertising the Trips Festival, a multisensory event that was supposed to offer a simulated LSD experience. There would be music and dancing. And so, on a chilly Friday evening, he showed up with his date at the Longshoremen’s Hall to discover a long line of young people waiting in the parking lot. Once inside, he found his way to a darkened corner and under a table he reveled as his stripper friend “taught me 600 new things that skin could do.”

Afterward, high on LSD, he wandered through the crowd, bombarded by a cacophony of sound and light. Attire ranged from scruffy to occasionally topless. He spied Brand, thin with already receding blond hair, shirtless, with a large Indian pendant around his neck, a circular diffraction grating affixed to his forehead, wearing a black top hat capped with a prominent feather, sitting high above the floor on top of the flag-festooned “Tower of Power” that served as the Pranksters’ command center for controlling the projectors, speakers, black lights, and strobes that were intended to simulate the psychedelic experience. “That motherfucker knows how to throw a party,” Coyote thought.

It was, in Brand’s later retelling, the first time the Bay Area’s ten thousand hippies realized that there were ten thousand hippies. The three-day party opened a cultural fault line in America that defined the 1960s, which in many ways still resonates in the political, cultural, and environmental battles taking place in America today. The Trips Festival became a catalyst, igniting the counterculture that would soon take root in San Francisco. Indeed, there is a straight line from the Trips Festival to the creation of the Haight-Ashbury scene and the Summer of Love. The weekend also led directly to the establishment of the Fillmore Auditorium as the catalyst for the San Francisco music scene, etching a path that led to Woodstock. It was a spark that helped ignite a global youth movement that reached a peak just two years later in 1968.

A s successful as Brand was at promoting the Trips Festival, it was Kesey who inadvertently put it over the top when, late one January night several days before the festival, he and a young woman, Carolyn Adams, known to the Pranksters as Mountain Girl, were arrested while tossing pebbles off the roof of Brand’s apartment building. It was front-page news; Kesey was already in trouble with the police over an earlier drug bust in La Honda. Freeing him to await trial, the judge publicly admonished Kesey not to attend the upcoming festival, vastly increasing awareness of the event. (Camouflaged in a silver space suit with helmet, he would show up anyway.)

Afterward composer Ramon Sender observed that he and two other people were the only ones there who were straight on the Friday night the Trips Festival opened. One of the others was Bill Graham, who clearly understood that he had stumbled onto a gold mine. He raced around with a clipboard, pausing to express his sympathy for Jerry Garcia, the Dead’s lead guitarist, when he discovered that the neck of his guitar was broken.

The first evening Brand began taking money from people at the door, but when he was confronted by the huge line waiting to get in, he quickly realized he was out of his element. He asked Michael Phillips, a young banker working in the Bank of America’s research department, to take the gate. (It seemed reasonable to ask a banker, who obviously must know something about money.) Phillips undertook the task for about half an hour and then, studying the scene in the hall, said to himself, “I’ve had enough. This is too much fun,” and persuaded Graham to take his place.

At the time, LSD was still legal, and the drug wars that would tear America apart in the late 1960s were just getting underway. For many of the young people who attended that weekend, the Trips Festival would be not only the first time they’d been stoned or tripping but also a life-changing event, their consciousness chemically altered or not. One example was Peter Calthorpe, a precocious Palo Alto sixteen-year-old who built geodesic domes in high school with Lloyd Kahn, later the editor of the Shelter section of the Whole Earth Catalog, who went on to live in a commune and produce light shows for several years. He studied architecture and became an urban planner internationally known for the concept of New Urbanism, walkable communities, while he lived as Brand’s neighbor on a houseboat in Sausalito a decade later.

Until then, at rock shows put on in places like the Matrix, the audience had remained in their seats as they watched the performers. Now Kesey and the Pranksters were tearing down the walls. For good or ill the audience was going to be part of the show. The Pranksters had draped parachutes and other paraphernalia around the floor to damp the echoes in the cavernous hall. Ron Boise, a local sculptor who had come to prominence in San Francisco two years earlier when some of his art pieces depicting the Kama Sutra had been seized by the police, brought along an odd instrument called a thunder machine. It was made out of large formed metal pieces taken from old cars and strings that could be played simultaneously by ten or twelve people to make a wild variety of odd noises. Exhibits and art stations were scattered around the floor as well as concessions. One table sold Trips Festival sweatshirts while another was selling books about insects. A champion UC Berkeley gymnast had been tasked with diving off a balcony onto a trampoline; under the strobe light his act added to the surreal ambiance.

The event would prove bittersweet for Brand. On the first night, he set up a tall Indian tepee covered with canvas off to one side of the hall. Inside, Brand and Michael Harner played the hand game that Brand had discovered the previous fall. The problem was that the audience couldn’t see what was happening in the tent. The projectors were playing images taken from Brand’s multimedia slide show off the tent’s canvas, but it didn’t make a lot of sense to the festival attendees. Both men were wearing microphones, and after a while Brand began to chant: “Hey! Now we’re flying away! Any day now we’re flying away! Way-oh-may-ha! Su-na-na-na-yi-ha! Su-na-na-na-yi-ha!” Unfortunately, the game and the participants were hidden from the audience, who had no idea that Brand was trying out a new form of presentation for his multimedia show. It was a nice idea, but it made very poor theater. It would be the last time Brand would show America Needs Indians!.

Separately on Friday, Kesey was using one of the overhead projectors as a giant proto-Twitter account, writing compact witticisms such as “WHAT FANTASTIC MARVELS HATH OUR KILLOWROUGHT” on one of the giant screens.

The whole event was exasperating to Zach Stewart. He was angry at the Pranksters and had no interest in experimenting with LSD. He kept projecting architectural slides over Kesey’s handwritten messages. And he was continuing to quarrel with Brand, who in turn was furious at the architect for acting like a control freak.

Although the Trips Festival would be mythologized as the event that marked the dawn of the sixties counterculture, Brand and several others considered that Friday night a bust. The audience, it turned out, was not there to take in an avant-garde experience—they wanted to dance. In the middle of the evening, someone walked up to the microphone and said: “This is a bore, even on acid.” Confused and increasingly uninterested, a good portion of the audience left halfway through the evening.

It wasn’t until Saturday night, when the Dead mended their instruments and found their rhythm, that the Trips Festival finally took off. People had indeed come to dance, not stand outside a tepee watching what seemed to be a random slideshow. Afterward, Brand would say, “It was the beginning of the Grateful Dead and the end of everybody else.”[12]

On the Monday after the Trips Festival, the original organizers met at a small café across the street from the Fillmore Auditorium to divide up the $14,500 that had been raised from the long weekend. Graham showed up at the meeting having just signed the lease on the music hall. His portion of the take from the weekend was just $900, but he had seen clearly that there was a fortune in the new music being played that weekend by Big Brother & the Holding Company, the Grateful Dead, and the Loading Zone. Jacopetti’s theater group took $900. Brand came away with $1,400. In the end, most of the money from the weekend went to the Pranksters, although Mountain Girl would later say that much of it disappeared with Kesey, who, under the threat of jail, had split for Mexico.

The next month, when Graham launched the Fillmore with a three-day “dance” concert, the poster noted, “With Sights and Sounds of the Trips Festival!”

The sixties were beginning in earnest.

Brand wasn’t immune to the urge to dance and, with that in mind, went down to Los Angeles for one of several Acid Tests being held there. Unfortunately, the event seemed to be more about making films, and at midnight he decided to head back to the Bay Area. As he was leaving, Neal Cassady accosted him and asked if he could hitch a ride north. They took off with Brand at the wheel.

In the early hours of the morning, as the VW bus began to labor up the Ventura Freeway into the hills, Cassady suggested, “Why don’t I drive?”

Brand pulled over and they swapped places. Soon the bus was flying faster than Brand had ever driven it and Cassady casually began playing a frightening mind game in which he would swerve toward each passing telephone pole, seeing how close he could get the car to the edge of the road at speed before yanking the vehicle to a safe distance.

Brand was paralyzed.

“Would you roll me a J?” Cassady asked nonchalantly as the VW veered toward an oncoming telephone pole. As the bus lurched back and forth, Brand did his best to comply.

It was the most frightening ride he had ever experienced, and he breathed a sigh of relief when they finally pulled into Salinas and Cassady got out. Alone, Brand headed over the mountains to Big Sur, euphoric. He had survived close calls before—his chute not opening, the near disaster on the bridge over the Potomac—but this was different, and the relief he felt was different too. Far from feeling the fool, he was left with a sense of liberation. It felt like he could do anything: he could walk to China on foot or even marry Lois Jennings. He hadn’t just escaped an accident—he had escaped. He was that free. It was a serendipitous approach to life led without a grand plan, keeping an open mind, and doing whatever seems most promising at the moment.

In February he wrote his father, again trying to calm his fears. He assured him that despite reports that the new counterculture was taking a dangerous socialist turn, he had no beef with capitalism. He made the case that the Trips Festival had been a business success. His financial investment had been only $250, he noted. He had received $1,400 of the $14,500 gross, and he had paid off everyone in just four days.

While he had once been interested in Ayn Rand, he added, he increasingly viewed her laissez-faire capitalist worldview as old thinking. Now the ideas of Buckminster Fuller—pro-technology, with a deep faith that the coming of computerization and automation would result in an infinite abundance that would arrive shortly—were increasingly appealing to him. Fuller was an iconoclastic inventor and futurist who had popularized the geodesic dome and whole-systems thinking, and Brand fell under his spell while attending a series of lectures he gave in San Jose in early 1966. He would become a devoted adherent to Fuller’s whole-systems thinking approach; it would become a framing principle for the Whole Earth Catalog.

In his letter to his father he pointed to the power of cooperation: “Synergy—the unique behavior of whole systems, unpredicted by their respective sub-systems’ events,” he explained. He chose not to emphasize one implication—that systemic behavior might also generate unexpected consequences, and there was no reason to assume that they would all be positive.

Brand also explained to his father that he was equally influenced by Marshall McLuhan and his message that the world was in the midst of a communications revolution. He argued that his father’s passionate ham radio hobby was the harbinger of this much deeper revolution: “Thanks to your field of electronics, implosion, and detribalization is where we’re at,” he wrote.

It was an emotional argument that went on at a distance through letters and phone calls. It was heated enough that the senior Brand angrily condemned his son for bringing shame to the family name. Brand wrote back, telling his father that he was welcome to change his name if he wanted to, but that the younger Brand had no intention of changing his name: “I’m proud of it, of my parents, and of myself. Love, Stewart.”

He soon learned that his father had begun a battle with cancer that would ultimately claim his life. He had no sense of how to talk to his father about his illness, and so he sent him a letter asking what advice he would give on the subject: “Should I bite my lip in uncommunicative dismay? Or should we consider dying as a significant topic?” Brand had had his brushes with mortality, but this seemed different. This was the first time that someone he was close to faced death, and it put Brand in a more serious frame of mind. It would be almost two years before his father died.

Brand was close to three men, Jack Loeffler, Steve Durkee, and Ken Kesey, who each seemed like a potential model for how he might live his life. He thought of them as Lao-tzu, Buddha, and Nietzsche, respectively. Loeffler had chosen a rural life, Durkee a communal one, and Kesey was basically urban. Loeffler’s approach to life would be best for personal advance, Durkee’s for creativity. Oddly, despite Kesey’s rejection of activism, Brand viewed him as leading a life that would have the biggest impact on society. Brand realized he wanted to go down all three paths simultaneously, which meant that he would have to find a fourth—his own—path.

Brand had grown closer to Lois Jennings, but she was still teaching on the reservation. That winter she became pregnant and then miscarried, which, in their pain, brought them even closer.

Before the miscarriage he wrote Jerry Mander a letter asking about hiring him in his advertising company. His family, he noted, was about to grow by one and possibly two Ottawa Indians, and he was considering “modes of regular work.” Although Mander liked Brand, he didn’t have a position available, but he offered him a temporary job repairing some furniture.

Without gainful employment (his photographic work was enjoyable, but it wouldn’t become a profession), his success as a minor impresario of the Trips Festival was more or less his only career option, and he would spend the rest of 1966 and 1967 organizing events, without a clear direction in mind. What he had, just as he had had as a child, was an unending stream of notions. Every once in a while, one of them would be worth acting upon.

His father’s illness was one of the things on his mind when at the end of February 1966 he decided to spend the afternoon tripping on LSD on his rooftop in North Beach. He came down off his trip with the idea of posing the question he had spent the afternoon wondering about—why the space program had not publicized a photograph of the whole Earth—to a broader audience. The next day he went to the library and copied a list of addresses from the Congressional Directory and sent a handmade button with his slightly conspiratorial question to every senator and representative. He found another directory and sent buttons to NASA officials, United Nations officials, Russian scientists, and even members of the Soviet Politburo. He sent buttons to Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan for good measure, and to his surprise, Fuller responded that his campaign was in vain because it would never be possible see more than a little less than half of the Earth at any one time. (Sometime later, after the two men met at Esalen, Brand was able to clarify his concept, and Fuller would become a supporter.)

After Brand came down from the roof, he fashioned a plywood sandwich board painted Day-Glo blue with Day-Glo red letters that read “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” He added a tray to hold his buttons, which he planned to sell for twenty-five cents each.

With encouragement from Jennings, who arrived on the scene in time to help overcome his stage fright, he outfitted himself in a white jumpsuit, adding a top hat with a crystal heart and a flower, and headed over to Berkeley to stand at Sather Gate amid the passing student crowds.

Despite appearing just a year after the Free Speech Movement, he wasn’t a student and the dean’s office tossed him off campus. Before he was forced to leave, however, he encountered astrophysicist George Field, who took five buttons and told him he was going to visit NASA the following week. He also encountered a Chronicle reporter, who wrote a modest article about his quest.

Next, he repeated his vigil in front of the Student Union building at Stanford, where he ran into a group of NASA scientists and traded gossip about the space program with them. Finally, Jennings and Brand headed off to the East Coast, where he made similar appearances equipped with his feathered top hat, sandwich board, and buttons at Columbia University, Harvard, and MIT. At Columbia he ran into a guy who insisted that the reason they wouldn’t let a photograph of the Earth be shown was that the Earth was shaped like a doughnut. Later at MIT Brand’s brother Pete, who was teaching in the engineering school, joined the crowd he had gathered. (“Who the hell is that?” asked an MIT dean as he walked by one afternoon. “That’s my brother,” Pete responded.)

In hindsight, Brand’s whole Earth insight has been said to represent a seismic shift in our thinking about the relationship between nature and technology. “The image of the whole Earth forced all who saw it to think holistically,” wrote Andrew G. Kirk, the author of Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism.[13] In the moment, it was never clear whether Brand’s campaign triggered any response within the space agency. However, years later he would encounter a NASA security officer who told him that he had been tasked by headquarters to investigate an odd fellow in California asking about why there was no photograph of the whole Earth. He had done a thorough investigation and concluded that Brand was harmless. At the end of his report he inquired, “By the way why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?”[14]

After his campaign ended, Brand and Jennings extended their stay on the East Coast, moving in for a while with the USCO artists in Garnerville. Gerd Stern was living in nearby Woodstock and spending most of his time at the USCO church, and he introduced Brand to John Brockman, another young army veteran, who was still wearing his uniform because, unlike Brand, he was regularly showing up for his service in the army reserve.

While studying for an MBA at Columbia University, Brockman had been on his way to a conventional business career when he discovered the Realist at a New York City newsstand. Paul Krassner’s underground newsletter convinced him that he wasn’t crazy, or at least that others shared his view of the establishment. In many ways, Brockman was an East Coast mirror of Brand. When the two of them met, Brockman had just organized an avant-garde film series he named the Expanded Cinema Festival, which echoed many of the same themes being explored in the Trips Festival on the West Coast.

In another sense, the two men were complete opposites. Brockman was a Boston Jew while Brand was distinctly WASPish. Brand had explored psychedelics, as had many of the USCO artists, while Brockman studiously resisted any mind-altering substances. The mantra of the USCO artists was “We R All One,” but when Brockman became a fellow traveler, the group modified the slogan to read “We R All One, except for Brockman.”

After Brockman got USCO a gig putting together a video disco in an old aircraft hangar at Roosevelt Field on Long Island, the artists shifted their focus toward producing an exhibition at the Riverside Museum in New York that was described as a “be-in,” a term Stern had coined earlier that year.

We R All One, which completely took over the museum, opened in June and became a brief media sensation. Contact Is the Only Love, Stern’s infamous creation for the San Francisco Art Museum in 1963, was shipped from the West Coast, and other USCO artists contributed pieces, including Durkee’s recently electrified paintings that included flashing lights among their panels. Brand’s contribution was an ambient audio mix called Phase Raga.

The exhibition garnered enough attention that Steve and Barbara Durkee appeared on the Today show with Barbara Walters, outfitted with diffraction gratings on their foreheads. Life magazine put the exhibit on the cover of its September issue, for a story on psychedelic art. “We try to vaporize the mind by bombing the senses,” Life quoted a “psychedelic artist.”[15]

Back on the West Coast in June, Brand and Jennings helped Stern and Michael Callahan produce several more showings of We R All One, including a performance at a high-profile San Francisco conference on psychedelics. Brand continued to look for venues to exhibit his work, without success, and to put on multimedia happenings, and he began proposing a series of events designed to blend the USCO multimedia and Kesey Acid Test experiences. Eventually, he approached Glide Memorial Church, which under the Reverend Cecil Williams was becoming a progressive institution, with an ambitious proposal to bring together a range of folk and rock musicians like Joan Baez and the Grateful Dead with USCO artists and other counterculture celebrities like Allen Ginsberg for a Saturday evening extravaganza he dubbed “Metamorphosis.” An electronic evening at the church would attract a new generation, he wrote to the church elders. “To pay a visit to the Cathedral on our own spiritual terms would, gentlemen, blow our minds,” he wrote.

The blown mind learns, he added. Despite his enthusiasm, his message failed to resonate with the church and the plan died a quick death.

The act of learning was about to become one of the central themes in Brand’s life. At Stanford, he had experienced an epiphany: “I’m not really actually here to learn French, or whatever, I’m learning how to be able to learn anything, and then I can go forth and have a life. . . . I don’t need the class.” Learning was an end unto itself.

He was coming to see learning as an essential element in keeping both individuals and organizations vibrant. You needed to learn skills and acquire tools. His romance with tools—the Catalog would be subtitled Access to Tools—came in part from his 1966 encounter with Fuller, who was legendary for claiming: “If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.”

Brand came to believe that tools were inherently democratizing and would serve as agents of social change. Further, his passion for tools would translate into a general stance as a technophile with a deep faith that human progress was dependent on technological advances. It was a perspective that would be reinforced the following year when he fell into the orbit of Doug Engelbart, the iconoclastic computer scientist who saw the computer as the most universal of tools.

In July, Brand and Jennings headed to Big Sur for an Esalen seminar. Afterward, they hiked back into the wilderness and spent three weeks exploring what it was like to live off the land. Despite his affection for San Francisco, Brand remained captivated by the romance of primitive living. Jennings was significantly more skeptical, but she went along for the adventure.

To get fifteen miles back into the wilderness, they crossed a 3,600-foot-high ridge, looking directly out at the clouds hanging over the vast Pacific Ocean. In the first years of their relationship they would spend weeks on the road, much of it camping in an Airstream trailer. When they hiked together on the mesa in Arizona, Jennings, befitting her Indian heritage, was generally fearless in the wilderness and would ignore the lightning. At the same time, she wasn’t naive, and she would always put Brand first on the trail. Rattlesnakes!

They took cornmeal, a copy of Euell Gibbons’s classic guide to wild foods, Stalking the Wild Asparagus, and a rifle. For a while they made do with just the cornmeal and some lily roots they discovered growing by a deep pool hidden beneath a seventy-foot-high waterfall. Things improved considerably after Brand poached a deer. It was dusk and he saw the deer in thick brush on the other side of a stream. He tracked ahead to a clear shot where the deer was heading and killed it with a single bullett to the head. He field dressed it, ate the liver raw, and slung the carcass over his shoulder to head back to camp, where they cooked and lived on it for several days.

Their flirtation with rural life continued as they headed to the Southwest, visiting with the Hopi Indians and then driving to a commune in New Mexico, where the Durkees had returned with radical dreams to found a commune.

It was called Solux-Lama, later just Lama. The commune was founded that summer by the Durkees and their friend Jonathan Altman, with the help of Timothy Leary’s former Harvard colleague Richard Alpert. (Alpert taught at Stanford and lived for a while in the Los Altos Hills south of the university, and Brand would occasionally pitch his tepee and live in his backyard.) Brand would be with them when they first discovered the property in New Mexico. He erected his tepee on the site where the commune was being built and lived off the land for several weeks. It was the first structure on what would become one of the defining communes of the back-to-the-land movement. Alpert, the LSD guru who became Ram Dass that year, would write his bestselling Be Here Now in a collaboration with Durkee, who designed the original graphics and typography for the book. Brand contributed photographs to the first edition.

Ironically, though in a few years the Whole Earth Catalog would play a key role in the commune movement, Brand never embraced the idea of rural life. He and Jennings stayed at Lama for only a couple of weeks and then moved on. Durkee was committed to building a new world, and Brand was fascinated by the project but not committed in a personal way. Jennings had even less interest in the communal hierarchy imposed by Steve Durkee, which she thought was overly regimented and verging on being a cult. They quickly decided to go back to California and settle on the Midpeninsula.

This didn’t, however, prevent Brand from continuing to dream about creating an ideal community. He fantasized about the features his utopian collectives might have. (In one case, he fixated on the idea of separating the community in halves, divided by a volleyball court—a level of detail that was both meticulous and decidedly utopian.)

In August at Libre, an artists’ commune in the Huerfano Valley in southern Colorado, Brand came up with the idea of creating a mountain community with access only by foot. It would be governed by an executive council and regular town meetings, with a voting age of sixteen. Revenue would be generated by taxing cultural events. Population would be controlled by “disadvantaging” families with more than two children. Innovation in community activities such as games would be expected, but how things might be set up to encourage entrepreneurship was a question left hanging in his journal.

Perhaps better than going back to the land completely, he decided, would be a backcountry retreat to get away from the urban world occasionally. He proposed the idea of having a “back forty” to Lou Gottlieb, who had been the bassist for a folk-music group called the Limeliters. Gottlieb happened to have some land he had purchased in Sonoma County. The following year, 1967, Sender, who had co-organized the Trips Festival with Brand and whose first wife was a descendant of one of the members of the original Oneida community, a nineteenth-century religious commune, suggested that the land be used to create a new communitarian experiment, which led to the creation of the Morningstar commune.[16] It would be precisely the opposite of what Brand had suggested.

All of this left Brand feeling out of sorts as the summer wound down. He had a sense that he might be in the wrong country. The commune world was no utopia, to say the least, yet he was finding that he grew easily bored “in the woods.” His perception of the growing commune movement was further complicated by the fact that they were often created around charismatic leaders, leading to the cult behavior that he was anxious to avoid. What could he do that was “wholly of use”? he wondered.

Before LSD spread into the general population as a recreational drug, it had been explored by a small community of academic and military researchers who pursued its uses, from mind control and mind expansion to spirituality. It became illegal in California on October 6, 1966. Ken Kesey had fled to Mexico and attempted to fake his suicide, but on the weekend of September 30, his disembodied voice wafted from a campuswide audio network at San Francisco State that the organizers of a “happening” known as Whatever It Is had created for their event. Although it was unofficial, what would be the penultimate Acid Test took place one weekend night, sponsored by the student-run Experimental College.

At the start of the school year, Brand had contacted a group of San Francisco State student leaders who hired him to organize an event modeled on the Trips Festival. The poster advertising the event noted that the weekend would be spent researching the question “How can we get higher?” There would be a full menu of psychedelic rock and roll (Brand had booked the Grateful Dead, Mimi Fariña, and a variety of other Bay Area bands) as well as light shows, a dance workshop, elaborate “sound sculptures,” and a McLuhanesque television crew to feed the event back to the audience as it happened. Designed by Brand, the poster conveyed an image of the Earth as seen from the moon as envisioned by his “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” campaign earlier that year. In the poster, the surface of the moon was populated by naked figures from Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. Anticipating trouble from school officials, he had printed eight thousand of the posters before he showed them to anyone. Many more than the planned ten thousand tickets were sold, almost matching the entire sixteen-thousand student enrollment at SF State. The weekend proved to be a proto-Woodstock. The Jefferson Airplane wasn’t part of the official program, but after the Dead had been playing for a while one evening, members of Airplane got up onstage with them, and the two bands jammed for a while.

Brand had put the Pranksters on the bill, and they all wanted to be there, including an incognito Ken Kesey. On their way from Mexico, the Pranksters’ bus broke down repeatedly—the temperature in the desert went well above 100 degrees—and their pet parrot died on the trip, but in the end, they pulled into San Francisco at sunset on the Friday night Whatever It Is was set to open.

Brand would later say that his antipathy for the New Left began when he recoiled in horror in response to the Leninist politics the San Francisco State students displayed while he worked with them. The reality was more nuanced.

That Whatever It Is happened at all was thanks to James Nixon’s election as student body president in the fall of 1966. Nixon had been living in the Haight, and he thought of himself as part of the hippie movement; he had been among a handful of students (including his wife, Cynthia) who in 1965 created the university’s so-called Experimental College. Self-styled revolutionaries who were heavily influenced by the Cuban Revolution, they had decided to begin their own insurrection by collectively seizing control of the school and organizing their own system of instruction intended to undermine the established educational hierarchy. Like many of the alternative education efforts that blossomed in the Bay Area in the 1960s, it would come and go quickly (in this case lasting only until the end of the university’s student strike in 1968). Despite Brand’s antipathy to the politics behind the students’ insurrection, he would take many of their ideas and their community organizing approach with him both to the Whole Earth Catalog and afterward in his various learning-oriented projects.

As student body president, Nixon found himself in control of a huge budget: a half million dollars from the annual revenue of the Associated Students organization and a million dollars a year from the cafeteria and bookstore. When Brand approached the students with the idea for a cultural extravaganza, Nixon jumped at his proposal, viewing it as a way to merge the civic and cultural politics that were afoot in the Bay Area with the educational revolution they were trying to bring about.

The students set Brand and Jennings up in an office on campus to plan the event. Brand hired Jerry Mander’s firm to generate publicity and was able to get local TV and press attention ahead of the event. Despite riots in several San Francisco neighborhoods (including the Fillmore District) the previous week following the police shooting of a Black teenager, and the university administration’s fears that San Francisco’s Black citizens were going to take over the campus, the event came off without a hitch. Although private security had been hired, Nixon kept them out of view and, in a nod to the growing influence of the feminist movement, controlled the event with an all-female security team.[17]

Although the event itself was a success, it would foretell the deep divisions that would emerge between the New Left and the counterculture, as well as a more personal fracture between the Nixons and the Brands a year later.

For several weeks afterward, Kesey, who had returned from Mexico, where he had been a fugitive from the California marijuana charges to secretly attend Whatever It Is, played a cat and mouse game with the police before he was arrested driving south from San Francisco while Brand and several other Pranksters followed in a second car. Two agents who were driving home spotted him accidently and then chased him after he got out of his car and ran. Miraculously, despite Kesey having faked his death and spent six months as a fugitive in Mexico, the FBI chose not to pursue charges against him, and his lawyers were able to persuade a local judge not to throw the book at him. As LSD was now illegal, the author convinced the judge that he could use his stature to persuade a young generation to move on past the drug culture that he had helped create.

An Acid Test “graduation” ceremony, meant to convey the idea that the psychedelic era was ending and the Pranksters and their friends were moving on, was scheduled for the end of the month. Originally it was supposed to include the Grateful Dead and be held at the Winterland Ballroom, but Kesey had lost the trust of Bill Graham as well as the Chronicle’s influential music critic, Ralph Gleason, whose endorsement would have carried weight among those who might be interested in attending. Also, the psychedelic community itself was fractured, and many members felt that by renouncing psychedelics, Kesey was betraying their movement. Brand stepped in to help the Pranksters organize the event, now to be held in a dingy warehouse south of Market Street near the police headquarters. While the press showed up in force, there was a relatively small turnout at the event, at which Cassady handed out Acid Test graduation diplomas.

At the end of the evening, in the cold morning air, Brand and Jennings went up to the roof of the warehouse, where he asked her, “Isn’t it time that we get married?” Two weeks later they held a ceremony on the beach in Santa Cruz officiated by Paul Lee, a University of California at Santa Cruz philosophy professor who was a friend of Kesey’s. It was a foggy morning in November and the ceremony was a small one, attended only by the Loefflers and by Brand’s Prankster pal artist Roy Sebern.

Brand realized that it was time for his own graduation from Kesey and the Pranksters as well as his attachment to mysticism. He had concluded that Kesey was running a cult; he bridled at the control the novelist asserted over the Pranksters. Years later, after seeing the same process around Baker Roshi, abbot at the San Francisco Zen Center, he would come to describe the use of such charisma as “theft.”

Brand had also gone through the doors of perception to the cosmic place as described by Huxley enough times to realize that it wasn’t news anymore. Also, in meeting the Nixons, he was becoming intrigued with ideas in alternative education while simultaneously catching a glimpse of the technology on the horizon of what would become Silicon Valley. It occurred to him that education and technology could be combined in intriguing new ways.

It was time for his next notion.

Chapter 6

Access to Tools

W hile they brainstormed, the two couples drove all night, winding their way on and off highways and into neighborhoods and back alleys around the Bay Area. Stewart and Lois Brand and James and Cynthia Nixon spent the night rapping while Brand drove, exploring ways to blend the grassroots education work the Nixons had been doing at the Experimental College with the new computer technologies the Brands had learned were emerging in the technology world south of San Francisco.

Nixon and Brand represented polar opposites of the sixties counterculture. Brand, like Ken Kesey, identified with the “psychedelic side” of the antiwar movement while Nixon found inspiration in the Cuban and Chinese revolutions. Nixon wanted to take power while Brand wanted to circumvent it. In the end their differing philosophies would be the undoing of their partnership, and their clashes would leave Brand permanently embittered toward the New Left. The failure of their project would also lead directly to the Whole Earth Catalog.

The Brands roamed the country freely during the summer of 1967, intermittently returning to the Bay Area, where they parked their trailer in Menlo Park, just off the Stanford campus, at the home of Diana Shugart, a former Stanford student then working as a social worker, who became a close friend of the Brands’. When they arrived, Brand wrote in his journal that he had returned “to let my technology happen here.” Buckminster Fuller had opened his eyes, and he was spending his time reading widely with the intent of giving himself a “world technology education.”

The consumer electronics industry was not yet anything like the force that it would become, but there were hints that something was afoot on the Midpeninsula. Brand would be one of the first people to catch wind of the remarkable technology transformation that was just over the horizon.

The future of computing and what would become the internet were being designed at two labs located on either side of the Stanford campus: the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) and the Augmentation Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute. Many of the young researchers in those labs were close to the counterculture, and through Dick Raymond, Brand became friends with a number of them.

One day he wandered into the office of Dave Evans, a young Australian computer researcher who was a key member of Doug Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center, and discovered a Janis Joplin poster on his wall. Brand decided that he felt quite at home in the emerging computing world.

He announced to Raymond that he was “sort of” looking for a job in business technology and hoped that Raymond would have either a position or a pointer to something interesting. Raymond had recently left his consulting position at the Stanford Research Institute. Caught up in the alternative education movement, he had created the Portola Institute the previous year as a haven for freelance entrepreneurs in the field of education. In an early profile of the Whole Earth Catalog that appeared in Esquire in 1970, Ed McLanahan and Gurney Norman, two young writers who had been fellows in the Wallace Stegner creative writing program at Stanford, described Raymond as conveying “an almost tangible aura of Goodness, a beatific quality that is part sincerity, part innocence . . . a truly virtuous man.”[1] His decision to step away from the high-pressure business consulting world was emblematic of the impact of the counterculture movement during the 1960s. The best and the brightest were leaving the establishment and striking out on their own to create alternative institutions.

The Portola Institute became an umbrella for a wide range of projects and would become Silicon Valley’s first “incubator.” Raymond pioneered the idea for nonprofits in the sixties, and as a result of his philosophy, the institute would have a significant impact. Both the Whole Earth Catalog and the Homebrew Computer Club, which gave rise to several dozen companies that forged the personal computer industry—including Apple—emerged from the fertile ground that Raymond created. He would also help pioneer the entrepreneurial culture that is still at the heart of Silicon Valley—where failure due to having taken risks is a badge of honor rather than shame.

Another Portola Institute founder was Bob Albrecht, a refugee from the mainframe computing world who, like Brand, had moved to San Francisco, attracted by the city’s bohemian culture, with a passion for teaching children about computing. When Raymond invited Albrecht to join him in creating the Portola Institute, he moved to relatively bucolic and suburban Menlo Park.

The institute was housed in an unassuming commercial building in downtown Menlo Park, just off El Camino Real, the original route of the Spanish padres that runs from San Jose to San Francisco. Initially Raymond put in some money and Hewlett-Packard donated some more, but it didn’t add up to much. The eclectic board of directors included Richard Baker, who would soon become the abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, and Fannie Shaftel, professor at the School of Education at Stanford University. People would walk in off the streets with ideas, and the principal control mechanism was that the institute kept careful books and knew exactly what it was funding.

Several years after it opened, the Portola Institute served as the umbrella for Albrecht’s publishing company, Dymax, a for-profit spinoff that took its name from Buckminster Fuller’s term Dymaxion—the blend of dynamic and maximize. It was a word coined by Marc LeBrun, a teenager who had grown up in Portola Valley and who had been initiated into the world of computer hacking at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Several years later the publishing firm spawned a newsletter called the People’s Computer Company. The cover of the first issue had a hand-drawn sketch by LeBrun. Across the top was written: “Computers are mostly / used against people instead of for people / used to control people instead of to free them / time to change all that— /we need a . . . / People’s Computer Company.”[2]

It was an eclectic scene that had its own magnetism. LeBrun had an office at the Portola Institute, and Shel Kaphan, one of his close friends from high school, spent more and more time hanging out with him. Kaphan became completely fascinated by the Whole Earth Truck Store and the Catalog, both located in the building next door. He had just graduated from high school, and his father, who was in the aerospace business, had gotten him a messenger job that he intensely disliked. Still, he was getting ready to go to college and he felt that he needed to work, so he walked next door and asked J. D. Smith, who was working as the store manager, if he could have a job.

“OK,” Smith responded.

That would become his exposure to the mail-order business, as well as to a bookstore. It also gave him a front-row seat as a parade of interesting people would file in to visit Brand that summer, including Richard Brautigan, Ken Kesey, and Hugh Romney Jr. It was a great summer job. Kaphan would go on to become an early computer software hacker and would be hired by Jeff Bezos as the first Amazon employee.

And so it was. A growing group of hobbyists who had emerged from the institute discovered that computers could be used for more than just crunching numbers and were captivating even in their most primitive state—even machines that had to be laboriously programmed by toggling switches to enter individual instructions to start. The secret was beginning to trickle out into the world, no longer obvious only to the priesthood of engineers and programmers who had access to corporate computers. When Dymax moved to a tiny shopping center in Menlo Park, a People’s Computer Center was created in the adjacent office, and soon terminals were connecting to a time-sharing computer service. People could walk in, program, and play games. The system, without even the blocky graphics of the first personal computers, was a powerful fantasy amplifier. Little more than text printed on paper by the teletypewriter terminals, the games were still remarkably compelling.

LeBrun was one of the hundreds of kids whom Bob Albrecht turned on to the power of computing. Albrecht had a clear vision of taking computers—at the time viewed by most people as cold, controlling machines—and liberating them so they could be used by anyone. It was a pure sixties vision: he became the Pied Piper of personal computing, intent on bringing the power of computing to the people.

That world was just over the horizon when Brand wandered into the institute in the summer of 1967. His friends were still heading back to the land, but Brand was one step ahead, looking toward a different future. Not long beforehand Raymond had met Michael Phillips, the San Francisco banker who had helped sell tickets at the Trips Festival. Phillips had organized an Educational Innovations Faire that had taken place on the San Francisco State campus as an early effort to explore the intersection of education and technology.

Raymond asked Brand if he wanted to extend Phillips’s original educational fair and help organize a larger version. At first, he demurred, telling Raymond that he was through with public events for a while. The Vietnam War was just beginning to generate a national protest movement. Earlier in the year, the War Resisters League had asked him to organize a series of events at San Francisco State, UC Berkeley, and Stanford that he had dubbed “World War IV.” His idea, in tune with Kesey and the Pranksters, was to promote “friendly violence.” He was quoted in the San Francisco State student paper the Daily Gater, arguing that “a person’s natural aggressive feelings are diverted harmlessly in mock fighting. You get the fun and satisfaction of fighting without inflicting pain—to any serious degree—on others.”[3]

Afterward, Brand felt that his events, which were based on the idea of competitive games to work out aggressions—rather than war—had been failures. At Stanford he had a run-in with David Harris, then the student body president and a committed pacifist, who had rejected Brand’s idea of “nonviolent” violence.

Spurred on by his need for work, however, he gradually warmed to the education and technology exhibition and several weeks later took Raymond up on his offer. Next, he brought in the Nixons.

As the project picked up speed, Brand invited a range of his Prankster friends to visit the institute, asking them to share their fantasies about the future of education. Together they decided they would hold a multiday event showcasing the best educational ideas and technologies at the San Mateo County Fairgrounds, tentatively planned for October of 1968. Albrecht, their most experienced computer industry contact, told them they could expect to attract roughly a hundred equipment makers, each willing to spend $50 and $300 for booth space.

It would also spotlight the ideas of two men in particular. One was Buckminster Fuller, whom Brand and Nixon approached at Esalen about the idea and who agreed to become a featured speaker. The other was Douglas Engelbart, the idealistic computer scientist who in 1962 had embarked on a plan to give humans powerful new intellectual tools by developing a system that would “augment” the human mind. Engelbart had assembled a small group of young computer hackers just across the railroad tracks from the institute’s offices at the Stanford Research Institute.

Between the two men a complete vision of the role that tools could play in aiding an individual to remake his or her world came into view for Brand. A year later he would make their ideas the foundation for the Whole Earth Catalog.

It was the Midpeninsula folk dancing scene that initially connected Brand to Engelbart. Every weekend there was a spirited gathering on an outside deck at the Stanford Student Union. Both Albrecht and Engelbart were feverish folk dancers (Albrecht hosted combo Greek dancing/computer classes at his home in San Francisco), and they soon became friends. This drew the computer researcher into the Portola Institute community as an informal adviser, and it opened a window into his computing research for both the Brands and the Nixons.

Engelbart had a grand vision of a “bootstrapping community”—small teams of knowledge workers supplemented by powerful computers—which he believed would accelerate human progress. Called the oNLine System, or NLS, while it ran on an early mainframe computer that connected workers at terminals using a suite of custom programs for collaboration and productivity, it was the forerunner of the Apple Macintosh, Microsoft Office, and the World Wide Web, several decades ahead of its time. Indeed, the original design papers for the ARPANET, the computer network that was the forerunner of the internet, specified that the first test of the network was to permit remote access to Engelbart’s NLS software, partly because that software was used for the ARPANET Network Information Center that hosted all of the standards documents that defined the ARPANET.

Engelbart was a quiet evangelist for the idea that the power of computing would transform the world. While Brand was trying to recruit the Augmentation Research Center to participate in the fair, Engelbart was in turn recruiting Brand and Nixon to join his bootstrapping computing community. Finally, when the fair collapsed, largely from its inability to obtain foundation support for a proposed $138,000 budget and in part because of increasingly strident quarrels among the Nixons, Brand, and Raymond, Engelbart would briefly fold Nixon and Brand into his team in different ways.

Inspired by Engelbart, Brand, immediately after the failure of the education fair, began thinking about an idea he called the Electronic Interconnect Educated Intellect Operation, or E-I-E-I-O. Initially a fleeting idea, it would reemerge a decade and a half later as the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, or WELL, a computer conferencing system that Brand launched in 1985. Meanwhile, after his falling-out with Brand, Nixon worked at writing manuals for the NLS system from his home in San Francisco.

Ultimately the political chasm between Brand and Nixon could not be bridged. The Nixons thought of themselves as revolutionaries, and they were immersed in campus Marxism as well as the growing antiwar movement. Neither Brand nor Raymond agreed with them on almost anything political and, increasingly, on almost anything else. The project was further complicated by more intimate fragility. The Nixons would separate soon after the project ended. Jennings and Stewart were not doing well either. One night in bed Jennings complained that Brand’s monologues were growing harsh and boring. She asked him to please “gentle up.”

Their partnership on the brink of collapse, the two couples managed to produce and circulate a funding proposal for the education fair. They had a maximalist vision: “architecture, booths, exhibits, bands, lectures, student guides, wandering barkers, food, rides, art environments, electronic hardware, signs, souvenir stands, political harangues, movies, children, innovational demonstrations, dancers, newsmen, seminars, flags, computers, and people with cameras.” Brand hoped to bring in everyone from IBM, RCA, GE, and the US Army to the Mime Troupe, a custom car show, and a steam calliope run by the Merry Pranksters. In 2008, four decades later, a Maker Faire, which felt very much like the idea Brand had initially envisioned, was held at the San Mateo County Fairgrounds.

After Raymond pulled the plug on the project, the Nixons left, while Brand, with Raymond’s blessing, began to think about what he might do next. The experience had convinced him that rather than be the operations coordinator for the fair, he wanted to focus on new technologies. One night Brand and Jennings invited Engelbart to dinner, and over their meal he described a coming vast increase in computing power that would make the computer unique among all tools. Earlier in his career, Engelbart had given a talk on the subject at an electronics conference in Philadelphia, describing a coming exponential increase in computing power—an idea that would become known as Moore’s law, based on predictions made by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore in a 1965 article.[4]

It was an idea that the futurist Herman Kahn was also spreading widely. A week earlier, at an Esalen talk that Brand attended, Kahn argued that computers increased in power tenfold every two years. That night at dinner Engelbart pointed out that a ten-fold increase would be a qualitative change, and that such changes made predictions about future technologies and their impact difficult. It offered Brand a hint of the world that Engelbart was inventing and a head start in understanding the transformation that Silicon Valley would bring to the world. Engelbart was busy developing what would become a universal intellectual tool, and his vision was very much on Brand’s mind when he began to think more deeply about the importance of tools and learning.

At the same time, he was hesitant about completely accepting Engelbart’s vision. The prematurely silver-haired engineer was experimenting with both electronics and “social” technologies. He was trying to draw on all of the ideas that were in the air on the Midpeninsula during the 1960s—everything from est, the “personal growth” movement, to LSD and even Maoism—to help build his community.

“Does the Bootstrap community have a chance anyway?” Brand wrote in his journal. “Is encounter groups etc. going to solve their problems? I’m afraid I doubt it. I Ching?”

He threw the I Ching and it returned “tread carefully.” Then its message changed into “difficulty at beginning.”

From his window seat, brand gazed idly at the dark expanse sliding beneath the plane. He had returned to Rockford to see his father before the end of his long struggle with cancer and then attended the funeral.

He took turns with his mother and his sister, sitting as they watched his father fade away. He didn’t feel grief. Their relationship was a puzzle. He had never felt the same bond that he had had with his mother. Now Brand kept hearing his father’s voice from just a few days earlier as he thrashed and tore at his various restraints and tubes: “I’m free. Hey, I’m free.” Perhaps, in a sense, Brand was too.

Flying home after the funeral, somewhere over Nebraska, between chapters of the book Spaceship Earth by Barbara Ward, an early advocate of sustainable economics, he fell into a reverie about his friends who were building communes all over the rural countryside. He wondered what he might be able to do to assist them. He remembered growing up looking through the L.L.Bean catalog, and he mused about the value it provided—blankets, boots, sweaters, binoculars. It was a celebration of a somewhat mythic lifestyle that married tramping through New England wetlands during hunting season with sitting around the dinner table as cranberry sauce was served. But the catalog’s fundamental value was in what it sold, some of which could not be easily acquired from other sources.

He was quietly musing about his family inheritance. It was something he had largely ignored throughout his twenties, but now that his father was gone, it struck him that he had a responsibility to use it wisely. Now he thought about it in the context of what he might do that would be helpful to his friends who were busy going back to the land and creating communes. He had already been involved on the edges of three such efforts, including the Garnerville Church, Lama, and Drop City, another early rural commune.

Brand realized that many of the challenges that his friends were facing came down to a question of access. What they needed, he decided, was a means to acquire a particular tool or service or knowledge about how to perform some task—not via piecemeal tips passed on from person to person but in a coherent, systematic, easily transferable manner. The Whole Earth Catalog would be subtitled Access to Tools, a bold statement implying the intent to enable skills—to reinvent, initially, the individual and, ultimately, civilization.

How to create such a service? He and Jennings had spent a portion of the past two years roving the West in Brand’s VW bus, and he began to fantasize about a truck that could travel the countryside with information and samples of items that were worth having. It would be almost like a bookmobile, but instead of lending, it would be selling, and it would be spreading not just physical items but also information on how to use them. He added the notion of a catalog that would be continually updated, largely by its users.

Recalling Fuller’s admonition that you have about ten minutes to capture an idea “before it recedes back into dreamland,”[5] he began scribbling furiously on the inside covers of Ward’s book: “What I’m visualizing is an Access Mobile (accessory?) with all manner of access materials + advice for sale cheap. Including performances of stuff, books, dandy survival and camping equipment, catalogs, design plans, periodical subscriptions, copy equipment (+ other gathering equipment—some element of barter here). Prime item of course would be the catalog.”

As an afterthought—in a riff on a then-popular backpacking catalog with a cult following, he added: “Notion: every catalog item pictured is held by a naked lady.”

He would never finish reading Spaceship Earth.

When he arrived back in Menlo Park, once again something had changed in the way he viewed the world. Early the next morning he drove to the Portola Institute and pitched the idea to Dick Raymond. Raymond listened while Brand sketched his vision for the access catalog idea and then asked a couple of questions for which Brand had no ready answers: “Who do you consider as the audience for this ‘catalog’? What kind of expenses do you think you’ll have in the first year? What will be in the catalog? How often would you publish it? How many copies?”[6]

After some back and forth, Raymond said OK to the idea that Brand would move into the scheme gradually, bootstrapping the project from Portola’s office and using its phone, stationery, and financial support.

Several weeks later Brand was ensconced in his new office when Raymond leaned his head into the room and asked, “By the way, what do you think you’ll call it?” At this point, Brand hadn’t even gotten that far. His 1966 Whole Earth campaign still echoing in his mind, he responded, off the cuff: “I dunno, Whole Earth Catalog, or something.”[7]

In history, some years acquire what cultural historian Jackson Lears describes as a “numinous” quality.[8] He points to 1789, 1861, 1914, and 1968 as unique historical branch points. The same can be said of places. There are particular geographical locations where cultural, economic, political, and technological forces intersect and conspire to throw the world in a new direction. Venice and Florence lit the spark that led to the Renaissance, and pre–World War I Vienna served as an extraordinary cultural and scientific hotbed for modernism.

Silicon Valley, first named in 1971, has been a similar magnet for the forces that shape world history. Historians have paid attention both to William Hewlett and David Packard’s garage in Professorville and to William Shockley’s laboratory in Mountain View, but less attention has been paid to the extraordinary convergence of counterculture institutions in 1968 at what would soon become the northern boundary of Silicon Valley. It was not accidental that the Whole Earth Catalog emerged in the heart of this technology hothouse, shaped by the same forces and at exactly the same historical moment that birthed Silicon Valley.

One evening Brand brought Kesey by for a look at Engelbart’s oNLine System. For an hour Dave Evans took the system through its paces, showing the writer how it would be possible to manipulate text, retrieve information, and collaborate with others. At the end of the demonstration, Kesey exhaled and said, “It’s the next thing after acid.”

LSD might expand your mind, but computing gave you a steering wheel. So would the Catalog.

When Brand decided to abandon any notion of going back to the land and instead returned to Menlo Park to explore his “technology,” the location of the Whole Earth Truck Store would prove to be fundamental. Despite his grand plan to become a tool supplier and educational library on wheels, another round of commune visits had provided ample market research that it wasn’t a business; the communards simply had no money. The truck (a 1963 Dodge, to be precise) would be stocked and sent out several times, but it made much more sense to open an arm of the business without wheels attached.

On the face of it, the Truck Store was a hardware store, its mission to sell things that appeared in the Catalog. However, in addition to an eclectic array of intriguing and useful tools, many of which were hard to find, it mostly sold books, T-shirts, and other clothing, maps, and postcards.

Set just across El Camino Real from the Menlo Park business district in four thousand square feet of retail space with a volleyball court in back, the Truck Store was a storefront with a large warehouse space, where at one point Brand constructed a small bedroom, and another common room that served as a lunchroom off to one side. Raymond was able to swing a five-year lease for $450 a month, and by renting two offices, they brought it down to just $250.

Jim Wolpman had worked at a large establishment labor law firm in San Francisco. But the increasingly strident politics of the sixties led him to leave the firm, and he quickly became a people’s lawyer on the Midpeninsula. He needed a place to hang a shingle, and Brand offered him space for an office at the back of the Truck Store. He also helped out by referring contacts and clients. They had met through Kesey on Perry Lane, but the two men never became close. Wolpman’s law practice began by representing the victims of marijuana busts and then increasingly expanded into work defending the burgeoning antiwar movement. Brand was militantly apolitical in Wolpman’s eyes, but in the Whole Earth Catalog he could see the influence of the Morley family hardware business. He had a ringside seat as the operation blossomed; to his mind the Catalog had much of the flavor of infinite hardware store, full of nooks and crannies and shelves with every possible gadget and component.

The Truck Store showcased just a fraction of that variety. By the spring of 1970 most of its goods consisted of books found in the Catalog, but on display could also be found Ashley stoves, a Corona corn mill, Aladdin lamps, Snugli baby carriers, and a few magazines.

Dennis Allison, a young physicist who worked several blocks away at the Stanford Research Institute, made a habit of visiting regularly during his lunch hour to peruse novel items he wouldn’t find anywhere else. On one visit he found a pair of Mennonite pants that were good for gardening; another time he found a broad, sharp axlike tool, called an adze, to use in his garden. The Truck Store began as a counterculture boutique and eventually became a destination to which Catalog devotees could make a pilgrimage.

Serendipitously, the decision to locate the Truck Store adjacent to the Portola Institute at 558 Santa Cruz Avenue also placed Brand at the center of the emerging counterculture on the Midpeninsula. Ramparts magazine had been founded in offices just around the corner in 1962, before moving to San Francisco several years later. The Truck Store was also several blocks away from the already legendary Kepler’s Books. Founded by peace activist and World War II conscientious objector Roy Kepler, it was part coffeehouse and gathering spot for the political and bohemian elements that were the heart of the gathering counterculture. In the evening the bookstore would play host to Jerry Garcia and his pals before the Grateful Dead was formed. (First as Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions and then as the Warlocks, they had begun playing at Magoo’s, the local pizza parlor just up the street from the Truck Store on Santa Cruz Avenue.)

Around the corner on El Camino was East West Bookshop, an early alternative bookseller, while in the opposite direction was the storefront office of the Midpeninsula Free University, which had begun in the living room of a handful of local Marxists in the midsixties and would erupt into a powerful counterculture institution, briefly teaching as many as fifty thousand students at the height of the antiwar movement. Several blocks to the west was where the International Foundation for Advanced Study, the LSD research group, had been located until 1966, when LSD became an illegal drug.

The Truck Store was also only a few blocks from Douglas Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center laboratory at the Stanford Research Institute, and near where Bob Albrecht soon would open the People’s Computer Company, which would ultimately serve as the incubator for the Homebrew Computer Club. In 1974, Raymond and the Portola Institute also helped nurture the nearby BriarPatch Food Co-op, which would thrive for the next decade. From the rich soil of this alternative community, the Catalog would shape the worldview of an entire generation of young Americans, key engineers and entrepreneurs in what would soon become Silicon Valley and would presage the 1970s environmental movement.

As had been the case since he’d arrived in the Bay Area, Brand’s family inheritance, as well as a contribution from Jennings, was just enough to keep him from having to take a day job. Years later Brand would adopt the mantra “Live small, so you can live large.” Indeed, when the Brands first arrived on Alpine Road in Menlo Park, they lived in a fifteen-foot-long box trailer that had little more than a bed and a tiny kitchen. It was a classic hippie pad—the bed was a mattress set directly on the trailer’s floor. It was barely large enough for the two of them and their cat, Tao. They parked it in Diana Shugart’s backyard on Alpine Road.

The Catalog would become an intellectual touchstone for the emerging alternative to mainstream American consumerism. In theory, at least, the back-to-the-land movement was onto something wondrous. To an increasing number of Americans, substituting a more intimate, low-footprint relationship with rural living was a brave and radical escape from an economic system that encouraged violent oppression, personal alienation, and the destruction of the environment. They would build their homes, till their fields, and sell homemade crafts to the outside world.

After he launched the Whole Earth Truck Store during the spring of 1968, Brand spent almost $6,000 on an additional Airstream trailer and a used Dodge Power Wagon equipped with extra fuel tanks and parked them on Shugart’s property. Shugart would go to work at the Truck Store as an office manager as the enterprise grew.

Although Kesey was in the process of moving to Oregon, many of the Pranksters were still around, along with a number of fellow travelers. One day Jennings heard a man shouting in the street in front of Shugart’s home. It turned out to be Hugh Romney, later to go by Wavy Gravy, the leader of the Hog Farm commune. He was yelling at a young woman who was on a bad trip, attempting to bring her down by threatening to staple his penis to the front of his car. Weird, Jennings thought, though no weirder than many other events she had witnessed.

Jennings assiduously avoided the drug scene, never became a Prankster, and would become the driving force and effective general manager of the Catalog and the Truck Store. A “hidden figure” when she was a programmer working for the navy, she was long underappreciated for her role in creating the Catalog as well. John Brockman visited during the Truck Store’s first year and spent the day sitting with Brand painstakingly underlining passages in Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings, an early book on cybernetics, while Jennings, seated across the room, worked at laying out an issue of the Catalog. (At the fiftieth anniversary, held in San Francisco in October of 2018, from the stage Brand would acknowledge that Jennings had been the cofounder of the Catalog.)

Brand and Jennings had found their way into a tight community less than a mile from Perry Lane, the bohemian focal point of the Midpeninsula, where Brand had first met Ken Kesey. Members of the Grateful Dead had lived in a rambling mansion known as the Chateau about halfway between the two neighborhoods. Dick Raymond lived just up the road a mile farther along Alpine Road in a middle-class neighborhood known as Ladera. Vic Lovell, Shugart’s former boyfriend and a psychology graduate student who alerted Kesey to the LSD experiments at the Menlo Park Veterans Administration Hospital, and Richard Alpert, as well as the writers and Kesey pals Robert Stone and Ed McClanahan, had previously lived just a couple of blocks over on Homer Lane, as had several Merry Pranksters. In a cottage at the other end of the tiny neighborhood, Bill English, Doug Engelbart’s chief engineer, was renting a home from Raymond. English would be closely involved in several conferences on sustainability and environmental design that grew out of the Catalog. His wife, Roberta, was working as a secretary for Engelbart (and as a result was probably the first secretary to ever use an interactive word processor with video display). They would both be Catalog volunteers, and Brand would marry them in a ceremony in Shugart’s backyard.

Although Brand had underwritten the project with his family inheritance, it was operated as a nonprofit and rooted in the egalitarian values of its time and place. Wages ranged from $2 to $5 an hour; even Brand as the publisher was taking home only about $10,000 annually. The staff would grow to almost thirty by the time of the release of The Last Whole Earth Catalog in 1971. Volleyball in a lot behind the store became a daily event, and Engelbart’s programmers and engineers would occasionally join in. (Because it was played during lunch on paid time, teams tried to stretch games as long as possible.)

The Catalog itself was first announced to the world in May 1968 in a Portola Institute marketing brochure, offering $8 annual subscriptions covering two issues and two supplements, and setting the single-issue price at $5. “The function of this program is improving access to tools for self-dependent self-education, individual or cooperative,” the brief announcement read, adding that as a preliminary to the Catalog, the Truck Store would travel to intentional communities, experimental schools, and design departments during the summer to do market research.

In preparing for his new project, Brand went back to the roots of his senior year magazine-writing class at Stanford. His first stop was to visit Bill Lane, the publisher of Sunset magazine. He remembered a basic lesson from his class: that it would take a minimum of $1 million to launch a national magazine. But having had an early hint that new publishing technology was going to change the equation, he was undaunted.

Lane suggested a do-it-yourself approach. He counseled Brand to shoot his own photographs, but he should do so using a Hasselblad, a top-of-the-line large format camera, so it wouldn’t appear that he was cutting corners on quality. Soon the decision was made not to carry advertisements. The philosophy was simple as was spelled out in the Catalog: “We don’t carry ads anymore, if you have a product, let us see it, if we like it, you don’t owe us anything.”[9]

Brand also kept his hand in on multimedia projects even while he was launching the Catalog. In June, shortly before he and Jennings headed out on the road for the summer, Portola Institute announced WAR:GOD, an abstract multimedia extravaganza based on images “polarized around spirituality and violence.” It was an extension of some of the ideas in World War IV that had angered David Harris. Brand used two Kodak slide projectors, a 16 mm projector, and a stereo tape recorder to create an hour-long presentation that never repeated itself because the slides would be resequenced between each performance. He took the soundtrack from almost two dozen sources, including Ramon Sender’s electronic music, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the movie A Fistful of Dollars, Malcolm X, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Franklin Roosevelt, Ken Kesey, the Grace Cathedral Choir, and Adolf Hitler, among others.

Like America Needs Indians!, WAR:GOD received good reviews[10] and might have gone further, but after seeing it, Jerry Mander pointed out that most of the images and some of the audio had been “borrowed” without copyright license and that was that.

In July, Brand produced a prototype of the Catalog—a four-page typed “Partial Preliminary Booklist” that began with Buckminster Fuller’s No More Secondhand God under the heading “Understanding Whole Systems” and concluded with descriptions of two magazines, the Modern Utopian and the Realist. In between, he listed favorite magazines and lumped books into three design-oriented categories: Shelter and Land Use, Industry and Craft, and Communications. By the time the first Catalog appeared in October, the category list would expand to include Community, Nomadics, and Learning. Brand took his inspiration for the size and format of the first Catalog from Steve Baer’s oversize Dome Cookbook, which had been published the previous year, and drew together his drawings of geometric shapes, handwritten memories of building various domes, typewritten instructions, and black-and-white photos.

Baer, introduced to Brand by Steve Durkee, was an early example of the diverse assembly of technophiles Brand organized Tom Sawyer–style to help create the Catalog. A fellow army vet, Baer had originally been inspired by Lewis Mumford to view technology as a positive force for society, and he played a key role in the design of the dome residences at the early Colorado commune Drop City.

Brand was gradually moving away from LSD, but he still had a penchant for psychedelics. For a while an E tank of nitrous oxide, ordered weekly, was a permanent fixture at the Truck Store office. It was a convenient quick high, or “flash,” as Brand liked to think of it. It was kind of a workingman’s drug. You could take a hit and if you liked it, you could take another. It wasn’t like acid or grass. Afterward you could drive home safely, and unlike with LSD, if you had a bad trip, you weren’t stuck in hell for the next eight hours. He introduced Dick Raymond to “gas”—as he called it—and then declared that his mentor had passed the Acid Test in just forty-four seconds. Brand became highly dependent on this instant rush that quickly brought you right back to reality—until one day he just kept flashing.

In November, just after he had published the first Catalog, he found himself crying helplessly at the end of Camelot, the musical comedy-drama. Soon thereafter, he was listening to the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band when suddenly the world went away, and then he found himself on the other side of a large room with Jennings shaking him, saying, “You’re laughing hysterically.”

Clearly, he had gone over some physiological edge with nitrous oxide, so he abruptly stopped using it. Before he stopped, however, nitrous oxide—or perhaps the combination of the explosive growth of the Catalog, nitrous oxide, LSD, and a crumbling marriage—would push him into a deepening depression. It would be a significant factor in his decision to place an end date on the Catalog: 1971—in the fall of 1969, only a year after its first publication, just as it began its exponential growth.

Sandy Tcherepnin had gone west after Harvard to look for a new life. Through friends, she spent the summer of 1968 living in Marin County with a group of mostly former Stanford students. At the end of the summer, they gave her a puppy and told her it was time to move on. They also told her that Stewart Brand was looking to hire someone for a new project in Menlo Park. Coincidentally, she knew who Brand was: one day walking across Harvard Square after class she had seen this odd fellow in a top hat, standing in the square with a billboard that read “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?”

So she hopped in her VW bug and headed to Dick Raymond’s house for an interview, where she learned about the Catalog. Brand was looking for a typist to help with the production operation, which they planned to establish in a rambling house owned by Raymond that was set among the redwoods on Skyline Boulevard in the mountains above Stanford.

Tcherepnin had a crucial qualification—she was a good typist. After a brief conversation, Brand told her the job was hers and invited her over to the Portola Institute for a celebratory round of nitrous oxide. She became the Whole Earth Catalog’s first employee.

After a short time working at the Portola Institute office, the Catalog team set up shop in the garage of Rancho Diablo, a seventy-acre former hippie crash pad with views of the Pacific Ocean. For a while they all commuted from Menlo Park up into the hills to the garage. Later Brand and Jennings moved the two trailers up to Skyline. At one point they lived in the house as caretakers and at another point they lived in the trailers set among the redwoods on the Rancho Diablo property. Production was laid out around a wood-burning stove set in the middle of the garage; sometimes when Brand came across a book that he felt was truly terrible, he would toss it into the fire.

He kept his desk in a corner next to the garage door, while typesetting, photography, and pasteup were each arrayed in the other corners of the large, open room. They began by using beeswax to paste down each article and eventually moved on to rubber cement. Sometimes Catalog entries would be cut from a book or magazine and be pasted directly into the layout. In the summer when it got hot they just opened the garage doors.

The first sixty-four-page Catalog was printed at a small Menlo Park printing press located around the corner from the Truck Store, and then the cover, which was printed separately in color, was saddle-stitched to create the finished product. When they began, desktop publishing did not exist, but for $150 a month, Brand leased an IBM Selectric Composer, an advanced version of the company’s workhorse electric typewriter that had been introduced in 1966. The composer was capable of producing camera-ready justified copy with proportional fonts and it opened the door to low-cost publishing. (The Fall 1969 Catalog cost only $33,000 to produce.)

The new desktop publishing tools meshed perfectly with Brand’s editorial design for the Catalog. By purchasing an $850 halftone camera, he freed the Catalog from the world of print shops and graphic design houses completely. It made self-publishing not only possible but easy and adaptive in real time. He had decreed there would be no politics—although there clearly were, both between the lines and otherwise. He went about recruiting short, pithy items, mostly mentions of useful books, magazines, and journals, from an expanding list of contacts. There would be only positive reviews because the point was to provide people with what they needed, not what they didn’t. The contributor’s fee was ten dollars for about two hundred words plus a byline.

It was all tied together by Brand’s introductory sentence: “We are as gods and might as well get used to it.” (In a second printing of the first edition it was edited to read “get good at it. . . .”) The notion, he later acknowledged, was borrowed from Edmund Leach, the British social anthropologist who in 1967 had given a series of lectures focused on the interconnectedness of the world and humanity’s relationship to the environment. A Runaway World?, a book based on his lectures, begins: “Men have become like gods. Isn’t it about time that we understood our divinity?”[11]

Brand’s introduction contained a simple rationale, divided into “FUNCTION” and “PURPOSE.” The Catalog was to be an evaluation and access “device”—making it possible for the user “to know better what is worth getting and where and how to do the getting.” To be listed in the Catalog, an item must be useful as a tool; relevant to independent education; high quality or low cost; not already common knowledge; and easily available by mail.

Under “PURPOSE” the Catalog noted that government, big business, formal education, and the church had gone about as far as possible. Now a “realm of personal power” was ready to “find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.”

Both the front and back covers featured a large color photo of the Earth taken by a NASA weather satellite. On the back cover, Brand added a final philosophical touch in large type: “We can’t put it together. It is together.”

The inside cover of the Catalog offered a directory dividing its contents into seven categories, ending with “Learning,” telegraphing Brand’s enduring passion. The interior layout had the informality of a scrapbook—items didn’t line up, and they would sprawl across the pages. Some pages were so packed with a hodgepodge of images (drawings, charts, photographs) and text that they brought to mind the collage of Brand’s multimedia experiments. All told there were microreviews of 135 items in the first Catalog, including shout-outs to the Sierra Club, Heathkit electronics kits, Kaibab boots, and Richard Brautigan’s novella Trout Fishing in America.

You could find advice about complications when cutting the cord after birth; a short discussion of whether “sportsmen should take dope”; an endorsement of New Scientist magazine; a reproduction of the Ariadne astrological symbol; an article about how house shells quickly made from epoxy could solve the world’s housing crisis; a discussion of “bioholography,” which argued that animals take advantage of “a ‘coherent’ level of background ultrasound”; a cartoon of a naked woman with an elephant head; instructions (printed upside down) on how to correctly use a barometer to measure building height; sketches of the molecular structure of LSD, psilocybin, trimethoxyamphetamine, and inactive bufotenine under the headline ALL THE WAY WITH DNA; and an analysis of the causes of urban rioting—and that was just up to page twenty-four. Of course the drug descriptions came without an inventory of things to order. Three pages later one could find illustrated descriptions, with ordering information, of hacksaws; flexible files (“impregnated with super-hard aluminum abrasives”); a compact tool and knife chest; eight-and-a-half-inch shears; a “Model 355 Midgetester” for measuring voltage and resistance; an Atlas of Landforms from the US Geological Survey; a “G1717 Engineering Compass” that was “similar to Model G1719 Geological Compass except that it does not have a pendulum clinometer, level bubble or extension rule”; as well as information about how best to make potholes with explosives and a tribute to internal pipe wrenches. And there it was: How many people heading to northern New Mexico to start their commune had ever thought of the dilemma of poorly excavated potholes before arriving? The Whole Earth Catalog had. There was even a page of products from good old L.L.Bean.

But much of what filled the Catalog were listings for books and magazines—practical guides to glassblowing and woodcrafts and how to grow organic vegetables, but also books about dolphin neuroscience; Arthur Koestler’s Ghost in the Machine and The Act of Creation; an anthology of John Cage’s writings and lectures; Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilization in China, volume IV:2; Frank Herbert’s Dune; the USGS’s Thermal Springs of the United States and Other Countries and the World—A Summary; Leslie M. Lecron’s Self-Hypnotism: The Technique and Its Use in Daily Living; Matsuo Bashō’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North; the I Ching; and scores more. National Geographic was in there, but so were American Cinematographer and Architectural Digest. There were guides to auto repair, home refrigeration, welding, selling honey, mushroom hunting, operating a one-man sawmill, and solar power. Endorsements could be expert or playful. (“Van Waters & Rogers is a huge supply house. I don’t know anything about them except that they have a hard-bound catalog this thick of illegal-looking equipment.”) Sometimes a book would get only a summary; for those of greater ambition or complexity a section run-through was occasionally offered. (The content breakdown for the Yearbook of the Society for General Systems Research, volume IX, included “Concession-Making in Experimental Conditions,” “Some Considerations on the Notion of Invariant Field in Linguistics,” and “Toward a Unified Theory of Cognition,” among numerous other such condensations for that volume alone.) Credit was given to outsiders who suggested inclusion of an item; as for his own commentary, as a longtime fan of the Realist, Brand adopted Paul Krassner’s trademark “PK” signature style, signing his articles in the Catalog “SB.”

From the outset, while much of the counterculture rejected computing technology for being a central component of the bureaucratic mainstream world they dismissed, Brand embraced it.

“I worked for 2 hours last night online with a fantastically sophisticated interactive computer system,” he wrote, describing Engelbart’s computing system to Baer. “And then dreamt most of the night among the tree of choices and clarities.”

Although it was still more than seven years before the first hobbyist personal computer would appear, the Catalog was sprinkled with hints that the power of computing might be seized from corporations and the military. A few pages after listings of buckskin (“hair-on-calf unclipped $1.60/sq. foot”) and yarn (fifty cents for a catalog and sample card) was this:

9100A Calculator

The best of the new table-top number crunchers is this Hewlett-Packard machine. It is programmable, versatile, and fast—more so than its competition. Portola Institute currently is using the 9100A to help kids gain early mastery of computers—it is a superb inquiry machine.

Later in the Catalog was an endorsement of We Built Our Own Computers, a British book, accompanied by a photo of the “Electric Logical Computer Exeter.” And a page before the 9100A was a two-page spread on Human Biocomputer, which “offers the opportunity to learn and explore computers without requiring money or administrative approval.” The signs were there from the beginning.

Fuller’s systems thinking perspective and a cybernetic approach to information spilled out of the Catalog. Fuller and Norbert Wiener were highlighted up front (the first two pages of listings—the first thing a reader would encounter after the introductory material—concerned material written by Fuller), and deeper within were discussions (with ordering instructions) of Fuller’s Education Automation and Weiner’s Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. For many of the Catalog’s readers, it was the first time they had heard about Wiener’s science of communications and control. (By the early 1970s, cybernetics would take root more deeply in Europe than in the United States, where Wiener was viewed as an arrogant and prickly outsider. Indeed, John McCarthy, the computer scientist and mathematician, had come up with the term artificial intelligence because, he wrote, he was trying to avoid contact and quarrels with Wiener and his devotees.[12])

Brand saw the Catalog not as a stand-alone document but as part of a dynamic system, and throughout its existence he added regular supplements to offer a channel for feedback in what he believed would be a self-sustaining organism.[13] Brand’s insistence on this feedback loop added more currency and complexity to what thus became a sort of “living” document—The Last Whole Earth Catalog, published in 1971, would offer a vast menu of items sprawling over almost 500 pages.

The Whole Earth Catalog supplements offered a window into the communal back-to-the-land movement that had captured the spirit of the counterculture. The January 1969 issue featured this stark Prankster-friendly statement in large block letters on its cover: “BRAIN DAMAGE IS WHAT WE HAD IN MIND ALL ALONG. CHROMOSOME DAMAGE IS JUST GRAVY.”

Inside was reprinted correspondence from Mark, Vicki, Bernie, Diane, Parscal, and Liz, who were writing that they were headed from Detroit to Oregon and were looking for a place to stay for an “indefinite amount of time.” Incredibly excited about their upcoming adventure, they concluded by noting: “This last weekend the Doors shouted out to the audience to break on through to the other side.”

In a startling handwritten scrawl, George, Liza, and Dave wrote back from their Oregon farm with an impassioned plea asking the supplicants to please stay away: “Help!!! We’re all dying of leprosy!!! Bring lots of bandages, clean gauze, old rags, anything!![14]

The production of the first two Catalogs was an intense round-the-clock marathon, with the burden falling almost entirely on Brand and Jennings. Despite the spreading counterculture that surrounded them, they had adopted a largely conventional marriage. They would spend long hours putting together the Catalog and then come home to the trailer, where Jennings would make dinner, wash the clothes, and then do the project accounting while Brand “sort of spaced out in front of the TV and got inspired.”[15] The project quickly began to take its toll on their marriage.

Dick and Ann Raymond had recently been divorced, and Brand had difficulty accepting their separation. She had met a therapist, whom she would marry, and she invited Brand and Jennings to dinner one night to meet him. She was shocked when a sullen Brand set what appeared to be a Colt .45 revolver on the table and remained almost completely silent during the meal. She didn’t know it at the time, but it was, in fact, not a real gun but rather a realistic toy that would attain national notoriety that year when it appeared in Lois Jennings’s hand in the first chapter of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which described the couple driving to meet Ken Kesey, who was getting out of jail: “And, oh yeah, there’s a long-barreled Colt .45 revolver in her hand, only nobody on the street can tell it’s a cap pistol as she pegs away, kheeew, kheeew, at the erupting marshmallow faces. . . .”[16] No matter its authenticity, the gun and Brand’s brooding left a lasting impression.

While she lived in Ladera, Ann Raymond had become an informal den mother for a neighborhood group of bright youngsters, several of whom, like LeBrun, would soon go to work at the Portola Institute or the Whole Earth Truck Store. The first to arrive was Joe Bonner (he would later change his name to Dwarka), one of two sons of a Stanford University chemistry professor. He had studied art with Ann Raymond for five years, and shortly after graduating from high school, he became the Catalog’s first pasteup artist, living in the Brands’ trailer while helping to finish production.

The IBM Selectric Composer was a revelation for Bonner. It provided a kind of immediate flexibility that hadn’t previously been possible. He could simply tell the typist, “Okay, make this one so wide,” and they changed the width and then printed it out again without having to reenter all the text.

The Catalog’s first print run was a minuscule one thousand copies. After he retrieved the first batch from the printer, Brand drove out to the beach at San Gregorio. It was the spot where he had first touched the Pacific Ocean. Sentimentally, he tossed a Catalog out into the waves—he considered it a symbol of launching his publication into a timeless ocean. It was a ritual he would repeat for the first several issues.

Shortly thereafter, Bill English invited him to participate in several planning sessions ahead of a demonstration that Engelbart’s computer designers were preparing for an industry and academic meeting known as the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. English had seen both America Needs Indians! and WAR:GOD and believed that his planned demonstration to the world’s one thousand leading computer scientists and engineers could use Brand’s multimedia expertise.

At this stage, the computer industry was dominated by a handful of mainframe computer makers, and computing itself was not directly interactive: you entered your program onto punch cards that were read into a processor that then ran your program. The output was returned on a computer printout.

That was all about to change.

Engelbart was a dreamer who envisioned a style of computing that was instantly responsive to a user who would interact with the machine through a mouse, a keyboard, and a screen. It would be almost two decades until this became the standard way that personal computers were used by the general public. But Brand was one of the few humans on the planet given an inkling of what was around the corner.

In December, at an event that would later be called the Mother of All Demos,[17] Engelbart sat onstage at the conference in front of a giant video screen and introduced this new style of computing to the world. Even computer scientists had not seen computer mice and interactive displays before, nor had they learned about the hypertext concept for linking documents that would decades later become the basis of the World Wide Web. The computer itself was located in Menlo Park, just blocks from the Portola Institute. Brand was on hand there to operate a video camera that would relay images of the computer operators to the conference. He was an observer, but there was no video feed of the audience to see the crowd reaction to the demonstration.

When Engelbart ended his presentation, the Menlo Park team asked over the microwave relay, “Did they like it?” They waited for what seemed like a very long time, and then the answer came back: “Yes, they liked it.” Engelbart had received a standing ovation.

There was a deep resonance between Engelbart’s intelligence-augmentation vision and Brand’s access-to-tools philosophy. Although the Catalog was neither fish nor fowl (he wasn’t really selling things—just telling people where they could find them—and it wasn’t actually a book, which confused bookstores), sales were immediately brisk. Soon, despite the fact that he had trouble persuading bookstores to carry the Catalog, there was a second print run of another thousand copies.

Early on, there were few reviews. One appeared in Scientific American, written by physicist Philip Morrison, who had met Brand when he was on his “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” tour in Cambridge and purchased a button. Brand had sent him a copy of the Catalog, and Morrison described it as “good reading” from a “strangely attractive subculture, that of the dissenter and reformer who seeks to construct a philosophical, personal and economic refuge from the curious industrial society.”[18] Morrison’s review was important. It set a tone for the Catalog to be seen as “cool.”

Not long afterward, the Washington Post columnist Nicholas von Hoffman wrote a column about the Catalog that was syndicated nationally, resulting in lots of attention. What really boosted subscriptions and purchases were other mentions in newspapers. At one point in 1969, “Uncle Ben Sez,” an advice column in the Detroit Free Press, received a letter from someone asking about how to go “back to the land.” “Get the Whole Earth Catalog,” the columnist responded, adding an address to write to. That one mention generated scores of magazine sales and subscriptions.

“We’re getting very friendly reviews in the underground press and extraordinary mail,” Brand wrote in a letter to his mother. They had received 650 subscriptions and sold out their second printing of the first Catalog. They were up to seven employees, and in the summer they planned to take the operation on the road and produce a supplement in New Mexico or Colorado, “where a lot of the action is this summer.”

It was soon even clearer that they were riding a rocket ship. Brand had advanced the project about $25,000 from his family inheritance to produce the first Catalog. After selling out the first two thousand, they did ten thousand more in the spring, followed by a second run of twenty thousand. In July of 1969, the Catalog operation had its first profitable month, taking in almost $16,000 in income against $8,000 in expenses. For the Fall 1969 issue, they printed sixty thousand copies and had four thousand subscribers.

For many readers, stumbling upon something in the Catalog would prove a transformative experience, sending their lives careening in a new direction. That was the case with Jamis MacNiven, who had been a loyal reader for several years and was working as a traveling salesman selling milking machines to small dairies in Connecticut. One day the snowfall was so heavy he and his wife literally couldn’t find their home on the street where they lived. They decided that they had to move to California, where he’d gone to college. He moved back to the Bay Area and used the Catalog as an instruction manual to teach himself to become a general contractor. He soon talked his way into his first Berkeley home remodeling job and then was hired by a young Steve Jobs to remodel his home in Saratoga. Ultimately, MacNiven opened Buck’s, a popular Silicon Valley restaurant, and he would build his own home off the grid in the Santa Cruz Mountains, not far from where the Catalog was produced.

Within a couple of years the Catalog became synonymous with the counterculture. Journalist Shana Alexander profiled Marlon Brando in Life magazine, reporting that she had spotted the Catalog lying on the floor next to his bare feet. He told her that in the publication he had finally found a statement of purpose that matched his own.

National recognition, however, meant more pressure and more work, and it quickly began to take a toll. In September, after just eleven months, Brand announced, “The CATALOG has but 20 months to live.” Then he added: “The function of the skyrocket is to get as high as possible before it blows.”

As work expanded, staff was added to run the Truck Store as well as produce the Catalog. By the fall of 1969, the team had grown to fourteen. Most of the new employees were young, some right out of high school. To them Brand was something of a distant figure who kept to himself, reading books and writing quick reviews in a small cubbyhole at the store. But as the workload of the Catalog relentlessly increased, Shugart noticed Brand’s mood darkening. Each day, he would dig just a little bit of a coffin-shaped hole in her front yard.

At one point she asked him what he was doing. He said that after he had begun the Whole Earth Catalog, he asked God, “Okay, God, what’s next?”

And God replied, “Sorry, Stewart, that was it.”

In 1968, James T. Baldwin, often known as Jay Baldwin or J. Baldwin, was teaching industrial design at San Francisco State University when the departmental secretary came to him during his lunch hour and said that someone was waiting to see him.

The sandy-haired man who was waiting outside of the design workshop was wearing a white jumpsuit and sporting a small holographic disk attached to his forehead.

“I have this idea,” the man said, “that with three phone calls you ought to be able to find out anything about anything that exists in the world.”

“There’s only one place where you can find a catalog of everything in the world,” Baldwin responded. “The Yellow Pages of the Manhattan phone book.”

Stewart Brand responded, “Well, I’ve heard you read catalogs. Why should the Manhattan phone book make a difference?”

“What’s important about a product is you can get it,” Baldwin replied.

A disciple of Buckminster Fuller like Brand, Baldwin was a stickler for the notion that design ideas actually work. He had made a rubber stamp that read “Bring it around and we’ll take it for a drive.”

Baldwin was five years older than Brand and both men had served in the US Army. They both shared a love of tools, and while Brand had left the military with an antipathy for mindless bureaucracy, Baldwin, the son of an AT&T engineer, had left with a parallel distaste for bad design.[19] Baldwin had walked away from a career as a commercial industrial designer when he realized that he believed his designs had to have human rather than merely commercial value.

He had worked for Moss Tents, an early maker of innovative camping and backpacking gear, before moving to California to attend graduate school. At UC Berkeley he was involved in the Free Speech Movement and then was fortuitously hired to teach industrial design at San Francisco State. An inveterate tinkerer and prototyper, he would become part of a small cadre of “outlaw” designers and builders who were the heart and soul of the Catalog.

Baldwin was one of Brand’s first serious recruits. He soon became the editor of the “Nomadics” section and stayed with Brand when he reinvented the Catalog as the CoEvolution Quarterly in the 1970s. Soon after meeting Brand, Baldwin received a letter from Fuller offering him a teaching job at Southern Illinois University—the letter appeared in his office mailbox simultaneously with a pink slip from San Francisco State. He left the Bay Area, but he would remain an integral part of the informal guild of Catalog contributors.

It was through Baldwin that Brand met Lloyd Kahn, who would become the editor of the “Shelter” section of the Catalog. In 1965, Kahn quit the insurance business to become a self-taught home builder, eventually specializing in domes. He had gotten a job as the foreman on a project to build a home in Big Sur employing giant thirty-foot-long bridge timbers. It was nicely designed, but it was also remarkably heavy. That winter Buckminster Fuller had come to lecture at Esalen and spoke about building geodesic domes. Kahn was struggling with immense timbers that weighed as much as half a ton, and he was stunned to hear Fuller describe these ethereal, lightweight buildings.

He quit his job and began building domes.

The counterculture was in full bloom, and he built his own home in Big Sur complete with a terraced organic garden. When he had been a Stanford undergraduate three years before Brand, there hadn’t been any discussion of Eastern religions in his Western civilization class. Now, however, the baby boomers were exploring a vast array of ideas that had been missed by Kahn’s silent generation: cosmology, mind expansion, communication with dolphins, ecology, political activism, communes, and on and on and on.

As the counterculture burgeoned, he discovered he was frequently writing people letters about how to build domes. In fact, he was writing the same letter over and over again. He was thinking about publishing his own book on how to build a dome, throwing in some how-to information on organic gardening, and how to get chickens by mail from Iowa, when he met Baldwin. Baldwin told Kahn about the Whole Earth Truck Store, so he drove to Menlo Park to meet Brand. When he read the first issue of the Catalog, he realized that Brand was way ahead of him, and he didn’t need to publish anything. He was thrilled with the Catalog and ordered five copies.

He also could see that Brand was a cerebral type, not a true back-to-the-lander, who needed “earthy” people like him to round out his stable of writers and researchers. In the back of the Truck Store, Brand was literally buried in books and Jennings was complaining, “Stewart, you’re buying too many books!” Simultaneously, Brand recognized Kahn’s value and drove down to Big Sur with his production crew in the camouflage-repainted Volkswagen bus with an army star on the front door.

Soon thereafter, Kahn sent a long letter to Brand detailing a list of interesting references resonating with the commune movement, which Brand printed in the first “Difficult but Possible” supplement to the Catalog in January 1969:

“I’m writing from the standpoint of having gone out in the semi-country, built a house, put in a water system, a garden, and I’m now building a shop and going to farm in the spring,” he wrote. “We started with a bare hillside and had to do everything alone, and because of this, whatever pertinent information I could get ahold of was vital, because there was no one to ask.”

In the early Catalogs and supplements Baer, Baldwin, Durkee, and Kahn would become Brand’s musketeers, animating its pages with authentic do-it-yourself back-to-the-land wisdom.

There were distractions. Brand had begun to get some national visibility, and he would frequently receive invitations to speak, occasionally on subjects related to psychedelics. At the end of February, he was invited to appear on a panel at SUNY Buffalo on “Drugs and the Arts” featuring Allen Ginsberg and Ken Kesey, as part of an ambitious “New Worlds” conference on psychedelic drugs. He took the train across the country, on the way reading Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb.

After appearing on the panel, he showed WAR:GOD as the warm-up act for a rock concert featuring the MC5, then at the height of their “Kick out the jams, motherfuckers!” fame. Another panel featured Ralph Metzner, an LSD pioneer, and antiwar yippies Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and Paul Krassner. Brand had met Hoffman through John Brockman, and he continued to be attracted to the “psychedelic” side of the Vietnam War protest movement. That was certainly an accurate description of Hoffman, who would become embroiled in the trial of the Chicago 8 that fall, and who took pleasure in being absolutely outrageous. One time when he and Brand went to a New York City café on the Lower East Side, as they walked in Hoffman saw some plates with unfinished food and immediately went over and began consuming the leftovers. Everyone in the restaurant was confused: What is happening? Is this theft? Or is it really good conservation of food, because otherwise that stuff is just garbage? But it’s not garbage. It’s still warm.

Brand loved it.

To Brand’s mind, Hoffman represented what the counterculture was at its best—taking the practices that have very good reasons to exist and just messing with them a little bit to see what they’re made of, what you’re made of, what relations are like when you mess with them.

That evening at Leary’s appearance, Hoffman and Brand made their way to the front of a large auditorium full of several thousand students and hid under a table set directly in front of the stage. Leary, his graying hair tied back in a ponytail, came onstage accompanied by his young wife, Rosemary Woodruff Leary. Before Leary could begin to speak, Hoffman called out in a loud voice: “Hey! When’s Rosemary gonna have a baby?!” The horror film Rosemary’s Baby had just begun playing in theaters, and Leary was visibly flustered by the taunt. He looked around and couldn’t see who was baiting him. After a while he left the stage, dismissing the audience as he walked out: “We go around once in life and it’s a shame to just waste it and I’m leaving now.”

The crowd was confused. People were asking, “What just happened? Who insulted the guru?”

Under the table, Abbie Hoffman was cackling.

Soon after he returned from the drug conference, Brand, Jennings, and Joe Bonner packed up the Truck Store in his camouflage-painted VW bus full of books and headed to New Mexico. Steve Baer, the environmental designer, and his business partner Barry Hickman had been plotting a gathering of the tribes in New Mexico in the spring of 1969. The Alloy Conference took place over three days beginning on March 20. Located between the Trinity bomb test site and the Mescalero Apache reservation, the site was an abandoned tile factory near the tiny village of La Luz.

In Brand’s retelling it would be the first “programmatic gathering” of the community of “outlaw designers” that he celebrated in the Catalog. In his words, they were:

Persons in their late twenties or early thirties mostly. Havers of families, many of them. Outlaws, dope fiends, and fanatics naturally. Doers, primarily, with a functional grimy grasp of the world. World thinkers, dropouts from specialization. Hope freaks.

J. D. Smith, an early Truck Store employee, later referred to the gathering as “some group of baling wire hippies who can tell us how to convert our broken hairdryers into incubators.”

Alloy perfectly captured the spirit of what Brand was trying to create. One hundred fifty people attended, camping among the tumbleweeds in weather that alternately baked, rained, snowed, and added a dust storm for good measure. J. Baldwin had filled his Citroën full of students and taken two days to drive from Illinois, stopping at communes in Colorado on the way. Lloyd Kahn drove from Big Sur with his wife and son in his own VW bus. When they arrived, they first built a zome, a domelike structure that had been named by Steve Durkee as a contraction of the words dome and zonohedron. They set it on the base of a hillside above the factory with cars parked below and held their meetings in the simple transparent structure where they also cooked and played music for three days.

Robert Frank, the photographer and documentary filmmaker who had attained international stature for his photographic essay The Americans, attended, although he would never produce anything from the event, and the film he shot is presumed lost.

Although Brand was moving away from photography, he got to know Frank well during the conference. Later that year, Frank came to California to film the documentary Life-Raft Earth, based on Brand’s effort to draw international attention to overpopulation, and their bond became closer.

At the Alloy Conference, Brand served as an impromptu secretary, capturing sound bites and printing them largely verbatim in the next Whole Earth Catalog supplement accompanying photographs he had taken, adding two pages of addresses:

“A temporary structure only needs to meet certain building codes.”

“We want to change ourselves to make things different.”

“You can use dope as a pure design tool.”

“You don’t have to take dope to do things.”

“We are trying to develop computers that will help human beings to develop computers. The human and the computer work symbiotically.”

The idea of information sharing resonated, a good example being that Brand had gotten his inspiration for the format of the first Catalog from Baer’s Dome Cookbook. The spirit of the gathering was captured succinctly by Brand’s assignment of the label “hope freaks” to the participants. Baldwin and Brand in particular left with new enthusiasm and confidence that the emerging environmental movement could chart an alternative course to save the planet. Shortly after Baldwin got back to Illinois, he quit his teaching job, striking out on his own to live a nomadic life focused on creating alternative technology.

For Kahn, it had the force of something like the Monterey Pops Festival—a point in time when all the stars aligned. There were five speakers during the weekend—Baer, Durkee, Kahn, Baldwin, and Dave Evans—all sketching out an alternative ecology and society. In the view of environmental historian Andrew Kirk, it was the first moment when a tiny band of outlaw thinkers came together to attempt to articulate an environmental design philosophy that saw technology as a means to solve practical problems such as shelter and energy.[20]

Both Brand and Kahn were energized and optimistic as they drove away in their VW buses on Sunday night, when the sky was pink, lit with a rare aurora borealis pushing far south. The next day the Durkees’ child was born and named Aurora.

The Spring 1969 Catalog was produced in the Truck Store in Menlo Park, which turned out to be a mistake resulting in countless interruptions. Afterward, Brand hitchhiked to New Mexico to “clear his head” for what would be billed as “The Great Bus Race.”

Held on the summer solstice in the mountains near Santa Fe, it was a gathering of a very different kind of tribe from the small spring conclave of outlaw ecological designers who had gathered at the Alloy Conference. Kesey, who had achieved global fame from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, was there with Further, his 1939 International Harvester bus, driven by the Pranksters while Kesey himself arrived in a white Cadillac convertible stocked with his tennis racket and lots of beer. Members of the Hog Farm commune, Paul Krassner, and hundreds of camp followers, hippies, and back-to-the-landers were in attendance.

The original plan had been for the buses to race the clock in a large meadow, but Kesey insisted that it be a real race. Brand wrote about the race in the next issue of the supplement, but later acknowledged that there had been some errors in his reportage because he “drank fluid from a Donald Duck glass” and as a result had been “too stoned to function and misrepresented some facts.”

For Brand it was his last LSD trip and, in a real sense, the end of the sixties. Woodstock would take place in a few months, but despite its magnitude, the summer solstice was sundown for a chaotic decade. For Brand, too, there was a sense that a phase shift was at hand. His unease with the power of the drug, combined with an increasing number of experiences that had been either uncomfortable or just plain bad, reached a tipping point, and he stopped for good.

Stepping away from drugs, he would for several years step toward more conventional political organizing. Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire had been published the previous year, and “monkey wrenching”—sabotage carried out by environmental activists—was in the air.

It was not just environmental design outlaws; the following year Earth Day would take place, and a new environmental movement was forming. There was a growing sense that a more militant approach was necessary to bring about real environmental reform. Brand fantasized about a “militant conservation organization” that would carry out guerrilla-style propaganda actions. “The instrument to play is growing Earth Consciousness,” he wrote in his journal. “—And play is the means.” He thought about obvious comrades in arms—Jerry Mander, David Brower, and “the Mills chick,” an energetic young woman who had caught his eye, came to mind.

It remained a small crew even as the Catalog operation expanded with each issue. Production was an intense, multiday affair that took place six times a year—twice for the Catalog and four times for the supplements. While each Catalog would be bigger and better than the last one, the supplements were what allowed Brand to communicate with the growing counterculture. Each one read like a messy conversation, full of opinion and improvisation. Despite the inclusion of more “outside” content, they were still a tremendous amount of work to put together.

Sandy Tcherepnin had quickly moved on from her role as a typist and was replaced by Annie Helmuth and then later by Matthew “Cappy” McClure, a Stanford history graduate. The arrival of an IBM service tech became a weekly occurrence. Beginning with the Fall 1969 Catalog, Fred Richardson, a skilled mechanic who had the longest hair of anyone on the Truck Store staff and affected an Amish style of dressing without buttons, joined as the production photographer, proofreader, indexer, and general handyman.

Jennings quickly became the store manager. “She had the administrative qualities of a good First Sergeant,” Brand would write in the last issue of the Catalog. She also had the math skills to make a good bookkeeper and a sharp tongue to organize a staff composed largely of walk-ons and high school dropouts.

In addition to volleyball, the other tradition that quickly emerged was a daily communal lunch for the entire staff. Midmorning each day Jennings and Shugart would take off for the grocery store and return to prepare the midday meal.

It was almost impossible to capture how eclectic the Truck Store staff was, but when Ed McClanahan and Gurney Norman profiled the phenomenon for Esquire, they tried, painting this picture of a normal lunchtime scene in a room with a “bile-green ceiling” around two plastic and chrome kitchen tables covered in oilcloth.

Let’s see, there’s: Freaky Pete the White Panther and Pretty Leslie the first girl to drop out of Yale and Merce the Peace Corps dropout and Tracy the dope-scene dropout and Alan the Karmic Yoga dropout (no hair on that one; he shaves his head) and Jim the dropout high school civics teacher and Diana the dropout social worker and Fred the dropout electronics technician and Dick Raymond the dropout land-use economics consultant and maybe half a dozen others, perhaps a cell of anarcho-syndicalists, an infernal machine in every pocket, revolutionaries, dope feens, Communists, communards, conscientious objectors, peace feens, love freex, vegetarians, Christers, Christians. . . . [21]

Subscriptions continued to roll in. During the summer Hal Hershey, who had joined early to do page layout and graphics design, noted that on a Monday in July they had received orders for forty-seven subscriptions on a single day. In wavy handwritten block letters, he wrote: “HELP??” in the daily journal that was kept to track business. “Dear Tribe,” he wrote. “We have obviously reached a higher level of business—the problem being to regear for procedures, methods, and people to deal with the increasing influx of orders, customers, etc.”

Several days later Shugart added that she had put $2,250.25 into the bank for three days of business and that the bank balance was continuing to grow no matter how hard they tried to spend the money.

Yet despite the great success of the Catalog, Brand was increasingly withdrawn. Shugart could sense the toll it was taking. Trained as a clinical social worker, she had never gotten the sense that Brand was emotionally interactive. Instead, while a great talker, she saw him as someone who lived in his head with the ideas he was passionate about. The Catalog was his baby—everyone knew that, and it placed enormous weight on his shoulders.

Joe Bonner, who had been the first layout person, was joined by his younger brother, Jay, who had just graduated from high school, for what would turn out to be just a single issue. Awash in the Bay Area’s intense antiwar movement, Jay soon came to Brand with several suggestions for making the Catalog more connected to the political moment. To his surprise, Brand instantly rejected Bonner’s ideas. He told him that he had started the Catalog with three criteria: no politics, no religion, and no art. Bonner was stunned because in his view the Catalog was full of all three. He felt as if he were being treated like a child and condescendingly shut down.

The friction would continue for the entire time that Jay Bonner worked on the Catalog. Another reason he was put off was because Brand was a vicious boffer, the New Age jousting sport played with Styrofoam swords called boffers. When fencing with rank beginners, Brand would attack with a banshee-like frenzy, leaving welts on his opponents.

Their discord became public in the January 1970 supplement when Brand published a long letter from Bonner attacking the Catalog’s “capitalist” leanings. He wrote, “From all the 128 pages of the Whole Earth Catalog there emerges an unmentioned political viewpoint. The whole feeling of escapism which the catalog conveys is to me unfortunate.”

Bonner went on to note that his salary was just five dollars an hour, that the Catalog was nonprofit, and that he had yet to figure out what capitalism was. He had been radicalized by working on the Catalog into a personal involvement with politics, he wrote, but that guilt-based action never worked and only made the situation worse. “I’m for power to the people and responsibility to the people . . . ,” he concluded.

Brand responded curtly: “Jay worked with his brother Joe doing layout on the Fall Catalog and was not rehired for January production, because of too many technical mistakes on his pages. Jay is 17. (I’m 31. How old are you? It matters, more than any of us like.)”

The Catalog and the Truck Store became a vehicle for Brand to follow his whims and chase after any kind of new idea. He reviewed a build-your-own-airplane kit and found it interesting enough that he decided to order one. Ultimately, the plane, unfinished and unflown, ended up in the barn on Bill English’s property. Brand purchased a BMW motorcycle and discovered that as great an adventure tool as his new motorbike was, it was also probably more risk than it was worth. Thinking about the hazard of zipping along the freeway at seventy miles per hour, he decided to sell the bike after several misadventures.

The unrelenting pressure of running the Catalog soon led to signs that he was beginning to lose control. One evening he went with Jennings to see the Burt Lancaster movie The Swimmer, based on a John Cheever story about a man who decides to go home via swimming every pool in his suburban Connecticut town. At the beginning of the movie, Lancaster’s character is treated with respect, and then at the end of the movie, as his family collapses, he is treated with contempt. The chilling portrait of a life unraveling shook Brand viscerally. That night he returned to his trailer reflecting that people could really lose it; he found himself thinking that maybe he was losing it too.

He remained close to the Engelbart team and a close friend of Dave Evans’s in particular. At the end of May the two men teamed up at a weekend workshop at Esalen on the use of tools. The idea was to investigate “some of the new modes of tool use—from the satisfying do-it-yourself labor of intentional communities to the intense experience of living and working on-line with a powerful computer facility.” The connection between Brand’s access-to-tools orientation and Engelbart’s intelligence augmentation ideas with computers was immediate; personal computers were on the horizon, simply awaiting the invention of the microprocessor in 1971, making computing affordable to hobbyists.

The relationship between the two cultures, however, was imperfect. Evans was passionate about strengthening the connections between the cybernetic and countercultural worlds, and in August he organized an Alloy-inspired weekend conference that was named Peradam, a term from René Daumal’s novel Mount Analogue, which was loved by Brand, Durkee, and Evans. A Peradam was supposed to be a crystal of remarkable purity that was stronger than diamond and with an index of refraction close to that of air.

Evans had persuaded Engelbart to visit the Lama commune, but as hard as he tried to bridge the gap between Engelbart and the countercultural community, he ended up increasing the stress on the computer scientist, who in principle was open to new ideas but who in the wake of the success of his computer demonstration in the fall of 1968 was increasingly obsessing over losing control of his group.

Evans believed it was a perfect philosophical match for the challenge confronting both the computing and counterculture communities: creating tools to attempt to scale the power of the human intellect. It was an event that should have been at the sweet spot of a range of sixties movements from human growth to psychedelics to Brand’s access-to-tools and self-education crusade. The event brought together a group of half a dozen of Engelbart’s researchers with Stewart Brand, Steve Baer, and Steve Durkee. Evans believed that Engelbart’s “bootstrapping” vision depended on getting a whole host of people on board if he was ever to reach beyond the computer science types at the Stanford Research Institute.

Nonetheless, while Alloy had been a sparkling success, where everything came together—the people, the setting, the food, the music—in comparison Peradam felt “lame.” A group came from Pacific High School, an alternative school located in the mountains behind Stanford where Lloyd Kahn had begun teaching and building domes; and the Hog Farm, a commune that was then based on a mountaintop near Los Angeles, did the cooking. A performance-art group known as the Texas Inflatables created a futuristic plastic environment to walk through.

But nothing jelled.

Engelbart couldn’t cope with the idea of an eclectic vision that wasn’t his. Although he was invited, he chose to stay away from the weekend retreat. He didn’t like the idea. In his mind, it was just another symptom of losing control of his intelligence augmentation vision. Brand did attend, but he felt that it lacked the spark of the Alloy Conference and he chose to bury his notes from Peradam in the back pages of the January 1970 supplement, noting gently that Alloy was a hard act to follow.

Having decreed that there would be no politics in the Catalog, Brand quickly violated his principles. Antiwar activism and labor organizing were forbidden subjects, but environmental activism was in his blood going back to Outdoor Life’s conservation pledge, and in 1970 poet Gary Snyder published “Four Changes,” his environmental call to action in the supplement.

In the fall of 1969, The Population Bomb fresh in his mind, Brand began planning a public “starve-in” he called the Hunger Show or Life-Raft Earth. Ehrlich had predicted that there would be huge famines arriving imminently in the 1970s and 80s, and there was nothing that could be done about it.

After unsuccessfully approaching foundations for funding, Brand picked up the $2,300 cost of the event from his family inheritance. To demonstrate the dangers of overpopulation and the impending threat of global famine, the protesters would hold their fast in a hundred-foot-by-hundred-foot inflated plastic pillowlike enclosure. Brand’s idea was to make it a game: if you broke your fast before the week was out, you would “die” and have to leave the island they had created. The plastic enclosure—unceremoniously sandwiched between a restaurant and a supermarket in Hayward across the Bay from Menlo Park—was equipped with portable toilets and an emergency “hospital tent.”

Unable to get permission for a larger venue, Brand was forced to hold the event in the parking lot of a poverty program center in Hayward, clearly a disappointment from the point of view of creating a public spectacle. He described Hayward as the kind of place where you get marooned while hitchhiking.

The Hunger Show began on the evening of Saturday, October 11, the original idea being that the participants needed to be inside by that time and if they left, there would be no return. Robert Frank, the filmmaker, showed up and joined the fast. He was let into the plastic enclosure to film while the rest of the media was forced to set up outside and conduct their interviews over the barrier.

On Sunday, ABC-TV showed up as part of a piece they were filming on environmental activists. They pleaded to be allowed to come inside the plastic pillow to film. That created a debate within the fasting community. Many were dead set against the media, whom they viewed as the enemy. Others thought the media could be used. Still others thought they could be converted. ABC was told that if they were willing to fast, they could come inside. The TV news team didn’t have the time. They filmed from outside.

Initially, about one hundred Hunger Show participants began the fast. The group was joined by Wavy Gravy and a busload from the Hog Farm, now famous for having served as security at Woodstock. Twenty people left the first day, some to go back to work, and some because fasting proved challenging. On Tuesday, rains drenched the parking lot, soaking sleeping bags, and numbers dwindled further. When the rains continued, the decision was made to evacuate to the Truck Store in Menlo Park. The next morning the police showed up and told them to leave, and Brand had a confrontation with an angry cop that threatened to get out of hand until Dick Raymond intervened, suggesting that a better choice might be to move once again. The rest of the troops drove up to Rancho Diablo and spent the remainder of the week in isolation, with very few of the reporters who had originally flocked to the event.

On Friday, Wavy Gravy departed with the Hog Farm bus to attend the trial of the Chicago 8. The next morning the remaining fifty-two survivors broke their fast, and diplomas were issued commemorating their achievement. Brand would stay in Ehrlich’s apocalyptic orbit for several more years.

His deepening depression came at a time when his celebrity rose in concert with the visibility of the Catalog. Cerebral and almost a half generation older than the youth movement mainstream, he found that he was increasingly sought out as both a symbol and a spokesman. In general, attention only made him feel worse. He tried to improve his outlook with a visit to Jack Dowling, a gestalt therapist and neighbor in Menlo Park, who had introduced LSD therapy for alcoholics in the early 1960s. Their meetings were ineffective. (Dowling instructed him to shout at a chair that was supposed to represent his deceased father.)

One day he was driving up the hill to work on production at Rancho Diablo when he realized that he simply didn’t want to do what he was doing. He put a bed in his reading cubbyhole at the Truck Store and would spend entire days on the mattress under the pretext of reading books to review. In his mind, each Catalog had to be drastically better than the one before it, and the one before that, and the next one better than that, and the next one better than that still. He was attempting to do that partly by hiring more staff, but mostly he was demanding more from himself. As a result, he was only quasi-functional at times and would end up, by his own assessment, completely dysfunctional by the time the latest Catalog was published. It drove a deep wedge into his relationship with Jennings, who had a no-nonsense approach to most matters and who suffered as he became more distant.

The irony was that while the burden of the Catalog weighed ever more heavily on Brand, it was liberating an entire generation of young Americans. Not only did millions learn how to do new things, but they were inspired by the Catalog to strike out in new directions.

Larry Brilliant was a young doctor who traveled freely in the world of San Francisco rock royalty. He was close to the Grateful Dead, and if not doctor to the stars, he was an insider in the West Coast music scene, which stretched from San Francisco to Los Angeles. He had first met Brand during his residency in San Francisco while Brand was organizing the Hunger Show.

One of Brilliant’s friends was David Crosby, the singer and guitarist who had been a member of the Byrds and then in 1968 joined Stephen Stills and Graham Nash in Crosby, Stills & Nash. By 1971, Crosby was at the peak of his fame and like many in the emerging counterculture he was romanced by the ideas he found in the Whole Earth Catalog.

One of Crosby’s passions was sailing, and he had recently purchased the Mayan, a seventy-four-foot wooden sailing boat that he often kept in Sausalito but was in San Francisco near the St. Francis Yacht Club when Brilliant came to visit. Sitting on board one afternoon, Brilliant told Crosby that he knew Brand, and Crosby said he was anxious to meet the Catalog’s creator. On a whim they jumped into Brilliant’s car and headed to Menlo Park and the Truck Store.

When Crosby and Brilliant arrived, they were escorted into the back room where Brand was sitting up in bed, editing. If Brand was in a deep depression, he hid it well. Brilliant had no sense that he was in the dumps. What he remembered afterward was a “pretty fucking intellectual” conversation between the two men. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated just months before the first Catalog had been published. Several years later the country seemed on the verge of a revolution—catalyzed in part by Crosby’s band, which had written “Ohio,” an impassioned protest song, in response to the National Guard killings at Kent State on May 4, 1970.

“Are we going to get out of this?” Brilliant remembered Brand asking Crosby, who responded, “Nothing will get us out of it but a total change in human consciousness.”

After the two men left, Brand decided that Crosby must have realized he was falling apart. “Basket case. Too many drugs. I’ve seen a lot of this!” he figured the rock star must have decided.

Despite the crushing darkness—which he would later describe in the Whole Earth Epilog: “I was dealing with a sporadic case of the Greater Whim-Whams,” his midwestern attempt to be folksy and gloss over the depths he was in—he was visible on the first Earth Day in 1970, when he spoke at the Parsons School of Design in New York City. The New Yorker recorded his appearance in his buckskin outfit and top hat.

When asked for advice on taking action to protect the environment, he cited Kesey’s advice on how to make money—he ran a good creamery, compatible with good environmental stewardship, and money followed.

In the wake of Earth Day, he was invited to testify at a House Committee on Education and Labor hearing on environmental education, held at the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park. He stunned the committee when he showed up and argued against the value of “education.”

The next day the San Francisco Examiner headline read WHOLE EARTH MAN SHOCKS PROBERS. Dressed in his “Daniel Boone buckskin suit and battered top hat,” he told the committee that their efforts would backfire: “Forget it. If someone is interested in ecology and environmental matters, he’ll delve into it. If he isn’t, trying to make him learn about it will only make him hate it.”

Brand’s remarks outraged Representative John Brademas, a liberal from Indiana: “Yours is an Adam Smith super-duper philosophy. Your rhetoric, though colorful, is really very dangerous.”[22]

Brand responded that the billions spent on the space program had been worth it because it brought home the image of the Earth as a spaceship. Brademas shot back that he didn’t think a space image was worth the year’s $3.6 billion appropriated for NASA and that he had voted against it.

He told Brand, “I agree with your vibrations but not with your perception.”[23]

Brand’s comments were, in many ways, consistent with his earlier assessment of his time at Stanford: “I’m learning how to be able to learn anything, and then I can go forth and have a life. . . . I don’t need the class.” Telling someone they had to get to a particular place was ultimately much less effective than providing them the tools by which they might leapfrog from curiosity to curiosity until they got there—or somewhere else that was even better.

At the end of 1970, the Catalog editorial staff took the supplement on the road as an experiment in mobile production. Along with several members of the Ant Farm art collective, they erected an inflatable plastic dome near some hot springs in Saline Valley, a California desert seventy miles from the nearest telephone. They brought along a generator to keep the dome inflated and to power their typesetting tools; however, the wind soon blew the dome away and production was moved into the Airstream trailer. The resulting issue was subtitled Difficult but Possible. The word desirable was likely not considered by anyone involved.

Brand’s celebrity would peak with the publication of The Last Whole Earth Catalog. The following month, in February of 1971, he appeared, complete with buckskin suit topped this time with a hard hat, before a national television audience on the Dick Cavett Show.

Cavett was effusive about the Catalog and immediately probed Brand about why he was stopping something that was such a success. “It’s an incredible publication and its very personally done by the guy who is the sort of genius behind it,” he told the TV audience. “And people are very sorry, the fans of the Whole Earth Catalog, that this is the last Whole Earth Catalog, because it’s such a hit, and he owes us an explanation as to why it’s the last Whole Earth Catalog. We welcome Mr. Stewart Brand.”

Brand responded with a more upbeat version of the truth. “We wanted to stop something right for once,” he responded. “So many institutions sort of fade out and piddle out. It seemed like stopping it was more important than starting it.”

Cavett wasn’t convinced. It was a little like stopping a show while it was a great success. Eventually, Brand brought out some of the goods that made the Catalog unique, including boffer swords and kama sutra oil, distracting the TV host with demonstrations.

For his mother, who was a loyal Cavett viewer, the fact that the television interviewer treated Brand with respect in front of the whole world meant that he had arrived. He was now a serious adult, in her mind. In Rockford, at long last, Stewart Brand had made it.

After two years of increasingly popular publications, in April 1971 the Catalog’s balance sheet was flush, it and the Truck Store both indisputable cash machines: for the nine months up to April 30, revenue had been $498,000 with profits of $276,000.

In the face of the Catalog’s hypergrowth, Brand decided to stop doing everything on his own. Previously they had self-published and relied on a growing network of distributors. This time, recognizing that the demand for the Catalog was going to be even more substantial, he struck a deal with Random House. The agreement paid off very nicely for all: The Last Whole Earth Catalog sold more than one million copies. Published in 1971, it would offer a vast menu of more than a thousand items sprawling over 447 pages. Printed and distributed by Random House, it included Gurney Norman’s novel Divine Right’s Trip, which was threaded in snippets throughout the entire Catalog, requiring readers to pursue it as if exploring a maze. For books such as John Muir’s How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive or Jeanie Darlington’s Grow Your Own: An Encounter with Organic Gardening, a mention in the Catalog was instrumental in assuring bestseller status.

Divine Right’s Trip had grown out of a meeting that Brand held shortly after he decided, in the fall of 1969, that there would be a “demise” for the Catalog. He assembled a dozen of his contributors with the idea of eliciting ideas for a grand finale in 1971. They went around the table, and Norman said, “I think the last Catalog ought to be a novel.”

“That’s not likely a workable idea,” Brand responded.

“Well, it ought to have a novel in it,” Norman responded.

“Fine, will you write it?” Brand countered.

“Yes,” Norman replied.

In addition to being a financial success, the deal was instrumental in reshaping the publishing industry. In negotiating with Random House over their distribution contract, Brand got on his “environmental high horse” and insisted that the unsold books be returned in the same way that hardcover books were, rather than be pulped. This policy change would eventually help create a justification for the “trade paperback.”

None of this could buy peace of mind. Brand was barely holding it together emotionally. His marriage to Jennings was disintegrating. It seemed that the world was starting to close in, and he had become agoraphobic. In the end, he kept up appearances, putting out the last Catalog, but he had begun to contemplate suicide.

He found his way to Pierre Mornell, a Marin County psychiatrist. In talking to Mornell, he came to believe that for many people around him psychedelics had become an all-purpose cure using drugs as a crutch. He had pulled back on his drug use, but now, looking more closely at his state of being, he saw ways in which he had used external entities to prop himself up instead of seeking true internal stability. With Mornell’s counseling and guidance, he decided to shed himself of some of the things: first the Catalog, and later his marriage.

He had gone into counseling on his own, not as a couple with Jennings, and although they would separate reasonably amicably, without a legal battle, for decades she was wounded and would remain bitter about what she saw as Brand’s selfish decision. Several years later in a biographical note in a Catalog update, he would agree, blaming himself for the failure of the marriage: “Mostly my doing, I reckon.”

He arranged to mark his decision to kill the Whole Earth Catalog with the “Demise Party.” Brand had gotten to know Frank Oppenheimer, the founder of the Exploratorium science museum at the Palace of Fine Arts in the San Francisco Marina District, where he had helped Oppenheimer think through some of the museum’s plans as it was being developed. So he decided to throw a party with a special twist.

The Whole Earth Catalog rented the Exploratorium for an evening, and as a midnight surprise Brand brought along $20,000 in cash in an inch-thick stack of hundred-dollar bills with the idea that, because he had started the Catalog with roughly that amount, it would be fitting to put the money back out into the world and create new things that might be equally interesting, in a pay-it-forward fashion.

It was an unusual event, even by the standards set several decades later during the height of the internet boom. The invitation went out to the entire Whole Earth community, from employees to subscribers to reviewers to anyone who had attended the Alloy Conference or seen Life-Raft Earth. It was suggested that you might consider dressing as a “tool.”

The Exploratorium provided optical gadgets and illusions, and there was music, dancing, food, and drink. Whole Earth Catalog supporters from all over the country showed up, more than a thousand people in total. A band called Golden Toad played and a nonstop, nonscoring volleyball game went on all evening.

No one told the audience what was afoot until Scott Beach, a well-known local actor, took the stage at midnight and said, “Sorry to stop the volleyball and the inhaling of nitrous oxide from balloons, but there is $20,000 that is about to be handed out to the audience.” He paused and added, “Oh, I see we have your attention.”

Brand had a hypothesis that, under duress, people would come up with the most amazing ideas. Afterward, he decided it didn’t work out that way. He concluded that, rather, under duress people would come up with what Brand considered remarkably stupid ideas.

After Beach’s announcement, Brand climbed onstage and said, “I can tell you from working around foundations for three years that they are absolutely strung out about how to use money. They don’t know. If we don’t know, we can’t really complain about them. So we are into frontier territory here. And like on any other frontier we have got to get together and deal with our problem. It may be a creative problem, and that’s our task—to find a creative way out of it.”

A microphone was set up in the audience, the one-inch-thick envelope of hundred-dollar bills was handed to each speaker, and people started walking up to the mike, taking the envelope, stating what they thought should be done with the money, and then handing it to the next person. Brand was dressed in an odd monk’s black robe that had belonged to his father, a gesture that was meant as a gentle homage. He stood at a blackboard and began writing down the proposals as people made them in two-to-four-word summaries. The hour kept getting later and people kept getting more and more raucous.

There were a lot of what seemed to Brand to be knee-jerk liberal ideas. One guy stood up and said, “Let’s give the money back to the Indians.” That prompted Jennings to go to the microphone and say, “I’m an Indian and I don’t want the money.”

At one point as the money, in the form of a stack of bills, was being handed from speaker to speaker, someone said, “This shouldn’t be decided by one chunk. There are a lot of things that can be done with this money. Let’s all decide.” And then he grabbed a handful of cash and started handing it out to the crowd. Brand rushed back to the microphone and said: “Hey, I think it is more interesting to talk about what to do with $20,000 than what to do with $100. Maybe the money will flow back to the stage.”

And miraculously, the money did come back—at least $15,000 of it. The rest disappeared into the night.

In the crowd was Fred Moore, an itinerant pacifist and draft resister, who had just returned from a trip to Mexico, where he had created a project called Skool Resistance in the spirit of the deschooling ideas of the radical Chilean educator Ivan Illich. Loosely affiliated with the Portola Institute, Moore, who was almost totally broke and living in the garage of a house on the Midpeninsula, had arrived that evening with two dollars in his pocket.

But after midnight, when the dispersal of the money was being debated, Moore got angry. This was just like all the bad things that money did everywhere else in the world, he decided. Earlier in the evening, he had gone up to the microphone, removed one of those dollar bills from his pocket, held it up in the air, and burned it. The point, he argued, was not about delegating the money; it was about empowering people directly by sharing information, which would help create consensus for what to do with the money. He went up to the microphone again and tried to make his point: “If we are going to build a change—in a changing new world, or whatever we want to call it, ‘New Age,’ then it’s going to be because we are going to work together and we are going to help each other.”

Although no one realized it at the time, several years later that would be the heart of his initiative to build a hobbyist computer club to share resources and information freely. From the man who now only had a single dollar to his name would come one of Silicon Valley’s supreme ironies: Fred Moore, an itinerant activist who rejected material wealth as an end in itself, would light the spark of what became the “largest legal accumulation of capital in the twentieth century: the PC industry,” as venture capitalist John Doerr described it.[24] Indeed, paradoxically Moore would also become the unrecognized patron saint of the open-source software movement, which in turn has become a major force in the computer industry.

That evening, however, it was well past midnight and still, no decision was reached. Someone finally stood up at the microphone and read the I Ching, which decreed, “Undertakings bring misfortune.” Not a good omen. Finally, there was a vote, just on the question of saving the money versus spending it. But it ended in a 44–44 tie, solving nothing.

Not long afterward, a decision was finally made: give the money to Moore in hope that maybe it did make sense to create resources for (in Moore’s words) “information, community, and educational networks.”[25] At dawn, Fred Moore became the steward of the envelope.

Brand just shook his head. It had been an interesting experiment, but he never really expected to see Moore again. Maybe he’ll send a postcard from Mexico, he thought as he left the Exploratorium in the morning light.

In the days that followed, Moore would come to feel increasingly trapped. To him banks were part of the problem, and so, not knowing what else to do with the money, he went home and put it in a tin can and buried it in his backyard. Word of the strange conclusion to the Demise Party spread quickly. After several newspaper accounts appeared, Moore was besieged with financial requests by both phone and mail.

And like Frodo’s ring, the money wouldn’t stay in the ground.

Moore was soon forcibly turned into a “people’s banker” when a small group of San Francisco activists who were engaged in building a collective in a warehouse in a tattered neighborhood south of Market Street heard about the windfall. Project One encompassed a diverse set of community political projects, ranging from education to organizing to the theater to one of the first community time-sharing computer efforts, which was called Resource One and had become the final resting place for Doug Engelbart’s original SDS-940 mainframe computer, on which he had developed his oNLine System—as luck would have it, ultimately paid for with a grant from a foundation created from money generated by the Catalog.

A few Project One representatives arrived at Moore’s house and accompanied him out into the backyard, where he grudgingly dug up his tin can. It seemed as if Moore were about to break down in tears as he retrieved the can. Yet, as uncomfortable as he was, serendipity was at work.

Decades later, countless Whole Earth Catalog readers would describe how something they had stumbled upon in the Catalog had sent their life in a completely new direction. In Moore’s case, his appeal at the Demise Party laid out a path for his quest to build an information network to tie all of the community and the political activists together. Working with his database on notecards, he desperately wanted his own computer as a tool to organize his network. In April of 1975, along with Gordon French, a local computer engineer, he called a meeting to create the Homebrew Computer Club. It would prove to be a crucial step toward the world of personal computing.

The demise of the Catalog also marked a familiar turning point for Brand personally. Just as he left San Francisco at the moment when the Haight-Ashbury district emerged, he chose to leave the Midpeninsula at the moment when politics and community were converging with technology to create a computing renaissance in the world that was to become Silicon Valley.

Chapter 7

CoEvolution

During the summer after he had broken free from the Catalog, Brand and Jennings took a cross-country road trip, exploring New England, then driving north until they reached the wilds of Robert Frank’s summer home.

There was a bit of symbolism in their destination. In getting away from the Catalog, Brand would travel to the continent’s eastern extreme, almost four thousand miles away from the San Francisco Peninsula, to Nova Scotia, Canada.

Getting to Canada had been relatively easy: head east and then north. Other challenges he was facing were more complicated. He was casting about for what to do with his life. Brand fantasized that perhaps he could reconstitute himself as a “private statesman” or public intellectual like Buckminster Fuller, Ralph Nader, or David Brower. But how?

Robert Frank had been Brand’s guide for understanding where photography was heading. Earlier, Frank had told him that he had stopped being a photographer because “I noticed that when I made an exposure my eyes closed.” He confided in Brand that he believed that photography was stopping him from seeing the world.

Sometime later, Brand decided that was happening to him as well; moreover, he realized that he had the skill but no talent for photography. That was different from writing, where early on he believed he had both skill and talent.

And so his pilgrimage to see Frank, who had a summer home on Cape Breton Island. The desolate island blew Brand’s mind. He found Frank on a steep, mountainous coast in an almost uninhabited wilderness. They drove to a bay that you could reach only on a dirt road, a place above the water where huge lobsters could be easily hauled up out of the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Right next to Frank’s house was another equally evocative piece of property. Brand bought it on the spot.

It would be another year before he would return to build his own home there. Ultimately, it would be in the isolation of the Canadian wilderness that he would leave Jennings in the same way he walked away from the Catalog.

Jack and Jean Loeffler had come to New York City to raise money for an environmental defense fund created to protect Navajo lands from coal mining companies. They were staying at a friend’s house on the Upper West Side in April of 1972 when Brand showed up in a chauffeured Rolls-Royce to gather them up to accompany him to the National Book Awards Ceremony.

In a surprise to Random House, The Last Whole Earth Catalog had received the National Book Award in the Contemporary Affairs category. The publishing giant hadn’t even thought to enter the Catalog, and so it was intent on making it up to Brand by whisking him around town in style.

The award had created something of a tempest in a teapot when two of the judges, Digby Diehl of the Los Angeles Times and Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times, independently decided to give the award to the Catalog, even though it hadn’t been nominated. “In 100 years, ‘The Last Whole Earth Catalog’ probably will be the only book of 1971 to be remembered,” one of the judges opined. A third judge, historian and journalist Garry Wills, who believed that the rules specified that the award should go to an author rather than a compilation, was so outraged that he resigned from the panel in protest.

While having a drink with his cousin Edward Hoagland, an established Manhattan author, Brand asked if the National Book Award was actually important.

“I wouldn’t mind getting one,” Hoagland responded.

Later Brand arrived for the award event at Lincoln Center in his by-then-trademark buckskin outfit. Donald Barthelme, a fellow National Book Award recipient, advised him to speak slowly. Onstage, in front of an audience of 1,800 people, he intoned: “If the award encourages still more self-initiated, amateur, use-based, non–New York publishing, good deal.”

He planned to give the $1,000 prize money to an organizing effort to hold a counterevent at the upcoming United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, scheduled for Stockholm in June, he told the audience.

The National Book Award confirmed Brand as a member of the cultural elite, if only by a two-judge margin. His editor, Jim Silberman, had been amused that he was the editor of a book for which he did no editing. After the award ceremony, Silberman and several top Random House executives took Brand to the ‘21’ Club, where he again created a bit of a stir. His buckskin outfit didn’t include the required tie, and so he had to quickly find one to add to the ensemble. The East Coast embrace of California counterculture could go only so far.

Spurred in part by the environmental consciousness that the Catalog had helped spawn, the UN conference was intended to consider “the need for a common outlook and for common principles to inspire and guide the peoples of the world in the preservation and enhancement of the human environment.”[1] At the time, Brand still thought of himself as an environmental activist—albeit with an antipolitics stance.

A counterevent in Sweden, which had begun as Household Earth and later was known as the Life Forum, had already gotten off on the wrong foot. In March, Brand had traveled to Sweden to build bridges with Swedish activists to lay the groundwork for what they hoped would be an event on the same scale as Woodstock, but rather on an international stage. At one point during their meetings, Brand asserted that he believed he could attract between one hundred thousand and four hundred thousand participants to travel to a remote camping site he had persuaded the Stockholm authorities to grant the protesters at Skarpnäck, a suburb far from the city center, where the UN conference was to be held. Afterward, however, he would ridicule himself for being so out of touch. The Life Forum organizers had no ability to recruit participants in Europe, and the cost of getting to Sweden from America ensured that ultimately less than a thousand people would attend.

Brand had begun by enlisting his usual supporting cast, including the Hog Farm commune, which was committed to shipping several of its buses to Stockholm to be part of a planned protest march. Because they had fed the crowds at Woodstock and provided security, the Hog Farm had acquired a reputation for counterculture crowd control.

Brand’s marriage to Jennings had “loosened up” since the demise of the Catalog, and he was “waiting for the next big idea”—which hadn’t yet materialized. He had taken an apartment in San Francisco with the idea of getting distance from his wife to give himself some freedom. He was in psychoanalysis with Pierre Mornell, and he had also begun actively pursuing several young women.

There was a vast gap between the Swedish leftists he met with and the group of American environmentalists who identified with Brand’s counterculture roots. The Swedes were deeply suspicious of the fact that Brand was flush with cash from the success of the Catalog. A Ramparts magazine article had recently documented the CIA’s infiltration of the American student movement, and the Swedes, who were “old” European socialists, were paranoid about the American counterculture. According to an account in the Village Voice, at one point during a Stockholm meeting, Brand passed out copies of the Whole Earth Catalog and “someone opened the book to a page that advertised books on growing marijuana. The socialists were alarmed and accused the Life Forum organizers of being CIA plants, intending to spread drugs during the Stockholm UN Conference.”[2]

Despite his belief that the Demise Party had been a failure, it hadn’t diminished Brand’s ideal of philanthropy. He and Dick Raymond decided to create the Point Foundation, a new organization intended to give away the Catalog’s profits. The decision led to grumbling among some of the Truck Store workers, who had hoped their hard work might be rewarded in some way, but Brand largely ignored the staff, instead creating an initial board that consisted of himself and Raymond as well as environmentalist Huey Johnson from the Nature Conservancy; Michael Phillips, then associated with the Glide Foundation; Jerry Mander; and Bill English, who by then had left his role as Doug Engelbart’s chief engineer and moved to a new Xerox computer science laboratory called the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Each director was assigned $55,000 annually to dispense as they saw fit. Brand initially assigned his funds to the Life Forum, the San Francisco Zen Center, and Steve Baer’s Zomeworks, among others. Additionally, a seventh director, dubbed “Elijah”—a different person each board meeting—was invited to participate in funding decisions.

Brand’s departure for Sweden was preceded by a series of traumatic encounters with Jennings, who ended up driving across the country to her parents’ home in Bethesda by herself, leaving Brand with feelings of guilt, though clearly not an incapacitating level, because at the same time his mind was mostly on twin affairs. One was with Melissa Savage, a young environmentalist involved with the Sweden project; the other was with Stephanie Mills, a Planned Parenthood organizer he’d first met when she participated in the Hunger Show. While he had partially moved to the apartment in San Francisco, periodically he would decide that he was still in love with Jennings—this in between bouts of torturing her with admissions about his affairs. If he appeared to be acting like a scoundrel, he was not alone. He was straining at the confines of his marriage during a period of societal sexual liberation.

In April, before the Life Forum, he took off with Mills to soak in the hot springs of the Black Rock Desert. On their way east they stopped at Gary Snyder’s home, but he was away, and so they visited with his wife, Masa. They then spent four days wandering in the desert and lounging in the hot springs, camping in the rain, and on occasion taking shelter in an abandoned cabin. Before they left, Mills commemorated their visit in graffiti on the cabin wall: “Two clean freaks came from hot creeks to stay in High Rock Canyon. We walked the heights and stayed two nights and loved with wild abandon.”

The political chaos and organizing challenges facing his Life Forum idea were so formidable that by the time he got on the plane to fly to Sweden, he had become disenchanted with what he thought of as the “same-old-shit eco march.” He was also in terrible psychological shape.

He flew over with Mills. On the long plane ride, she had been affectionate, and he had hoped they would stay together in rented apartments adjacent to a gallery the Life Forum was using near the UN conference. (They had decided not to camp with the majority of activists at Skarpnäck.) But after they arrived, Mills appeared to lose interest and dived into her project hosting salons for various international delegations. She also visibly took up with others, to Brand’s consternation.

“You can’t do that,” he protested. “That’s actually not fair!”

“Reparations,” she responded. “I’m doing to you what men have been doing to women for a long time and it’s about time. So just settle down and enjoy it.”

Mills’s disappearance plus the long plane trip and jet lag, coupled with his growing sense that his effort to organize a mass gathering was going to be viewed as a debacle, sent him into a downward spiral. He was highly visible in his trademark top hat with an eagle feather and buckskin suit. Yet news photos taken in Stockholm showed him with hollow, sleepless eyes and a bittersweet pained expression, his face reflecting what he believed was going to be an almost certain fiasco.

He led a Save the Whales march and appeared at several public events outside the official event with Maurice Strong, the Canadian oil executive who was the secretary-general of the conference. But the efforts by the American environmentalists to build a united front with the Europeans failed. A deep anti-American sentiment pervaded Stockholm, exemplified by Swedish prime minister Olof Palme, who had opened the conference by demanding that American “ecological warfare cease immediately.”

During a preliminary spring meeting, Brand and his confederates had proposed supporting the Europeans with $40,000 to permit the Life Forum to share facilities with the European leftists. They were completely rebuffed. When Mary Jean Healy, a young editor at the environmental magazine Clear Creek, showed up in Stockholm as a fairly typical Berkeley New Leftist, she was shocked to find that she was viewed as a political conservative in the context of the intense factionalism swirling around her.

While there had been talk of chartered airplanes flying Americans in from both coasts, in the end, Brand underwrote fifty Hog Farm commune members and several buses—nominally for crowd control and feeding the expected hordes who never materialized; a group of antiwar activists committed to raising the issue of the environmental destruction that had resulted from the Vietnam War; Beat poets Michael McClure and Gary Snyder; Healy, who would publish Open Options, an alternative guidebook to the UN conference; and Jack Loeffler, who managed to bring a group of fifteen American Indians and Chicanos, some without passports or visas. Loeffler succeeded in getting a group of four Hopi Indians safely to Stockholm by finding some old paper that looked like parchment and making home-brewed passports, binding them in buckskin. The back of each passport said its bearer was a citizen of the Hopi Independent Nation and that “this passport is valid as long as the sun shines, the water flows, and the grass grows.”

Brand felt that his efforts to make the case for a new form of personal responsibility and ecological consciousness were largely lost amid the politically charged atmosphere that surrounded the conference. Growing increasingly despondent, he began to feel dizzy and sick to his stomach. He tried to steady himself with Librium. From somewhere nitrous oxide appeared and he sampled it. He plunged into an increasingly deep depression that was exacerbated by painful calls and letters from an emotionally distraught Jennings, who was trying to hold on to their marriage. Savage, who had been his cultural guide three months earlier on their organizing trip to Stockholm, had also vanished into a new relationship, leaving Brand with a deepening sense of isolation. He recalled one of the directors of a local FM radio station in the Bay Area who had had affairs with many of his staff and then leaped from the Golden Gate Bridge. Suicide again floated through his mind.

Brand would remember Sweden as a disaster, but the reality was more nuanced. Both Walter Hickel, Nixon’s former secretary of the interior, and Strong, the UN conference’s secretary-general, praised him publicly, and the event ultimately did have an impact on environmental consciousness globally. For the most part, however, Stockholm proved to be a maze of the sort of political infighting that he abhorred.

Paul Ehrlich, his Stanford mentor, was at the conference as a population doomsayer. It had been four years since The Population Bomb had been published, and the issue of potentially mandatory population control remained a flashpoint in international forums. Barry Commoner, a rival biologist who was also in Stockholm, actively attacked Ehrlich’s view. Commoner argued that there would be a demographic “transition” and that population growth would abate. At the time, Brand remained firmly in Ehrlich’s camp, although years later he would change his view and acknowledge that Commoner had been correct.

One evening he accompanied Healy to hear Peter Berg, an environmental activist who had been a member of the Diggers and the San Francisco Mime Troupe, make a distinction between “one world,” which he called a “bullshit transnational fuckup” idea, and “one planet,” which he considered a timeless idea grounded in experience. The idea would stay with Brand.

The bright spots that eluded him were due in part to $75,000 of Point Foundation funds invested in the Life Forum. Brand had given Berkeley activist Joan McIntyre $15,000 to launch the campaign to Save the Whales, which was unveiled in Stockholm. The Hog Farm had dressed up their bus as a whale for the planned Save the Whales march that marked the coming-out party for McIntyre’s Project Jonah. The Life Forum activists marched through town making whale sounds, and photos of the whale bus appeared on the front page of newspapers around the world, giving the project tremendous impact and leading to a symbolic unanimous vote against commercial whaling at the Stockholm conference.

And it had an impact on individuals as well. In Stockholm, Savage ended up sharing a hotel room with McIntyre. At the end of the conference, the two women discussed what should come next. McIntyre told the younger woman, “Well, you know, just pick a species.”

Savage remained an ardent environmentalist and scientist throughout her career, and when she turned sixty, she decided to take McIntyre’s advice and focus her work on saving the otters. She viewed her lifework as one of those “little vortexes” that would spin off from one of the areas that Brand dived into.

For Brand, however, his conclusion that “Woodstockholm” was a grand failure would sour him permanently on political protest—with several exceptions for local politics. When the UN conference was over, he took off with Healy to go camping near the Arctic Circle for several days. Then he flew to Washington, DC, for a tense reunion with Jennings, who told him he smelled different.

On the long road trip from Bethesda to Cape Breton Island with Jennings later that summer, Brand again began to fantasize about becoming a journalist. He mused about learning shorthand, assessed his writing as “bad,” and began to contemplate the possibility of teaching himself to write “pretty, clear & fast.” After spending a morning in a New Jersey hotel room reading the New York Times opinion page, he was inspired. He thought about learning languages and possibly even taking a new direction in photography.

He was starting to come out of the downward spiral that he had been in since shutting down the Catalog the previous year, and his head was spinning with ideas. He began discussing several projects with Marlon Brando, the early supporter of the Catalog, including a television adaptation of the Catalog and a possible sustainability project on Brando’s island in the South Pacific. He was considering practicing zazen, a form of seated meditation, and would join the San Francisco Zen Center when he returned to the West Coast. He even reconsidered graduate school at UC Berkeley, perhaps returning to biology.

He jotted down a list of fifteen ideas titled “many fantasized projects for California” and inserted one in the middle—“uncouple.” He’d taken a big step already in renting a basement apartment in San Francisco, but there had been excuses for that. On the trip north, he and Jennings quarreled repeatedly, and she accused him of planning to leave her. It was true, but he couldn’t bring himself to force the discussion.

The planned trip to Cape Breton Island had originally been intended to complete their shared dream of building a small summer home to live in for a while each year far from civilization. However, upon arriving they both immediately had reservations. It was an overwhelming and expensive project, and they discussed giving up and fleeing back to California.

To make matters worse, the first night was spent in the rain in a tent. Trapped in a downpour, he found an upside: it was the moment when he discovered Gregory Bateson, who would supplant Buckminster Fuller as his intellectual guiding star. He had with him a copy of Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind, published earlier that year, a tightly coupled collection of essays offering a synthesis of cybernetics, philosophy, and the social sciences, situating humanity in the natural world. Brand was spellbound.

It was not his first encounter with the anthropologist. Brand had interviewed him as part of his Stanford senior project about the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences. Later, he had also seen Bateson speak at the LSD research conference at San Jose State College. But he’d never invested the time to read Bateson’s work. Bateson offered a mystical and biological foundation for a cybernetic theory that placed the individual in a much broader context that stretched from the social to the cultural and ecological dimensions of the world. The ideas that Brand now encountered would lead directly to the perspective at the heart of the CoEvolution Quarterly, the magazine that he would found two years later.

When the weather cleared, Brand put down his book and set to work clearing the ground for an interim tepee and then shaping the long poles. After the tepee was up, he and Jennings commenced work on a twelve-foot-by-sixteen-foot shack, mostly finishing it in a month of steady hard labor. While he worked, however, Brand continued to fantasize about leaving his wife and living alone as a bachelor in his San Francisco apartment when he returned to California.

He planned to wait until they were back on the West Coast to talk about divorce, but the tension overwhelmed him. Once he fainted, coming to with his fingers clutching the grass, wondering what had happened and what might be wrong.

He vacillated for days and then finally broached the subject of living alone in San Francisco—of separating. His hand was forced when Jennings found Mills’s hairbrush in the glove compartment of the truck. She was furious and he responded in kind. Jennings heard his anger as the end of the relationship that she was certain he had been building up to. She began to weep softly. “What do I do now?” she asked. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.”

Her words echoed inside his head, leaving him feeling guilty and scared. He wasn’t sure what he had done. He stood on a cliff looking out over the ocean and thought about jumping and realized he wouldn’t. His mood swung and he felt a brief breeze of freedom.

There was no sudden collapse; Brand and Jennings continued to work on finishing the shack while discussing coming apart. They left for California in early August, again in heavy rain, stopping at Higgins Lake in Michigan to spend time with Brand’s family. His brother Mike and his sister-in-law Gale took separate walks with each of them and afterward agreed that they were certain the relationship was ending.

They arrived in California before the end of the month. Still not formally split, they stayed briefly on the Midpeninsula with friends, and then Brand headed to his city apartment, only to find that the building had been sold and he had just three weeks to find a new home.

During the next month, he slowly ended their marriage. On occasion, he would “freak out” and run back to Jennings, but that only made things worse. “Wounded with each other we lean on each other for further wounding,” he wrote in his journal. At the same time, he realized that his behavior had a terrible impact on Jennings, who wanted their marriage to survive.

He had scrambled and found an apartment on Rose Street Alley, half a block from the San Francisco Zen Center, and christened his new “pad” by inviting Mills over. That night they went to see Fiddler on the Roof and then ate dinner in North Beach.

During the fall he tried to establish a Zen practice but soon found that he quickly grew bored when he tried to meditate. He continued to see his psychiatrist while simultaneously dating both Mills and Savage as well as an expanding gallery of other women while spending time on the Point Foundation, figuring out how to give away the $1.5 million he’d earned from the success of The Last Whole Earth Catalog, all while still gripped with frequent deep bouts of depression and fainting spells.

“What I’ve got, these days, is a tenuous, sophisticatedly tenuous, grip on reality,” he wrote. His confessed fantasy was to become a “Zen playboy,” but he simultaneously realized the effect his behavior was having on Jennings, ensuring that they both remained miserable.

He had been pursuing one of his fantasies—learning to fly. Despite the failure of his earlier experiment with the BD-4 kit, he had begun taking flying lessons. He soon gave up the experiment, however, in the face of persistent panic attacks. He would find himself paralyzed by anxiety—awash in emotions that were strong enough to force him to pull his car over to the side of the road. He realized that such a state of being was not conducive to piloting an aircraft.

It began as a period of personal and intellectual uncertainty, but gradually things began to come into focus. Toward the end of September, he had dinner with Peter and Fox King, and as he drove back to his apartment he found a new sense of clarity. He would become a gentleman “gamesman,” he decided, designing games and traveling the world to discover exotic ones. He would return to his original fascination with watching the California Indians playing and the “out of body” Spacewar! experience at the campus computer center. He would invent “New Games.”

As often was the case, it was a decision with an antecedent. After the War Resisters League asked him to organize a series of events at San Francisco State, UC Berkeley, and Stanford, which he had dubbed World War IV, he felt that his events, which were based on the idea of competitive games to work out aggressions—rather than war— had been failures. However, he was still passionate about “the sheer fun of fighting.” He fondly recalled his Catalog days as a vicious boffer.

At an Esalen event, Brand met George Leonard, the Look magazine writer who had published early articles that previewed the impact of the youth movement and the California counterculture. Leonard shared a passion for participatory athletics with Esalen’s cofounder Michael Murphy, and his ideas resonated with Brand, who had been thinking about what he had continued to think of as “softwar”—war without real violence, the organizing principle for what would be the first New Games Tournament in October of 1973.

Despite Brand’s early freelancing failures at Stanford and afterward, he finally broke into the world of professional journalism when Jann Wenner, cofounder and publisher of Rolling Stone magazine, gave him an assignment to write about a small cult of computer hackers who would stay up all night and play the video game Spacewar! in a computer laboratory hidden in the hills behind Stanford.

Brand asked Shel Kaphan, one of the young computer hackers who worked at the Truck Store, to put him in touch with the researchers at computer scientist John McCarthy’s Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. SAIL had been established to build a working artificial intelligence and he had collected an eclectic group of young researchers exploring technologies like robotics, computer vision, natural language understanding, and speech recognition. Simultaneously, Bill English opened the doors to the Palo Alto Research Center. Xerox had created PARC to compete directly with IBM, and Robert Taylor, a young psychologist who had funded the development of the ARPANET while at the Pentagon, had been given the charter of rethinking the future of the office based upon computers and networks.

Being admitted into the inner sanctum of the two research centers gave Brand an even clearer awareness of the impending arrival of personal computing and the potentially pervasive impact of computer networks. Several years later he would be the first journalist to use the term personal computer; but more important, he was the first to relay the significance of their imminent arrival to the world.[3]

One evening in October, Brand arrived at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory with Rolling Stone photographer Annie Leibovitz in tow. They had come to report on the first Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics. In doing so, he would describe the virtual world of computer hackers to a general audience for the first time, at the same time portraying the designers of both the first modern personal computer at Xerox’s PARC and the recently born ARPANET community, the forerunner of the modern internet.

He used his night spent with the SAIL hackers to draw an opening vignette that made a connection between the computing culture he had discovered and the counterculture he had helped create. Women were a novelty in the computing world, and Leibovitz was treated as visiting royalty by the young researchers, who proudly showed off the SAIL robot arm and other research projects going on at the lab.

Brand’s article was written in a style that was borrowed in part from Tom Wolfe and in part from Hunter S. Thompson, with a flashy you-are-there patter and mind-boggling grand observations: “These are heads, most of them,” he observed of the hackers, without bothering to source his claim. “Half or more of computer science is heads.” The implication, of course, was that computing was the next thing after LSD—something Ken Kesey had realized several years earlier when Dave Evans introduced him to Engelbart’s NLS computing system.

Style aside, the article caught virtually all of the significant trends in computing, ranging from PARC scientist Alan Kay’s Dynabook, which was the archetype of the modern laptop personal computer, to the impact of ARPANET and the fact that a new generation of computer chips, then just on the horizon, would consume far less power, making possible a generation of inexpensive consumer-oriented machines.

He also captured the original spirit that would engender the community of hobbyists from which the personal computer industry emerged beginning in 1975. Brand realized that the young computer hobbyists who were playing on the SAIL mainframe had a deep hunger to have their own computers, something that the microprocessor, which had been invented in 1971, would soon make possible. Most of the hackers weren’t even sure what they would do with their computers when they obtained them—they were simply fantasy amplifiers. Brand included an appendix in the Rolling Stone article on how to program your own Spacewar! game, including a sample of computer code written by Alan Kay.

“SPACEWAR: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums” appeared in Rolling Stone at the end of 1972, stating unequivocally: “Ready or not, computers are coming to the people.”[4] The term personal computer did not appear in the original Rolling Stone article. Brand would first use the term in an epilogue that he added to his first book, titled II Cybernetic Frontiers, published in 1974.

Comprising the Rolling Stone article and an extended profile of Gregory Bateson that appeared in Harper’s Magazine in late 1973, the book was published in part as a reward from Random House for the runaway success of The Last Whole Earth Catalog. Brand was attempting to portray a synthesis of Bateson’s “organic” cybernetics with the “machine” cybernetics of the emerging computing universe. Although it was far ahead of a world that was still largely unaware of the impending societal impact of computers and networks, Brand’s prophecy was clear, and together the magazine article and book would provide the first inkling to the outside world that something transformative was afoot.

However, none of the impact that his first successful journalistic foray would eventually have was apparent to Brand that winter. He ended his psychotherapy sessions, but he wasn’t out of the woods. He still suffered from precipitous ups and downs and panic attacks while frequently using Librium to get through the night, continuing to experience stomach distress while bouncing back and forth between a series of girlfriends, of whom Mills remained the most serious.

He visited Kesey’s farm in Eugene at the end of the year, traveling there and back by Greyhound bus. Kesey remained a combination mentor, older brother, and competitor. But Brand always gained something from his interactions with Kesey, and this time he came away with a surge of motivation and self-confidence.

Over New Year’s he and Mills drove down to Mazatlán in Mexico. After playing in the waves, he suddenly noticed a weird separation on the left side of his field of vision. He stumbled back to his VW van, put on sunglasses, took a Librium, and lay down on the seat trying not to freak out until his vision returned to normal. It would become a frequent occurrence, and years later he discovered it was a relatively common affliction dubbed “scintillating scotoma.”

At the time, Mills tried to encourage him not to worry, but they were both unnerved by the episode, and it cast a pall over their adventure. He felt fragile and she tried to push on as if nothing were wrong. Later at a Mexican rancho in Baja California, reached by two days of piloting the VW over rocky dirt roads, Mills gently inquired about why he was so troubled.

“Existence,” Brand answered.

“Whether or not, or how?” she countered.

“Both,” he replied.

“Well, remember. You’re just a speck of dust. In the sunshine.”

When he was back in San Francisco at his apartment on Rose Alley, Brand felt as if he were turning a corner. The world was changing. LBJ had died. Abortion was legalized. The Paris Peace Accords had been signed. And Jennings announced that she was filing for divorce and was involved with Keith Britton, a British engineer and explosives expert, whom she planned to marry.

A weight was lifted.

Although Brand retained a political aversion to the New Left, he made exceptions for people he considered friends, like Abbie Hoffman and Paul Krassner. Krassner had originally moved to the West Coast from New York when Brand had convinced him and Ken Kesey to edit the final Last Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog. They in turn had persuaded the counterculture cartoonist R. Crumb to illustrate the cover, making it look like a very raunchy Last Supper.

When Brand moved to Rose Alley, he let Krassner move into his second bedroom on the condition that their “lifestyles” didn’t conflict. Krassner later described their relationship as the “New Age Odd Couple,” a contradiction in lifestyles that reached a peak the day they conducted simultaneous interviews in their separate bedrooms, Brand with Gregory Bateson, Krassner with Squeaky Fromme, the member of the Charles Manson family who several years later attempted to murder President Gerald Ford.[5]

The “odd couple” description was apt in several other ways. Krassner had a tendency toward paranoia, fueled in part by his friendship with Mae Brussell, a leftist conspiracy researcher who published frequently in the Realist. When Krassner told her he was planning to share an apartment with Brand, she warned him that the former Whole Earth Catalog publisher was a “government pig.” When Krassner asked her if he would be in physical danger, she replied, “No, but he’ll try to psych you out.”

Krassner ignored her warning; however, there were moments when it seemed she might have been correct.[6] One day Krassner came back to his room and sensed that something was different. He puzzled for a while and then realized that it was his giant Nixon poster. The former president’s eyes, which had been looking to the left, were now peering to the right. He looked at the poster carefully and discovered that the original eyeballs had been whited out and new ones drawn in.

He confronted Brand, demanding to know if he had tampered with his poster. His roommate replied that, no, he hadn’t, but that Ken Kesey had been around for a while that afternoon.[7]

On another occasion, Krassner decided to read the journal that Brand was keeping, and then found his feelings were hurt when he read how he had been described.

As much as he was struggling to find balance, Brand was often the more reliable of the two. One night he was in his bedroom using an electric saw to build a bed while he listened to Krassner in the hallway brushing his teeth and complaining about his battles with the Church of Scientology. Suddenly there was a long silence and Brand peeked outside his room to see Krassner standing motionless making strange noises. As Brand watched, he toppled over onto a buffalo skin rug and continued making garbled sounds.

Brand enlisted several people from the Zen Center to help him carry Krassner to a nearby hospital. When Krassner finally came around several hours later, he admitted that in preparation for attending a final performance by The Committee improv comedy group, he had consumed his remaining stash of pure THC, suffering the predictable consequences.

Brand’s divorce from Jennings at the end of November 1973 was not contentious, and they continued to stay in contact as directors of the Point Foundation. Their community property totaled about $40,000. Brand kept the Nova Scotia property while Jennings kept the $10,000 savings account and the TV.

Soon after finishing his “SPACEWAR” Rolling Stone article, Brand began work on a profile of Bateson. With tape recorder in hand, he attended the social scientist’s courses at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

An Esalen conference led by G. Spencer Brown, who had recently written a philosophical mathematical treatise called The Laws of Form, enabled conversation with diverse members of the cybernetics and counterculture crowd that included Bateson, John Lilly, Ram Dass, Kurt von Meier, Alan Watts, and John Brockman.

That spring, through Bateson, Brand would dive more deeply into the world of cybernetics. He spent time with the anthropologist in Big Sur, where Bateson was building a home. When the resulting article, “Both Sides of the Necessary Paradox,” appeared in Harper’s Magazine in November, it had less of an impact than “SPACEWAR,” but his dive into Bateson’s world had a lasting effect on Brand’s thinking.

He had come to cybernetics earlier, and although it permeated the Systems section of the Catalog, it was his close encounter with Bateson that would shake him loose from his devotion to the engineering-oriented world of geodesic domes and Buckminster Fuller. Bateson’s assertion in Steps to an Ecology of Mind that the three interwoven systems of the individual, society, and ecosystem form a cybernetic system that encompasses everything would become the through line for Brand’s intellectual work for decades to come.

In his introduction to II Cybernetic Frontiers, Brand argued that “SPACEWAR” was the better article, but he was placing it after “Both Sides of the Necessary Paradox,” “because what Bateson is getting at, I’m convinced, will inform damn near everybody’s lives.” Both meat and machines learn, he noted, pointing out that organic and machine cybernetic systems share the quality that they both subvert “man’s special pride, conscious purposefulness.” In shifting his allegiance from Fuller to Bateson, Brand was able to fully exploit his training as a biologist.

Bateson’s ecological perspective also pried Brand loose from the last vestiges of the Ayn Rand libertarianism that he had carried with him into the Catalog. In Bateson’s thrall, beginning to think deeply about the concept of coevolution, he wrote in his journal, “Self-sufficiency is not to be had on any terms, ever. It is a charming, woodsy extension of the fatal American mania for privacy. ‘I don’t need you. I don’t need anybody. I am self-sufficient!’ ”

In the spring of 1973 Brand was invited to the Rhode Island School of Design to speak about creating New Games. It was a warm day, and he took off his shirt while leading a group of students in a game of Slaughter, which involved up to forty players, on their knees, trying to get their team’s ball into a hole dug by their opponents and vice versa. If you were pushed off the playing field, you were eliminated. (In a later permutation, you could be eliminated if an opposing player managed to remove your socks.) The shirtless Brand attracted a young architecture student named Gloria Root, who accompanied him back to his room, where she took off her shirt in return.

Root, the former Miss December 1969 Playboy Playmate, had the tantalizing backstory of having spent nine months in a Greek prison for smuggling hashish from Turkey, as well as having spent time with the likes of Hugh Hefner and Roman Polanski. Brand envisioned a lively ongoing romance, but when he tried to contact her in the following weeks he was ignored.

In June he returned to the East Coast to spend a couple of months in his shack on Cape Breton Island. But after he arrived, he discovered that he had not completely escaped Jennings’s ghost. He had felt her presence in the small trailer where he continued to stay on occasion in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and now in Canada, memories of his stomach pains and fainting spells from the previous summer still plagued him.

He kept telling himself that he had been tired of San Francisco and the rat race of work and social entanglements. His retreat was supposed to offer a respite for simple physical tasks and planning. “Relax, Stewart, enjoy paradise,” he reminded himself. That wasn’t as easy as he hoped. An air freight snafu resulted in much of his gear being lost—including his meditation pillow—and he used its absence to avoid the Zen practice. He had two female guests, but when each left, he simultaneously felt unsettled and pleased. Robert Frank was around, which was good, but Brand still felt uneasy, without serenity.

In the end, however, the summer offered new clarity. But when it arrived, it turned out not to be a new idea but rather a reinterpretation of an old one. He described his moment of inspiration in the Whole Earth Epilog the following year, in a riff on his darker comment to Diana Shugart some years earlier: “After burning our bridges we reported before the Throne to announce: ‘We’re here for our next terrific idea.’ The Throne said, ‘That was it.’ ”

He had found that his new freelance existence felt lonely and precarious and he missed the artistic control the Catalog had afforded. Harper’s Magazine had reached out to him with a proposal to produce a slim update to the last Catalog—an Epilog. He wrote back to the editors, pointing out that despite being out of date, the Catalog was continuing to sell three thousand copies each week. As he thought more about the Harper’s offer, he realized that what he had really enjoyed was working on the supplements. They had offered more freedom than the Catalog. There had been a satisfying pace, and it had allowed him to follow his nose for new ideas. They had provided a way to do intellectual and artistic explorations while simultaneously creating conversations and community.

And now, Brand realized, there was a need for a new conversation that went beyond the Catalog. At just the moment when millions in the American student Left were fixated on dialectics and were regurgitating calls for class struggle, Bateson had alerted him to a much more powerful approach to open up new ways of looking at the world. Although the biological origins of the term coevolution spoke to the evolutionary partnership between predator and prey, Bateson had a broader conception that scrutinized the juxtaposition of opposites to expose “new meaning and understanding.”[8] It was an idea that recalled Koestler’s Act of Creation, but Bateson articulated it with a degree of precision and sophistication that took Brand to an entirely new level—and new clarity about what he should do next.

His model for the Catalog had been L.L.Bean. Now, as he roamed the vacant lands surrounding his cabin, a new idea took shape based on the New Yorker. It would be an antithesis to other magazines, which he viewed as “publication by committee.” He had learned from his encounters with the publishing world that the best periodicals had a “mad monk” somewhere in the middle of the enterprise, someone who was devoted to the enterprise and who took responsibility for every comma.

That would be him.

At the end of the summer, he headed back to California intent on creating a new magazine, accompanied by an occasional Catalog. A decade later, in an interview, he would describe it as “the New Yorker of Sausalito.” He would do the Harper’s Magazine project as a stepping-stone toward something more permanent.

Across the Golden Gate Bridge north of San Francisco and just inland from the Pacific Ocean, Gerbode Valley lies in the heart of the Marin Headlands. It offers a broad, grassy plain that is home to bobcat and deer.

In October, Brand chose the site for his next act as an impresario. Once again, he assembled some of his usual cast of friends and fellow travelers to organize a New Games Tournament: Huey Johnson, who’d first alerted him to the hidden valley; George Leonard, who joined to teach aikido; and Wavy Gravy, who brought the Hog Farm to join in the festivities. To help with logistics, he enlisted Pat Farrington, a community organizer, and Andrew Fluegelman, a young attorney with a counterculture sensibility.

For Brand it wove together several threads. He had read Homo Ludens, the 1938 book by Dutch historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga, who put forward the idea that play was central to the formation of culture. But at some point, “games” had come to be seen as entirely zero-sum: one winner only. Bateson told Brand that a weakness in game theory was that there was no provision for changing the rules of the game. Thinking back to his childhood, Brand realized that as a kid he would change the rules of games all the time to make them more interesting. He decided that as they got older, children were forced into structured games by adults who in turn had been forced into such contests when they were kids.

Why not create games where the players changed the rules as needed?

Here was another Brand question that at first glance seemed simple (Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?) but encapsulated a profound shift in perspective. In his mind, the first New Games Tournament would be a prototype for a new type of competition. Moreover, his “softwar” idea implied that society at some point in the future might change the rules of warfare itself to make it less violent—definitely a utopian ideal.

Several hundred people showed up each day for the three-day event to play games like the ones that Brand had already invented, such as Slaughter and Earth Ball (in which two teams pushed a giant ball, painted to look like Earth, toward each other’s respective sidelines; the catch is that if one side appears close to victory, some of its members on occasion would switch to the other team and start pushing in the opposite direction) as well as boffing and classics like tug-of-war.

The idea was not only to invent new games but to change the rules of existing ones. Volleyball was played to see how many times the ball could be batted back and forth without hitting the ground, for example. Hang gliders—including one piloted by Brand—soared overhead to add a festive touch.

Afterward, he would describe the event as being only “semi-successful.” Although the New Games Tournament was covered by the national press, and even Sports Illustrated ran a piece on the idea of alternative sports, Brand was put off by what he would call the “nicey nice” counterculture gaming types who took over the New Games movement the tournament engendered. They tended to invent games that were not very competitive and in which everyone “won.” He had been interested in competitive, physical contact sports. He wasn’t interested so much in ending war as in civilizing it. He would sum up his views in a short essay on “Softwar” in II Cybernetic Frontiers, arguing, “Let Audie Murphy, Henry Kissinger, and Howard Cosell work the same playing fields. Let Martin Buber and Pope John train the referees.”

Immediately after returning from Canada, Brand had begun to reassemble a publishing staff, starting with Diana Shugart. For an office, he rented a “moldering crab shack” for $40 a month in Sausalito. Set along a working waterfront, it came with a parrot named Lolita that incessently screamed, “Lolitaaa! I want a cracker!”

He used the Point Foundation’s organizational structure to host his new publication; technically, Michael Phillips, the foundation’s president, simply hired Brand as the editor in chief. (After they spent a year in the crab shack, a developer got permission to demolish the pier where it was located and so the Quarterly offices moved to what they described as the “longhair industrial dump” section of Sausalito in a building that retained the sign “Harvey’s Lunches.”)

Fluegelman was ready to abandon his legal career, and Brand hired him as the managing editor for the new publication. The working title had been The Never Piss Against the Wind Newsletter and Brand also considered a Batesonian Making Circuit before at the last moment settling on CoEvolution Quarterly, which captured his newfound enthusiasm for Bateson and biology.

“Ecology is a whole system, alright,” Brand wrote in the Quarterly, “but coevolution is a whole system in time. The health of it is forward. Systemic self-education which feeds on certain imperfection. Ecology maintains. Coevolution learns.”[9]

The Epilog and the Quarterly, which first appeared in compressed form as a 112-page supplement to Harper’s Magazine, began with a four-point explanation about why the Catalog was being restarted. He had expected that someone else would fill the niche he had left, Brand wrote, but they hadn’t. Second, the Catalog was continuing to sell briskly, even with increasingly outdated information. Third, the North American economy was “beginning to lose its mind, putting more people than ever in need of tools for independence.” And fourth, he acknowledged that he hadn’t been able to come up with a better idea. The Harper’s wraparound ended with a review of a pessimistic assessment of the world’s energy future, partly occasioned by the ongoing oil crisis. Below it Brand set a half-page photo of Stephanie Mills naked and silhouetted with her back to the camera walking on the desert playa and captioned “Armageddon Outa Here!”

While Bateson introduced Brand to the importance of paradox as well as to the sense of complete interconnectedness of the natural world, the biology-centered worldview of Ehrlich and Bateson pried him away from the engineering-centered influence of Fuller and Wiener that had shaped the original worldview of the Catalog. The magazine that emerged from these ideas opened with a special section titled “Apocalypse Juggernaut, hello,” citing the head of the Arthur D. Little consulting firm who predicted food shortages, massive federal spending increases, a worsening climate, the end of Keynesian economics, and the tripling of coal prices.

A first printing quickly sold out seven thousand copies and went into a second printing. It featured an article on coevolution by Ehrlich, as well as features on subjects like energy and culture and “spiritual tyranny,” and an article by future New York Times science writer Gina Kolata on the promise of theoretical ecology.

While Brand was launching the Quarterly, in the spring he immersed himself in Ehrlich’s biological perspective, sitting in on his graduate ecology seminar at Stanford. The idea of coevolution was becoming a powerful concept for Brand. It offered both a new metaphor and a prism through which he would interpret the world.

Ultimately, a staff of twenty-five worked on the Epilog from September 1973 to September 1974, when a first printing of 350,000 copies was produced. Some of the staff had been part of the original Whole Earth undertaking, such as J. Baldwin, Lloyd Kahn, and J. D. Smith, but Brand remained an adept recruiter and quickly began to acquire a stable of talented young writers and editors. Echoing the original Catalog, the staff at the new offices shared lunch and a daily volleyball game.

The Epilog was not as imposing as its predecessor, The Last Whole Earth Catalog, but it contained some of the same idiosyncratic features. It was 318 pages and priced at four dollars, and it included a slightly ribald satire of the TV series Kung Fu penned by Paul Krassner, titled Tongue Fu and modeled on Divine Right’s Trip, Gurney Norman’s novel, which had been serialized in The Last Whole Earth Catalog. A new section, “Soft Technology,” edited by Baldwin, focused on new kinds of alternative energy technologies.

By the middle of the summer, Brand was ready to sever his ties with San Francisco. He initially found what was essentially a garage in Tiburon, a tony Marin bedroom community across the Bay from the city, and then fairly quickly settled in a boathouse below the fashionable homes on Belvedere Cove.

Living directly on the Bay allowed him to keep both a small sailboat and a classic Whitehall rowboat tied up on his dock. He indulged his enthusiasm for sailing and began regularly commuting across Richardson Bay in the rowboat. The Whitehall was a design that had been pioneered in the nineteenth century. It was a small, elegant craft with room for a sail at the bow. It was so perfectly built that in the afternoons he would frequently lie down on the bottom of the boat and sail home downwind.

Russell “Rusty” Schweickart had gone into space on Apollo 9 in 1969, the first astronaut to venture outside one of the Apollo spacecraft. In December of 1972, he met Irwin William Thompson, who along with Carl Sagan and other literary and scientific figures of note had been invited by Time magazine to watch the final launch of NASA’s Apollo program. Thompson was a gnomish philosopher and poet who had grown up in California, taught at MIT, and earlier that year, with Rockefeller family backing, had established a retreat center known as the Lindisfarne Association at the tip of Long Island.

Schweickart became friendly with Thompson, who invited him to the association’s annual meeting on Long Island during the summer of 1974 to give a talk about his experience in space. Brand missed Schweickart’s talk, which would become known as “No Frames, No Boundaries,”[10] but it had such an impact—half the audience was in tears when he finished speaking—that a recording was passed around samizdat-style, and in the summer reached Brand, who began playing it on a long drive to his Canadian retreat.

As he listened, he was stunned to hear Schweickart confirm from his time in space what Brand had imagined under the influence of LSD on his rooftop in North Beach. “When you go around the Earth in an hour and a half,” the astronaut said, “you begin to recognize that your identity is with that whole thing. And that makes a change.”

Schweickart described how it was unimaginable how many international borders and boundaries he had crossed as his spacecraft repeatedly circled the Earth, and how ludicrous it seemed that people were killing each other over these imaginary lines. He told his audience that he wished that he could take one person from each side of a conflict and say, “Look. Look at it from this perspective. Look at that. What’s important?”

Brand was gobsmacked. Here was an astronaut having what amounted to a mystical experience. Schweickart had become humanity’s eyeball in orbit. He made real what until then had been merely a philosophical idea.

Driving on the freeway, he pulled over and called Schweickart at his office in Washington, DC. The two men spoke for half an hour and struck an immediate bond. Not long afterward Brand appeared in Schweickart’s office, and the astronaut showed him a file drawer containing dozens of beautiful prints of the Earth taken from space. Brand soon reprinted Schweickart’s talk in the CoEvolution Quarterly.

The same wellsprings that drove the creation of the Bay Area counterculture in the sixties continued to run deep in the seventies. And as the political New Left began to fragment and George McGovern’s idealist antiwar coalition was crushed by Richard Nixon, there was a fountain of New Age and personal growth movements. The back-to-the-land movement that had been fueled by the Whole Earth Catalog had ebbed, and in its place more individualistic paths to salvation and enlightenment ranging from est (Erhard Seminars Training) to Zen thrived.

Baker Roshi was a charismatic figure and a great salesman and one of the main reasons that Brand had been attracted to the study of Zen. He had quickly established an informal “Invisible College” that stretched from the Tassajara retreat center to the San Francisco Zen Center to Green Gulch, the organic farm purchased by the Zen Center in 1972, located just north of the Golden Gate Bridge near Muir Beach.

In the early seventies, Baker attracted an eclectic coterie of counterculture types ranging from Gregory Bateson, a longtime student of Zen who frequently used Zen concepts in his writings and talks, to Peter Coyote, writer Orville Schell, and Brand.

It was through the Zen Center that Brand met Jerry Brown, who had bonded with Baker at a Tassajara retreat in 1974, and began spending a significant amount of time at the center after he had been elected governor but before he took office. Like Brand, Brown had been significantly influenced by an Aldous Huxley speech; when Brown heard him speak in 1961, the writer had condemned modern education and, when questioned by the future governor, pointed Brown to the study of Zen.[11] Shortly after Brown took office, Brand sent him a letter endorsing his “dialectical approach to truth,” praising the field of cybernetics for providing a similar analytical approach to problems, and offering his services. He included a copy of Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics with several marked passages. (He underscored that the book was a loan. He had previously sent two books to Brown, and they were returned by the governor’s staff because he was unable to accept gifts.)

After Brown took up residence in Sacramento, Brand became part of an informal kitchen cabinet or “brain trust” surrounding the young governor. It included people like Baker and a handful of others from the Zen Center such as Coyote; Sim van der Ryn, who would become the state architect; and Huey Johnson, who served as California’s natural resources secretary.

Brand was so wide-eyed and enthusiastic about the new administration that he took on a temporary full-time position for several months in the capital, pronouncing Sacramento “Oz—munchkins, witches, wizards, the motley band with Dorothy, and all. There’s dazzling magic,” adding, “As Jimmy Breslin said of politics, it’s all done with mirrors and smoke. What isn’t?”

He would make weekly trips to Sacramento, and he acquired a three-piece suit for his new role, an effect that completely failed, according to Brown’s biographer Orville Schell, who noted, “The concept was good, but this particular piece of haberdashery hung on him like a shroud over an unveiled statue.”[12]

Brand’s role was to invite a wide-ranging group of thinkers to a speaker’s series for Brown and his staff called What’s Actually Happening. Among those he roped in were Buckminster Fuller, Ray Bradbury, Carl Sagan, Jacques Cousteau, E. F. Schumacher, Ivan Illich, Gregory Bateson, Ken Kesey, Amory Lovins, and Herman Kahn. (Brand decided that the intelligent conservatives he had invited to meet with Brown—Kahn, Milton Friedman, and William F. Buckley Jr.—were more open-minded and better company than the intelligent liberals.) On occasion he would record the interviews and reprint them in the Quarterly, giving his magazine added influence.

For more than a year during Brown’s first term in office, Brand held the title of special assistant and was paid $2,000 monthly. He also acted as an impresario for a Save the Whales concert and Space Day, put on by the new administration.

Before he worked for Brown, much of Brand’s learning had come from reading books, but in Sacramento, he discovered that those in government were hardworking and that they didn’t care that much about politics. He decided that his libertarian friends had almost exclusively never served in government and had no idea how it functioned. At the Whole Earth Catalog, they’d had little time for government. But after working for Brown, Brand decided that good government had value.

He stayed for only part of Brown’s term as governor, deciding that it was too challenging to perform his role as assistant without moving to Sacramento and giving up the Quarterly, which he was unwilling to do. Later he would take particular pride in having persuaded the governor to direct one of his agencies to produce the California Water Atlas. Brand became the chair of the planning group and the first edition of the Atlas was published in 1979.[13]

It was not just his political worldview that was altered. Before he departed, he was forced to confront some of his most closely held beliefs, in the process reframing the way he saw the world. In the run-up to Space Day—intended to celebrate the launch of the space shuttle and the California aerospace industry that created it—Brand visited the Rockwell International space shuttle factory in Los Angeles. Steeped in a counterculture of “small is beautiful,” it turned out to be an overwhelming experience. He stood with Schweickart and several Rockwell “suit wearers” and looked up at this enormous structure teeming with busy, capable men and women who were all doing things he couldn’t begin to comprehend.

He found it mind-boggling and revolting at the same time. He fled to the men’s room, feeling completely alienated by the technological gigantism and yet simultaneously compelled by what he realized was a tour de force. “Technology, kiddo,” he wrote in his journal several days later. “This is today what the great sailing ships were in their day. Get with the program or stick with your spinning wheel.”

The visit would have the same impact on him that his visit to the Warm Springs Indian Reservation had had, radically reshaping his sense of man’s relationship with nature. Brand had always been an optimist about technology, but this was different. He had to choose sides—a decision that would set him apart from the counterculture movement he had been instrumental in creating.

He decided to get on board.

Space Day was underwritten by eleven aerospace companies and the United California Bank. Showing that he didn’t want to completely be labeled a shill for the space industry, Brand invited R. Crumb to “cover” the event for the Quarterly. The cartoonist took away a different message from his host’s: “Finally it was over. . . . I staggered out the door, my mind reeling from the eight hours of lies, double-talk, persuasion, and downright madness I had just sat through.”

The highlight of the resulting cartoon was a panel portraying an oblivious Stewart Brand flirting with poet Michael McClure’s blond daughter.

The first issue of the Quarterly was produced by a staff of about a dozen people and continued to reflect the Catalog’s back-to-the-land roots, with discussions of sources for obtaining wheat and reports from several communes.

Brand continued to work at being provocative. He had been frustrated by quarrels with his Harper’s Magazine editors, and he flashed his editorial independence by including a query to readers on the best sources for mail-order pornography, accompanied by a stark photograph of a naked woman with her legs spread apart. He had met Huey Newton, the militant leader of the Oakland-based Black Panther Party, and he turned the third issue over to the Panthers to edit. Newton had fled the country for Cuba in the face of a murder charge, and so Elaine Brown, who ran the Panthers in Newton’s absence, led the project. Later Brand interviewed Newton, who was then in exile, for the Quarterly.

The Quarterly production cycle had been established as a series of six-week-long pushes and equally long breaks where the staff would temporarily disperse. It was largely collegial with lots of activity and idiosyncratic personalities. As an editor Brand put his earlier army philosophy to work—that the best managers were the ones who were smart and lazy, leaving it to their employees to take their own initiatives. As a management approach, it mostly worked well. However, there were on occasion skeptics, such as the production employee who sent Brand a letter describing what it was like to work for him:

The other day in the production area (trying to maintain my reputation as a wit) I said that sometimes I pictured you, the publisher and boss, you Stewart were joyously pursuing your dream in the driver’s seat of an old VW microbus—the John Muir kind—careening happily up this curving mountain road with both hands tight on the wheel and a big toothy SB smile (well, that’s the way I pictured it as I said it) and the way I pictured it, we were in the back, the windows blocked off with Cost Plus madras bedspreads, bouncing from the ceiling to the wall to the floor—not knowing where we were going and very very carsick.

He had evolved into the sharply idiosyncratic editor he had imagined would be necessary to create a publication with a unique voice, but he relied heavily on the network of friends and intellectual fellow travelers he had created at the Catalog. Steve Durkee supplied cover art and illustrations; J. Baldwin came back into the fold as a section editor; and Steve Baer wrote an early article attacking the idea of converting to the metric system. Brand was opposed to the metric system but for reasons different from Baer’s, arguing that he was against metric measurement because it was too efficient—slowing down to do conversions forced you to think. (Eventually, Brown would appoint Brand to the California Metric Conversion Council, in a move that was attacked as an effort to undermine the process.)

The Summer 1975 issue was the first to have significant impact, thanks to a cover story on the Gaia hypothesis, proposed by British chemist James Lovelock and microbiologist Lynn Margulis, for the first time presenting their concept to a nontechnical audience.

The Gaia hypothesis argued that the Earth’s biosphere was a complex and naturally self-regulating system; as Brand wrote in his introduction, the innovative theory treated “the anomalous Earth atmosphere as an artifact of life and comprehends the planet itself as a single life”—which was quite up his alley.

The issue included another innovation: “Listen, it is very likely true that little computers are on the way to revolutionizing human behavior,” Brand announced. “Eager not to be left out, we herewith become the first general magazine with a computer science department.” The section on personal computers was compiled by the now twenty-two-year-old Marc LeBrun, one of the group of enthusiasts who had that spring launched the Homebrew Computer Club, which in turn would light the entrepreneurial fire leading to the emergence of the personal computer industry in Silicon Valley. LeBrun called attention to a 128-page “underground” publication, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, published the previous year by Ted Nelson, a former sociology graduate student and coinventor of the concept of hypertext—Doug Engelbart had simultaneously come up with the same idea—that would eventually lead directly to the creation of the World Wide Web. (Like a range of publications, Computer Lib was modeled on the format of the Catalog.)

There were also walk-ons and discoveries based on manuscripts that came in over the transom. Anne Herbert, a young writer from Ohio, was one such discovery. A talented poet and writer of fiction, Herbert would soon move to Sausalito to join the Quarterly as an editor. She would be remembered for the phrases “Practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty” and “Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.”

Brand also failed on occasion to reel in the big fish he invited to write for the Quarterly. An entreaty to Woody Allen went unanswered. However, Norman Mailer had the courtesy of responding: “Dear Stewart Brand,” he wrote in 1975. “I’m IRSed to the tune of 100 times 10 times 100, and so writing for the metaphysical essence of turds, once known as cabbage. Alas, I can’t afford your rates. Wish I could. Cheers, Norman Mailer.”

It would be Gerard K. O’Neill’s twenty-five-page cover story in the Quarterly’s Fall 1975 issue that established the publication, its voice, and its unique identity. O’Neill was a physicist who had done original work in the field of particle accelerators, and Brand had first stumbled across him at a World Future Society conference that summer and been wowed.

“O’Neill’s Space Colonies,” the cover announced. “Practical, Desirable, Profitable, Ready in 15 years.” Within, O’Neill proposed a vision of a vast industrial-scale space-based platform for the exploration and colonization of the universe, a concept that horrified many of the Whole Earth Catalog’s devotees. The issue, which also featured an article by E. F. Schumacher, of Small Is Beautiful fame, and a transcription of a conversation between Governor Brown and Bateson, would drive a wedge between Brand and some of his closest environmental allies and cement his reputation as a “techno-utopian.”

O’Neill laid out his argument that there was no good reason why an off-the-planet colony shouldn’t be an established fact by the year 2000. Brand added a full-throated defense of the idea in his introduction: “Space Colonies show promise of being able to solve, in order, the Energy Crisis, the Food Crisis, the Arms Race, and the Population Problem. . . . Space is part of the wildness in which lies ‘the preservation of the world.’ ”

The ensuing debate stretched over multiple issues of the Quarterly and brought out a series of big names on both sides of the issue, including Lynn Margulis, Wendell Berry, Paul and Anne Ehrlich, E. F. Schumacher, Lewis Mumford, Buckminster Fuller, Ernest Callenbach, David Brower, Carl Sagan, Gary Snyder, and Russell Schweickart.

None of the attacks were more bitter than Berry’s, whose writings on agriculture and the environment had been showcased in the Catalog. Calling Brand’s enthusiasm a “warmed-over Marine Corps recruitment advertisement,” he wrote, “As you represent it, a space colony will be nothing less than a magic machine that will transmute little problems into big solutions. Like utopians before, you envision a clean break with all human precedent: history, heredity, character.”

The controversy echoed through the pages of the Quarterly and in Space Colonies, a 1977 book on the dispute that Brand published. He reported that positive mail had far outweighed negative responses. Moreover, he added that almost all of the 122 unsolicited positive responses came from college students—a fact he considered to be a sign that the younger generation might avoid the cynicism and passivity of his own.

For Brand the idea of colonizing space was mostly a thought experiment that was in line with his faith in the ability of technology and tools to improve the quality of human life. It showed a consistency that stretched back to the opening sentence of the Catalog: “We are as Gods and might as well get good at it.”

However, his thinking on the ideal of self-sufficiency that had helped inspire the back-to-the-land communal wave had changed. Writing in the Quarterly, he declared that “ ‘self-sufficiency’ is an idea which has done more harm than good. On close conceptual examination it is flawed at the root. More importantly, it works badly in practice.”

As with many things, it was his encounter with Bateson that had caused him to rethink his philosophy of independence. “It is a damned lie,” he wrote of self-sufficiency. “There is no dissectible self. Ever since there were two organisms life has been a matter of coevolution.”[14]

The Quarterly never experienced the rocket growth of the Catalog. After four years of publication, subscriptions were hovering around 20,000 and newsstand purchases added another 35,000 in sales—still not enough to break even. It was a precarious existence. Although Random House had published The Last Whole Earth Catalog, Brand had decided to switch to Penguin to partner for the publication and distribution of the Epilog. They had printed 450,000 of the Whole Earth Epilog in 1974, and it turned out to be far too optimistic, putting the Point Foundation, their holding company, in debt to Penguin.

Fortunately, a benefactor emerged at a crucial moment.

Marlon Brando had long been a fan of the Catalog and particularly of J. Baldwin and his writing on nomadic life and ecological design. Shortly after the publication of the first Catalog, he had raved about the publication in an interview in Life, which had proven to be one of the viral moments that pushed dramatic sales.

Brando had stumbled upon the tiny atoll of Tetiaroa, located north of Tahiti, in 1960, when he was scouting locations for Mutiny on the Bounty. While filming, he fell in love with his Tahitian costar, whom he married. He would ultimately purchase most of the atoll. He called Brand at one point and said that he wanted him to run the island for him as a sustainable retreat. The idea intrigued Brand, and Brando invited Baldwin and Brand to visit him in Los Angeles at his home on Mulholland Drive. The actor picked them up at the airport and proved to be the world’s most distracted driver, routinely stopping at green lights and running through reds, scaring the wits out of his two passengers.

Ultimately, nothing came of the proposal, though Brand and Baldwin did get to visit Tetiaroa. However, the actor remained friendly and one day in late 1975 he called with a very convenient question: “Would you like $20,000? It’s the end of the year.”

“We’d be absolutely thrilled!” Brand responded. “And would you like to come by and visit?” When Brando visited in Sausalito, he proposed that they move operations to Tetiaroa and produce the Quarterly from there. Isabella Kirkland, who was working for the Quarterly as an artist and graphics designer, listened as Brand and Brando decided that they would have to use bicycle-powered generators to produce enough energy to run the electronic typesetter and waxer to do layout. She was excited about the idea of moving to Tetiaroa, but having the actor in the Quarterly office seemed bizarre. He overflowed the small chair he was sitting on in their cramped rooms. Although the supplement had proved that it was “difficult but possible” to produce the magazine remotely, it was clear to the staff that Tahiti would not be “difficult but possible”—it would be way too much of a stretch. The idea evaporated after Brando was gone.

While playing his role in Jerry Brown’s kitchen cabinet and growing into his role as a magazine editor, Brand had no shortage of female companionship—but nothing stuck.

His “great love” continued to elude him. For several years he had a long-distance relationship with Alia Johnson. She had been Donna Rasnake when she first wrote Brand asking him for an interview with Reason magazine when he came to Washington, DC, for the World Future Society conference.

She soon became Johnson (Johnson was her birth name, and Alia was taken from a character in the science fiction novel Dune who was described as a “virgin witch”), and was living on a commune run by George von Hilsheimer, a former columnist for Krassner’s Realist, who was collecting silver coins. She and Brand began their long-distance relationship at the commune deep in the Virginia countryside.

Brand had continued to return to Cape Breton Island each summer, with a never-finished vision of building a larger home to replace the shack that he had built with Jennings. At the end of the summer of 1976, he visited for several weeks with Johnson and Schweickart and his wife. Although their brief romance was ending amicably, it was one of his best vacations.

He was back in California the next spring when Johnson showed up at his boathouse unexpectedly and told him she was pregnant with their child. She informed him that she wanted to keep the baby and was asking his consent; she would raise the child without him. They spent an intense night talking about it, and in the morning Brand told her “fine.”

Several months later she returned to introduce him to his son, Noah Johnson (as a teen he would change his last name to Brand), who was born in Denver in May of 1977—eight pounds, with red hair and blue eyes. Brand greeted the occasion from a distance, noting in his journal: “Mother ecstatic. Father interested, evidently relieved, still puzzled.” (Johnson eventually married Robert Fuller, a physicist who had been president of Oberlin College.)

In November, Brand wrote his mother to let her know that he had become a father. “A nifty kid,” he told her. “At present I see Noah every couple of weeks and I provide some things for him—a camera, a stroller, etc. I can go dote anytime, or they come here. As for the future we’re taking it as it comes. I may or may not acquire a family of my own.”

Patty Phelan had been a social entrepreneur since she was a teenager. The youngest of seven children in a well-to-do Pasadena family, in high school she turned a small tutoring program into a year-round mentorship and summer camp for kids who were growing up in poverty.

She had puzzled her parents with her passion for helping the underprivileged, and she entered UC Berkeley intent on getting a teaching credential. By the time she graduated, she had shifted her focus to publishing. While she was a student she had put together a community services directory, loosely modeled on the Whole Earth Catalog, called Savvy. It was intended to be a compendium of all the services offered in the East Bay for people who were low-income or were challenged with problems like housing or with navigating the other social services offered by the local government.

She had learned how to create her directory by reading an article in the CoEvolution Quarterly that was a step-by-step account of how the Whole Earth Catalog had been created. A fresh college graduate, she decided that a job at the Quarterly would be a good stepping-stone.

Learning quickly that Brand was difficult to reach, she simply rang the Quarterly office and in her sweetest girlfriend voice said, “Hi! Is Stewart there?” She was put through to him and immediately made her pitch to come to work. Brand was intrigued, and after her interview, during which she slapped a copy of Savvy down on Brand’s desk as her résumé, he hired her on the spot, even though they had no open positions. Her title was “projects.” Initially, her salary was half paid by the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, a Nixon administration federal program that subsidized public services jobs. Her hiring “demolishes the last of our capitalist pretensions,” Brand noted in the Gossip section of the Quarterly.

He was immediately attracted to Phelan, who at twenty-five years old was fourteen years younger than Brand. But he was also chastened because he had made the mistake of chasing a Quarterly staff member several years earlier, creating all of the problems attendant with fraternizing with employees, so he kept his feelings to himself.

Early on, however, he tapped Phelan to help him in organizing a tenth-anniversary event to celebrate the founding of the Catalog. The idea was to celebrate to “help us get used to the idea of having been in business for ten years.”

The initial plan was to go back to the Gerbode preserve, where the New Games Tournament had been held a half decade earlier. As Brand got deeper into the project, however, he began to have second thoughts. What had seemed to be a grand celebration began to feel stale, more like looking backward than at a new idea.

Brand’s original vision had been an eco-festival with the usual cast of characters plus some. The jamboree was intended as an “educational and cultural” experience, with speakers, exhibits, music, and a re-creation of the original New Games Tournament. What he failed to realize was that in the intervening five years the deserted valley where he had held that tournament was now part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

Initially, Brand was able to obtain the enthusiastic support of the National Park Service plus a commitment from the National Guard. However, once word of the event leaked out, he ran into stiff resistance from environmental groups, homeowners, and Sausalito city officials. There was a great deal of pessimism about his intentions. In the end, the park’s superintendent gave Brand a permit for a far more constrained event.[15]

Approximately twelve thousand people attended the celebration, which had hits and misses. Brand had unsuccessfully attempted to recruit celebrities such as James Watson, the codiscoverer of DNA, and Marlon Brando. Watson pleaded that he was too busy, and Brando said he would show but didn’t. Joan Baez wasn’t there, but her sister Mimi Fariña sang. Wavy Gravy entertained the crowd, and poets like Alan Ginsburg and Peter Orlovsky read from their work. Almost sixty five-minute “lightning” talks were interspersed through the event.

Brand, outfitted in his jaunty black top hat with an eagle feather and looking like he needed a shave, closed the event saying that he was most enthusiastic about the idea of being able to take a bath. He also talked about the importance of second acts and suggested that everyone should have some hobbies that might open up into new lines of work.

One afternoon while they were scouting locations for the event, Brand and Phelan lay on a hillside in the late afternoon sun. He had taken off his shirt, and he suddenly realized that she had taken off hers as well. Phelan, who was living with someone else at the time, had fallen for Brand head over heels, and it would soon be apparent to him that he had finally found his great love. Their friendship went quickly from dating to something much deeper.

Indeed, their bond was sealed soon after they began dating. One day after a ballet class Phelan came running back to her apartment in Sausalito, rushing to get ready to go out to the movies. She ran the water for a bath, but before she could climb into the tub, she found herself doubled over in pain. She had no idea what was going on or whether it would pass, but she struggled to put her clothes on. She was panicking when Brand knocked on the door. She crawled out of the bathroom.

Greeting him still doubled over, she moaned, “I’m so sorry. I’m sure it’s really nothing, but I just really can’t even put on my pants.” She kept protesting that her severe pain would pass, and he kept telling her, “I’m going to take you to the hospital.”

She was mortified when he finally picked her up and put her in her car and drove her to Marin General.

He took her to the emergency room at about seven p.m. Finally, after an examination, Phelan was admitted to the hospital at midnight. The doctors were concerned that she was bleeding internally, and they wanted to keep her for observation. Her doctor said that they suspected she had a burst appendix. Brand went home deeply worried.

It turned out to be a burst ovarian cyst. When she came out of surgery, Brand was there with a small pillow he had fetched from her apartment.

That was it. “This guy’s a keeper,” she decided.

Chapter 8

Anonymity

A rt Kleiner was a struggling graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley School of Journalism when he decided to send Stewart Brand an unusual proposal.

A transplanted New Yorker, Kleiner hadn’t had much contact with the Whole Earth Catalog, but he was a devotee of magazines and was aspiring to a career in writing and editing. He was particularly struck by the fact that the CoEvolution Quarterly and Mad magazine were the two publications that seemed to be making a go of it without running advertising. He was taking a course on graphic design and supporting himself by working as a typesetter, so he submitted an article on the history of magazines that was completely camera-ready. The visuals appealed to Brand, so he invited Kleiner over. “You can come in and paste it up on our equipment,” Brand told him.

In addition to being graphically adventuresome, the 1979 article was prescient in several ways. In his concluding paragraph, Kleiner wrote:

Computers will eventually break down the structure of the print media. Once magazines, newspapers, and books start to come in over the home terminal, or the terminal down at the corner computer center, then the boundaries between them won’t be necessary; they’ll merge into a steady flow of information, stories, pictures, design, photographs. You might never have to stop reading.[1]

Brand had found his guide back into the digital world he had first stumbled upon almost two decades earlier in the Stanford computer center, which was now encroaching on the world. Kleiner proposed another article that Brand accepted, this one focusing on the emerging world of online services.

Kleiner had happened into the online realm one day while he was driving his car and listening to someone talking about how people were sending messages to each other via computer. Early on, he found his way to a networking experiment known as the Electronic Information Exchange System, or EIES, a National Science Foundation–funded computer conferencing system being developed at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. The system operators gave him a free account in return for his work as a support person.

EIES was a granddaddy of the coming world of virtual communities, and Kleiner wrote a second article for the Quarterly that served as a guided tour to the new electronic services, titled “Better Than the Next Best Thing to Being There.” Not long afterward, Brand called up Kleiner and asked him to come over to Sausalito to meet. Kleiner assumed he was going to discuss writing another article, but Brand had something else in mind.

Despite the appearance to Kleiner that the Quarterly was surviving on subscriptions alone, it wasn’t. It was a money-losing proposition that was persisting because the occasional Whole Earth Catalog was highly profitable. Shortly before Brand had reached out to Kleiner, John Brockman, now Brand’s literary agent, had sold another version of the Catalog. It was early January 1980, and the plan was to have The Next Whole Earth Catalog in the market for Christmas. “I would like you to be the research editor,” Brand told him.

It was the most remarkable offer Kleiner, who was still mired in his journalism school thesis, could imagine. He joined to work on the Catalog and would spend the next five years as part of the Quarterly staff, first putting together a massive, completely reworked Catalog, a 608-page rendition that would be considered by many the definitive statement of the genre.

Kleiner became a fixture at the Quarterly offices during an era when the publication grappled with the impact he had foreseen of new communication technologies on the print world. He moved first into a cooperative apartment at the north end of Sausalito with Anne Herbert and Lori Gallagher, who was the Quarterly’s office manager. They called their home Vague Acres, and used it as a crash pad while they basically lived, ate, and even slept at the office on Gate 5 Road, which curved to parallel the waterfront. Later, Kleiner moved to San Francisco and would bicycle to work across the Golden Gate Bridge, frequently sleeping overnight in the magazine’s offices and then riding home the next day.

By 1981, the counterculture that Brand had helped create was not so countercultural. The Vietnam War was over. The most famous Hollywood star was not a long-haired rebel but a newly elected, right-wing president. Psychedelics were being replaced by cocaine. Vegetarian cuisine could be found in supermarket freezers, and the most prominent celebrity antiwar protester had shifted her focus to profiting from her aerobics videos.

Despite the shift, the arrival of the newest version of the Catalog was greeted with great fanfare. Brand himself was treated like a rock star, the subject of innumerable newspaper and magazine profiles charting his course from Stanford to the army to North Beach to the Pranksters and onward. “Ah, well, the wings of man come hard, and Stewart is anchored by sensible gravities at his core,” intoned Calvin Fentress in his Washington Post profile. “Earthbound thus, he might as well get good at it, knowing it’s always a kind of sleepwalking anyway. He will do what he can. Stay open. Stay foolish. Keep the transmitter on.”[2]

In the Christian Science Monitor, Stewart McBride added: “Brand’s embracing of Milton Friedman’s neoconservative economics and his enthusiasm for Gerard O’Neill’s space colonies have recently gotten him into hot water with the organic, ‘small is beautiful,’ appropriate technology constituency. But Brand seems too preoccupied with the search for tomorrow’s frontiers to be looking over his shoulder or slowed down by his critics.”[3] Among those critics was Sue Halpern in the Nation: “The Whole Earth Catalog, once considered the hip bible, has become a slick testament to the acculturation of the counterculture.”[4]

For Brand it was a period of increasing freedom to explore various passions. He bought part ownership in what would be his last sailboat, the Bakea, and spent time in the Northwest hoping to make it seaworthy enough to bring it to the Bay Area. After making a series of repairs, he began to sail it down the coast with two skilled friends. They soon found that the boat had a built-in list to port, and so they parked it in view of the boat designer’s home in Friday Harbor to shame him into fixing the problem. The designer ignored them, so Brand gave up and had the boat shipped to Sausalito, where it was anchored out among the fleet of aging vessels that dotted Richardson Bay.

He was aware of his own aging too. At forty years old, Brand was a good decade older than most of the Quarterly staff, and he was regularly confronted with a younger generation that was both jarring and intriguing.

Isabella Kirkland was one of the twentysomethings on the staff who played volleyball, ate, and partied together. She had been at the Quarterly for more than a year when one day Brand came out of his office and asked her, “What is it you do here exactly?” He was puzzled because she did a little bit of everything. She ran subscriptions, proofread, helped with marketing, and could do letterset if needed.

At the time, Kirkland was living in San Francisco’s seedy South of Market neighborhood while attending the San Francisco Art Institute. She was also heavily into the burgeoning Bay Area punk rock scene. Her hair was pink; she wore combat boots; and her skirt ended substantially above her thigh. She started telling him about the concerts she’d attended, and Brand asked if she would take him.

Soon thereafter he accompanied Kirkland and another Quarterly staffer to hear the Dead Kennedys at Temple Beautiful, an abandoned synagogue that had been adopted by the punk scene. Brand had helped create the original San Francisco acid rock scene in the sixties. This was better, he decided—the music rawer, the crowd closer to the performers, a real sense of camaraderie in the audience, and none of the “fake” love of the flower generation that he had come to disdain.

But unlike then, now he was simply a cultural tourist—the scene was already trending, and his inclination had always been to depart if he felt his role was merely receptive and not creative. He didn’t go back.

Several nights after the concert, the punks were still on his mind, however. He dreamed he was a member of a country-punk band and that his instrument was a chain saw: “At the correct musical moment I would fire it up BRRAAAAAP!!! and have at the stage itself.”

Ecologists speak about an edge effect that occurs whenever two biomes meet. An unusually rich habitat is generated at the edge. And that was what Brand found on the Sausalito waterfront, a tidal basin both physically and metaphorically, with a habitat that sustained artists and quasi outlaws. He had stumbled into this world, first in 1960 as a young Stanford graduate, and again after he returned from the army in 1962, when it had been home to artists and poets and professors. It was still a rich mix of people with a villagelike closeness, everyone from welfare recipients to wealthy architects and TV people.[5] It also provided a bit of longed-for continuity. Steinbeck’s Cannery Row had remained his touchstone, and the Sausalito waterfront was similar to the world inhabited by its protagonist, Ed Ricketts.

When Brand left San Francisco and began to both live and work on Richardson Bay in 1977, he was still attracted by the romance of what Buckminster Fuller described as “outlaw areas.” Fuller had noted that human habitation of the Earth was concentrated on a tiny portion of the Earth’s surface and that for most of human history the oceans had been outlaw areas beyond the reach of the law. He had pointed out that most technology developments had occurred in the outlaw areas because of the toughness of nature, citing space as an obvious future arena for invention. Fuller’s idea was that technology innovation happened first and most effectively in the areas that were most challenging for human life, forcing creativity.

Brand had first noted Fuller’s idea in the June 1970 Whole Earth Catalog supplement, where he had celebrated the notion of an innovative outlaw culture. Fuller’s ideas resonated with Brand’s sixties counterculture world populated with twentysomethings whose lives consisted of a range of illegal activities.

Fuller had convinced him that there would always be outlaw areas, indeed that a society of laws required them. The question was whether you preferred a highly “coevolved” outlaw area like the Waldo Point scene “with the benefit of 20 years of mutual accommodations between the transients, permanent residents and surrounding town and county,” or would take your chances on whatever might spring up elsewhere.

All of this was on Brand’s mind when, in the summer of 1980, with almost no warning, eviction notices were given, and bulldozers started destroying structures at the Napa Street Pier.

Brand, who continued to describe himself as a conservative (though one who refused to read the Wall Street Journal because he was horrified by its editorial pages), was increasingly skeptical about the value of activism on the national stage, and in some ways, Fuller’s thinking played into this: focusing on the edges, which in this case meant local. Thus, willingly, Brand became a local activist.

In the late 1970s, the city of Sausalito had changed zoning laws to make living aboard a boat illegal. The change went through quietly and almost nobody realized that the houseboat community along the Napa Street Pier had become an outlaw community.

That quickly changed after the city took ownership of the underwater “street” that followed the path of the Napa Street Pier and quietly issued eviction permits. Grange Debris Box & Wrecking Co. showed up early one morning with axes and bulldozers to be confronted by an angry crowd of waterfront residents held back by local police.

In the wake of the destruction of Bob’s Boatyard, Brand convened a meeting of neighbors where slides of the destruction of the waterfront community were shown. There was a lot of bitterness and a series of first-person accounts of disruption and loss. The meeting turned out an eclectic group with a diverse set of talents. Brand asked the protesters, “Well, what are we going to do about this?”

“I’m willing to work with the council,” he continued. “It seems to me that if they can change the zoning that easily, they can change it right back.”

They put together a group to organize the opposition to the zoning changes and when one of the women at the meeting asked, “Why isn’t there an art zone?” they decided to give that name to their newly formed group. When Art Zone applied for funding from the San Francisco Foundation to support their organizing effort, Brand wrote in a cover letter for the grant application: “If there were no Sausalito waterfront there would be no Whole Earth Catalog or CoEvolution Quarterly.”

For years the group worked to focus attention on the waterfront and to convince Sausalito residents of the cultural value of the waterfront community. In the end, they were able to radically change the city’s orientation toward the waterfront, and in doing so a group of dedicated waterfront residents, including Brand, built a vibrant community movement. A member of the activist group eventually became mayor of Sausalito and later a Marin County supervisor.

In the long run, however, it was not an unqualified victory. The developers persisted and gentrification won; as is often the case, the outlaws and the libertines ultimately gave way to upper-middle-class hipsters.

Shortly after she became involved with Brand, Patty Phelan left her job at the Quarterly to work at Planetree, a patient-centered medicine nonprofit that had been founded by Angie Thieriot, the wife of San Francisco Chronicle publisher Richard Thieriot. Phelan and Brand had been a couple for more than two years when they decided it was time to move in together. Neither his boathouse flat on Belvedere Cove nor her apartment seemed appropriate and so they began scouring the Sausalito waterfront for a place to live.

Commissioned in 1912, the Mirene had been a working tug in the Oregon logging industry for decades before it showed up in the Bay Area in 1975. By 1982 it had been left to die, and when they first rowed out to look it over, it was in such questionable condition that parts of the boat were rotten to the touch. The engine was gone, and the tug had been stripped of almost everything, including its rudder.

They purchased the Mirene for just $8,000 and then spent the next two years and $180,000 converting her into a houseboat berthed at the South 40 Dock. A decade later they would put the boat back in dry dock and add a new engine as part of making the boat seaworthy again.

The South 40 Dock became the best example of what Brand’s friend and neighbor Peter Calthorpe would describe as the “new urbanism.” Calthorpe was inspired in part by living in the houseboat community to realize that “walkability”—the notion that all of the resources a resident might need, from shopping to work and entertainment, were within easy walking distance—was the key to creating a livable community. That insight would be at the heart of Brand’s break with the back-to-the-land movement. He had realized early on that he was an urban person at heart—thus his flight from commune life in favor of the Bay Area. Now he came to agree with Calthorpe, who in 1985 wrote that in terms of impact on the environment, dense urban cities were the most benign forms of human settlement. It would later become one of the key ideas in Brand’s own Whole Earth Discipline—a book that evoked cries of betrayal from many in the environmental movement when it appeared in 2009—that cities were the “greenest” of human communities, with the least impact on the environment.

The plan to move onto the Mirene also led to Phelan’s decision to marry Brand. In July of 1983, just as they were about to move aboard, Joe Kane, a San Francisco freelancer, penned a laudatory profile for Esquire around the thesis that Brand was not the hippie he was often portrayed as but was rather a tough competitor whose personality was perfectly suited for the coming digital decade. That was not what caught Phelan’s mother’s eye, however. The story included a full-page photo of Brand and Phelan posed in front of the Mirene, just as they were about to move into it, and her mother, a devout Catholic, was not at all happy with the notion of her daughter living in sin.

Phelan had had no intention of marrying Brand, but in the wake of her father’s death, seeing the pain she was causing her mother, she softened her views. In October of 1983 they were wed by a Zen priest at Green Gulch, the San Francisco Zen Center farm near the Pacific Ocean. In their vows they didn’t promise to be forever faithful to each other—rather their common bond was to protect all sentient beings. To appease Phelan’s mother, a Catholic prayer was read during the ceremony.

Their choice of Green Gulch was also a statement about their support for the Zen Center, which earlier that year had been rocked by a scandal involving Richard Baker, the abbot. He was publicly revealed to have been sleeping with a number of his students, including Anna Hawken, the wife of businessman and environmentalist Paul Hawken, who was Baker’s close friend as well as Brand and Phelan’s.

Over Phelan’s initial objection as well as pressure from the Zen Center, Brand chose to run an article about the scandal written by Katy Butler, a San Francisco Chronicle reporter, in the Quarterly; it effectively ended his decades-long friendship with Baker. Their relationship had become more complex before the scandal tore it apart. At the time, Brand was a member of the Zen Center’s Outside Financial Advisory Board, and he and Phelan would regularly attend Sunday talks given by Baker at Green Gulch, where Hawken and his wife were living in a small house they had built. However, Brand had grown increasingly wary of Baker’s charisma and how he employed it.

Hawken, also someone Brand had known since the early sixties and a major funder of the Zen Center, threatened legal action after he discovered his wife’s affair with Baker, touching off the crisis.

The Zen Center scandal fractured a web of close friends and forced members of a tightly knit community to choose sides. Phelan was caught between her husband-to-be and a new group of people with whom she had become close. “Stewart, he is your friend,” she pleaded with him, speaking of Baker. She believed that friendship came first.

Brand was unmoved. “I can’t sit back,” he told her. “This is going to happen in other communities.” The pressure wasn’t just from Phelan: the Zen Center itself wrote Brand, asking him to allow their community to “heal” privately.

Butler’s article in the Quarterly opened with a scene describing a confrontation between the Zen Center’s board of directors and Baker, who was accused of having a sexual relationship with a student who was also the wife of a man described as his best friend. Several other female students had come forward with similar accounts. The article did more than describe his sexual behavior. Baker had abused his power to live well and travel widely. He had used the Zen Center’s funds to buy himself a new BMW. He was forced to step down from his position as abbot and ultimately left the Zen Center.

Brand wrote a personal introduction to the article. He described encountering Baker at a philanthropy conference early that year where he said, “In most religious groups, the rules gradually relax as you get more senior. At Zen Center it’s the reverse; the rules are stricter the more senior you are.” Brand noted that he had nodded approvingly at the time and responded: “Western philosophers teach only with their talk. Eastern philosophers do it with their whole lives.”

He described his sense of responsibility for permitting Baker’s distorted style of leadership, adding, “I gradually became peripherally involved in the community’s efforts to understand what had happened and to reshape things so it wouldn’t happen again. This article is perhaps part of that effort.”

In response, Baker wrote an angry letter to Brand’s mother attacking him. She told Brand that she had ignored it.

Life aboard the Mirene fundamentally transformed Brand. His decade as a bachelor had made up for the frustrations he had felt in his marriage to Jennings, but now he felt centered and comfortable and there was a consensus among their friends that Patty Phelan had made him a nicer person. At the same time, after editing and publishing the Quarterly for more than a half decade, he again felt bored and ready for something new.

Increasingly delegating more of the Quarterly’s editing to a rotating group of staffers, Brand traveled, spoke publicly, and, to stave off the ennui, launched new projects, some of which failed and several of which succeeded spectacularly. He tried to push back against the “self-help” orientation that had seized America in the seventies. As part of that effort, he offered a series of classes focused on helping others. Like many of Brand’s schemes, Uncommon Courtesy: School of Compassionate Skills had bubbled for many years as an idea before he launched it. At the end of 1971, he had written a long essay on the subject of “What is most worth doing now?” to the directors of the Point Foundation. In the essay, Brand imagined the creation of something he described as a “Peripheral Intelligence Agency,” which would employ a group of “Free Agents” whose role would be to use their resourcefulness to do the maximum amount of good with the minimum expenditure. The Point should explore the humanitarian uses of “applied laziness,” by which he meant that the amount of work wasn’t the issue, rather the degree of impact was. A decade later he wrote, “Most of the real good done is accomplished by amateurs in their spare time with their left hand and the corner of their eye.”

In 1982 he hired a friend of Phelan’s to serve as director of the Uncommon Courtesy school, in which students would spend about $50 to take classes “aimed at teaching people skills necessary to become better and more efficient helpers or ‘do-gooders.’ ”

He planned other classes, on firefighting skills, home care, local politics, and creative philanthropy, all with the intent of making “doing good do better.”[6]

He enlisted his friends, persuading Paul Hawken to teach several classes, and got some national press attention, including positive articles in Esquire and the Christian Science Monitor. In early 1983 Brand joined with Hawken and Michael Phillips to teach Business as Service, a two-day bus tour of some of the Bay Area’s best for-profits and nonprofits. The excursion featured lunch at the Zen Center’s Greens Restaurant, an evening lecture, and visits to the Fort Mason “art park,” to a collection of businesses run by ex-convicts and ex-addicts called Delancey Street, to the East Bay to see Nolo Press, and to Hawken’s own Smith & Hawken. In the Quarterly, Brand praised the garden supply business, asserting that the higher the “integrity” of a business, the more its customers would support it. The tour filled a fifty-seat bus and was similarly at capacity when the trio repeated the event several months later.

In the fall, Brand ran a weekend seminar titled Creative Philanthropy along with Hawken and two local philanthropists, targeting those who may have recently inherited wealth and were trying to do something useful.[7]

Distracted by other projects, however, he soon lost interest in Uncommon Courtesy. Managed in an offhanded way, the School of Compassionate Skills lasted until early 1984, when it fell victim to Point Foundation belt-tightening. Brand missed the irony when summarizing the demise: “All this was good people doing work for good service to the customers, but so structured it threatened our fundamental service.”[8]

At the end of 1972, Brand had defiantly announced in his Rolling Stone article on Spacewar!: “Ready or not, computers are coming to the people.”[9] It would be another decade, however, before he would acquire his own computer. When it arrived, the machine was a Kaypro II, one of the last successful entries in the hobbyist period of the personal computer age. It was what was referred to as a “luggable” computer, about the size and weight of a heavy sewing machine. It was modeled after the earlier Osborne 1, which had revolutionized the neophyte industry by bundling a complete suite of business software for less than $2,000—word processing, database, spreadsheet, and, most significantly, a communications program that connected the machine to a device known as a modem. The modem dialed via the telephone network and connected to a growing array of information and bulletin board services, or BBSs, which provided small-scale platforms for personal computer users to share information and software, usually one user at a time.

From the perspective of today’s internet-connected world, Kaypro’s applications were almost laughably low-tech. But for Brand, not only was his Kaypro a powerful writing tool, it also unlocked the door to an emerging world of online services.

Cerebral and democratic, it was a perfect fit for Brand. In the spring of 1983, he wrote in the Quarterly that he had been waiting half his life for word processing software even as he acknowledged a bumpy road early on, describing it as a bit like learning to drive in a Model T that would have a flat tire every five miles.[10]

Brand came upon the computer by agreeing to become a faculty member at the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in La Jolla. In 1981, cofounder Richard Farson, a psychologist, had begun a series of programs pioneering the use of teleconferencing to build communities of scholars in areas such as education, leadership, and the development of social policies. The institute also set up distance-learning programs in which the faculty would teach classes using the EIES teleconferencing software that Kleiner had discovered some years earlier.

The yearlong classes were conducted in a hybrid manner: they involved online exchanges alongside a pair of weeklong, face-to-face meetings with Brand’s students in La Jolla. The students were an eclectic mix of corporate chief executives and managers, some of whom were in the midst of midlife crises, trying to figure out what their next step would be.

One of Brand’s courses focused on something he described as Benign Genres. In his mind, the Catalog had been a genre, New Games was a genre, in fact, his whole approach to organizing public events was a genre. With his students, he tried to spell out how he did it, which forced him to further look for patterns in his own wandering path.

Brand was paid a modest monthly fee for moderating the online courses and given free access to the EIES service. He quickly fell in love with the idea of living online. At that point, the computer network world and most of the personal computer world was limited to text. (Indeed, the marketing phrase used by Infocom, an early publisher of text-based interactive games, was “the best graphics are in your head.”)

Brand had left Silicon Valley just as it was being born in the early 1970s. The region was now exploding as computing proliferated and each new generation of technology reached a broader portion of the population. At the end of 1982, Time had named the personal computer Man of the Year.

The first glimmers of the media revolution were being brought back to the hidebound New York publishing world by Brand’s friend and literary agent John Brockman. Brockman had touched off a personal computer publishing business frenzy by selling a ten-book series for IBM PC owners to Simon & Schuster for $600,000. The deal proved to be a disappointment when the market for how-to computing manuals was quickly oversubscribed, but its magnitude alerted an industry that remained notoriously conservative about using new technologies that there might be a market for books about personal computing.

Brockman had come to San Francisco in the spring of 1983 to attend the West Coast Computer Faire, an annual computer hobbyist exhibition. (It had been at the first Faire, held in 1977, that a twenty-two-year-old Steve Jobs and his twenty-six-year-old partner, Steve Wozniak, had introduced the Apple II.) Brockman’s literary agency was focused on scientists and technology writers. Now he embarked on a strategy of trying to find and represent star programmers, selling their work to the new software publishing industry. He had recently added an image of a floppy disk to the logo on his company stationery.

Brockman was also just beginning to perfect the idea of a book auction in which he would persuade writers to prepare simple proposals without the traditional accompaniment of sample material, and then share them with a small group of publishers who could bid on the titles. At Brockman’s urging, Brand quickly cobbled together a twelve-page proposal for a Whole Earth Software Catalog, modeled after the original Catalog. The idea was for the Catalog itself to be updated annually, with some of the advance diverted through the Point Foundation to support the quarterly publication of the Whole Earth Software Review, which would attempt to keep up with the cascade of new products released as the next full edition was being worked on. Brockman and his wife, Katinka Matson, then circulated it to eight of New York’s largest publishing houses.

Brockman could be brazen, and he demanded contract terms that the publishing industry would normally never grant, such as an unusually high royalty rate and complete editorial control. Doubleday bit, offering $1.3 million, an unheard-of amount for a trade paperback book that created general astonishment and outrage among the rival publishers.

Doubleday told Brockman that Brand had one day to accept or the offer would be withdrawn. He had initially told Brockman that the deal was “too much money, it might screw us up.” Then he said he needed to speak to his financial adviser. At midnight he called Brockman back and said he hadn’t been able to find him, adding that he was going to think about it overnight and throw the I Ching. Brockman couldn’t tell whether he was joking or not. In the morning Brand called back and said he would accept.

Kevin Kelly was a high schooler in a suburban town in New Jersey when his mother alerted him to the Whole Earth Catalog, having read a story about it in Time and figured it might be something he would be interested in. It would take Kelly another year to actually find a copy in a bookstore in Woodstock. Like many others of his generation who had found the Whole Earth Catalog, it changed his life.

Steve Jobs later described the Catalog to Stanford graduates in 2005 as “Google before Google.” For Kelly, the Catalog was a roster of possibilities, a portal that suddenly opened up into endless hallways, offering access to an unending procession of doorways, each a world of its own. Kelly was already a catalog person, and now he felt as if he had found the catalog of catalogs. He felt as if it were whispering to him.

When he got to college at the University of Rhode Island, he began trying to contribute to both of Brand’s publications, without any luck. Still, he took the implicit message inherent in the Catalog to heart: you should invent your own life. It was part hippie ideal, but underlying it was a utilitarian set of values demonstrating that tools exist to give the confidence needed to strike out on your own.

So he did, dropping out after his first year. Kelly became an inveterate traveler, spending the better part of a decade in Asia and wandering through more than a dozen countries as an independent photographer and travel writer. While his early contributions had been uniformly rejected, he now had better luck. Brand published the first article he submitted to the Quarterly, a piece on how to explore the Himalayas on very little money. (He had spent several years in the region during the 1970s.) Not only that, but the article ran with one of Kelly’s photos on the cover. It was one of the happiest moments of his life. Kelly felt as if he had arrived as a professional journalist. He decided that his dream job would be to edit the Whole Earth Catalog.

Several years later he would visit in Sausalito, but Brand wasn’t around. There was no immediate way to work at the Catalog, and so he decided to dabble in science, taking a job in a microbiology lab at the University of Georgia. He continued to write travel articles and started a small mail-order business selling travel books. Simultaneously, like many young writers at the time, he found his way to nascent online networks by using the Apple II computer in his university laboratory. As Kleiner had, Kelly dived into the expanding world of virtual communities, online chat rooms, and computer bulletin boards. (Among his articles from this period was “The Birth of a Network Nation,” for the New Age Journal, where he described the online world as a new country.)

Kelly had continued to stay in touch with Brand, occasionally proposing a project or even a new magazine, without a great deal of traction. Then he learned about a new software industry conference called SoftCon being held in New Orleans. He sprang for a long train ride from Georgia to New Orleans in the hope of finding Brand at the conference.

Successfully tracking him down on the exhibition floor, Kelly pitched Brand the idea of producing a Whole Earth “greatest hits,” what he described as the Essential Whole Earth Catalog. Brand was evasive, as he already had two consuming projects on his hands, but he agreed to stay in touch, and eventually would give the green light on the Essential version Kelly had proposed.

One day not long afterward, Kelly received an email from Brand, asking if he would like a job editing the Quarterly, replacing Kleiner, who was taking over the job of editing the Software Review. The first thing Kelly did was write a letter to Anne Herbert, one of the Quarterly editors he trusted, asking if she thought he would fit in. Although there was no question that he saw himself as a Whole Earth Catalog kind of person, several years earlier he had also undergone a conversion to Christianity while traveling in Jerusalem. His wasn’t a born-again, Bible-thumping Southern Baptist–style Christian—he was more in the Thomas Merton mystic tradition—but he was still concerned that he might be an alien enough object to ask if he was going to be a problem.

Herbert didn’t think so, but when Kelly showed up in Sausalito looking like an Amish farmer, and Brand learned that he had hired a converted Christian, he had second thoughts. How would this young acolyte’s Christianity mix with the Quarterly’s scientific orientation? he wondered.

When he learned that Kelly was a deacon in the Faith Presbyterian Evangelical Church, he inquired, “Fundamentalist?”

“Not a comfortable word,” Kelly responded. “Try Bible-preaching.”

When he moved to Sausalito, the new editor’s first purchase was an aging Toyota that he acquired for twenty-five dollars and used to get to church on Sundays.[11]

Kelly rented a room close to the Mirene, several berths over, belowdecks in Peter Calthorpe’s houseboat. It was just a concrete shell, almost like a dungeon, but he didn’t mind. Calthorpe felt that the young editor, who would emerge each morning and chat briefly on his way to work, was a bit like a gnome.

Brand had little time to fret over his new hire. He had the money from Doubleday and a limited time to build a Whole Earth Catalog–style book from scratch. He found office space for the new project on the second floor of a nondescript commercial building across the street from the Quarterly offices. Space was quickly filled with a new corps of staffers—editors, design and production artists, staff assistants, research librarians, staff researchers, assistant researchers, “domain” editors, contributing editors, line editors, proofreaders, office managers, clerks, and camera operators. The list was endless, and most of them were paid at a rate significantly above the Quarterly’s ten-dollar-an-hour communal wage.

The way he ran the operation was that Andrea Sharp, the Whole Earth business manager, would come to him and say, “Stewart, we’re running out of money.” That would set off a mad scramble for new revenue-producing ideas. A new version of the Catalog or a book idea or perhaps a new conference or service.

There was a brief period when he discovered spreadsheets, and for a while he dived in deeply, fantasizing about all of the incredible successes that would finally generate money to conjure with, leading to cool new projects. “Wow,” he imagined, “I can control the future with these spreadsheets, fantastic!”

Sadly, it was fantasy. What a spreadsheet is supposed to tell you is the trouble you’re in, because it reflects real numbers. But he didn’t use them that way. Instead, he created his own numbers, which frequently had little bearing on reality. While he was launching the Software Catalog, the cost of running the operation was roughly $100,000 a month, creating a precarious high-wire act. It worked only until the book advance ran out.

Kleiner would later decide that agreeing to the Doubleday offer was Brand’s worst business decision. On the surface, however, the idea made some sense. A generation of Catalog readers was now older and a bit wealthier and increasingly coming in contact with the new digital world. He was gambling that the Whole Earth Software Catalog would provide the same kind of counsel that it had offered in the preceding analog era. Moreover, Brand believed it seemed logical that the counterculture generation he had led would follow him into cyberspace.

“They have no immunity at all to personal computers,” he told a Christian Science Monitor reporter.[12]

It turned out that they did.

There was actually a profound generational split over the arrival of personal computers and computer networks. It could be seen in the gulf that emerged along Gate 5 Road as defined by the higher wages offered on one side of the road. Everyone would rally together for the daily volleyball games, but the two cultures were heading in different directions.

Matthew McClure could see the divide clearly. One of the early typesetters for the Catalog, he had departed with the caravan that left Haight-Ashbury for the Farm, the Tennessee commune started by Stephen Gaskin, where he had become the editor of their publishing business. McClure had a background similar to Brand’s—he had gone to prep schools and Stanford—and when he learned that a new Catalog effort was underway, he came out and interviewed and was hired to help run production. Their similar backgrounds made for an easy rapport between the two men. McClure became an effective lieutenant in the new publishing effort. Brand was the boss, but with a hands-off management style, and McClure had enough of a technical background to make him a valuable employee. He did have a bit of culture shock in coming back to the West Coast from his commune. The new editors of the Software Catalog were big lunchtime drinkers, and when he joined them, he found that he would on occasion come back from the meal with several drinks under his belt, making for a challenging afternoon.

Joe Kane was an adventurous young writer who had come from several years of working at Rolling Stone to initially work as a Quarterly copy editor. Before going to New York, Kane had grown up in Silicon Valley, where in junior high school he had the distinction of punching a young Steve Jobs in the nose—and breaking it—when he found Jobs and another boy harassing his brother in the schoolyard.

Kane had arrived at the Quarterly in the early 1980s and had taken over a regular column in the San Francisco Chronicle that Brand had recently begun before quickly deciding it wasn’t his cup of tea. Brand could be a compelling writer, but he was never able to master the art form of the weekly eight-hundred-word essay.

Despite Kane’s Silicon Valley roots, he had little interest in the personal computer cultural explosion that was beginning to transform workplaces everywhere. He lived in San Francisco and commuted to Sausalito each day on a Miyata 12-speed bicycle.

Early on, he experienced a John Henry moment that confirmed his skepticism about the emerging networked world. Kleiner and Brand and several others were struggling to configure a Radio Shack Model 100 portable computer to connect it by a modem so they could electronically file weekly Whole Earth columns that Kane would soon inherit at the Chronicle offices.

“I bet you I’m quicker,” Kane taunted them, and he grabbed a paper copy of the column, hopped on his bike, and rode across the Golden Gate Bridge and along the waterfront to reach the Chronicle’s offices at Fifth and Mission.

He won the race.

Brockman’s deal for the Whole Earth Software Catalog in 1983 helped cement Brand’s futurist credentials, which had already been dovetailing with the digital changes that were afoot. He was, after all, the man who had coined the term personal computer, a badge to pontificate on what was over the horizon. Paid speaking engagements (often high-paying affairs for corporate clients, including trips to events in exotic locations) began to roll in.

At one point, Prime Computer, a high-flying minicomputer maker based along the Massachusetts Route 128 tech corridor that was about to be swept away by the PC onslaught, invited him to the British Virgin Islands to address a corporate sales retreat. He came as the bearer of bad tidings. “What are you going to do,” he asked them, “when PCs act like minicomputers?” He donned his biologist’s cap and told them that lines were blurring between their species, something that spelled opportunity to his ecologist’s point of view. However, not for dinosaurs like Prime Computer.

The media reception for the Whole Earth Software Catalog was decidedly uneven. There was the predictable round of articles chronicling the fact that the nation’s hippie icon was going digital, and the mainstream press was largely enthusiastic, playing on Brand’s celebrity status.

There were also skeptics.

Computer industry columnist John Dvorak pointed to the sixties counterculture flavor of the Whole Earth Software Review when it arrived in March of 1984: “There is a leftover element of the long-forgotten late 1960s that permeates the magazine,” he wrote.

It was Erik Sandberg-Diment, a computer columnist for the New York Times, who posed the most telling critique. “Far too many mediocre books about computers are hogging space on bookstore shelves this season, for publishers are still jumping on the silicon bandwagon,” he warned. The digitized version of the Whole Earth Catalog was a disappointment: compared to its original “imaginative” namesake, “the digitized version is a rather drab collection of predictable reviews.”

Rather than the black-and-white low-production newsprint values of the original Catalog, for the Software Catalog Brand decided to opt for glossy and expensive paper stock, with bold red headlines and color photographs. This made budgeting even more challenging, because the new book and the Review would have to compete with existing computer magazines, of which there were many. (By 1984 there were well over two hundred monthly and weekly business and hobbyist publications focusing on just one subject, according to Brand’s estimate.[13] In true Whole Earth tradition, a number of these publications were endorsed in the new Catalog.) Brand’s original policy of running only positive reviews was a quaint affectation in a newsstand niche where readers wanted strong opinions. The economics became even more difficult because he had also decided to adhere to the original Catalog values of not accepting advertisements. He thought to himself at one point, “There has never been a wronger time to be in this particular genre of periodicals.” But by then he had already jumped into the pool.

“I can report on my own continuing dismay, delight and intensely educational confusion as a shopper as well as a would-be cataloger,” Brand wrote in the first issue of the Whole Earth Software Review, describing his maiden visit to the vast COMDEX Trade Show in Las Vegas the previous November.[14] The new Catalog went a good distance toward dispelling some of that confusion. Like previous Catalogs, it culled and distilled, it advised on process in addition to tangible objects. There were parallels throughout, in specifics (The Last Whole Earth Catalog’s recommendation of Wolfgang Langewiesche’s Stick and Rudder: An Explanation of the Art of Flying; the new version recommended Microsoft’s Flight Simulator) and expansiveness. The Software Catalog was divided into ten main sections: Playing, Writing, Analyzing, Organizing, Accounting, Managing, Drawing, Programming, Learning, and Etc. (which included, among other things, entries on music, weaving, artificial intelligence, nutrition, exercise, astronomy, meditation, postal services, gambling, and—forever dear to Brand’s heart—slide show control).

But the fact that Brand took the stance of being a gawker outside in a hothouse technology culture that was unique and as insular as the sixties counterculture had been two decades earlier didn’t help. As Dvorak intimated, the entire enterprise conveyed a Stranger in a Strange Land sense of eyes-wide-open naivete.

Although the second Software Catalog appeared at the end of 1985, it all came to a head a year earlier. In a lengthy profile[15] on Brand and the Software Catalog, San Jose Mercury reporter Michael Malone—who had first seen Brand in his “high Indian” phase, when as a young boy growing up in Silicon Valley he went with his father to see Brand perform his America Needs Indians! multimedia slide show—revealed that the Whole Earth Software Catalog Review was being folded together with the CoEvolution Quarterly after just three issues.

It had quickly become clear that it wasn’t a viable business. Catalog sales in the United States were unimpressive and subscriptions to the Software Review could be measured in the hundreds per quarter. (Sales of the UK edition were almost nonexistent.) It was left to Paul Hawken, the Point Foundation’s financial officer, to break the news to the Review editors that their publication would be folded into the CoEvolution Quarterly to create the newly combined publication that Art Kleiner had named the Whole Earth Review. Kevin Kelly, who was editing the Quarterly, was put in charge of editing the two publications together into a strange mixture that pleased neither audience.

The coup de grâce, however, was delivered by Richard Dalton, who had served as editor of the first two issues of the Review and then handed the job off to Kleiner. In a gossip column called “Inside,” in what would be the final issue, Dalton wrote: “Shocking news: most people don’t care doodly squat about computing.”

Brand had celebrated the notion of the “outlaw area” in the January 1970 supplement to the Catalog. “One thing we need is better outlaws,” he wrote.[16] He had argued against reasonable laws, created by reasonable men, suggesting that they proscribed innovation. Now a generation of mostly young men were finding adventure and mystery by breaking into the then largely corporate and military world of the first computer networks. They had already created a vibrant dark version of the hacker culture that Brand had been the first to alert the world to more than a decade earlier. Like virtually all of his generation, however, he chose to ignore the warnings and plunged ahead into the beckoning world that science fiction writer William Gibson described as a “fluid neon origami trick.”[17]

And there was much to be excited about. Among those invited to present at the first Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) Conference were Brand and MIT professor and architect Nicholas Negroponte. Their encounter would reframe the next decade of Brand’s life.

The event, held in a hotel conference center in Monterey in February of 1984, was a little-noticed affair attended by a relatively intimate group (compared to later conferences) of 250 artists, writers, musicians, corporate execs, and scientists united by their “faith in the computer.”[18]

IBM mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot and Megatrends futurist John Naisbitt both spoke, but it was Negroponte who stole the show. Dressed in a dapper gray suit and tie and with a rich mane of longish hair, he showed off in his “TED Talk” (the term had yet to become a marque—and, in some quarters, a pigeonhole) a variety of futuristic technologies for interacting with computers, including touch screen manipulation, which would not become commonplace until a quarter century later with the introduction of the iPhone.

Negroponte was an uncompromising digital utopian. “The icebox will realize when it’s out of milk. It will tell the answering machine, and it will tell you. . . . Toasters will know about toast,” he proclaimed.[19]

Phelan was smitten. “He’s incredible!” she exclaimed to Brand. He agreed.

When they met later during the conference, the two men instantly formed a mutual admiration society. Brand had written a positive review of Negroponte’s book on the future of architectural design, Architecture Machines, and the MIT professor not only expressed his admiration for the Whole Earth Catalog, but he recited the review verbatim.

Negroponte was about to launch an interdisciplinary center at MIT to explore the new digital world, to be named the Media Lab, and he suggested that Brand spend a quarter to see how the Media Lab evolved. He was even willing to pay him to visit. Brand tucked Negroponte’s offer into his back pocket.

Brand kept his hand in a growing array of outside activities, including several nonprofit board seats and his lecturing position at the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute, where he went at the end of 1984 for his twice-annual face-to-face stint with his students. It was there that Steve Jobs played an indirect role in plunging Brand even more deeply into the emerging digital universe.

Phelan had accompanied Brand to the La Jolla campus, and one day they were about to sneak off during lunch to a secluded skinny-dipping spot known as Black’s Beach when they were cornered by a roly-poly man on a mission. In 1969, Brand had met Larry Brilliant while Brilliant was training to be a doctor in San Francisco and Brand was organizing the Hunger Show. Brilliant had later befriended Steve Jobs when the young computer entrepreneur was on a spiritual pilgrimage in India while Brilliant was there working on the international effort to eradicate smallpox.

Brilliant had discovered computer conferencing while he was doing medical relief work in Nepal, and Jobs had helped him acquire a 300-baud modem to contact the outside world via satellite. In 1983, Jobs visited Brilliant at the headquarters of Seva, a medical foundation the doctor had established to help cure blindness. Brilliant had created a simple communications software program called Seva Talk, which they were using to run the organization that was spread all over the world.

Brilliant asked Jobs for money to support Seva, and the brash computer entrepreneur responded, “Build your own fucking product! Build your own fucking company! Make your own fucking money! Fund your own fucking non-profit! Give that to Seva!” And then he paused and smiled and said, “And I’ll help you.”

Jobs gave Brilliant the first $5,000 to create a computer software company called Network Technologies International, or NETI. Brilliant took the company public on a Canadian stock exchange, raising $6 million, despite not having publicly announced any business for the conferencing system they had built. Quickly, however, they announced deals with AT&T and General Electric.

Despite his momentum, Brilliant was completely at sea as an entrepreneur and a technologist. An associate professor of medicine in Michigan who had leaped into the grubby world of business, he felt as if he had no idea what he was doing. He went out to California to participate in a three-day meeting about EIES and computer conferencing and ended up crying in frustration in the office of the dean of the School of Public Health at UC San Diego.

At the time, he was flush with capital, and he approached Brand with the idea of putting the Whole Earth Catalog online in some interactive fashion. They quickly came to an agreement that called for NETI to invest $250,000, including a refrigerator-size Digital Equipment VAX minicomputer, in a new joint venture. Brand would supply the labor from his staff.

Brand had no interest in digitally reinventing the Catalog, so he listened to what Brilliant had in mind and then pretty much ignored it. From his experience with EIES at the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute, he understood that the online world was a deeply different kind of medium from a book or a magazine. Moreover, he had learned from his original Catalog experience that the supplements and the feedback loop they created with his readers was what he wanted to re-create in the digital world.

Art Kleiner was sent off to Michigan to work out the details of the joint venture, and Brand began to brainstorm. Passionate about building institutions, he fantasized about the details of this virtual world he was creating from whole cloth. First, he took a piece of stationery and made a list of possible names, and one of them felt just right: the WELL, or Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link.[20]

He then made a series of design decisions, even before he hired Matthew McClure as the effort’s first employee. The WELL would be relatively low cost, billing would be entirely by credit card, users would be the owners of the content they created (“you own your own words”), and, in a stroke of marketing brilliance, he gave free accounts to a group of technology journalists, ensuring that the WELL would gain an out-of-scale reputation in the emerging digital universe.

Unlike Brand’s earlier efforts, however, the WELL was neither first nor unique. The world was already full of giant, albeit more costly, online service providers. Compuserve had begun in 1969, and the Source had been founded in 1978. In the Bay Area, Community Memory had been created in 1973 to act as a local bulletin board service with the idea of placing terminals in public spaces. Not only was there also a thriving world of thousands of BBSs, but in 1983 a system called FidoNet had begun linking them together into a nationwide electronic mail service.

Moreover, the “cyberculture” for which the WELL would become emblematic had actually been thriving nationally since 1980 in the form of Usenet, an anarchic set of computer conferences or “newsgroups,” which circulated on the nation’s computers that ran in academic and corporate computing settings. (Concepts such as FAQ, flame, sock puppet, and spam all emerged from Usenet.)[21]

Indeed, the culture that blossomed on the WELL was something of a throwback. Despite its state-of-the-art minicomputer, so-called WELL beings seemed to believe that the medium was as much a step backward toward the nineteenth-century literary salon as a step forward into the future.

‘‘People used to write letters all the time,’’ Howard Rheingold, a Whole Earth Review editor and a key member of the WELL community, told the New York Times. ‘‘Now we do again. It’s not for everybody. It’s for people who enjoy communicating through the written word.’’[22]

Moreover, the community that sustained the WELL was not entirely online; rather, it became a creative hybrid, with lots of face-to-face socializing in which Brand frequently participated. In fact, the WELL may have ultimately owed much of its early success to its discovery by one of the nation’s most eclectic countercultures: Deadheads. Devotees of the rock group Grateful Dead, the Deadheads, who included modern-day hippies, professionals, and computer enthusiasts, were a floating community that would gather at the band’s dozens of concerts each year, and those who were online stayed in touch between concerts via the WELL.

Brand had learned an early and important lesson from his time communicating with the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute students via EIES. At one point, they had created an anonymous online conference, and he watched as it had instantly become pathological. Anonymity immediately triggered the basest of human behaviors, he discovered. People masqueraded as others, behaved viciously, and then the victims would act the same way to exact some revenge. As a result, he outlawed anonymity on the WELL. Each user was tied to their identifiable account and linked to their credit card.

However, while outlawing complete anonymity, the design of the WELL permitted pseudonymity: a user was permitted to have several aliases that were not his or her real name. Years later, Brand would come to see this as a major design flaw that would ultimately drive him away from the community he had created. It would also give him an early and unique window into the online threat of fake identities and unverifiable and untraceable assertions that would come to haunt the entire world.

Nevertheless, even though he grew troubled early on and relatively quickly moved on from the electronic community he had created, Brand would remain publicly optimistic. Although the first issue of the combined Whole Earth Review was titled “Computers as Poison,” Brand was outwardly sanguine: “Computers suppress our animal presence,” he told an SF Focus interviewer. “When you communicate through a computer, you communicate like an angel.”[23]

Just a few years later he would realize how naive he had been.

Shortly after he arrived in Sausalito, Kevin Kelly read Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, a book that portrayed three generations of “white hat” computer hackers (the good guys) ranging from the young programmers at MIT’s AI Lab decades earlier, through the Homebrew Computer Club, to the then new world of video game design. (The term hacker had only recently entered the national lexicon. It had been just a year since the movie WarGames had introduced the American public to the notion of network-accessible computers and bright young computer wizards.) Levy identified what he described as “the hacker ethic,” epitomized by the MIT students who, beginning in the 1950s, had “hacked” projects for the simple joy of designing computers and software as an end in itself. According to Levy, this ethic was a set of ideals premised on access to computers; free access to all information; distrust of authority; meritocracy; the belief that computers could create art and beauty; and the faith that computing could improve your life.[24]

Kelly went to Brand and said, “You know, the funny thing about this is, as far as I can tell, none of these guys have ever met each other, these three generations of hackers. Let’s bring them together.” Brand loved the idea and he persuaded Kelly and Phelan to help organize an event to be called the Hackers Conference.

They began assembling a group of elite computer programmers and hardware designers from around the Bay Area, crowding them into the Mirene for weekly evening meetings. High-profile computer designers such as Lee Felsenstein, who had designed the Osborne 1, and Andy Hertzfeld, one of the key designers of the Macintosh, trooped up to Sausalito to help with the organizing.

The gathering took place over a November 1984 weekend at a funky retreat center at Fort Cronkhite, a former army base set in the Marin Headlands near Gerbode Valley. Ultimately, from the roughly 400 they’d invited, the Mirene team attracted about 150 computer hackers and a sprinkling of technology journalists. They were people like Ted Kaehler, who was a Whole Earth Catalog/CoEvolution Quarterly devotee. Growing up in Palo Alto as the son of a Lockheed Missiles & Space Company engineer in the 1960s, he had belonged to his high school science club. Kaehler had attended Stanford University, fallen in love with computing, and then gone off to study computer science in graduate school at Carnegie Mellon, where he thrived under the tutelage of pioneering AI researchers like Raj Reddy and George White, both of whom would end up at Xerox’s PARC in the early 1970s. Kaehler had followed his professors and helped develop the Smalltalk programming environment, which became the model for both the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows.

Kaehler had read Hackers, and when he heard that Kevin Kelly, Brand, and Phelan were planning a meeting of all the hackers, he called Kelly and asked if he could invite his own group of hacker friends. Kelly gave him the green light, and as a result, several PARC researchers were in the mix at the first Hackers Conference.

Kaehler threw himself into the conference. He moderated two of the panel discussions and he would stand behind the cameramen who filmed the first hackers meeting, giving them cues on whom to focus on. While walking to dinner the first night, however, he ran straight into a side of Brand he was unprepared for. As they headed down a hill near the conference center, Brand asked Kaehler how many of the people walking ahead of them he knew. “Why, none of them!” Kaehler responded. He was familiar with the Xerox crowd, but the hackers’ community, which included game developers and “graybeards” from MIT and Bell Labs, was new to him. In response, Brand appeared to Kaehler to grow aloof. He didn’t speak to Kaehler again during the conference, and Kaehler felt slighted, deciding that he must not be a member of the hacker elite.

While Brand may simply have been intimidated by all of the Silicon Valley star power, there was also no disputing his attraction to people who were in the limelight, whether they were well-known intellectuals, CEOs, or governors. It was what Kesey had noticed when he had accused Brand of “cleaving” to power. When Brand had read the quote in a generally flattering Washington Post profile,[25] the words had stung.

The Hackers Conference would become an annual event, drawing together a digital subculture that was passionate about the machines and programs they designed. The first gathering was marked by several heated debates that would continue long after everyone had gone home. While Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak argued that the term hacker represented the child in everyone, a well-known programmer named Brian Harvey warned there was a dark side as well, and the general public would soon come to see the word as synonymous with computer outlaws who broke into computers for sport and profit.

Another important debate took place over the economic value of software. Richard Stallman, a young MIT programmer who had developed freely shareable versions of several key programming languages, stated that his goal was to make all software free. That angered other attendees such as Apple Macintosh designer Bill Atkinson, who responded, “Hackers want me to give [this] Quickdraw code away, but there is this thing called IBM and I want Apple to be around in 20 years.”[26] Others, such as former Quarterly editor Andrew Fluegelman and former Microsoft programmer Bob Wallace, who had coined the terms freeware and shareware, respectively, tried to walk a middle ground, giving away their software and asking for donations.

It was Brand, however, who framed the moment most accurately, and in doing so helped spark the open source software movement that would come to transform the computing industry.

Wozniak was arguing that when private companies kept software away from the public, “that’s a hiding of information, and that is wrong.”[27] At that point, Brand, who had been silent during the session, stood up and said:

It seems like there’s a couple of interesting paradoxes we’re working with here. That’s why I’m especially interested in what Bob Wallace has done with PC-WRITE and what Andrew Fluegelman did before that with PC-TALK. On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.[28]

He saw clearly what he had absorbed in his apprenticeship with Bateson. It was a classic example of the dilemma that two conflicting messages present—a double bind. In a phrase, he captured the moment that became a flashpoint for a set of multibillion-dollar information industries and a rallying cry for an emerging digital culture, which, while not Marxist, passionately believed that locking up digital property was theft.

The nuance was missed, however. Only the second half of what he said, the aphorism “Information wants to be free,” quickly came to frame the digital era. Entire industries—newspaper publishers in particular—took the notion of free digital information as gospel and tried to build digital versions of their businesses based on giving away their product and eventually—largely unsuccessfully—trying to make it back based on advertising revenue. Even more transformational, it became the cultural and business foundation of a wave of Silicon Valley companies that would become among the world’s most profitable and powerful based on the same idea.

And like almost all of Brand’s ideas, there was a backstory. He had actually laid out the idea in a talk he gave that summer at the Western Behavioral Sciences Institution, shortly after he and Kevin Kelly received a copy of the galleys to Levy’s book. At the end of July, one of his students said to Brand after his lecture: “Your point about information wanting to [be] free turned out to be more controversial than I thought it would be—particularly when coupled with the ‘hacker’s ethic’ idea. Several people told me they thought you were selling ‘stealing.’ ”

Ultimately, a range of software activists would coalesce around the term open source software, fundamentally changing the way an industry competed and simultaneously unleashing dramatic collaborative forces leading to free public services such as Wikipedia. It was also adopted as a rallying cry by a generation of disruptive Silicon Valley start-ups—sometimes in ways that were contrary to the openness implied by Brand’s declaration. “Information wants to be free” would come to define an antiregulatory stance taken by new internet industries that argued successfully that their “innovations” were of such benefit to society that they should not be fenced in as more traditional industries were.

Brand’s original description of the paradox was lost. All that anyone remembered was “Information wants to be free.” Just as he had defined the counterculture and the environmental movement of the 1970s, Brand had captured the essence and the contradictions of the emerging digital era.

Soon after the WELL launched in early 1985, Brand began to feel that he was once again burning out. One night he sat with Doug Carlston, the cofounder of the software company Broderbund and a member of the Point Foundation, and poured his heart out. He was tired of writing the kind of stuff that was appearing in the Quarterly and he was tired of being known as the guy who put out the Catalog a decade earlier. He needed to find a way to entirely separate himself from the institution he had created.

He arranged what he thought would be a summer-long paid sabbatical. In the end, however, he would never return to actively managing the Quarterly or its successor, the Whole Earth Review, except in a largely symbolic role. To mark the transition, he moved his stuff out of his office on Gate 5 Road, and with Huey Johnson’s assistance, Brand and Phelan were able to engineer a house swap, trading their sixty-four-foot tugboat in Sausalito for a ten-thousand-acre farm adjacent to the Masai Mara game reserve in southern Kenya.

They clearly got the better end of the deal. Their African guest was six feet six inches tall and soon decamped for a rental in Belvedere. In contrast, Brand and Phelan had an extraordinary time spending several months with two servants, a household pet cheetah, and another couple who lived on the farm who became their friends on safari.

Phelan had persuaded Brand to travel to Africa in part because of their shared fascination with Beryl Markham’s memoir West with the Night. The book had long been out of print before it was picked up and republished by a boutique Berkeley publishing house in 1983. Markham, who had been a bush pilot, adventurer, and racehorse trainer and who was the first person to solo nonstop across the Atlantic from east to west, was now down on her luck at the end of her life and living near a racetrack in Nairobi.

While taken by the book, Brand was still not as enthusiastic about their coming trip as Phelan, who was ready to try to hunt for Markham. That changed, however, when he met the writer Peter Matthiessen at a houseboat party on their dock shortly before they were scheduled to take off.

A legendary novelist, wilderness writer, Zen proponent, and former CIA officer, Matthiessen was a member of a long line of Western adventurers ranging from Teddy Roosevelt to Ernest Hemingway.

Brand was in awe of Matthiessen, but when Phelan confided that they were getting ready to visit Africa, Brand demurred, saying something like “I’ve seen the postcards.”

“Don’t even think that stupidly,” Matthiessen shouted. “Until you have smelled and seen the dawn in Africa you have no idea what you’re talking about.”

On their way to Africa, they first stopped at MIT to visit Negroponte, who renewed his invitation for Brand to be a paid “visiting scientist” at the new MIT Media Lab. Negroponte was on the cusp of opening the lab in a $45 million building designed by I. M. Pei. With Jerome Wiesner, electrical engineer and former MIT president, Negroponte had spent seven years fundraising for the lab, which would be housed in the futuristic metal and glass structure. The intent was to create a research center at the intersection of engineering, social science, and the arts.

From Negroponte, Brand learned that the new Media Lab was a descendant of the Research Laboratory of Electronics, or RLE, an earlier multidisciplinary laboratory that Wiesner, a veteran of MIT’s legendary World War II–era Radiation Laboratory, had led. MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory had also grown out of the RLE, which in turn had spawned the hacker culture that Brand discovered at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory when MIT AI Lab cofounder John McCarthy headed west. Negroponte’s Architecture Machine Group, an early effort at an advanced computer system to prototype human-computer interaction, was also a descendent of the RLE.

The Media Lab’s intellectual tradition was reminiscent of what Brand had first come in contact with as a college student when he encountered cybernetics through Wiener and Warren McCulloch and information theory from the writings of Claude Shannon and Robert Fano.

At MIT, visitor and host discussed the idea of coauthoring a book, but Brand had already learned enough about Negroponte, who had a large ego and a forceful personality, to realize that would be problematic. Instead, he negotiated a contract that gave him access to the Media Lab and in return agreed to pay special attention to Negroponte’s research.

He then traveled to England, where he and Phelan stayed with Peter Schwartz, whom Brand had known casually when Schwartz worked at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) as a futurist and who was a board member of the Portola Institute.

Schwartz, who was fond of saying that he actually was a “rocket scientist,” had studied aeronautical engineering as an undergraduate at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He had been hired at SRI as part of a futures group led by Willis Harman, one of the founders of the Menlo Park–based LSD group where Brand had taken part in the 1962 drug experiment. (Schwartz had shown up at SRI just in time to be given the office that had previously been occupied by the mysterious Al Hubbard.) At SRI, Schwartz had been early to foresee the impact of new digital technologies (he had consulted with the screenwriters for WarGames, alerting them to the emergence of the new subculture of computer hackers), with a special interest in scenario planning.

The scenario-planning method was defined by twin intellectual heritages: “thinking the unthinkable” nuclear war-gaming by Herman Kahn at the RAND Corporation in the 1950s, and the ideas of Pierre Wack, a planner at Royal Dutch Shell who had brought from his intellectual apprenticeship with the French mystic and philosopher George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff a focus on narratives rather than quantitative charts and data.

Although Schwartz had been an antiwar activist and a member of the Students for a Democratic Society in college, in 1982 he joined Royal Dutch Shell to lead the firm’s scenario-planning group. At the time, Shell was an unusual company in the energy industry. It was not as buttoned-down as a company like Exxon, and just the fact that it had hired a Californian like Schwartz was indicative of the fact that it was more open to ideas, even to environmentally friendly ones.

Shell’s head strategic planner was Arie de Geus, who had previously met Brand when he visited Northern California while on the hunt for fresh ideas. De Geus had spoken about doing some research on how organizations learn in order to improve Shell’s planning process. Brand told Schwartz that he had been deliberating about how complex systems learn, and Schwartz responded that de Geus was pondering the same thing.

From London, Brand and Phelan headed to Italy, where Richard Thieriot, the San Francisco Chronicle publisher, and his wife, Angie, had rented a spectacular villa in Venice. Brand was bowled over by the tiny city-state that had survived on its wits for eight centuries. Wandering in the city by foot and boat, he explored Venice’s heritage as a mercantile empire. Inside St. Mark’s Basilica, the Italian-Byzantine cathedral at the eastern end of the Piazza San Marco, he peered into the magnificent golden domes overhead and was shocked. Until that moment he had been seeing Europe, Europe, Europe, Rome, Rome, Rome, Italy, Italy, Italy. Now he looked up and saw Constantinople. The striking mosaics showed deep Asian influence. “Did I just step out of Europe into Asia just going through these doors? How can that be? The fuck is going on?” He was overwhelmed.

For an afternoon he remained in the basilica and watched as the tourists poured through, looking up agape but mostly appearing to be numb. He was stunned to see that no one smiled. He lingered, unable to remove his grin, and the golden images beamed down, offering an infinite, mineral perspective.

Only gradually, by reading deeply, did he come to understand that, finite in width, yet infinite in historical depth, Venice fit perfectly as a frame for his conversation with Schwartz about complex systems that evolved and learned.

His first thought was to move to Venice and burrow in to write an extended “systems” history of the city. That quickly morphed into the idea of a fictional trilogy whose protagonist would be a physicist who would solve mysteries in a modern Venetian setting, affording the couple the opportunity to live in the city for several years.

By the time he got to Kenya, Brand was deep into fantasizing about his new life as a novelist.

Arriving IN AFRICA in early July, Brand and Phelan settled into a fairy-tale existence. The ranch was owned by David Hopcroft, a fourth-generation white Kenyan with a Cornell doctorate in wildlife ecology. Phelan was as happy as she had ever been as they walked, ran, and toured on the lands with Phillip Tilley, a hunter who lived with his wife on the ranch.

Phelan fell completely in love with the large animals that roamed freely across the Masai Mara, particularly the cats. Brand and Phelan had private safaris, driving hundreds of miles and camping in the bush. They would sit all day in their safari vehicles and watch sleeping lions. Brand decided that if he ever wrote about Africa, he would call it “Sleeping with Lions.”

They also tracked down Markham and visited her several times shortly before her death in August of 1986. She had heard only vague word of the American success of West with the Night, and if there had been profits, they were not visible to Brand and Phelan.

Meanwhile, Venice was threatening to become an all-consuming project. Brand thought about writing his book without an advance, possibly selling his sailboat and his house in Nova Scotia to underwrite his work. While out on an early morning run one day, Phelan pointed out that Venice was a perfect counterpoint to the space colonies that Brand had become fascinated by a decade earlier. Human designers planned space colonies in a matter of years, while Venice, an island ecology in its own right, had been designed organically over centuries.

His Venetian reverie was soon punctured by a letter from Andrea Sharp, who wrote to inform him about the precarious financial situation back home in Sausalito. As gently as possible, she noted that Kevin Kelly was working without a salary and the decision had been made to turn Brand’s paid sabbatical into unpaid leave. “I did want you to know that there aren’t additional funds from us going into your account right now,” she wrote, adding that the WELL’s revenue was around $2,000 for June.

The letter touched off an identity crisis. Brand had left America thinking of himself as an integral part of the organization he had created. Now he felt at sea. A continent away and out of contact, he felt like the Point board of directors had decided to discard him. It seemed they believed that he was distracted and used up and no longer a revenue-producing part of the operation.

He had established himself as a respected editor and a publisher, and now, at forty-eight years old, he faced the task of starting over. He would need to earn a living, and his fantasies of living a Bohemian literary life in Europe would have to wait.

It was a branch point. He had run a nonprofit business more or less continuously for the past seventeen years. Now he felt as if he were tired of being in charge, meeting payroll, being present from ten in the morning to six at night Monday through Friday at a minimum, being stuck with some people he had little interest in knowing.

It was time for a change.

Back in Sausalito, he moved his office to the Mary Hartline. It was a dry-docked fishing boat, a rickety and a soon-to-be disintegrating affair that he called High Tide. Hidden behind a fence just across a courtyard from the Whole Earth offices, it remained a comfortable two-hundred-yard commute.

Kevin Kelly was now running the Whole Earth Review, and the WELL was slowly gaining new users—it had passed six hundred during the summer—and Brand had two new projects with which to reinvent himself.

While he was in Africa, the letter had arrived from Negroponte confirming his appointment at the MIT Media Lab in the winter of 1986. On the way back from Africa he once again visited Schwartz in London and met with his scenario-planning partner at Shell, Napier Collyns. The two men suggested that Brand spend time at Shell as a consultant with the idea that the company also sponsor him in arranging a set of conferences on organizational learning.

The offer struck an immediate chord. Soon after his arrival at Stanford, Brand had celebrated self-reliance, believing that independent learning was more effective from the bottom up. It was something he had come to early on and had been catalyzed in his America Needs Indians! project, the Whole Earth enterprise, and his fascination with software and personal computing. Brand wrote Robert Rodale, the publisher of the Rodale Press, tentatively looking for a half-time “patron” grant. Rodale was an admirer of the Catalog and Brand appealed to his “incessant curiosity.” “What if something provocative can be learned about how systems learn?” he asked.

Brand had been fascinated by this question for decades, as had been made demonstrably clear in his prototype of the Catalog, which began with the heading “Understanding Whole Systems.” Here, too, was a way of picking up where Bateson’s last book, Mind and Nature, which drew parallels between personal, cultural, and evolutionary learning, left off.

Brand planned to spend the first three months of 1986 with some of the “top people” using unconventional learning theories—namely, Alan Kay and AI pioneers Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert—at MIT. He would continue to stay involved in Whole Earth, but his sole activity would be “investigating how Systems Learn,” to create a lexicon of effective learning strategies that would hopefully lead to a rudimentary taxonomy and ultimately a general theory of learning.

He proposed the idea of a Rodale scholar at large, but his appeal fell on deaf ears. In the end, he would make do with the consulting fees he was earning as well as his mother’s continued largesse.

Brand had written that one would have to be a “moron” to want to spend January in Cambridge, but Kay’s offer of his apartment just off Harvard Square was impossible to refuse. So it was that on a chilly and cloudy January morning he found himself walking through the Square to the T-stop feeling like a delighted child: “this is me . . . a smart scholar studying how to save the world.”

He fell completely in love with the hyperintellectual Cambridge scene—the campus, the magazine kiosks, the bookstores, and the endless supply of intellectuals at the two universities. In his first month at MIT, he gave a series of lectures on his experience publishing the Catalog, keeping the students engaged by frequently changing the subject and veering off into odd anecdotes, then trying to swerve back, surprising his audience by converging on his argument from an unexpected angle.

After his lectures in January, he plunged into two Media Lab research projects. One was an effort focused on the future of electronic publishing, which was close to Negroponte’s heart, and the second was Kay’s Vivarium project, a computer learning simulation that Apple Computer was funding.

Vivarium began as an “ecology-in-a-computer” simulation when Kay was at Atari. (Ann Marion, the researcher who came up with the Vivarium concept, told him her goal was to create puppets that were capable of pulling their own strings.) Kay had attracted a remarkable brain trust of advisers, including Minsky; Frank Thomas, the Walt Disney animator who created Bambi; Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets; Tim Gallwey, author of The Inner Game of Tennis; and Richard Wurman, founder of Access Press and the TED Conference. When Brand joined, he and Wurman were given the assignment of putting together a “cave of knowledge,” a repository of information for the kids who were the Vivarium designers. During his stay, however, Brand would remain largely an observer, taping interviews and doing the groundwork for the book he decided to write about the lab.

Negroponte had instilled a “demo or die” culture in his new Media Lab, and although the lab would be criticized for its ratio of hyperbole to tangible outcome, what the critics failed to realize was that its “product” was a generation of designers who would shape the thinking of technology companies around the world. Media Lab alumni would populate Silicon Valley companies, and as Hollywood consultants, they would have a dramatic impact on American popular culture.

Brand for the most part embraced Negroponte’s vision of the future. A key for him came in reading Ithiel de Sola Pool’s 1983 Technologies of Freedom: On Free Speech in an Electronic Age, which foresaw the transition from the print to the electronic age and explored the challenges of governing cyberspace. He relied on Pool’s perspective in interpreting what he saw at the Media Lab.

Just as Brand had found his way to the early wellspring of personal computing in the late 1960s and early 1970s at SAIL, PARC, and Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center, now he found himself surrounded by the technologists who were building the digital world that would become both the World Wide Web and the “Internet of Things.” One key idea that was deeply embedded in the Media Lab was the notion of personalized media. What Negroponte called the Daily Me, the concept that each person’s newsfeed would be personalized, was seen as an inevitable future with little understanding of the darker reality that would become known as filter bubbles several decades later.

One of the people Brand met during his three-month stay was Danny Hillis, a cerebral young supercomputer designer who was a protégé of Minsky’s. Several years earlier Hillis had founded Thinking Machines, a radical supercomputer company based on the idea of linking tens of thousands of small microprocessor chips to work on problems simultaneously. It would be a forerunner of today’s internet-centric computing—now described as cloud computing.

Hillis had shown up one day for lunch at the Media Lab. At the time, his company was just delivering its first computers and the lab had taken delivery of an early prototype. Hillis invited Brand over to his office just off Kendall Square on the edge of the MIT campus. The two men quickly found common ground.

“One of the things I’m really interested in is the connection between the kind of learning an individual does and the kind of learning an ecology does as it evolves,” Hillis told him.

“Yes please. That’s my main interest. Say more about that,” Brand responded.[29] It was the start of a close friendship and partnership that would lead in a range of different intellectual directions.

Fortuitously for Brand, Hillis’s journey would take him to California. Unfortunately for Hillis, that relocation was born of the collapse of Thinking Machines. For a while one of its supercomputers was ranked first on the list of the world’s fastest, but the company mishandled negotiations to be acquired by a larger computer company and subsequently went into bankruptcy. Afterward, Hillis moved to the West Coast to work as one of Disney’s Imagineers at its blue-sky research laboratory. Before long, he would also buy a houseboat in Sausalito and become a part-time neighbor of Brand and Phelan’s.

Brockman had been able to obtain a good advance for Brand’s 1987 book, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, and so after spending three months in Cambridge, Brand headed back to Sausalito to write for several months before traveling to London to take on the role of Royal Dutch Shell business consultant.

More than a year later, when it appeared in September of 1987, Media Lab made the bestseller lists in the Bay Area but not nationally. However, Brand’s timing was impeccable. The nation had still not woken up to the arrival of computer networks, but personal computers were now firmly embedded in America’s culture, and there was a growing awareness that the PC and computing in general were changing the world. Significantly, the book cemented his credentials as a futurist. He would find a steady demand for speaking at events that would bring as much as $5,000 per lecture.

Several reviewers pointed out that he often seemed starstruck by technology, perhaps unwilling to step back and consider what might go wrong. The New York Times reviewer noted, “When he assesses potential problems arising from the new technology, Mr. Brand worries that it is easy to be paranoid; others might worry that it is also easy to be complacent,” adding, “At times, Mr. Brand seems overwhelmed by imminent utopia.”[30]

There was truth to that.

The book cover itself, with the aid of the Media Lab researchers, created a minor sensation. The front cover image was an Escheresque outline of the faces of two people in conversation, separated by a holographic image showing a three-dimensional sprinkling of letters. It gave the book a glitzy sense that “the future has arrived.” Although it was a commercial success, the book did not come without the inevitable turmoil that accompanied working with a personality as big as Negroponte’s. When Brand showed the Media Lab director his manuscript, Negroponte hated the portion of the book that focused on a visit that Peter Schwartz, the Dutch Royal Shell scenario planner, had made to the Media Lab and threatened to withdraw his cooperation. Significantly, this included the images that the lab had promised to provide for the book.

For a while Brand was traumatized by Negroponte’s tantrum. It seemed like a year’s worth of labor, largely spent without weekends off, was about to go up in smoke. He turned to Paul Hawken for counsel, and his friend encouraged him not to freak out. In the end, MIT physicist Phillip Morrison, who had also become a good friend, persuaded him to stand his ground.

“You don’t need his photographs,” he told Brand. “Do what you want with the book. It’s your book, not his book.”

Brand stood his ground and prevailed. Negroponte eventually relented and supplied photographs. Later, after the book played a key role in cementing the mystique of the Media Lab, he acknowledged that “sometimes it’s nice to be wrong.”

At various points in the book, Brand noted that society had significant decisions to make. Yet when it came to darker prospects, he kept mum. One night in February, at home in Kay’s apartment, he and Phelan talked about the consequences of the ultraconvenience that the Media Lab was intent on bringing to modern life. She suggested it would corrupt people in the same way they had seen Western civilization corrupting traditional tribal life in Africa. Worse, “people become a slave to their phone.” Maybe “Phone Slave” is the correct term for what the lab is making, he mused. That thought, two decades before the introduction of the iPhone, did not make it into the pages of his book.

After returning to the West Coast in the spring, he sat in the Mirene one morning, reading about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. “I wonder what kind of calamities are awaiting us in communications technology?” he wrote in his journal. “Financial freak-outs I suppose, massive false-story propagation, I dunno what else. Back to The Machine Stops,” a reference to E. M. Forster’s short story in which civilization collapses when technology fails.

Those dark premonitions, however, were largely kept to himself.

Chapter 9

Learning

From a helicopter, the Brent oilfield platform did not appear massive. It came into view as a tiny dot lost in a vast sea. Once delivered from Aberdeen, Scotland, to the Cormorant Alpha platform in the East Shetland Basin of the North Sea, Stewart Brand had a persistent feeling of slight motion, kind of dodgy and fluttery, a jiggle and then a roll. Despite his sailing experience, it took him awhile to get his sea legs. This was clearly a much bigger houseboat.

In the third month of his Royal Dutch Shell consultancy, Brand was sent north in September to see firsthand how field operations worked. On his flight from London to Aberdeen, he had peered down at the Scottish countryside. When he wasn’t watching what appeared to him like an unending green golf course sliding under the plane’s wing, he drifted into a reverie, thinking about his quest to find a general theory of learning. If he was lucky, the trip would provide a new way of understanding how organizations could change.

He had arrived in London in July, juggling his new role as a business consultant and finishing his Media Lab book. Now finding himself on a city-scale high-tech structure set above a rolling ocean in four hundred feet of water, he had none of the stomach-turning alienation that had overcome him when he’d first seen the space shuttle in Southern California a decade earlier.

This, too, was the diametric opposite of the do-it-yourself human-scale technology he had extolled in the Whole Earth Catalog, but unlike a spaceship, this was more—well, more down-to-earth, literally. It was comprehensible to imagine the platform as an extension of the Catalog in a way he could not comprehend the shuttle. And, frankly, it was one of the coolest things he had ever seen. He was thrilled to be around something that was so inaccessible and at the same time significant. The clang and the bang and the visibility of machinery—it felt designed for old school experts, much like the early NASA.

The irony of the idea of one of the world’s iconic environmentalists going to work in the heart of the fossil fuel industry did not perturb him. Visiting a North Sea oil platform was his opportunity to see how the world’s infrastructure worked. His charter was to help a giant corporation learn how to “learn,” and he needed to see it from the inside. Both he and Peter Schwartz had no concern that they were perhaps being co-opted; rather they saw it as a rare opportunity to carry on a crusade for environmental sustainability from the inside. And right now, it felt like one of the highlights of his life.

Touring Cormorant Alpha, capable of storing one million barrels of oil, Brand wasn’t focused on its impact on the environment. Rather he plunged into the company’s effort—impeded by its unions—to restructure the oil platform workforce of two hundred into an organization that simultaneously performed both production and maintenance. He took copious notes while trailing after the Shell engineering manager who was hosting him.

The tour over, he was quickly back on his helicopter. He put on his headphones and they lifted off, everything relatively quiet and calm except for a terrifying, ear-shattering beep! before every announcement from the pilot.

Three months earlier, when he’d arrived in London, Brand had no certainty that he would have what it would take to become a successful consultant, much less a corporate guru. It hadn’t helped that Schwartz had picked Brand’s arrival week to disappear on holiday for three weeks, leaving him without any guide or tutor in understanding the ins and outs of his giant benefactor. It felt a little bit, he thought to himself, as if he had just set out doing fancy somersaults on a high wire and then noticed he had no net.

On his first day, dressed in the same respectable three-piece suit he had worn on his Sacramento tour of duty for Jerry Brown, he sat in his office in Shell Centre with nothing on his schedule and no particular agenda, asking himself, “Why am I here?”

Eventually, the phone rang, but the two calls he received were merely greetings without assignments. He decided he would lie low with his door closed until lunch, get some reading done. He considered working from home on Tuesday.

Things brightened, however, when he met Arie de Geus.

A tall and charismatic figure, de Geus welcomed Brand by telling him, “It’s great to have a buccaneer in our building. We like people who have an entrepreneurial approach to things, and we don’t see many of them here. In any case, you’re welcome here, and we look forward to working with you.”

After several weeks, Brand began to acclimatize to Shell’s secretary-heavy corporate culture. It seemed like every attempted contact with the company’s executive staff was met with one arrogant secretary after another asking him, “And who are you with?”

Brand had picked an interesting moment to embed himself at the heart of the global fossil fuel giant. At the end of 1985, Saudi Arabia had ceased price supports and begun increasing production to take market share. By the time Brand arrived in London, the price of a barrel of oil had fallen 58 percent and the oil and gas industry had laid off more than a hundred thousand workers around the world.[1]

A Dutch accountant with a deep interest in philosophy and psychology who had joined Shell in 1951, de Geus was an adherent of Kahn’s scenario approach to strategic planning. He also introduced Brand to his “planning as learning” philosophy and some simple ideas to implement it, such as regular job rotations for executives.

When Schwartz returned, he provided a list of key Shell executives to meet and debrief, and Brand picked his way through the corporate hierarchy, introducing himself widely within the organization. Cathleen Gross, Schwartz’s girlfriend, had found Brand and Phelan their quarters, and the two couples became good friends, having frequent weekend adventures around London. On occasion, Brand would carpool into Shell Centre with Schwartz, who lived close by.

When he wasn’t engaged in such outreach, he tried to find time to finish the Media Lab book. After completing two chapters, he decided that he so hated what he had written, it was hard to even reread. He had no choice but to soldier on, writing in a “Dear Paul” conversational style, framing his writing in the form of discursive notes to his friend Paul Hawken and with the intent of fixing things in later drafts.

At Shell, Brand had been commissioned to organize a series of international learning conferences to bring together a small group of company executives and outside thinkers. The group would meet twice each year and the events were to be modeled after the legendary Macy Conferences, a set of interdisciplinary scholarly conferences that had begun in the early 1940s.

In August, Kelly wrote to apprise Brand of the status of the various Whole Earth projects. They had finished the Essential Whole Earth Catalog, scheduled to be published in September, and he told Brand that they would need to sell at least 136,000 copies if they were to see revenue beyond their advance.

The WELL, which was still growing at a modest pace, was “slowly silting up and becoming paralyzed by gridlock,” Kelly acknowledged. There had already been an acquisition offer by a New England internet service provider, but it turned out that the tiny company wasn’t able to come up with any funding. The entire staff was still working for ten dollars an hour with “no overtime pay, no paid benefits, no paid lunchtime, no paid volleyball, no paid vacation.” Despite the financial squeeze, Kelly had decided to give everyone a dollar-per-hour raise, adding, “We ‘can’t afford it,’ but we never will. Raises first, income will come, or we’ll find other work.”

After returning from his trip to the North Sea at the end of September, Brand hosted Negroponte on a visit to Shell Centre to describe his ideas about the digital future. It did not go well. Usually charismatic, Negroponte was uncharacteristically flat, and in return, the executives had been polite but noncommittal, which led the MIT futurist to write off his hosts as clueless corporate suits.

Brand was caught in the middle, frustrated by Negroponte’s haughty stance toward Shell and his somewhat dismissive attitude toward him as well. Why, Brand wondered, was he knocking himself out working nights and weekends on a book that would probably help Negroponte more than himself? For a while he considered just dropping the entire project or instead quickly “hacking” the book out, taking the advance, and using it on “real work.”

Danica Remy was sitting at home reading the Pacific Sun, a Marin County local paper, when she stumbled across an intriguing classified ad hidden in the paper’s back pages: “Hi, I’m looking for someone who lives in Southern Marin, knows computers, wants to travel the world and meet interesting people and who will work from home. Ask for Ann.”

From the phone number, she immediately suspected that Stewart Brand must have placed the ad, and she was certain that she was the perfect person for the job. With her mother, who had a dual PhD in statistics and social welfare, she had built an early personal computer kit. The Whole Earth Catalog had been part of her childhood, and Remy had also worked for Peter Coyote, introducing him to personal computers.

Remy had dropped out of college to become a ski bum and had supported herself by teaching filmmakers how to use personal computers—everything from scriptwriting to production planning. She sat down and wrote Brand a fan letter, then picked up the phone and called Coyote and told him, “Call Stewart and tell him he should hire me.”

Several days later on a Friday at 5:30 p.m., Brand called her and said, “I read your letter and Peter called me and said I should talk to you.”

“Great, I would be thrilled to come in and see you,” she replied.

“How about tomorrow morning?” he responded.

She was planning a blowout of a party that evening with thirty-five people coming over for daiquiris.

“That’s fine, when should I show up?” she said.

The first thing the next morning she staggered in to meet him on the Mirene. Seventy-five people had applied for the job and he had narrowed it down to Remy and one other candidate. That evening he called her back and told her the job of running the Learning Conferences was hers, with the first of six planned conferences scheduled in just four months, in May of 1987.

While at Shell the previous summer Brand had set the goal of the conferences: to expand the breadth and depth of what was thought of as learning. Initially, they would be intimate, with a gradually widening focus. “Let them start quite small, quite selective,” he wrote, “with the idea, the first ones are a germ structure for the later ones, and that the conference sequence itself is one of learning growth and self-creating structure.”

In addition to Shell, both Volvo and AT&T had signed on as sponsors, and from 1987 to 1989 Remy and Brand organized six conferences that brought together a small group of scientists and engineers to meet with the corporate executives. The meetings were organized so that the corporate sponsors sat outside of the circle as observers to the discussion.

Each of the conferences took place in a different location, ranging from the first meeting held at Biosphere 2—an elaborate sealed environment intended to explore what it would be like to live in outer space, which was being constructed outside of Tucson—to Hillis’s Thinking Machines Corporation in Cambridge. Others were held in places like Sweden, Big Sur, and Costa Rica. Each of the conferences was organized around several “learning journeys” selected by Brand and Remy—essentially brief field trips to visit interesting places and organizations. There were also activities like paintball sessions and improv theater for the participants. From the airfare to the accommodations, everything was first class.

The overarching theme remained developing a deeper understanding of how companies learn. In between the conferences, the members would stay in touch via a private online conference that was hosted on the WELL. Also, Brand would regularly send books that he thought shed light on questions of organizational learning along with his comments—an impromptu book club for the participants.

Sixteen invitees showed up for the first meeting, among them de Geus; Bo Ekman of Volvo; Hillis, Minsky, and Papert from MIT; Peter Schwartz, who had recently left Shell to move back to California, and his wife, Cathleen; Mary Catherine Bateson (Gregory’s daughter), an anthropologist; and naturalist and future Whole Earth Review editor Peter Warshall. Several others, including Alan Kay, were invited but couldn’t attend.

Brand introduced the event by describing it as a “fishing expedition.” They were not striving to build a “learning-bomb,” at least not at the outset. “We’re trolling for insights,” searching within one another’s current work and interests.

By now, early in 1987, he had submitted the Media Lab manuscript. The breakthrough had been when he decided to confront Negroponte, emailing him a note that said bluntly, “I need encouragement.” With cooperation, everything finally clicked.

Later that year the success of his book would result in a new stream of offers to expound publicly as an invited speaker on the coming digital “revolution” that was increasingly captivating the world. While he was physically present just across the courtyard from the Quarterly, and still a member of the Point Foundation board, it had been almost two decades of editing and managing, and he realized it was time to move on. Now he had the freedom to think about what was next and to bond with his son, Noah, who was then ten years old. During the summer the two of them drove together from the Detroit airport to Higgins Lake, the first of several summers spent together swimming in the warm, clear waters Brand had adored as a child. He was touched that his son was taking to the world where he had grown up, but he still found it a place that he was glad he had escaped from.

On long hikes in the Marin Headlands, journal in hand, he would daydream about how to reinvent himself. Phelan told him that his minor “angst” was simply the “postpartum” feeling that was normal in the wake of his book project. She was right, he acknowledged, but he found it difficult to shake his continuing irritation with Negroponte.

What can I do that lasts? he wondered.

He was two years from fifty, and he decided that he would have thirty more years of effective work, albeit “waning” in the last ten (or even fifteen) of those years. His passion for understanding learning was at the front of his mind, followed by an interest in communication technology or “ecologies,” as he thought of them. He jotted down a simple list of possibilities—discover additional “Benign Genres,” invent useful technologies, make art that reverberates, live in an exemplary way, stop or flag something bad, search for valuable principles, invent good games, start conversations, create a new type of public library. Underlying it all was the recursive curiosity that had been behind all of Brand’s enterprises: What questions should we ask so that they would keep asking themselves usefully?

The idea of writing a book with Paul Hawken on “how businesses learn” crossed his mind, but most of all he thought more frequently about pursuing something that he had observed while visiting the Media Lab. Despite being a visual jewel, the new Media Laboratory building had proved to be an imperfect workspace. In contrast, Brand had learned from people like Hillis and Minsky that one of the most loved buildings on the MIT campus was the one known as Building 20, so innocuous that it merely had a number, not a name. However, Building 20 was attractive precisely because it could be continually and easily refashioned for new uses. Built as a temporary structure during World War II, with its wooden beams, planked floors, leaky windows, and ground-level concrete floor, elegance was out of the question. Yet its warehouselike nature and the fact that MIT never removed its “temporary” status meant its inhabitants felt no compunctions about moving walls, rewiring as needed, refashioning office spaces, and more or less doing what they wanted to the space to make it more workable at a given moment.

Out of that came Brand’s celebration of “low road” architecture. “We shape our buildings; then they shape us,” he jotted in his journal in May, quoting Winston Churchill. Then he added his own coda: “Then we shape them.” This was the opposite of Pei’s Media Lab building, an architectural approach Brand described as “form follows funding.”

From these thoughts would come (after many years of research and writing) How Buildings Learn, a book that would be widely praised both as a critique of the architectural profession and for a deeper theory of how different aspects of cultures and societies evolve at different rates, which Brand later named pace layering.

At the same time as Brand was contemplating his future, Phelan was starting Phelan’s Equestrian Catalog (no shock that a Brand would choose that format), intended to be sort of a cross between Smith & Hawken and Patagonia, the outdoor equipment maker. Phelan’s catalog did well and won design prizes, but ultimately a recession and a dysfunctional board of directors undercut her hard work, and after five years she sold the business for “a song.”

For Brand, the Learning Conference had been an opportunity to move closer to a corporate world he had been remote from in the sixties and seventies. And while no general interdisciplinary theory of learning emerged from the gatherings, they did serve to launch the Global Business Network, which Brand would cofound with Schwartz and several others, as well as provide a springboard for Schwartz’s book The Art of the Long View.

The planning for GBN began at the first Learning Conference meeting, where Schwartz had discussed how much they should pay themselves—he thought a $250,000 salary each was about right. Brand’s reaction was “Well that’s an awful lot,” and Schwartz responded, “Well, I have an expensive wife.”

Brand, who did not have an expensive wife, considered it for a few moments and then decided that “getting that kind of money sounded like a swell idea.”

Later, when Schwartz actually offered him a position, which would have meant commuting to work and spending each day in an office cubicle coordinating people and projects, he felt repulsed.

The Japanese publication of The Media Lab took Brand and Negroponte to Tokyo in April of 1988. In an unusual arrangement, Brand’s contract with the Japanese publisher had given Negroponte the lion’s share of the royalties, 65 percent versus 35 percent. (Negroponte had brokered the deal and Brand had acquiesced because Negroponte, with his deep connections, “owned” Japan as far as Brand was concerned.)

It was a quick trip, but it renewed his fascination with Japanese culture and architecture. On the book tour, he stayed at the Akasaka Prince Hotel, a hypermodern aluminum and glass fortress adjacent to the traditional Kitashirakawa Palace. After checking in, he took off on an hour-long stroll through the neighborhood feeling alternately reverential and nervous. He was in awe of Japan’s material culture; it seemed as if everything fit together perfectly, refined Japanese craftsmanship evident even in humble modern buildings. Japan, it seemed, had succeeded in combining Venice’s two different dominances—trade and crafts—simultaneously.

Although he had left the Whole Earth Software Catalog behind, he remained immersed in the computing world. Apple had struck a deal with the Point Foundation to develop a CD-ROM version of the Whole Earth Catalog. Apple financed the development of the project, which began in earnest in July 1987, based on its HyperCard technology, an early effort to implement the hypertext ideas of Engelbart and Ted Nelson, an iconoclastic computer philosopher who was Brand’s neighbor on the South 40 Dock—ideas that would eventually lead to the World Wide Web. The digitized Catalog was delivered to personal computer users via then brand-new CD-ROM optical disk technology. The computer game publisher Broderbund had agreed to publish the digital version of the Catalog, but it would prove to be a conspicuous failure—largely because CD-ROM players were still selling for $500, ensuring that the market for digital content remained minuscule.

Brand’s office was just down the street from Autodesk, a software company whose principal product was AutoCAD, the most popular computer drafting program for PCs. Flush with revenue and with an eccentric founder, John Walker, the company was funding forays into new technologies, including Nelson’s hypertext and virtual reality. Brand was a frequent visitor, and in early 1989 he listened to a talk given by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Russell Brand (no relation), a gaunt and tousle-haired computer hacker and artificial intelligence researcher; a few months earlier he had been one of an elite cadre of computer systems operators who had fought off the first internet worm, launched by Robert Tappan Morris, the son of the chief scientist of the National Security Agency’s National Computer Security Center.

It was the moment when the nation was first alerted simultaneously to the power and potential threat of computer networks. Meant to be a harmless “Kilroy was here” bit of electronic graffiti, because of a small programming error the Morris worm tore through the nation’s then brand-new internet, initially raising fears of a foreign invasion or a cyberattack—although that word had not yet been coined.

Russell Brand warned that the Morris worm was just the tip of the iceberg. After the talk, John Walker, AutoCAD’s CEO, suggested that the world was in a brief golden period between the first warning and a real catastrophe. But Stewart Brand decided that while the legal system moved glacially, technology was moving at light speed and that the “crackers” (as he referred to bad guys, to distinguish them from “white hat” hackers) wouldn’t easily have the upper hand.

He was far from the only one to belittle the threat. The warning signs about the dark underside of the new online world were everywhere, but there was also a gold rush mentality that, like actual gold rushes in the past, fixated on the ore and not the hazards of extraction.

“There are fortunes to be made here,” one Autodesk technologist enthused to Brand on one of his visits. “It’s totally virgin territory.”

Soon afterward, Brand listened to an Autodesk talk by a young computer hacker named Jaron Lanier. Lanier, whom Brand had met during the first Learning Conference at Biosphere 2, was a computer scientist who was pushing the boundaries of what the technology could do. (Several years earlier, in a review of one of Lanier’s games in the Whole Earth Software Catalog, Art Kleiner said, “If this were still the psychedelic era, every game would be like Moondust.”) His inventions would make him one of the pioneers of virtual reality technology, designed to create exotic simulated computer worlds experienced through computerized headsets.

It had been three decades since Brand had watched two young computer hackers playing Spacewar! in the Stanford computing center where he had his first inkling of what William Gibson later dubbed “cyberspace.” Now Lanier was tutoring him on what that new world would mean when it arrived.

For Lanier, who had grown up on the Whole Earth Catalog, virtual reality was going to be the biggest thing since mankind had landed on the moon. Riffing on the opening line of Brand’s original Catalog, he argued, “We’re actually frustrated by our inability to be gods and change the world. That’s one fundamental compromise of human life and virtual reality sort of fixes it.”

Brand was impressed by the demonstrations, but he also picked up niggling concerns that the enthusiasts were getting ahead of themselves. “Look! We can pick up books,” one newcomer to the virtual reality worlds exclaimed. To which Ted Nelson responded, “That’s nice, but can you read them?”

Sitting in Peter Schwartz’s Berkeley living room, John Brockman discovered a Stewart Brand he had never seen before.

Despite the commercial failure of the Whole Earth Software Catalog, Brockman’s literary agency was booming. Beyond the book deals, Brockman had long played the role of impresario, and that continued after he became a book agent. In 1981 he created a salon dubbed the “Reality Club,” where he hosted informal talks attended mostly by New York City–based writers, scientists, and intellectuals.

On occasion, he would take the Reality Club lectures on the road, and in the fall of 1988, with Fritjof Capra, a client and a physicist who had written The Tao of Physics, he organized a talk by Susan Griffin, a prominent feminist scholar, at Schwartz’s home.

Brand was there along with the inner circle of the Global Business Network, which had recently been launched with a small group of corporate clients, each of whom paid an annual $35,000 membership fee.

The idea underlying GBN was to bring together a diverse group of out-of-the-box thinkers to work with corporate and government clients who would join the “network” as paying clients. Schwartz had tapped Jay Ogilvy—who previously ran the Values and Lifestyles program, a marketing research group at SRI that had separated from Stanford in the face of the antiwar movement in 1970 (it was renamed SRI International in 1977)—to join the GBN effort along with Brand, Napier Collyns, and Lawrence Wilkinson, a television producer and media executive.

One evening Schwartz invited his four friends to his home, and they sat around a pool table in his basement while he outlined his ideas on a flip chart. He had come up with the name the day before and his idea was that they would have three interlocking businesses around consulting, a network of experts, and producing media to convey business ideas. The first two ideas would work well, while the third one completely failed in the face of the deluge of free content that came with the internet.

While GBN’s public reputation would be as a consulting firm that facilitated scenario planning, it rose to prominence based on several big ideas: that globalization would change everything, computer networks would change everything, and the internet would change everything.

As the internet gradually wove its way into every nook and cranny of modern life, GBN prospered as a forum for clients who were grappling with the changes brought by the “networked” economy. Ultimately, the consulting group would build a network of “remarkable people,” roughly one hundred big-name scholars, poets, consultants, musicians, technologists, activists, and science fiction writers who could be brought together to help clients speculate about alternative futures.

Between 1988 and 2000, the firm would grow rapidly and become synonymous with the emerging Silicon Valley perspective that the world’s problems could be tackled with technology-centric solutions. Schwartz prided himself in saying that he didn’t make predictions but rather facilitated the development of scenarios that made it possible for corporate and government decision makers to think more broadly while they were planning. Nevertheless, he became known for the idea of a sustained economic “long boom” resulting from the convergence of four powerful technology trends—computing, communications, biotechnology, and nanotechnology—that would supposedly last until 2020. Originally appearing in 1997 as a Wired article[2] written with Peter Leyden, Schwartz’s idea of a long boom took book form in 1999, just months before the dot-com bubble burst in early 2000.

The collapse hit particularly close to home. Discounting the likelihood of a variety of “black swan” events, the GBN executives minimized not only the probability of global investment bubbles and leveraged debt obligations but also the risks to the stability of their own businesses. Although it had grown rapidly, during the downturn that followed, GBN itself was forced into the arms of Monitor, a rival consulting firm.

Before that and for a number of years afterward, Stewart Brand was able to enjoy a part-time relationship with GBN. He was paid a half-time salary, roughly $125,000 annually, serving as an elder statesman for the consulting practice and curating a book club, patterned after the one he had created for the Learning Conference, which shipped two books monthly to GBN Worldview members.

He joined frequently in the scenario-planning sessions but was able to avoid the daily schlep to the GBN office in Emeryville. He was never closely involved in day-to-day business activities but would be deployed as needed in various meetings and presentations. It was an ideal situation, affording the freedom to pursue books and other projects that caught his interest.

Brockman had known Brand as he had risen to become the icon of the counterculture. On that early evening in 1988, however, he felt as if he were looking at a changed man. Griffin was an anticorporate radical and Capra was a deep ecologist. The GBN consultants, on the other hand, were completely at home with their clients tossing around corporate nicknames like Big Blue and Manny Hanny. The GBNers spoke in an inside-baseball patois, and Brockman watched as Brand chuckled warmly, breathing it all in. Brockman felt bewildered by the familial warmth Brand showed toward what he thought Brand in the past had seen as a faceless and antihuman corporate world. In Brockman’s eyes, Brand still affected an off-grid vibe; his custom-sheathed knife was omnipresent on his hip, certainly not typical dress wear among the GBN crowd, but instead of a signifier, it suddenly seemed like a barnacle.

As GBN grew, Brand’s transformation became more evident to many of those who had known him in the days of tepees and Garnerville. Though now a successful movie actor, writer, and documentary film narrator, Peter Coyote remained a committed activist who was deeply suspicious of both technology and corporate power. Not long after he was added to the list of GBN’s “remarkable” network of intellectuals, he asked to be removed. Although the network members were each given a $2,500 annual sinecure, Coyote decided he was simply being used as window dressing to sell corporate clients expensive high-concept ideas.

Brand took another view of their dispute. He had concluded that most of what the sixties counterculture advocated was, and remained, wrong. In his journal he recounted what he thought had failed: “Drugs, communes, spiritual practice, New Left politics, solar water heaters, domes, small farms, free schools, free sex, on and on. Right about a few things too, and for us for proposing them, but my bad.”

Brand was headed yet again in a new direction, on an arc that would culminate seven years later with a Fortune magazine profile titled “The Electric Kool-Aid Management Consultant.”

Occasionally it created situations in which he felt he was a strange bedfellow. When Nils Gilman, a young historian with dot-com entrepreneurial experience, joined GBN, his first scenario-planning exercise took place in San Francisco with a small group of CIA officials led by a man who introduced himself only as George—which Gilman assumed was not his real name. Both Brand and Schwartz were part of the planning exercise, and Brand introduced himself by saying that he had organized the Trips Festival in the 1960s. Then George said that he was one of the longest surviving agency employees involved in drug interdiction programs and that he was burned out, suffering what he called “policy fatigue.” Brand quickly corrected the record to point out that while he had had a lot of experience with recreational drugs, LSD had been legal in January of 1966, and that he hadn’t taken any since 1969, in any case. With impish glee, Schwartz chimed in that he could not make a similar claim.

The fourth meeting of the GBN network was held at Autodesk in September of 1989. The theme for the all-day meeting was “People in the Nineties.” Significantly, cyberspace did not take center stage; it was relegated to an add-on “learning journey” in the tradition of the field trips that Brand had offered as part of each of the Learning Conferences.

Opening the morning in a large Autodesk conference room, Schwartz began the day by saying, “We put remarkable people together in intellectually stimulating circumstances, present them with a few provocative views of what’s new, and see what kind of insights emerge. So far it seems to be working well.”[3]

He then introduced Brand, who, having quickly gone from student to tutor, described the virtual reality demonstrations that would be available to explore during the day. “Keep in mind that we’re seeing a technology-in-progress,” he warned. “One point to keep in mind is how rapidly a severe shift in how we use communication technology can happen. You will be flying a Wright Brothers contraption. Think about what a 747 version might be like.”[4]

For the rest of the day, however, it was striking how completely cyberspace remained off the table as a significant factor in reshaping global culture and politics. Instead, the discussion stayed decidedly predigital. The Worldview members were treated to an exploration of global politics and culture led by GBN network members like writer and activist David Harris (who years before had criticized Brand’s Slaughter game) and Brand’s old acquaintances Paul Hawken and Orville Schell. At the end of the day, Brand and Rusty Schweickart led the GBN members on a decidedly physical-world tour of the Sausalito houseboat community.

Brand had not been able to shake the idea of a book on the new world of digital information. In 1971, Abbie Hoffman had written Steal This Book, an irreverent countercultural attack on the capitalist system. Hoffman died in April of 1989, and that fall Brand toyed with the idea of naming his project about exploring the world of digital information Copy This Book in Hoffman’s honor. In the end, he chose Outlaws, Musicians, Lovers & Spies: The Future of Control.

John Brockman had perfected the art of big money book auctions, and he circulated Brand’s proposal to twenty-two New York publishing houses. He got offers from just two, ultimately obtaining a $100,000 advance. Though it sounded like a healthy sum, the contract, per publishing industry norm, paid half of the $100,000 up-front and the second half upon publication. After taking out Brockman’s agent fee, taxes, and basic expenses, it meant that the one or two years of writing and researching might pay less than $25,000.

Nevertheless, it was an alluring project. “Information wants to be free” continued to grow in influence as a rallying cry for the new digerati. Moreover, everywhere he turned, from virtual reality to computer hackers in both black and white hats and the emerging internet, digitized information was becoming a defining force. He accepted the offer.

Then immediately he decided that he had made a giant mistake. He had always done best when he was out on the edge, pursuing something that nobody else saw. Now he realized that while he had been early to see the advent of a digital world, he was no longer alone. Lots of people he knew were working on their own books on the subject.

Worse, his old phobias had returned. Once again he found himself afraid of heights and spooked while driving over bridges. It was a sure sign that something was amiss. He struggled through a difficult trip to New York, where he made a daylong presentation at a conference on multimedia in Albany. He was beset by travel fatigue and, worse, subject fatigue: some of the allure that computing had held for him was waning.

The next day, as he headed to a GBN presentation in New York City on the subject of global finance, he felt the same disinterest plus the anxiety that still plagued him when he traveled. On the train into the city, he contemplated his future. He had heard rumblings that he was being considered by the MacArthur Fellows Program (known for the genius grant). When the awards were made and he was not one of the winners, he had been crestfallen. It set him thinking: “Well, if I did get a McArthur [sic], what would I do with the money? I don’t want to do another Brockman-inspired technology book. I want to do the book about buildings that got me really worked up.” He called Brockman and told him he was returning the advance and going to work on the buildings book.

In the end, his original proposal would appear in the Whole Earth Review as an article in the summer of 1990, where he confessed at the outset that he had “chickened out” on the project, adding that even if it had been published, it would have had little impact. He added that he was handing his ideas off to Kevin Kelly, who would publish Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World in 1994—the same year that Brand would finally publish the book that was closer to his heart.

After walking away from Outlaws, Musicians, Lovers & Spies, Brand found that his work-avoidance neurosis had evaporated, and he charged ahead. It reminded him of when he had dropped out of army ranger training and quickly moved on to get his Army Airborne School badge in 1960. It put him in a state of euphoria, and he penned the first of a series of proposed opening lines for How Buildings Learn: “In the real life of buildings permanent is temporary and temporary is permanent.”

Not long after launching the Global Business Network, Lawrence Wilkinson had lunch with Brand in Sausalito and learned about his new book project focused on the difference between “low road” and “high road architecture.”

Brand was already framing his research in terms of his “questions that ask questions” learning metaphor. He had outlined his book in a letter to Sim van der Ryn in the summer of 1987. His early working title was How Buildings Learn or Fail to Learn: The Strategies of Bad Design. The title, he wrote, reflected his larger agenda to explore learning in complex systems, and the book was part of his larger, more theoretical quest.

When the idea first came to him, Brand realized immediately that he had stumbled onto a concept—buildings over time—that he would have to himself. Indeed, Hillis convinced Brand that while others could write books on the environment or the emerging digital world, if he didn’t pursue his buildings idea, no one else would.

Still, for a while, he vacillated on committing to the project. He contemplated shrinking How Buildings Learn to an essay and moving on. Other potential projects constantly distracted him. “Information wants to be free”—not what he had originally said—had rapidly become a meme, and he thought about a book on the economics of information. Simultaneously he mused about another book idea, The Restoration, focusing on how to fix the world’s damaged places coupled with a checklist of what the environmental movement had gotten right and wrong. His fictional Venice trilogy continued to haunt him.

Hillis had suggested that rather than try to shortcut the project, he might instead supplement it with something artistic—something like his quest for a photograph of the whole Earth, or perhaps a photographic exhibit in the tradition of the 1964 Museum of Modern Art photography exhibition “Architecture Without Architects.”

Instead, Brand decided to teach the subject in the form of a seminar at UC Berkeley, titled How Buildings Learn. He had just eight students and he quickly learned that he was not a compelling teacher, though his failings were compensated for by world-class guests. Christopher Alexander, Peter Calthorpe, and Sim van der Ryn all gave lectures. When he set out, he thought that the seminar might evolve into a position at the UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design, but that didn’t materialize, which at least left him with more time to write.

“Do you want to see where I’m going to do this?” he asked Wilkinson at the end of their lunch. The two men walked over to Gate 5 Road, where Wilkinson expected to see some cubbyhole office aboard the tugboat Mirene. Instead, they stopped before they reached the dock at a long white shipping container set up on cinder blocks. Brand’s landlord had once had big ideas for containers and had acquired a large number with the notion of some kind of avant-garde construction project, but after giving up on the project, he had instead lined them up as a public storage facility.

Brand had another idea. Peeking inside the eight-by-eight-by-forty-foot shipping container, Wilkinson discovered that it was completely retrofitted as a work space. There were plywood shelves everywhere and an old couch and long desk-height working surfaces to lay out images, with hanging electric lights and strategically placed task lights, as well as a hole cut in the ceiling topped with a stovepipe with a vent sawed into the wood floor to create a simple ventilation system. The roof had been painted white to keep the interior cool.

The book he had in mind was an illustrated one, and he had created an office that let him place images on the walls held in place with magnets, making it possible to see each chapter as a visual whole, with cards of the associated text. It was a work space where he could lay things out, walk away from them for two months, and come back and they’d be exactly where they had been left—under a fine layer of dust. The whole thing was an extension of his Whole Earth Catalog production days. He wanted to produce a camera-ready product in which he completely controlled the appearance as well as the content, delivering a finished product to the publisher. When he was done, he could simply put a padlock on the container and have a complete archive of the project.

When Brand had described his new work space to his agent, Brockman had replied that he thought the idea was creepy and that he couldn’t conceive of working in a library without windows, to which Brand replied, “The library is a window.”

On October 17, 1989, Brand was in San Francisco on his way back to Sausalito, driving by the Marina Safeway, when he felt as if he simultaneously had four flat tires. He slowed down and heard car alarms going and saw mud squirting out of the ground and then a large cloud of dust hanging over the Marina neighborhood.

He was in the midst of the magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake. The Marina, which was home to a young and affluent community, was the hardest hit neighborhood in San Francisco, with more than sixty buildings damaged or destroyed. Four people died, four buildings were destroyed by fire, and seven buildings collapsed.

Afterward, Brand would write about what had happened in a Chronicle series[5] as well as a longer piece in the Whole Earth Review.[6] Both articles focused on the mistakes that were made by rescuers and the lessons that needed to be learned. He wrote about having the right tools in the aftermath of an earthquake, pointedly noting that the professionals needed the army of volunteers who were prepared to help.

In the moments after the quake hit, he parked his car and walked toward the rising column of dust. He found he was of three minds: one was full of pure feline curiosity, the second was garden variety altruism, and playing in the very back of his mind was a scene from a Jimmy Stewart movie, with him as “the alert good guy walking up the street toward trouble.”[7]

Soon he came upon two four-story apartment buildings that had collapsed to half their height. With an off-duty police sergeant, he explored one of the buildings, climbing over splintered walls, aware of the stench of leaking gas. As he poked into collapsed rooms it felt frighteningly silent. Later he would chastise himself for not calling out—a woman had been trapped ten feet below him and might have been located if she’d been aware there was someone above.

He would write about the horror of watching a building ablaze with people trapped inside. He interviewed the husband of Janet Ray, who’d been unable to escape. William Ray was convinced that the disorganization of the response and lack of water for firefighters had led to the death of his wife.

In his articles Brand offered a clinical analysis of what went right and wrong. But he also admitted that his experience as a volunteer rescuer left him with another feeling—he was an adrenaline junky, and in his quiet everyday life he missed the drama.

That fall, Brand was invited to join the board of trustees of the Santa Fe Institute. Rooted in physics and founded by a group of scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, it had tentacles and interests that spread throughout both the physical and social sciences and had a growing reputation for being at the forefront of several emerging disciplines, most notably complexity theory.

The offer had come from George Cowan, a chemist who had been involved in the Manhattan Project and who had founded the institute. Cowan had picked up Brand on his radar and came to visit in Sausalito to personally make the pitch. Brand, already completely awestruck by the institute, responded immediately that if he had to choose between a British knighthood and a board position at the institute, he would be torn, and since there would be no knighthood, he would be honored.

His focus remained on How Buildings Learn. He read From Bauhaus to Our House, Tom Wolfe’s critique of modern architecture, and decided he was a fan, noting in his journal: “Tom Wolfe took his customary knitting needle, rammed it up the nostril of high-style architecture, hoping to engage the brain—and found no brain at all. Just face.”

He threaded his research through the constant interruptions of traveling to speak and serving as a Global Business Network consultant. His goal was to turn architecture if not on its head, at least on its side. The design of buildings, he believed, was something that should happen across time rather than as an artistic snapshot frozen in time. From the outset, architects and their profession were in his crosshairs. “Frank Lloyd Wright houses are aesthetically paralyzed forever,” he wrote in his journal one day. “His commercial buildings get demolished.” He spoke with Peter Calthorpe and Sim van der Ryn as well as Christopher Alexander and Jane Jacobs. He also went back to his Whole Earth Catalog roots and interviewed J. Baldwin and Lloyd Kahn and went back even further to visit with his early mentor and boss Gordon Ashby.

He also formed a small brain trust of people that he could use as a sounding board as he played with the ideas for the structure and the content of the book. (Later he would formalize this approach, maintaining a small circle of intellectual fellow travelers he would refer to as his “guild.”) People like Hillis and William Rawn, a Boston architect who specialized in designing for reuse, became part of a wide-ranging conversation mostly carried out by email. Nobody, however, was as valuable as Brian Eno.

Brand had discovered Eno when the musician appeared at the San Francisco Exploratorium in 1988. During a lecture, Eno mentioned how important Alexander’s A Pattern Language was to his thinking, and afterward Brand tried to reach him backstage to tell him he not only shared a passion for Alexander but could introduce the two. Guards kept him away, however, and it wasn’t until a year later that they would meet at a Global Business Network meeting. They quickly formed an intense friendship. Beyond their personal bond, Eno became Brand’s role model.

Eno’s career was almost as shapeshifting as Brand’s. He had begun his career playing synthesizers in the English glam rock band Roxy Music but had later become a pioneer of ambient music and the producer of several landmark records by other artists, perhaps the most legendary being Remain in Light by Talking Heads. Eno had also long been interested in multimedia, setting up installations that combined film, text, and music.

Their bonding led to a prolific email correspondence (easier because they were on separate continents), initially carried out on the WELL. Years later Eno would abstract more than a hundred thousand words of just his side of their conversation in a single year for his memoir, A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary.[8] That, however, would scarcely touch the surface: when Brand archived their email during the 1990s, the printout totaled several thousand pages.

After one shared Bay Area dinner, he decided that he wanted to work like Eno—“hungrily and artfully.” In particular they shared a common aesthetic. It was Eno who pointed out that in British country homes, the servants’ quarters were more adaptable and human scale than the impressive but overbuilt manors themselves.

In writing about buildings, Brand decided to adopt the voice of a biologist. He wanted to convey the idea that buildings are analogous to living things. In his mind, good architecture would convey the “vernacular” life of a structure after it was built. Building design should evoke an ant colony or a termite nest, built from the bottom up and continuously evolving. It was an idea that had its roots in the same do-it-yourself, grow-from-scratch philosophy with which he had started the Whole Earth Catalog several decades earlier.

His neighbor Peter Calthorpe had convinced him that great architecture was not art—which was not to say the result couldn’t be beautiful. The Bradbury Building that had originally been built in 1893 in Los Angeles, designed in a manner that combined spectacular craftsmanship (particularly ironwork in this instance), with visible stairwells around a dramatically lit center space, was diametrically opposed to what Brand had seen at I. M. Pei’s Media Lab building, where the open space was arranged to obstruct casual interaction, while prioritizing privacy made for isolation and sterility. The Bradbury’s celebration of transparency was also stunningly unlike what Pei had aimed for; the physical workings of his building were secreted from view, and—concealed and ignored—tended to be much more prone to failure. The Bradbury Building was a living organism; the Media Lab, a lifeless one. The Bradbury had been revived several times, including an eerie back-to-the-future cameo in the movie Blade Runner.

The sort of building Brand favored was one, like MIT’s Building 20, that shaped and reshaped itself over time. Brand saw that sort of practice all over, but not among modernist architects and their clients. With them, formidability took precedence over humanity. The failure of architects and planners to look beyond the moment, to consider what would happen, say, once the snow piled up on the roof (the Frank Lloyd Wright example)—this was not so different from what Brand had seen in the army, what he had seen in the American government’s policies toward the natural world, what he had seen in the Sausalito evictions, and on and on: the triumph of inefficiency disguised as proficiency, the demand for automation at the price of autonomy. Modernism put the building first and residents last.

Although it would be mentioned only in passing in his book, his own Gate 5 Road community was his touchstone. When he traveled to his friends’ “nicer” homes, he would find them walled in like sterile deserts by zoning restrictions, “stuck in a place where nothing ever changes.”[9] The neighborhood immediately around his office included lots of recycled buildings, and because it sat between county and city jurisdictions, planning codes were fuzzy. Certainly, it fit Calthorpe’s New Urbanist worldview: from Brand’s boat, it was a short walk not only to his office but to everything he needed to live, from a supermarket to a gym to every kind of supply imaginable, all “scruffy” and neighborly and walkable.

When he founded the WELL, Brand had created several rules to ensure a more convivial online community accountable for its actions by placing responsibility on each individual. He decreed that “you own your own words.” This was meant to avoid the threat of libel suits against the WELL, absolving it from liability for any troublesome content. Unfortunately, the impact of YOYOW (as it was called by many WELL beings) veered badly from his original intent, quickly turning into what Brand would later describe as “copyright insanity, where people thought that their precious words should not be copied in other contexts.”[10] He tried to alter the impact by editing his original aphorism to read “You are responsible for your own words,” but to little effect.

In 1990 the WELL user Mike Godwin had proposed what became known as Godwin’s law: “If an online discussion (regardless of topic or scope) goes on long enough, sooner or later someone will compare someone or something to Adolf Hitler or his deeds, the point at which effectively the discussion or thread often ends.” By allowing people to post under “pseuds,” Brand had opened the door for users, in some cases their true names only lightly veiled, to write things that they would never dream of saying to someone face-to-face. Personal spats were carried on online, and on frequent occasions the WELL’s board had to step in much as a teacher would discipline schoolchildren.

Like many of the early participants in cyberspace, despite seeing the glimmers of the dystopian culture that was spelled out in the cyberpunk science fiction books he devoured, Brand would remain generally optimistic about the digital revolution. It was a sad admission that virtual communities were fundamentally different—often more sterile, anonymous, and less empathetic—than traditional groups in the physical world. The virtual world had some wonderful attributes, but there was a darker aspect as well that was just coming into view. Brand had an early inkling of some of the forces that would radically reshape the world three decades later when the cyberworld the WELL presaged became the world’s predominant communications channel. What would drive Brand away from the WELL foreshadowed on a microscale the online culture of trolls, filter bubbles, disinformation, surveillance, and censorship that has come to deeply trouble the entire world in the past decade.

Brand’s disaffection was complicated by the fact that the WELL’s growth had been strong up until 1991 and then slowed visibly, and it was not clear whether the slowdown was due to the national recession or some other reason. What was clear was that despite grand visions of expansion, the WELL had national competition with much deeper pockets, such as America Online, which already offered email, conferences, and much more than Brand’s squad could provide, as well as a much larger online community.

At the same time, it was indisputable that the WELL was feeling growing pains. The system had launched on a Digital Equipment Corporation VAX minicomputer, which it had outgrown. Relatively quickly, however, even its replacement had been overwhelmed, and system performance became a continual complaint.

John Coate, who was managing the WELL, came to the board with a well-thought-out plan for growth. His concept was to compete with AOL, but rather than create a centralized service, his strategy was to do it by federating a large number of community-oriented systems that would each reflect their local community. The board quickly rejected the idea, which would have required a large infusion of capital to grow it at scale.

At the end of 1991, the bickering and customer frustration boiled over in a WELL discussion (online conversations were organized as “topics”) named Backstage, which was meant to be a place to discuss the WELL’s inner workings. Invited to join the discussion, Brand and Kelly showed up and immediately were set upon by an angry e-mob of WELL users, many blaming the board for the system’s shortcomings.

Several weeks later, in January, Brand was still upset about the tone and ferocity of the attack, which he would later characterize as a mugging. When he sat down at his computer to log into the WELL, he found his hands were trembling. He created a new topic titled “System Scapegoat—does The WELL always need one?” He began by describing in his view what had taken place:

It was a lynch mob looking for an evildoer. I spoke, got misheard, knocked flat, and then piled on. The Board was obviously trying to kill the WELL, went the apparent fantasy, and I was a poor simpleton who needed straightening out fast. I learned not to interrupt a mob delusion with contrary facts—it just makes them madder. . . . I stayed for a few days and then realized in e.e. cummings’ poetic words, there is some shit I will not eat. . . .

For the next three days, the WELL community went back and forth about Brand, whether he was to blame and what should be done. The tone of the conversation ran toward what the virtual world called cyberspace had become: sharp-edged, often strident statements full of certitude. Even empathy when it was in evidence felt hollow.

A variety of people, including Howard Rheingold and Kelly, who posted a long description of how he would like to invent “WELL 2.0,” came to Brand’s defense, but the spirit of the conversation was exemplified by a user who went by the pseud Axon:

Well, heaven forfend that i should bully saint stewart. i’m afraid that this latest exercise in obfuscation fails to sustain my interest. it’s just a lot of handwaving. now that i’ve been branded a Torturer i suppose i can die happy. my only intent is to help.

After three days of reading and occasionally responding, Brand decided that it wasn’t the personalities, it was the medium itself that was failing—online communication was flawed, and he had been unable to find a way to solve it.

Increasingly, he wanted to lose himself in finishing the writing of How Buildings Learn, and the WELL had become a huge distraction.

On January 16, 1992, he posted word of his departure:

Anyway, ahem. <Chink, chink> Thank you. Um . . . this discussion persuades me that I can’t be on the WELL Board, these days, and have a life. The choice between those is easy. I’d love to engage in the fascinating problems of civilizing this part of the electronic frontier, but I’ve made other commitments that have to come first. The hurly-burly of online combat is fun, but it takes too much time, to not much effect. . . .

Four hours later he added a brief footnote:

Just a quick really gone comment. Thanks for the good thoughts. I’ll be around in fun and work conferences, but I’ve become a liability in any discussion of WELL behavior or business, so I’d best take my ears as well as my big mouth away. Beaming on out of here . . . blessings wherever they’ll do any good . . .

After he sent the last message, he felt wretched about his decision. He spoke with Rheingold, who offered several ideas for how to continue on the board in a more restricted fashion and suggested ways for him to deal with the mob. For a while he felt better because Rheingold was writing a book about online communities and it seemed to resonate in some basic way.

Then he went back and reread some of what had been said and felt depressed again, torn between giving up on something he cared about and being rejected by something he had created. In the end, he realized that there was no way to continue in the role he had been funneled into.

After he finalized his decision, he began to feel a sense of relief. At least momentarily he felt lonely, and he contemplated inviting friends to dinner more frequently. In his journal, he noted that it had been a long time since he had checked in about his emotions. Later, he told New Yorker writer John Seabrook, “I never loved the WELL again, nor fully trusted its process.”[11]

In November of 1992, Brand went to DC several days early to attend a GBN meeting without checking to see exactly when he needed to arrive. He found himself trapped in a hotel room near the Pentagon, reading a biography of Darwin, while Phelan was back on the West Coast at her parents’ home suffering from intense back spasms. Realizing that if he had stayed home he could have tended to her, Brand felt increasingly guilty and stupid.

It was a terrible year for Phelan, placing new strains on their marriage. Her award-winning Equestrian Catalog company was in the process of being undone by its board of directors and their unwillingness to commit capital to help survive a recession. While the business had grown from $50,000 in revenue the first year to $3.2 million in its last, it was not enough. In the end, in early 1993, she would move out of the warehouse space in Sausalito she had occupied for five years, closing it down. (Brand referenced the space in How Buildings Learn as an example of a business that grew organically in a building originally built for manufacturing Liberty ships during World War II.)

The year was further complicated by a failed pregnancy, which left Phelan distraught. Discussions about adoption would prompt the most stressful period in their relationship, especially because Brand had Noah and seemed less devoted to trying again. Phelan considered leaving the relationship but ultimately decided that she cared deeply enough for Brand to forgo motherhood. (Eventually, they would learn that genetic issues made a successful pregnancy impossible.)

Brand had long struggled with boredom—he started things but had difficulty staying long. While he wrote How Buildings Learn he was already regularly daydreaming about what he might do for his next act.

One day, while he lay stretched out in a dentist’s chair, listening intently to the radio on headphones while the man above him drilled for a crown, Stewart Brand began to contemplate the apocalypse. The Rodney King riots had just erupted in Los Angeles, and he felt impatient with both civilization and himself. What would last? What wouldn’t?

Brand had long been fascinated by the role that libraries played as the pillars of civilization, and they had been frequent subjects in both the Whole Earth Catalog and the CoEvolution Quarterly. The favor had been returned, and now Brand was a frequent speaker at libraries and to groups of librarians.

Indeed, library fantasies were a frequent escape. During a Caribbean vacation on Nevis, he saw an old stone church with huge beams that had been converted into a public library, and he pictured his own private library in a similar stone building with several large open rooms with high ceilings and a roof with dormers, including a plain ceremonial writing room like something from Machiavelli’s era. In the summer of 1990, his mother told him that she was planning to will all of her books to him. He immediately began to draw a detailed sketch of the space he would create to host her books, which he believed included many of the best contemporary works of the past half century. After Phelan shuttered her business, he considered that they might become innkeepers at an “intellectual motel” constructed for GBN as well as his friends, to give them access to his growing collection of books. How, he wondered, might he re-create the conversations that Baker Roshi had fostered at the Zen Center or capture the experience of staying at Chan Chich Lodge in Belize, an eco-tourist retreat that had enchanted him?

A great library would need an equally compelling bar, he decided. Momentarily, that left him nonplused while he tried to figure out what set his idea apart from a yachting club, or the Masonic Lodge for that matter.

His musings would likely have remained fantasies, however, if not for the unexpected email that arrived in Brand’s inbox several months after his visit to the dentist. In it, Danny Hillis sketched out his vision of a mechanical clock designed to run for ten thousand years. Hillis, still making the world’s fastest supercomputers but increasingly frustrated with society’s seemingly ever-shortening time horizon, was searching for some way to encourage humanity to take a long view. He had settled on a clock. Excited, he emailed his friends:

I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets people thinking past the mental barrier of the Millennium. I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium.

It would be, Hillis said, the world’s slowest computer.

He also reached out beyond his immediate circle, taking bemused reporters on long walks to outline his plan. As it turned out, however, Brand was the only one who responded positively to his scheme.

Hillis had realized that his plan dealt with time only as it is conceptualized in Newtonian physics. But he understood that there was another kind of time, which he described as “evolutionary information” time, and his clock as a stand-alone device wouldn’t capture that broader concern. Do you have an idea, he wrote, how I might be able to encompass both aspects of time?

A library, Brand responded.

It was the beginning of the Clock Library project, which, thanks to Brian Eno’s naming wizardry, would become the Clock of the Long Now, the project that would become the focus of Brand’s life up through the present day.

The roots of the phrase came from Eno’s riff on Brand’s original question about a photograph of the Earth from space, which gave us “the big here” and changed everything. How would it be possible to deliver a sense of a “long now” and have a similar impact on future generations? he wondered.

Significantly, while Hillis was exploring the idea of designing a clock, it was Brand who realized that creating an organization capable of serving for ten millennia to maintain the clock was just as thorny an engineering challenge.

During the time that he was beginning to think about the clock, Brand kept one foot in the world of the future as well. In November 1993, Brand attended a GBN-led meeting at Science Applications International Corporation, a Reston, Virginia, company with close links to the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies.

The following month the New York Times would publish the first news article describing the “World Wide Web,”[12] but there was already a growing buzz about the potential impact of the internet. The previous year Kevin Kelly had worked hard to help the WELL connect to the network, both making it easier to send email globally and making it possible for WELL users to reach the system without paying costly telephone charges. The GBN seminar had the bland title Agenda for Information Systems Seminar and had been pulled together by Andy Marshall, a Pentagon strategist who was the director of something called the Office of Net Assessment, a small think tank inside the giant bureaucracy that was tasked with developing future military strategies. Marshall, who had originally been recruited into the National Security Council by Henry Kissinger during the Nixon administration, was a legendary figure with a reputation for strategic thinking, and he was early to see the impact of computing and computer networks on the military. The seminar brought together a diverse group of military planners who were thinking about the concept of “information warfare” with a group of GBN consultants that included Brand; Hillis; Schwartz; Paul Saffo, a lawyer and geologist who had left practicing law to become a “forecaster” at the Institute for the Future; Esther Dyson, a well-known computer industry pundit; as well as computer scientists Joseph Traub and Tom Malone.

The first Iraq war was still a fresh memory, and there was a consensus that information technology, an area where the United States had an unassailable lead, would be a strategic advantage in the next war. The Pentagon officials talked about the coming era of “global situational awareness” and the development of a worldwide targeting grid. The assumption was that “information dominance” would assure American superiority.

Saffo, who was an inveterate and careful notetaker at meetings, listened as Brand spoke on the second day. He cited cyberpunk writers like William Gibson, who pointed out that technologies often played out in unforeseen ways, asserting that “the street finds its own uses for things,” and Vernor Vinge, who had forecast the advent—only decades in the future—of a “singularity” in which machines would outthink humans. Brand warned the group that we were moving from the world of global cities, from a world where citizens had lots of privacy, to the online global village, where we would have no privacy.

After the meeting, Brand thought about why he had felt so energized during the seminar. He realized that he had not gotten out very much in the past year as he pursued his buildings book. Now he felt a renewed pull toward software, computing, and the brand-new internet.

Afterward, with Noah, then thirteen, Brand visited Hillis in Brookline, where the supercomputer designer had a rambling old home that he had restored to capture a sense of life during the nineteenth century. Noah was going through a precocious stand-up comic phase, and so while Brand and Hillis tried to have a serious conversation about building an organization to care for a clock destined to last for ten millennia, he frequently interrupted with childish banter.

Hillis had been thinking no further than his passion project, but both men were fascinated by the story of the rotting beams in College Hall of New College at Oxford. When the beams needed to be replaced in the eighteenth century, it was discovered that a fourteenth-century builder had planted trees in anticipation that they would be needed centuries in the future.

The clock, they decided, would need to be located in a remote location, and some kind of facility would need to be built to house the clock’s caretakers—perhaps, Hillis thought, something akin to a monastery with buildings designed to last for more than a thousand years. The two men even fantasized about creating a religion based on the clock and the idea of long-term thinking to ensure that the device would be maintained across centuries. In Brand’s mind, it would begin as a practice, perhaps like Zen, intended to undertake a variety of long-term ecology research projects meant to extend beyond a single generation. (The religion notion was quickly shelved after Brand reconsidered the value of transforming the clock into an object of worship.)

Brand and Hillis continued to discuss possibilities, and the clock project slowly evolved into a massive mechanical mechanism buried inside a mountain for tracking “deep time.” With the desire that it would become a positive icon, a symbol to inspire societal reflection, they decided that visiting the clock should require the equivalent of a pilgrimage.

It would be almost four years before Hillis would publicly describe the clock project at a symposium at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and another two years before an initial prototype was completed. Drilling began on a mountaintop in Texas on the first ten-thousand-year clock in 2009.

Phelan had suggested Brand spend an uninterrupted month finishing How Buildings Learn, so he took refuge in a rented cabin in the hills outside of Willits, a Northern California town a two-hour drive north of Sausalito. But even on his own, he found seemingly endless ways to distract himself from the painful task of writing. One day he spent the afternoon working his way along the banks of a creek swollen with spring runoff. When he returned to his cabin, he brewed mango tea and enjoyed a cigar and then had a long phone conversation with Peter Schwartz. That evening he burned a TV dinner and then decided to fry a steak instead. Afterward, he settled down and spent time exploring System 7, the latest version of Apple’s operating system for the Macintosh. It was only after he returned to Sausalito several weeks later that he was finally able to finish.

Rather than the light tables, glue, and scissors he’d employed to assemble the Catalog, this time he used software that afforded him the ability to control every aspect of the design and content of his book. The finished book would contain 350 photographs of the evolving buildings that he used to make his case, all of his experience in photojournalism paying off in the composition of his images and the elegance of his layouts. (How Buildings Learn would also include several uniquely Brandian touches, including the author’s address, on the premise that “publishers are ill-equipped to forward mail and authors need contact from readers to make corrections for later printings and to make things happen in the real world.”)

After seven years of research and writing, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built was published in 1994. As Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language and Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities had for their respective authors, How Buildings Learn established Brand as an independent and original thinker on design, urbanism, and ingenuity. Of all five of his books, this would be the one in which he would take the most pride.

That said, when it was published, the book made much less of a splash than The Media Lab. The San Francisco Chronicle gave it a prominent review, but overall it received a far more modest reception than his previous book. Those who appreciated it, however, adored it. Soon after How Buildings Learn was published, Jacobs wrote to journalist Katherine Fulton, then completing a profile of Brand for the Los Angeles Times Magazine:

The reason I used the word “awed” back in the beginning of this letter is that I so much marveled at Stewart Brand’s originality of thought, his common sense raised to the point of wisdom, and his enormous and always specific knowledge that when I closed the book I knew I was reading a classic and probably a work of genius.[13]

Genius or not, Brand soon learned that, unlike in the technology world, there were few hefty speakers’ fees available from architects, who proved to be a generally miserly group. Perhaps because unlike in his previous book, he was not extolling the profession but indicting it. Indeed, How Buildings Learn found a much more receptive audience among urban planners than architects. It appeared just a year after the formation of the Congress for the New Urbanism, founded by a group of progressive urban planners, including Brand’s friend Peter Calthorpe. The book sparked a discussion that led to the idea of what are described as “form-based codes” in the planning world—the idea that rather than designing planning codes for land use, regulations should focus on the relationship between facades and scale and public space to create more livable communities.

At the root of that idea was what Brand had originally discovered when interviewing architect Frank Duffy, who described buildings in terms of “shearing layers” that changed at different rates, which became a concept that Brand would later generalize as pace layering.

In 1990, Brand visited London and interviewed Duffy, an architect who had thought systematically about the rate at which buildings change. Brand knew that over a half century, typically only a third of the cost of a building was spent on its original construction; instead, the vast majority of expenses went to remodeling, maintenance, and operation. Duffy had identified four aspects of building design—services, skins, structure, and site—that changed at different rates as buildings aged.

After How Buildings Learn was published, many of the responses Brand received suggested that the layering concept could be generalized—for example, it applied neatly to the world of software and computer systems as well. (Hardware is popularly understood to be “frozen” software, but the resulting distinction is that over time components of a computer system age at a different rate or pace.)

Two years later, visiting London with Brian Eno, Brand would repurpose his layering framework to understand how civilization evolves—or learns—with a hierarchy that changes at varying rates, beginning with the slow (for a natural biological system) and moving up through culture, governance, infrastructure, and commerce to that which changed most quickly (fashion). He had argued that features that emerged in the quickly changing layers were instrumental in how buildings became “wise” over time and eventually loved. With Eno he would argue that each layer constrains the faster changing adjacent one, moderating the rate of change and creating a healthy civilization. In grasping how the concept related more generally to systems, Brand had created an analytical tool that has since been widely adopted in different fields.

Unsurprisingly, How Buildings Learn also found enemies in the architectural community, initially preventing its publication in England. In addition to criticizing I. M. Pei, he had written critically about the buildings of other world-famous architects, such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Richard Rogers, the then recently knighted codesigner of the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Although Brand had included some positive comments about Rogers, he had also noted that putting the plumbing on the outside of a building, no matter how iconic it was, had created a costly maintenance nightmare.

Rogers threatened to sue Brand for libel both in the United States and in England. In the United States, Brand’s publisher told Rogers’s lawyer to get lost, but British libel laws created a more significant challenge. Brand first tried to reach out to Rogers to compromise, offering to change the language to assuage the architect’s ego, but Rogers began shouting at him and the phone call proved futile. Brian Eno, who was a friend of Rogers’s, then tried to negotiate on Brand’s behalf, to no avail.

Rogers was able to prevail, and Penguin UK initially chose to cancel publication of the book, but not before the kerfuffle showed up in the British press, where Brand stood his ground: “What I was saying is that I liked the look of his buildings—I am kinky for high tech—but putting the insides on the outside is still wrong,” Brand was quoted by the Evening Standard.[14]

In due course, Brand would have the last word when in 1997 he hosted, wrote, and narrated a six-part BBC documentary series titled How Buildings Learn, with a musical score provided by Eno, that ignored Rogers.

Chapter 10

Float Upstream

In the spring of 1994, Stewart Brand found himself back on the edge of Stanford University, camping out in an office belonging to Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. He was there thanks to David Liddle, chairman of the board of the Santa Fe Institute. The two had bonded when they assisted with a group effort to come up with a new mission statement for the institute. When Brand, who was then new to the Santa Fe Institute board, opined, “My experience is that mission statements are treated as a substitute for leadership, and there is no substitute for leadership,” Liddle had looked at him with an aha! glint and soon began to give him more responsibilities.

Two years earlier, with Allen’s backing, Liddle, who was a Xerox PARC veteran, had established Interval Research Corporation, with the goal of reinventing the future of computing with an impact similar to PARC’s influence in the 1970s. Interval was near a cluster of former Hewlett-Packard offices in the Stanford Industrial Park in the foothills looking out over Silicon Valley, just a quarter mile from the Xerox laboratory. That PARC was the model was no surprise. By the midnineties it had already become a defining legend in Silicon Valley, due in no small part to Brand’s 1972 Rolling Stone “SPACEWAR” article, which had featured PARC researchers like Robert Taylor and Alan Kay.

A tall former college basketball player, Liddle had studied electrical engineering at the University of Michigan. Before creating Interval, he had commercialized an early and pricey personal workstation for corporate workers known as the Star and then left Xerox to cofound Metaphor, which developed a similar computer targeted at professionals in corporate marketing departments, which he sold to IBM in 1991.

He had gone to great lengths to shield his researchers from the prying eyes of Silicon Valley technology writers, but he believed that Brand, thanks to his book on the Media Lab, would be a friendly observer, and he offered him an inside look in the form of a once-a-week consulting role, where he would have unfettered access to the researchers.

Brand had recently published an interview with the feminist author Camille Paglia in Wired, and Kevin Kelly, who had become the first executive editor of the magazine that would soon become known as the voice of the dot-com era, assigned him a piece on Interval. Later Brand would acknowledge that an article written by a paid consultant was “awkward,” but he spent months making the commute to Silicon Valley, interviewing and photographing the scientists and engineers who were engaged in a collective effort to leap past the world of desktop personal computing.

Liddle’s strategy was to hire the Valley’s best and brightest technologists and give them the freedom to come up with innovative ideas. He referred to his midcareer stars as being “post-managerial” talents and set up a laboratory with the intent of cross-fertilizing the research of almost fifty engineers and scientists. For several months, Brand would show up at the laboratory, sit in on meetings, and then meet with Liddle. He soon discovered, however, that his potential conflict of interest situation was further complicated by the fact that Interval had created a multimedia contest named New Voices and New Visions with Voyager, an innovative CD-ROM publishing company, and Wired.

In August he was still finding his way, showing up regularly and taking photographs as well as interviewing the researchers. He quickly found out that the goal of generating another computer revolution might not be as simple as putting a group of smart people together in a lab, which in terms of figuring out what to write left him feeling at sea. He had also come to dread the long commute from Sausalito in the swollen dot-com commuter traffic.

Interval’s lofty goal of becoming the next PARC was even more complicated because the ground was shifting underneath its researchers. The web browser had burst on the scene at the end of 1993, and during 1994 and 1995 it was becoming clear that the commercial internet was going to reset the technology world and eventually disrupt entire industries.

In August, Brand’s dilemma was abruptly solved when Wired ran a caustic profile of Allen, poking fun at the billionaire, describing his Microsoft-generated wealth as accidental and referring to Interval as a “rich-guy toy.”[1] Allen didn’t say anything, but a furious Liddle killed the Wired partnership, including Brand’s profile.

That was fine with Brand. He felt as if he had been let off the hook for an article he wasn’t sure how to write. Ending his role at Interval allowed him to simultaneously step back from the internet boom that was consuming Silicon Valley.

As a GBN consultant, Brand had a front-row seat to witness the commercial internet boom. Yet while he played the role of futurist for corporate clients, his heart was increasingly elsewhere. “Even churning fields like computing and communications seem grimly predictable,” he wrote in his journal.

While all around him his friends and colleagues were becoming obsessed with chips of silicon with clocks that ticked billions of times each second, Brand’s attention turned increasingly to the Long Now Clock. “My interest in history the last few years makes current events seem ever less eventful,” he wrote. He was searching for something worth doing that would take him in a different direction from the internet gold rush. It mirrored earlier periods in Brand’s life when he had pursued new ideas early on and then gotten bored and moved on just as the mainstream was arriving to take part in a fad or trend.

He found particular pleasure in exploring the design work that had once captivated him as a young student at the San Francisco Art Institute. While he had been researching and writing How Buildings Learn, he had taken responsibility for guiding the interior design of GBN’s new office in Emeryville, across the Bay from San Francisco. In attempting to create a convivial and productive office setting, he borrowed heavily on ideas that he had become familiar with at MIT, where Marvin Minsky had introduced him to the notion of “cave and commons”—small private offices that surrounded a shared common area for informally exchanging ideas.

A second opportunity to work as an architect came from the Santa Fe Institute. Liddle’s friendship with Brand had survived the consulting job, and he was an admirer of How Buildings Learn. A wealthy donor had given the institute an opportunity to bring in a well-known Chicago architect to remodel the Hurley estate, once the grand twelve-thousand-square-foot family home of General Patrick Hurley, a World War I hero, which would serve as the institute’s new quarters, but Liddle instead contracted with Brand to work with a different architect and bring some of the ideas he had developed in his book to life.

Once again borrowing on the cave and commons approach, Brand focused on transforming the Hurley estate to house roughly ninety people around four design points: conversation, community, concentration, and adaptivity. The new campus was considered a resounding success, but it would be his last foray as an architect.

Until he turned fifty-seven, Brand had increasingly become more sedentary. In his thirties and forties he had tried hang gliding and windsurfing, but as he aged, he’d given up running and other fitness activities. That changed abruptly one day when he was out for a hike with Phelan and found he couldn’t keep up. Mortified, he decided to fix the problem and joined a band of fitness fanatics who would torture themselves at the mercy of Jim DiRuscio, a forty-one-year-old former Army Airborne School veteran. DeRuscio greeted his clients in the dark at five a.m. and took them through an intense workout three times each week. The workout, known as Hit the Hill, consisted of intense three-hour training sessions based around running up Mount Tamalpais with a fifty-pound pack filled with water bottles strapped to their backs on some days and grueling outdoor weight-lifting sessions on others. Afterward, Brand would frequently fall asleep during GBN meetings, but his new fitness regimen would become a lifelong commitment. At eighty he was still attending CrossFit classes several times each week.

Although he would occasionally think about a new book project growing out of some of the GBN work that he had dubbed “Futurity,” the clock and creating an organization to build it remained his central focus. For this purpose, Brand gradually pulled together a band of fellow travelers including Doug Carlson, Kevin Kelly, Peter Schwartz, Paul Saffo, Brian Eno, Esther Dyson, and Mitchell Kapor, who had founded Lotus Development Corporation, a maker of spreadsheet software.

Several years earlier, Kapor and John Perry Barlow (who, in addition to being a Grateful Dead lyricist and a WELL member, was a cattle rancher living in Pinedale, Wyoming) had bonded over the plight of a group of teenagers who had run afoul of the Secret Service for breaking into computers. Several months later, the men met for dinner with Jaron Lanier; Saffo; John Gilmore, a technologist and privacy activist; and Brand. From the dinner came the Electronic Frontier Foundation, dedicated to civil liberties in cyberspace, and Brand was asked to join the board, along with Gilmore, Dyson, and Steve Wozniak. He served on the board for several years, but in the fall of 1994, Brand sent Kapor an email equating the Clock Library to a fragile startup venture that required all of his energies and politely stepped off it.

In July 1995, Brand met with Hillis, who was vacationing at Jacqui Safra’s vineyard in Napa Valley. (Safra was an heir to the Syrian Swiss banking family.) The two men sat by the pool brainstorming. Hillis worried that the clock might prove a futile gesture if humanity somehow destroyed itself in the next century. At the time, many computer technologists were concerned that the accelerating pace of computing might lead to a time, described as “the singularity,” when a machine superintelligence would surpass human intelligence.

Brand responded that he believed the clock could serve as a counterbalance to rapidly advancing technologies such as semiconductor chips and nanotechnology. While generally optimistic, later that summer he returned to his family’s Lakeside camp at Higgins Lake, where he came face-to-face with the shortcomings of institutions that became stagnant over time. Immersion in the Brand clan, with their grudges and bad history, made him reckon intimately with how institutions that were more than a generation old could become “dysfunctionally convoluted, aggressively introspective and both oblivious and irrelevant to the rest of the world.”

Some of that was particular to his own relationship with his family, but there was another concern as well. In November when he discussed the Clock Library during an impromptu session with Kevin Kelly at the Hackers Conference (still an annual event a decade after they’d founded it), the Long Clock idea proved to be a hard sell. Many of the hackers believed that an obsession with the past was lethally stultifying. “Everything that needs to be remembered is being collected and stashed easily accessible” was the consensus. “We are freed to innovate.”

The digerati’s disdain didn’t dissuade Brand—once again, he decided to go where the others weren’t.

While he was enjoying his freedom to focus on something other than the dot-com mania that had seized the nation in 1995, Phelan had a different reaction. After the demise of her Equestrian Catalog, her first impulse had been to shun the idea of ever doing another start-up. Then she saw a web browser and quickly realized that the internet would transform the market for consumer medical information. Planetree, where she had worked after leaving her job at the Quarterly, had created the first free public medical library in the United States. Now Phelan was certain the web would transform health care. She went to the Planetree board of directors and alerted them that medical information would be online in the future. She then immediately launched an online consumer health service named Direct Medical Knowledge, and Brand became a nonvoting board member. In just four years she would sell the company to WebMD, just months before the peak of the dot-com bubble. It would leave the couple worth millions of dollars and contemplating their future as philanthropists—only briefly, as it would soon turn out.

His father’s Russian fur hat almost killed the tour of Big Ben.

On a windy January morning in 1995 Brand and Brian Eno had shown up at the clock tower at Westminster for a backstage visit arranged by the new British prime minister, Tony Blair.

Both men were wearing fur hats. Eno was a Russophile, and Brand was garbed in a sinister-looking black cape to match his dad’s hat. He had inherited his father’s affinity for hats—Bob Brand had kept a large, colorful collection at Higgins Lake—and after his death, Brand had nabbed the Russian hat plus a hooded monk’s robe that he had worn at the Demise Party.

As a result, the suspicious Westminster guards grilled both men before letting them join a group of Argentinian students climbing the 334 steps to the top of the clock tower. Eno noticed that Brand knew a lot more about the clock than their guide, who specialized in witty anecdotes rather than a detailed understanding of what was the world’s most accurate four-faced clock when it was completed in 1859.

Right before the top of the hour, the guide told them to keep their heads away from the walls—the force of the bell had a way of snapping people’s heads back when they were unprepared—and promptly at eleven a.m. Big Ben struck. It was possible to feel the full force of the bell and even revel in it. Brand likened the power of the bell to feeling the impact of a rocket.

It had been a technological marvel in the nineteenth century, “exact to the second” thought to have been unachievable in a tower clock at the time. As a result, Big Ben had become a reference point for Hillis and Brand as they plunged into the intricacies of clock design.

By the autumn of 1995, the Clock Library had an office in the Presidio, the historic former army base with picturesque rows of neat white barracks and officers’ quarters, which had recently been transferred to the National Park Service, as well as a bank account and nonprofit status. (It was also where Brand had been assigned to do his reserve training all those years ago when he’d been allowed early military leave to take classes at the San Francisco Art Institute and San Francisco State.)

Soon they would begin to acquire their first round of financial backers, including Microsoft’s Nathan Myhrvold and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos; Shel Kaphan, Amazon’s first employee and a former Whole Earth Truck Store worker; Jacqui Safra; and Priceline founder Jay Walker.

Shortly after the Clock Library project was launched, Brand returned to the Black Rock Desert to attend the annual Burning Man festival, which since 1990 had been held annually on the Black Rock playa, which he had first visited in the early sixties. He came away momentarily certain that he had identified a mountain nearby that would one day house both the library and the clock. At roughly the same time, Hillis convinced him that while they might use twenty-first-century tools like computers and sophisticated machine tools to build the clock, maintaining it should not require any advanced technology.

By the following summer there was enough momentum that the group decided that in addition to a clock hidden somewhere in the desert, there should be an urban wing in San Francisco that would offer higher visibility for the project. Eventually, they moved their headquarters from the Presidio to nearby Fort Mason, another converted military outpost. They settled on the Long Now Foundation, given concerns that if they called it simply Long Now Foundation, it might be assumed that it was the family foundation of a Chinese gentleman.

Early on, the Long Now board met several times at Doug Carlston’s Aspen home. Alexander Rose, who had grown up on the Sausalito waterfront and known Brand since childhood, had graduated from Carnegie Mellon with a degree in industrial design and returned to the Bay Area. Brand had described the Clock Library idea to Rose, but he also got him a number of job interviews at dot-com start-up firms. Rose went to the interviews, but he couldn’t stop thinking about the idea of building the clock. He was determined to find something else to do besides designing more “plastic toasters” for a living, and he came back to Brand and told him he wanted to work on the clock.

The first board retreat at Carlston’s house was scheduled in just a couple of weeks, so Brand invited Rose to join the group, where he met Hillis and spent the next four days designing pieces of the clock. Rose bonded with Hillis at the retreat and would soon take on the role of the project manager.

The official coming-out event for the Clock Library took place at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles in early 1998. Brand moderated a two-day event—Time and Bits, Managing Digital Continuity—exploring what the digital transition would mean for storing and using human knowledge.

Hunting for a remote location where the clock could be permanently installed, he had set up a war room in the back room of his Sausalito office on Gate 5 Road. There was a large table in the center of the room, and he had pinned maps to the metal-clad walls with magnets. For a while Hillis was passionate about locating the clock in Cheyenne Mountain, where the North American Air Defense Command, or NORAD, is headquartered. For his part, Brand was continuing to explore the idea of finding a place for the clock in the mountains just south of the Black Rock Desert.

One day he was busy briefing Roger Kennedy, soon to become a Long Now board member, on the Nevada desert. Kennedy, whom Brand had met through a mutual acquaintance, was a polymath who had been a popular director of the National Park Service during the Clinton administration. He had also been a Justice Department lawyer, an NBC news correspondent, a banker, an unsuccessful candidate for Congress, and an author.

While Kennedy listened to Brand describe what attracted him to the Black Rock Desert site, he studied the eastern side of the large Nevada map that Brand had laid on the table.

Finally, he stopped Brand and pointed to a remote mountain range just south of where Highway 50—the “loneliest road in America”—crossed the Utah border.

“Have you ever been here?” he asked. “This is a new national park— Great Basin National Park. They’re so isolated, I think they’d be rapturous to have something like the Clock.”

Kennedy was pointing to the Snake Range, one of the most remote places in the United States. Midway between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada, it had everything Brand was looking for—a 4,900-year-old tree, deep caves, and rock that would protect a mechanical clock for millennia. The closest town was Ely, Nevada, which was forty miles from Great Basin National Park.

“I’m dying to just jump in a car and go investigate,” Brand wrote the board.

At the end of September 1998, he drove his Range Rover across Nevada to Ely, where he met Danny Hillis and his then wife, Patti; Rose; Kennedy; Saffo; and Brewster Kahle. Kahle, a New Yorker who had studied computer science at MIT and then worked for Hillis at Thinking Machines, had come to the West Coast to create Alexa, an early search engine he had sold to Jeff Bezos for $250 million in Amazon stock. Concerned that the ephemeral digital information that made up the World Wide Web would be easily lost, in 1996 Kahle had created the Internet Archive as a nonprofit repository for the world’s digital information. Given his preservationist inclinations, he seemed well suited for this new mission.

A local real estate agent drove them to Spring Valley, a remote farming region in the shadow of Mount Washington, an 11,767-foot-high peak in the Snake Range, just one of the park’s fourteen peaks over 11,000 feet. To Brand, Mount Washington looked like it should have been dubbed “Flag Mountain”—from the valley floor it looked like a beautiful white and green pennant streaming to the south. Together they explored deep into a mine shaft that had been cut into the base of the mountain.

The next day Becky Mills, the head park ranger, took them on a walking tour of the trail that led up Wheeler Peak, the highest mountain in the Snake Range. Brand was swept away as they walked through groves of bristlecones, hardy survivors that matched the timescale that Long Now was attempting to capture.

“Thousands of years old, each big one is,” he wrote later in his trip report. “Gazing at a bristlecone is a glimpse into another time zone—the one we want to occupy.”

On Monday everyone except for Brand and Rose flew home, and the two of them went on to hunt for a property before driving back to California. On their return, they stopped at Spencer Hot Springs, one of Brand’s old haunts, where they coincidentally shared a plunge with several dozen Burning Man veterans.

Afterward, Brand wrote that they had “Found The Place.”

The next year they bought the abandoned property they had discovered on their expedition. Jay Walker; Bill Joy, a cofounder of Sun Microsystems; and Mitch Kapor donated the money to buy 180 acres of virtually inaccessible mining land suitably populated with bristlecone pines. Safra’s contribution would be used to fund the first clock prototype and Myhrvold would underwrite a second model, a development project that would take until 2005.

Ultimately, it would be Jeff Bezos who would offer the Long Now project the financial wherewithal to create a full-scale model of the clock. Bezos had been enthused by reading How Buildings Learn, and Brand had gotten to know him through Shel Kaphan, who was just leaving Amazon in 1999. Bezos and Brand had met in Hawaii at a party Bezos organized to celebrate Kaphan’s birthday and his impending departure. Bezos was immediately intrigued after Brand described the Long Now project, in part because he felt his business philosophy was predicated on a set of ideas that resonated with the effort: “It’s All About the Long Term,” he had written in his first letter to Amazon shareholders in 1997. “We believe that a fundamental measure of our success will be the shareholder value we create over the long term.”[2] In 2003, Bezos jumped in as a funder.

Several years later, while he was looking for land for his space company, Blue Origin, Bezos traveled several times with Brand to the Long Now Nevada site. The Amazon founder argued that the site, surrounded by National Forest and Bureau of Land Management property, would prove to be a bureaucratic nightmare for building an offbeat undertaking like the clock and that a better idea would be to install the first clock on a 165,000-acre tract he was buying in Texas, bounded by the Sierra Diablo Mountains, the least occupied region of the United States. Bezos offered the Long Now Foundation land and underwrote the construction of the clock, beginning in 2005. In 2009, construction began on a massive version of the instrument inside a 6,000-foot-high mountain on the edge of his vast ranch and spaceport in West Texas.

Brand was about as enthusiastic and as happy as he had ever been. It was exciting to imagine building a sturdy mechanism and an organization robust enough to last for more than three hundred human generations. However, occasionally doubt continued to intrude on his fantasies. In December of 1999, while on vacation in Morocco, staying in the luxurious La Maison Bleue hotel in Fez, the reality of his undertaking took on a darker veneer. While the city radiated history, a dingy arts and crafts museum in a rundown palace by the Blue Gate had a more decrepit feel. A light rain was coming down when he visited the museum, which held exhibits of tools, musical instruments, embroidery, and wood ornaments. Everything felt shabby and neglected. The roof of the museum leaked. It felt as if the artifacts had been kept in a basement for decades. They were “faded, rough, dingy, worth throwing out,” he wrote in his journal. The “eternal burden of maintaining something for 10,000 years” took on a new, more oppressive reality for him. “I see why people would rather just start over,” Phelan said. “I would.”

Brand pushed the doubts aside. He was committed.

Shortly before the stroke of midnight at the turn of the new millennium in 2000, a crowd of thirty people gathered in the combined offices of the Long Now Foundation and Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive. By now the Presidio’s residential housing had been converted to upscale rentals for the dot-com workforce. For several years it would also become home to both Brand and Phelan and to Paul Hawken when they rented homes that had been former officers’ quarters. Kahle lived in the Presidio as well.

Hillis and Rose had assembled the first prototype of the clock, and at a party held to celebrate the end of the century, it loomed above the assembled guests as an elegant, predigital-era artifact. Hillis had committed to the idea that the clock’s bell—designed to ring once a century—would chime for the first time in 2000. Rushing to finish the prototype, they had cut it so close to the wire that they had not had time to test the clock before the new millennium arrived, and so there was a good deal of trepidation as the moment neared.

There was no countdown, only the quiet announcement by one of the young clockmakers who worked for Hillis, “One more minute . . .”

“The pendulum rotated. Rotated back. The escapement ticked. Then the governor balls atop the right-hand power helix spun up,” Brand wrote in an email message to Hawken. “The adder rings were rotating! Clickety-click, clickety-click, and then TWO of the Geneva hexagons rotated, and up on the Clock face in the brass index rectangle ‘99’ became ‘00’ and ‘019’ became ‘020’—and . . .”

Somebody cheered and was hushed and then through a painful silence a faint motor could be heard, and then a prolonged bonngggg. And then silence followed by a longer bonnnnggggg.

A decade after Hillis had sent out his email to friends, the clock was alive.

A few months after the clock chimed, a different bell rang. After rapidly filtering into every aspect of life in the Bay Area, the go-go internet boom ended abruptly in March of 2000. While Brand had tried to stay away from the greed and acquisitiveness that had accompanied the boom, he was inescapably tied to it both professionally and personally.

After selling Direct Medical Knowledge to WebMD, Phelan was briefly a dot-com multimillionaire. Flush, she and Brand began planning their next phase of life as philanthropists. They set up a foundation and began thinking about an organization that might parallel the Point Foundation that had grown from Brand’s first brush with wealth generated by the Whole Earth Catalog. Those dreams would end abruptly.

Through Paul Hawken, they had been introduced to Reed Slatkin, the initial investor in and cofounder of EarthLink, a high-flying internet service provider. Slatkin was a former Scientology minister who between 1986 and 2001 bilked roughly eight hundred investors in a Ponzi scheme that was outdone only by Bernie Madoff.

Brand and Phelan had the misfortune of being among the very last people to invest with Slatkin. Late in 2000, he had dinner with the couple on the deck of the Mirene, appearing to carefully weigh whether to let them in on his remarkable portfolio. It was not something he would usually do, he told them. But since they were close friends of several of his other investors, he would make an exception.

Phelan was skeptical, but Brand felt that it would be foolish to miss the opportunity. Before the end of the year, the couple would transfer more than $1.6 million to Slatkin’s account, almost half of their stock portfolio. Their money was then immediately transferred into another Slatkin account that was used to pay off previous investors. In May of 2001, the scheme was shut down by the Security and Exchange Commission, but ultimately Brand and Phelan would see less than 10 percent of their money returned. It was a crushing blow that wounded both of them deeply. Brand was mortified that he had been so gullible, believing against logic that someone had beaten the system and was going to invite them along for the ride. They told few of their friends about the financial setback, and it would contribute to a chill in their friendship with Hawken. There was little joy in the fact that a year later Slatkin was arrested and would ultimately spend more than a decade in prison.

At the peak of the dot-com bubble, Silicon Valley—which had expanded to San Francisco in a burst of multimedia and then e-commerce activity—was awash in enthusiasm for technology-centric ideas for changing the world. That zeal was reflected in the Long Now Foundation’s expanding focus. The challenge was to figure out ways to get beyond dependence upon philanthropy, to come up with unique ideas that would produce revenue.

Initially, Brand thought that he had come up with a brilliant moneymaking scheme to support the Long Now Foundation. “Long Bets” grew out of an impromptu workshop debate between Peter Schwartz and Amory Lovins’s wife, Hunter, over how quickly electric cars would be adopted. Listening to their argument, Brand decided there needed to be a place for that kind of intellectual disagreement with real money on the line and with the follow-through it takes to make it happen.

Kevin Kelly, still executive editor at Wired, got the magazine involved in the idea. That in turn brought in the lawyers, who pointed out that if the nonprofit Long Now Foundation became a bookie by taking a cut on the bets, the Internal Revenue Service would certainly frown on the idea. Eventually, Long Bets found its way around the legality issue by establishing a philanthropic fund to disburse the winnings.

Despite its shortcomings, the project was launched after Jeff Bezos became its first backer. Mitch Kapor and Ray Kurzweil (a high-profile inventor who gained increasing recognition for his belief in the inevitability of the singularity) placed the first bet over the question of when a computer program would successfully pass the Turing test, an idea first proposed by the English mathematician Alan Turing to determine whether a computer could be programmed to exhibit such humanlike intelligence that an observer would be unable to distinguish its answers from those of an actual person. Several other projects, including efforts to catalog all living species and all languages, were launched at around the same time, with varying degrees of success.

However, it was Long Now’s focus on finding a location for the clock that would have a most significant impact on Brand. In 2002, he had taken a field trip to Yucca Mountain, a multibillion-dollar US government effort to construct a storage facility for the waste generated by the nation’s nuclear power plants. The visit, and Brand’s participation the next year in a GBN study performed for the Pentagon on the possibility of abrupt climate change, reshaped his view on technology and the environment.

Brand thought of himself as being “mildly” antinuclear before touring Yucca Mountain with Hillis, Schwartz, Kelly, Rose, and Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay. Eno had come to Nevada as well but was unable to get a security clearance in time to participate in the tour and so he joined the group for dinner afterward in Las Vegas.

There had been some thought that the tunnel-boring machine used at Yucca Mountain might be repurposed for the clock, but instead, the group came away from the tour with a deep sense of the folly of bureaucratic-style planning for a time period that would stretch over ten thousand years. That was the time period the government had set to protect nuclear waste, and it was clear even from a short tour that the Yucca project was plagued by technical, geologic, and political problems. It was also a clear warning to the clockmakers, who had multimillennial-scale ambitions.

Afterward, the group repaired to Las Vegas, universally appalled that the government had spent as much as $16 billion on a hole in the ground that was obviously destined for failure. “It was a grotesque expenditure,” Brand wrote, “based on 1950s ideas, a deeply political set of gestures meant to reassure critics who are largely uninterested in science and distrustful no matter what.” The group rallied that evening, however, deciding they were smart enough to circumvent the pitfalls of what they had just seen.

The question that Brand never pursued was the fact that Yucca Mountain was on sacred ground for the tribes that had occupied land around the site for more than a millennium and would be a major factor in the opposition to the facility. He would later acknowledge their wisdom, however, when he publicly broke with the environmental movement and quoted his friend Gary Snyder: “There is something to be learned from the Native American people about where we are. It can’t be learned from anybody else.”

Schwartz, who had the best sense of big energy economics among the group from his time working at Shell, was certain that what was seen today as waste would, in as soon as half a century, be seen as a valuable energy source to be reclaimed. For his part, Hillis decided that he could have built the same hole for no more than a couple of hundred million dollars, based on the idea of keeping the waste safe for just a hundred years while time was taken to think about the long-run disposal of substances that might remain radioactive for much longer than ten thousand years.

Brand decided the problem was focusing exclusively on long-term planning. “What Long Now pushes is almost the opposite, long-term THINKING—where you set in motion a framing of events so that a process is made intensely adaptive, preserving and indeed increasing options as time goes by,” he wrote.[3]

Both Brand and Schwartz came away from their visit convinced that nuclear waste was not the boogeyman it was painted by the environmental movement. Waste had long been a significant issue for Brand. He had run antinuclear articles when he edited the CoEvolution Quarterly. Now he decided he may have gotten it wrong.

Lying on his back one night, asleep, Brand turned onto his right side and with a lurch felt the world go into a terrible spin. It wouldn’t stop.

It was terrifying, and he cried aloud, “Help.” Phelan woke up and before long she had Brand, who was in a frightened state, in the emergency room of Marin General.

After checking all of his symptoms, the medical staff told him he was experiencing vertigo, and that it was common and not surprising for a person in his early sixties. They taught him the Epley maneuver, a treatment he could do by himself to control vertigo, and sent him home.

But he wasn’t cured. Once again, he found himself beset by fearful mood swings that would occasionally turn to panic, for no reason that he could easily identify. Driving across the Golden Gate Bridge, he would again become acrophobic. He had trouble appearing in public. Lines at the airport suddenly petrified him. He had a nagging fear that vertigo would suddenly appear, causing him to keel over.

Increasingly afraid of his own brain, Brand soon found he was again struggling with bouts of depression. Not since the late sixties and early seventies had he faced a similar dark time. Then he had gone into therapy, left his first wife, and found his way into a new relationship to extract himself from the gray world he was inhabiting. Now, at the end of 2002, a similar dark cloud enveloped him. He had just turned sixty-four; he felt as if he were drifting a bit, and professionally he was at a loss. “I feel the lack of a new trail I’m hot on that illuminates everything else,” he wrote in his journal.

Work didn’t help. On occasion he would take an Ativan, a common antianxiety drug, to help with the vertigo, but he began hunting for different cures. Acupuncture did nothing and left him feeling as if he were dealing with quacks and medical fraudsters. He applied himself to perfecting what he cared about—focusing on Long Now, taking care of the Mirene, his marriage, friendships, and spending his free time on hiking and fitness—but that still left him feeling as if there were a hole in his life.

Phelan told him, “You have no reason to be depressed,” and he agreed with her. Finally, a neurologist prescribed Zoloft, a commonly used antidepressant, which pulled him back out of the depths. Once he found he was no longer in a place where he was afraid of completely losing it, everything else was manageable.

While he continued to try to sort out his depression, a second piece to the nuclear puzzle came together that year when Schwartz asked Brand to participate with a GBN team that had been awarded a $10,000 contract by the Pentagon to prepare a report outlining a scenario portraying the impact of abrupt climate change.

The assignment had again come from Andy Marshall at the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment. There was already a growing body of evidence that abrupt shifts in the Earth’s climate had happened relatively frequently, and the new scientific data had caught Marshall’s eye. The previous year the National Academy of Sciences had published a report that speculated that rapid climate change could have a dramatic impact on human society and ecosystems.

Schwartz had been aware of the potential impact of climate change on humanity going back to 1977, when SRI had done an early report on the subject. He plunged into the scientific climate literature and soon concluded that climate change could be both abrupt and extreme.

Pennsylvania State geologist Richard Alley, who had coauthored a 1998 article in Nature on abrupt climate change, was involved in the preparation for the Pentagon meeting, and Brand used his own involvement as an excuse to meet and interview a number of climatologists, including Stephen Schneider, a well-known Stanford biology professor known as a hardcore environmentalist and “climate warrior.”

A draft of the document was prepared by June of 2003, coauthored by Schwartz and Doug Randall, an independent scenario-planning consultant who worked with GBN. The final report was delivered in October,[4] but it had a more dramatic impact after Marshall gave GBN the go-ahead to have Fortune publish an article about their findings.

Run as a cover story in January 2004 with the headline THE PENTAGON’S WEATHER NIGHTMARE, the report described a scenario in which climate effects would be felt as early as 2010, claiming:

Global warming, rather than causing gradual, centuries-spanning change, may be pushing the climate to a tipping point. Growing evidence suggests the ocean-atmosphere system that controls the world’s climate can lurch from one state to another in less than a decade—like a canoe that’s gradually tilted until suddenly it flips over.[5]

The report generated a dramatic international reaction. At the height of the Bush era, everyone was shocked to see the Pentagon stepping forward and highlighting climate change as a national security issue. For Brand and Schwartz, it sealed the deal on nuclear power. Brand’s faith and optimism made him confident that a new generation of nuclear power could lower the risk of catastrophic meltdowns such as those seen at Three-Mile Island and Chernobyl.

Schwartz went public first beginning in 2003 with an article in Wired arguing that nuclear could be a “stopgap” while other sustainable energy sources matured.[6] Two years later he gave a more full-throated endorsement of nuclear power with another article, coauthored with Spencer Reiss, that proclaimed “Nuclear Now!”[7]

In 2003, two renegade environmental activists, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, had created the Breakthrough Institute to promote technological solutions to environmental problems, departing from the environmental movement’s opposition to nuclear power. The next year they published a manifesto titled “Is Environmentalism Dead?” that touched off a heated debate about nuclear power within the American environmental movement, with Shellenberger and Nordhaus being attacked by a range of mainstream environmentalists led by Carl Pope, the president of the Sierra Club.

There had long been warring factions within the American environmental movement. As far back as the nineteenth century, John Muir and Gifford Pinchot had very different views about caring for the environment. Muir believed that wilderness should be preserved—untouched. Pinchot, who founded the United States Forest Service, believed that the environment should be conserved—that humans were very much a part of and not separate from the environment.

Influenced by his encounters with American Indians in Oregon in the early 1960s, Brand had always aligned himself with the conservationist wing of the environmental movement as distinct from the preservationists as characterized by Muir. Now, living and working within the technology-centric and corporation-aligned Global Business Network, he grew increasingly sympathetic to the Pinchot side of the debate—those who argued that in addition to exploiting the environment, humans were responsible for caring for it as well.

Historian Andrew Kirk has described what he refers to as “conservative preservationists.” They were more likely to have a politically conservative outlook or to be apolitical, they were not anticapitalist, and they were comfortable with technology. It is a worldview that he traces back to Teddy Roosevelt’s original “wise use” conservationism, and he places Brand and Whole Earth countercultural environmentalism in the context of a reinvigoration of a deep strain of pragmatism in American environmentalism. So while in the late 1960s and early 1970s Brand had been instrumental in the creation of a new environmental movement, when he broke ranks, he would insist that he had not left behind that commitment to environmental stewardship and responsibility. His dispute, he argued, was over means and not ends.

Untangling Brand’s rejection of the mainstream environmental movement after 2004 reveals that portions of his new worldview were clearly rooted in his long-held antipathy of the Left—going all the way back to his 1950s anticommunist ideals centered around individual freedom—as well as his rejection of neo-Luddite environmentalists who raised the specter of the unintended consequences of technology. He would remain consistently hostile to those who warned prematurely about the dark side of new technologies and ultimately became a fan of what would be called “intended consequences.” It would become part of his philosophy; he would eschew the power of Bateson’s exhortation to be aware of both sides of a paradox.

In May 2005, Brand added his own voice to the growing debate with an article titled “Environmental Heresies,” which had been solicited by Jason Pontin, a Hit the Hill comrade who had edited Red Herring during the dot-com boom and then moved to Cambridge to edit MIT’s Technology Review.

Influenced by Peter Calthorpe and then by Robert Neuwirth’s book Shadow Cities, which offered a generally positive interpretation of slums and shantytowns, Brand had been giving a Green Cities talk for a number of years, pointing out that, for environmentalists, urbanization could represent an opportunity. Now he asserted that within a decade, genetically modified organisms would be embraced by the environmental movement. He took aim at his former mentor Paul Ehrlich and his argument in The Population Bomb declaring that urbanization was lowering population growth trends dramatically. Finally, he tweaked his friend Amory Lovins, calling him out for convincing environmentalists that a battery-powered Green car was possible but refusing to do the same with nuclear power.

Within weeks, Brand’s arguments had attracted a national audience. New York Times environmental reporter Felicity Barringer put him on the paper’s front page under the headline OLD FOES SOFTEN TO NEW REACTORS.[8] “It’s not that something new and important and good had happened with nuclear,” Brand was quoted as saying. “It’s that something new and important and bad has happened with climate change.” The article was bookended with a reference to Schwartz’s Wired article, noting that his critics had described it as “right-leaning Cheney-worshipping drivel.”

The debate launched Brand onto a speakers’ circuit that was far more lucrative than city planning organizations. In May 2006 he gave a talk to a group of “nuclear power heavyweights” at the Nuclear Energy Institute, making the case that they were all environmentalists now, thanks to climate change. “I use audio with my slides these days,” he wrote Eno. “I hit them with an atom bomb explosion (they jumped!) and showed how all of us see a mushroom cloud when we look at those toroidal cooling towers. Then later I converted the same cooling tower photo into a beautiful view up a tree trunk, with a robin caroling away. The engineers were moved.” Brand had indeed moved a long way from the revulsion to colossal machinery that he’d felt when visiting the space shuttle while working for Jerry Brown during the 1970s.

After she launched Direct Medical Knowledge, Patty Phelan had quickly discovered that it was difficult for a female chief executive of a start-up to get her calls returned.

She thought for a while about new names to get around the problem. On vacation in Maine, Brand helpfully suggested that she could name herself “Elecktra,” the name of the person whose room they were staying in. Instead, at the age of forty-four, she chose to begin using her middle name, Ryan, which in phone messages gave no hint of gender. It also gave her more gravitas when she was addressing rooms filled with male venture capitalists.[9]

Quickly realizing that she did not feel comfortable working with the WebMD executives who had acquired her company, she departed and began working with the Long Now Foundation. There she cofounded and eventually became chief executive of the All Species project, Kevin Kelly’s idea to create a compendium of all the species on the planet and make them available in a public archive. They had estimated that the undertaking might cost as much as $1 billion to $3 billion, but by the end of 2002, unable to get adequate foundation funding in the wake of the dot-com bust, it had largely shut down.

Two years later, Phelan, taking advantage of the falling cost of genetic sequencing, founded DNA Direct, one of the first companies to offer genetic tests directly to consumers. She soon met Richard Rockefeller in a registration line at one of the many medical conferences she was frequenting. Afterward, she and Brand became close friends with Rockefeller and his wife.

In Rockefeller, whose New York Times obituary headline read A ROCKEFELLER KNOWN NOT FOR WEALTH BUT FOR HIS EFFORTS TO HELP,[10] Brand saw the clearest expression of what it takes to be a responsible leader. In his mind, it wasn’t about social class, it was about how a responsible human being should behave in the world.

Brand’s philosophy of wealth remained complicated. He had long viewed himself as having an upper-class background, having been educated at Exeter and Stanford and with a small amount of family money available when he needed it.

Cofounding the Global Business Network paid him a good salary for twenty years and left him with a reasonable 401(k) retirement fund, but all of his other ventures had been established as nonprofits, and the wealth generated by the Whole Earth Catalog had gone to create the Point Foundation.

Phelan had also not inherited much, and after they purchased the Mirene and in 2005 a small dairy farm ten miles north of Sausalito next to the Petaluma River as a weekend retreat, virtually all of their wealth went into maintaining their homes. After meeting Phelan, Brand had sold the property on Cape Breton Island.

Brand’s experience at the Demise Party had left him believing that money did not inspire creativity. However, his growing fame in the 1970s and cofounding GBN increasingly put him in contact with great wealth, giving him a window into a rarefied world of power and privilege. Being flown to Aspen on Doug Carlston’s plane for a Long Now board retreat or spending time with Bezos in Hawaii was intoxicating. It confirmed his increasingly elitist point of view, but at the same time, he had continued to believe that privilege came with a responsibility to society.

He saw people he knew who were “creative and in business becoming extremely wealthy quickly while they were still young. Their money suddenly became a huge issue in their life—ruining their marriage (or creating one), torquing their values and character, and distracting them mightily.” He decided they had no one to look to for guidance besides one another.

Moreover, while others saw great poverty in the world, Brand, preternaturally optimistic, decided that affluence was not inherently bad. Life-changing wealth comes at many levels, he concluded. The rich could be far more of a boon to society if nudged in the right direction, and the world could use that.

He had been looking for a new book project for several years. At one point after visiting with Jane Jacobs in 2003 he had considered writing Great Grand: The Value, Values, and Duties of Elders. Then he reconceived his idea, focusing on the wealthy rather than the aging.

“Title is HOW TO BE RICH WELL,” Brand wrote Brockman in an email message.

“Tell me more,” Brockman responded.

A week later, the perfect Brockman moment, in the form of a laudatory profile, appeared in the New York Times, written by John Tierney, a Times columnist with a libertarian bent.

“Stewart Brand has become a heretic to environmentalism, a movement he helped found, but he doesn’t plan to be isolated for long,” Tierney wrote. “He expects that environmentalists will soon share his affection for nuclear power. They’ll lose their fear of population growth and start appreciating sprawling megacities. They’ll stop worrying about ‘Frankenfoods’ and embrace genetic engineering.”[11]

Despite the fact that Tierney had neatly summarized an obvious book idea, Brand was still focused on writing about how to be wealthy and socially responsible. The next day Brockman circulated a two-page proposal written by Brand for How to Be Rich Well.

“Billions of people in the world are now climbing out of poverty. Toward what?” he wrote. “They look to the rich to find out. The rich are a great public asset—as goals, as models, and as creators—when they do their job right, when they figure out how to be rich well.” Brand’s proposal described a book that would advise the rich on lifestyle and ethics, confident that they would feel free to talk about their lives and their wealth if he agreed not to name them. “I know the rich will speak to me because I’ve tried a few,” he wrote. “They trust me it turns out and they are highly interested in teaching—and in learning from others—how to be rich well.”

He would begin with the old money families he knew well: “Richard Rockefeller and his sister Peggy, William Randolph Hearst III, Juan Enriquez, Jacob Safra, Richard Thierot, Nion McEvoy, Nicholas Negroponte, possibly the Duchess of Devonshire . . .” To that list he added his “new-money friends”: “Sir Richard Branson, Jeff & Mackenzie Bezos, Pierre and Pam Omidyar, Mitch Kapor, Nathan Myhrvold, Susie Tomkins Buell, Garrett Gruener, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, John Doerr, Steve Jobs.”

In justifying his proposal, he noted that in 1982 he had decided that the world headed where the rich led it, and if they failed to lead, it went nowhere. In response he had run several seminars on Creative Philanthropy, trying to help a group—described as “Doughnuts”—of largely unhappy heirs to do something useful with their fortunes.

It is true that many people in America do admire the wealthy, but Brand’s proposal was tone-deaf to what Thorstein Veblen had described as “conspicuous consumption”—witness pronouncements such as, “Managing luxury is a huge and tricky issue, worth a couple of chapters, ranging from the burden of multiple houses to the lethality of helicopters.” In particular, the generation who venerated Brand generally didn’t share his access to or adulation of great wealth, and it is likely that the book, had it been published, would have tarnished his reputation.

Fortunately, the proposal landed with a resounding thud. Many publishers wrote back to express an interest in purchasing a book written by Brand—just not that one.

It would take Brand just a week to put a new proposal together and not much longer than that for Brockman to sell the proposal to Viking Penguin, the publisher of the Whole Earth Epilog.

The auction brought a hefty advance of $475,000.

It would also be his easiest book to write. Beginning in the spring of 2007, he buried himself in his pro-technology vision of environmentalism—committed to countering the deleterious impact that humans were having on the Earth by embracing technology rather than rejecting it. He centered his argument around four themes meant to redefine Green: massive urbanization, globalization, biotechnology, and decarbonized energy, based on his conviction that conservation and renewables would be grossly insufficient.

Initially, he titled the book Think Globally, ACT Globally, but after discussion, he settled on Whole Earth Discipline. Brockman came up with the subtitle An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, which Brand would come to regret. He wanted his book to be seen as journalism and not as a polemic.

In July 2009, several months before publishing Whole Earth Discipline, Brand stood before a US State Department audience to preview his book, which he described as a supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog. He didn’t look like a counterculture icon, but he also wasn’t wearing an East Coast business suit. He wore a dark brown dress shirt and a bright turquoise tie tucked into his shirt. He began by establishing his environmentalist credentials by reciting the Outdoor Life’s Conservation Pledge that he had taken as a youngster.

“I still believe that,” he told the audience.

Then, for the benefit of his State Department audience, he added, “The rise of the West is over.” Rapidly growing cities in the developing world were the world’s future, he explained, and that will be environmentally positive. As the rural exodus occurs, the natural world could reclaim the territory that has become depopulated. Furthermore, as soon as people arrive in cities, they have fewer children, defusing the population bomb.

Brand then shifted to climate. “My fellow environmentalists on this subject have been irrational, anti-scientific and very harmful,” he asserted, also bashing Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth for their opposition to GMO foods in Africa. “We are as gods and HAVE to get good at it,” he concluded.

Almost four decades after Earth Day, this was a new Stewart Brand. John Brockman had chosen to label Whole Earth Discipline as a “manifesto,” and now, once again perhaps somewhat reluctantly, Brand had become an activist.

In the sixties, he had shared Ken Kesey’s contempt for the antiwar movement, and afterward, he retained an antipathy for the New Left. His efforts at environmental activism in the sixties, Life-Raft Earth, and in organizing the Life Forum in Stockholm at the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment had led him to believe that activism was ineffective. Now, however, he set out to convert the environmentalists, whom he condemned as backward-looking romantics, not just to a scientific view of the world but to an engineering sensibility. His new mantra had become “What we call natural and what we call human are inseparable.” In one sense, it was a worldview he had first stumbled upon when he visited the Indian reservation in Oregon, and he had now returned to it, but with a twist even he would not have predicted in his America Needs Indians! days. It would now put Brand on a collision course with people who had once been his close friends.

When it was published in October 2009, Whole Earth Discipline was viewed as a rallying cry by some and as treason by others. By endorsing vast cities, GMO foods, nuclear power, and geoengineering to forestall global warming, he threw down a gauntlet that left many Greens feeling betrayed.

As he wrote, he savored the notion of going against the grain but in one sense felt the book was a reaffirmation of where he had begun with the Whole Earth Catalog four decades earlier. In the fall of 1968, he had set out by arguing, “We are as Gods and might as well get good at it.” Whole Earth Discipline opened with his new epigraph: “We are as Gods and HAVE to get good at it,” underscoring his belief in the existential threat of climate change.

Nevertheless, Whole Earth Discipline also marked a fundamental break with his youthful libertarian, do-it-yourself philosophy. It was his earlier perspective that had been called out as the “California Ideology” in 1995 by two British academics in a critique of what they called “dotcom neoliberalism”—a blending of hippie libertarianism and conservative economics.

That view of Brand was further documented by sociologist Thomas Streeter and communications theorist Fred Turner, who both trace an intellectual through line from the Whole Earth Catalog to the emergence of the libertarian online culture that emerged beginning in the mid-1980s.[12] None of the critics appeared to realize, however, the degree to which Brand had changed his mind about the value of “good” government from his year spent consulting for Jerry Brown in Sacramento long before the emergence of a digital culture. Brand felt that Huey Johnson had been “shockingly effective” as natural resources secretary for California in the early ’80s, proving “how much lasting good can be accomplished by intelligent and integrated policy at the state level.” Streeter and Turner also ignored the degree to which he felt that his effort in building a workable, not-for-profit digital culture upon the WELL had been a failure. They also failed to make the distinction—made later by Jonathan Taplin in his 2017 book, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy—between Brand’s original technological utopianism and Silicon Valley–centered digital libertarianism that emerged with a group of Stanford-educated young Turks known as the PayPal Mafia during the dot-com era.

In Whole Earth Discipline, Brand made a decidedly non-neoliberal argument: “The scale of the climate challenge is so vast that it cannot be met solely by grassroots groups and corporations, no matter how Green. The situation requires Government fiat to set rules and enforce them.”[13]

Brand retained a passionate commitment to the ideas of Aldo Leopold, an author, a philosopher, and an ecologist who is generally seen as the father of the science of wildlife management. He treated Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, a collection of essays enumerating a “land ethic” regarding the responsibility that people hold toward the land they inhabit, as a “holy writ.” Brand did not see himself as abandoning that obligation. Rather, he was calling for a new “turquoise” movement that would blend Green activism with what he described as a blue planet–friendly attitude toward science and technology.

In framing the urgency of the coming climate crisis, Brand turned first to his friend James Lovelock, the iconoclastic environmental theorist who had first proposed the Gaia theory in the CoEvolution Quarterly. He had known Lovelock as a gentle optimist and was struck when he read the text of a talk he had given to the Royal Society in October of 2007. The melting of the arctic ice, Lovelock had argued, was introducing more global heating, adding that large regions of the Earth would become uninhabitable decades sooner than the then current climate models estimated. The only answer was to go to a wartime emergency footing. The world needed to prepare for climate refugees and consider geoengineering solutions to buy time.

Brand called Lovelock for more detail.

“People don’t realize how little time we have. The planet is on the move,” Lovelock said, explaining that global warming was on track to raise the average temperature of the planet by 5 degrees Celsius.

How many humans could such a world support? Brand asked.

“Oh, I think it’s less than a billion,” Lovelock replied. “It will be too hot for things to grow.” To Brand, this reinforced his call for radical solutions that went well beyond what the bulk of the environmental movement seemed willing to consider.

To further make his case, Brand relied on Saul Griffith, an MIT-trained materials scientist and a MacArthur Genius Grant winner who had invented an ingenious wind power system based on tethered high-flying kites. Brand had met Griffith at a TED Conference dinner in 2008 and Griffith had introduced him to the idea of Renewistan, the land area needed for renewable power sources like wind and solar to generate enough power for the world’s population.

Griffith told Brand that simple calculations had proved to him that it would take the landmass of a country the size of Australia and require a committed, massively expensive development project involving every country on Earth. It was only a slightly less pessimistic assessment than Lovelock’s. “I’m not trying to be pro-nuclear,” Brand quoted David MacKay, a British physicist and Griffith ally, as saying, “I’m just pro-arithmetic.”[14] (Significantly perhaps, a number of Green critics of Brand and Griffith would quarrel with Griffith’s arithmetic;[15] meanwhile, Schwartz claimed that Lovins, who sat on the other side of the fence, had been loose with the facts in a debate they’d had on nuclear power.)

As Brand became visibly pronuclear, his disagreement with Lovins over the issue had grown increasingly chilly. Brand attempted to explain that he was trying to keep a relatively open mind on the issue of nuclear power. Lovins responded: “The more you tell me about your nuclear beliefs, the more I think you’ve been hoodwinked and are putting your reputation ever more seriously at risk.”

At that point, Brand, who had attended Lovins’s wedding and published several of his articles in the CoEvolution Quarterly, read into the letter that Lovins was actually threatening his reputation and decided they were no longer friends.

In his research Brand also relied heavily on the perspective of Gwyneth Cravens, a novelist and New Yorker writer who had been an antinuclear activist before changing her mind and writing Power to Change the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy in 2007. When he began his research, he called Cravens to ask her why she had changed her mind.

“Two things,” she replied. “Baseload and Footprint.”[16] Part of her argument was the same one made by Griffith; the other part focused on the most challenging aspect of wind and solar—they did not produce power continuously.

On the day Whole Earth Discipline was published, Grist, an online environmental site, posted “Stewart Brand’s Nuclear Enthusiasm Falls Short on Facts and Logic,” a full-throated attack by Lovins on a draft of the chapter of the book focused on nuclear power.[17] The article was a distillation of a much longer twenty-thousand-word paper, “Four Nuclear Myths,” which Lovins helpfully appended.

He began by stating, “I have known Stewart Brand as a friend for many years,” but there was nothing affable about his article, which concluded that despite Brand’s reputation as an environmental icon, his ideas would worsen the climate and increase security risks.

Brand felt he had been ambushed. He complained that Lovins had not read his entire book, only an early draft of the chapter on nuclear power—which someone had passed on to Lovins without telling Brand. He attributed the widespread belief about the extraordinarily high capital costs of nuclear power to Lovins. He felt Lovins had completely missed the heart of his argument, which was about the potential of technology innovation. He even pointed out that the potential of smaller “microreactors” could actually be the most effective way to implement one of Lovins’s cherished goals of distributing the generation of electric power. Brand argued that by his “obsessive ongoing vendetta against nuclear,” Lovins was actually contributing to increased reliance on coal and gas.[18] A once warm friendship ended.

A number of Green activists treated Brand’s book with respect, if not agreement. Denis Hayes, the founder of Earth Day, noted Brand’s “trademark” technological optimism in placing his faith in next-generation nuclear power plants: “With a serious commitment, Generation IV reactors might be commercially available by the 2030s, by which time global warming will have cooked our goose if we haven’t already built an economy relying heavily on solar energy, affordable storage, and smart power grids.”[19]

W hole Earth Discipline created a reasonable amount of buzz in the new world of social media when it appeared in print. Brand also heard from many of his friends and GBN associates who were uniformly enthusiastic. Traditional environmentalists were not the only ones upset, however. John Gilmore, the cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a libertarian and a committed privacy activist, sent a note saying he believed that Brand had fallen into a “doomsday” trap, and he accused him of forsaking his libertarian principles, writing that “it [the threat of global warming] has inspired in you exactly the same response—to throw away your reason and your principles. . . .”

In the mainstream media world that Brand still valued, however, there was much less attention—indeed deafening silence—a fact he blamed on Lovins’s attack. He felt that because Lovins was revered as the voice of Green science, his criticism had led to a de facto boycott by reviewers. Even the Chronicle, his hometown daily print newspaper, chose not to review it, which he took as a personal affront. The other daily paper he read, the New York Times, would not mention Whole Earth Discipline in its book review section for five months, and then only parenthetically in a skeptical essay on a spate of books subtitled “manifestos.” There were several offers to debate Lovins on radio and television, which Brand tersely declined, replying that his chapter would serve as his response now that both of their positions were on the table.

The lack of media attention translated into slow sales, disappointing his publisher—a striking contrast to the reception the book received in the United Kingdom when it was published there several months later. The complete gamut of newspapers reviewed the book, treating it in a serious fashion.

Less than a year later, however, shortly after the paperback had been published with a new subtitle—Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary—Brand ran into a more challenging confrontation in London.

The British television network Channel 4 had produced Where the Greens Went Wrong, a documentary based largely on the themes of Whole Earth Discipline, and had invited Brand to appear on a panel in London the day after the film was scheduled to air. At the same time, the Italian translation of Whole Earth Discipline was published, and he was invited to tour in Italy, where he was a popular figure. The plan was to begin his book tour in Italy, fly to England for the debate, and then return to Italy.

The trip was fraught from the beginning. Phelan’s sister Kathleen was dying of cancer, and in the middle of the European trip, Phelan learned that she had had a seizure and was near death. Distraught, she immediately began planning her flight back to the United States. (Kathleen Phelan died a month later.) Meanwhile, Brand’s friend Whole Earth editor and environmentalist Peter Warshall was also suffering from cancer and close to death. “I am 72 next week,” Brand wrote Eno. “I feel like our cohort lives in the graveyard these days.”

Even before it aired, the documentary itself had created an uproar among environmentalists when it became apparent that it was effectively a hit piece against the Green movement. Earlier in October, Brand had received a panicked email from Adam Werbach, the former president of the Sierra Club, who felt that he had been persuaded to do an interview under false pretenses and was “doing everything in my power” to get himself removed from the film.

“I have always had the utmost respect for you, Stewart; and even when I’ve disagreed with you I’ve been inspired by your earnest efforts to help those struggling for a better planet to improve their work,” he wrote. “But I fear that this documentary has become something altogether different.”

The British press had a field day: “There’s almost nothing so delicious on the small screen as a hippy eating humble pie; except maybe a whole parade of them, exhibited over an hour, and packed into a documentary prosecuting the intellectual crimes of a pressure group who claim to speak for the zeitgeist,” chortled a reviewer in the Independent.[20]

To make matters worse, in Italy Brand was horrified to discover, only after a reporter confronted him with evidence he was unaware of, that the publication of his book had been secretly sponsored by the Italian nuclear power industry. Brand had tried his best to stay away from this sort of thing. Back in February 2008, the main pronuclear industry group in the United States had approached him with its plan to award him its annual award for “outstanding contribution to technical development, an improved regulatory climate or public acceptance of nuclear energy.” Brand politely declined, explaining that such an award would undermine his independence: “To nuclear audiences I talk Green, to Green audiences and the public I talk nuclear (and other things). My identity is with Greens, not with nuclear. That’s how I can be effective and it’s the reality. You can see how an award would confuse that.”

In Italy, it was too late.

The evening debate in London was a one-sided slaughter, with Brand and Mark Lynas, a British journalist, environmental activist, and like-minded Green critic who had also appeared in the documentary, having the worst night of their lives. Brand’s nemesis was Guardian columnist George Monbiot, an argumentative Oxford-educated environmentalist, who had decided that Brand’s role in GBN proved that he was a corporate shill and basically a “spokesman” for a small group of oil and chemical companies. Monbiot spent the evening shouting at Brand and Lynas, asserting that Brand had made false claims in his book. Brand responded in a brief correspondence after the debate that GBN was a scenario-planning consulting firm and that it was worthwhile having these companies hear from a “hard over” member of the Green movement. When Monbiot continued to castigate him in his Guardian column, Brand chose to ignore him. (Several years later Monbiot would reverse himself and take a pronuclear stance.)

The day after the debate Brand flew back to Italy to complete his book tour. In Rome, he wandered by himself to the Colosseum in the rain, marveling at what a cruel place it was. He made a series of presentations to various audiences, capped by a three-hour drive to Naples to speak to fourteen people in a bookstore. His talk was interrupted by a fierce young woman who revealed a scar on her neck, asserting that cancer, caused by nuclear power and by implication Brand himself, had taken her thyroid.

“I offered sympathy, she had nothing to receive it with,” he wrote Eno. “What have we done, frightening so many people so badly about so little?”

Back in the United States, Brand continued touring to promote the paperback edition of Whole Earth Discipline. When Steve Jobs had given his celebrated 2005 commencement address at Stanford, encouraging the graduates to “stay hungry, stay foolish,” he had introduced Brand to a new generation of college students. As a result, he was still a sought-after campus speaker.

In March he traveled to Oregon to speak at Oregon State University and at Reed College, where he invited his son, Noah, who had moved to Portland, to attend his lecture. He had now been giving his talk for almost a year and a half, and in Corvallis, he again began by noting his Green credentials and concluded that we are now terraforming the Earth and we can’t stop terraforming the Earth and “so our only choice is to terraform it well.”

The following evening, he gave the same talk at Reed to a more skeptical group of students. A small group of polite protesters showed up, their enthusiasm dampened by an evening downpour. In an article headlined ROGUE ENVIRONMENTALIST DRAWS PROTEST, Lucy Bellwood, a student journalist who covered the talk for Reed Magazine, wrote:

Fielding questions about the dangers of radiation from the audience, Brand exclaimed, “Well, Reed has its own reactor. These people have been around it. And they’re not weird [Cue: whoops and hollers from reactor operators in the audience] . . . yet.” But despite the ripple of laughter that ran through the crowd, many attendees clearly remained skeptical about the virtues of nuclear power.[21]

As fate would have it, his talk took place just two days before the tsunami and resulting catastrophe at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, and Bellwood concluded her piece by noting, “If Brand had delivered the same lecture after that, it seems likely that the debate would have gotten even more heated.”[22]

Even seven years later, the Fukushima incident remained so painful for Brand that he recalled incorrectly that his lecture and the accident had happened on the same day. The grim situation began to unfold slowly and as the magnitude of the calamity at the plant became clear, reporters in the United States scrambled to find expert commentary. Brand, back in Sausalito, largely avoided fielding the dozens of calls and emails that flooded in, while continuing to follow the disaster and discussing it online with his Long Now coworkers.

Alexander Rose pointed out that while the tsunami and dam failure had killed thousands, at that time none had died from the nuclear power plant accident. Brand initially turned down all media requests—a good move, Paul Saffo agreed, given that “Stewart has been very wise to stay silent on the topic (the worst time to argue for nuclear power is while the crisis is still unfolding).”

Early on, Brand declined with humor a local San Francisco radio interview a reporter on deadline might have missed, responding by email: “Thanks. Can’t. At dermatologist getting treated for radiation damage from sun.”

Two weeks after the meltdown, however, he chose to sit down with Foreign Policy to stand fast in his defense of nuclear power. He reiterated his belief that nuclear energy was still essential for the challenge of baseload power when the sun wasn’t shining and the wind wasn’t blowing. He also argued that solar panels had not yet shown a Moore’s law rapid improvement associated with silicon chips. (The cost would fall by almost 90 percent during the ensuing decade.)

When asked about Fukushima, he credited the media with a more rational response to the accident than during Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. He expressed optimism that the accident wouldn’t completely sideline nuclear power as an option in the United States, making the point that half of US nuclear electricity was now coming from recycled warheads, an environmental win-win. “It’s kind of cool,” he enthused.

But as world public opinion shifted dramatically away from nuclear power in the wake of the accident, Brand was increasingly isolated. Beginning in 2001, there had been mounting talk of a “nuclear renaissance.” It had been tempered by the 2008 recession, but there had still been forecasts of a doubling of nuclear power by 2035 worldwide.[23] After Fukushima, however, countries in both Asia and Europe backed away, while in the United States the low cost of natural gas undercut any meaningful new investment in nuclear energy.

Brand has remained unmoved. He repeated over and over again that the climate situation hadn’t changed and that made nuclear energy necessary. During the summer of 2011, he agreed to debate Winona LaDuke, a well-known environmentalist and Ralph Nader’s Green Party vice presidential candidate in both 1996 and 2000. The debate was to be held in July at the David Brower Center in Berkeley, literally the home court of the “romantic” environmental movement that Brand had condemned in Whole Earth Discipline.

Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll teased him, writing in an email: “Oh man, are you in for it now. An Indian environmentalist and photographer. In this movie, you play the Nazi.”

Before the evening began, Brand had sent LaDuke a description of his America Needs Indians! show and the pages from Whole Earth Discipline that recounted his experience on the Oregon reservation in the 1960s. That evening he wore a blue work shirt with his sleeves rolled up to his elbows and a necklace with his eagle bone whistle from his days as a peyote roadman.

The debate, moderated by Earth Island Journal editor Mark Hertsgaard, almost didn’t happen—a “security threat” after a “powerful but unnamed member of the environmental community had objected to offering a platform to Brand because of his pro-nuclear stance” came close to jeopardizing the event—but eventually things went forward.[24]

He was clearly entering hostile territory. LaDuke and Brand covered a gamut of topics that had been discussed in Whole Earth Discipline, from nuclear power to GMO foods to geoengineering. “Brand appears to inhabit a parallel Earth that is free of the specter of corporate control or haunted by the profit motive; where new technology arises spontaneously, pure and without intent,” wrote Gar Smith, the correspondent for the Berkeley Daily Planet.[25]

When he was asked about Fukushima, Brand responded with a forced analogy, recalling the E. coli outbreak that had killed scores and sickened thousands in Europe, then exclaiming, “But you didn’t hear anyone demanding that organic farms should be shut down!”

Afterward, in the question period as the final audience member of the evening reached the microphone Brand leaned forward with his hands on his knees and smiled with pleasure.

“Hi Peter!”

Peter Coyote, one of those who had partied with Brand at the Trips Festival more than half a century earlier, stood at the microphone and challenged his “We are as gods” hypothesis.

“Idiot savants,” Coyote proposed instead. “We’re highly developed, we have these great skills, this technological cleverness, which is completely untethered to wisdom. My question is that what I find disturbing and a little sociopathic about your perspective is the absence of doubt.”

Coyote continued for more than three minutes, questioning Brand’s faith in technology and condemning him for endorsing a technology that would leave a poisonous residue for millennia.

Brand squinted into the stage lights and responded with a sad smile.

He leaned back in his seat and countered: “Try making that speech in Dharavi, that slum in Mumbai where a million people are getting out of poverty. Remember voluntary simplicity? The Whole Earth Catalog espoused it. . . . Guess what, that wasn’t even the standard for us. You and I are living better now than we did in that decade. And everybody else wants to do that too. Voluntary simplicity is a great idea, but it does not get taken up by people. Involuntary simplicity is where they’re stuck and what they want to get the hell out of. And I’m with them.” He stopped, raised his eyebrows at the audience, and the evening was over.

Epilogue

Their colors are brilliant.

Set against a black background that conveys the frozen motion of an M. C. Escher print, sixty-three plants and creatures populate an oil canvas that depicts species that have become extinct since the colonization of the New World began in the 1700s.

Gone was painted by Stewart Brand’s former employee and Sausalito neighbor Isabella Kirkland in 2004. It depicts life-size images of birds such as the laughing owl, the O‘ahu ‘akialoa, and the Carolina parakeet, as well as insects and animals like Darwin’s rice rat, tucked into an impossible jungle that includes extinct plants such as Hawaiian ferns and mariposa lilies.

Hidden in the painting is a barely noticeable iridescent butterfly, the Xerces blue. Once found exclusively in the sand dunes of the Sunset District in San Francisco, it is thought to have become extinct sometime before 1943. It has the dubious distinction of being the first butterfly to vanish due to destruction of its habitat as a consequence of urban development.

Yet while it hasn’t received the attention and controversy of proposals to bring back extinct species such as the woolly mammoth or the passenger pigeon, Xerces may become the first species to be brought back from extinction.

The idea of bringing Xerces back to life goes back at least to 2000, but in 2021 it came significantly closer to reality. A restored Xerces would become a powerful symbol of what French philosopher Bruno Latour describes as “Gaia 2.0.”[1] We have entered the Anthropocene era, and having completely reshaped our planet, we are faced with the reality that consciousness of humanity’s impact on the world entails responsibility as well. It is that realization that is the heart of Stewart Brand’s contribution and his continuing relevance.

Revive & Restore was launched as a Long Now Foundation project in early 2012 after Brand and Phelan sponsored a small symposium at the Harvard Medical School, hosted by geneticist George Church, called Bringing Back the Passenger Pigeon. While watching Church demonstrate new gene-editing techniques, it confirmed for them that if it was possible to revive the passenger pigeon, it would be possible to bring back other species as well, offering a path to restoring biodiversity, essential for combating the effects of global warming.

Not only would it be possible to bring back the woolly mammoth (which the project’s backers assert will help insulate the Siberian tundra from climate change); it would now be possible to rescue species endangered by the impact of global warming by modifying their genomes to add resilience. Efforts to change the genetic structure of coral to protect against the bleaching effect of the sun are an example of efforts to save entire species.

The project would complete the arc defined by the opening sentence in the Whole Earth Catalog: “We are as Gods and might as well get good at it.” At the age of seventy-three Brand set out to make good on his original promise, orchestrating an active conversation between biologists, ecologists, urban planners, and government officials about using modern biotechnology tools to reintroduce the species into the remaining dunes in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Recreation Area.

As he had with Whole Earth Discipline, he immediately stepped into an ethical thicket. The idea of de-extinction had already been defined in the public mind by the novel (and then the movie) Jurassic Park, and similar controversies soon swirled around the potential unintended consequences of passenger pigeons and woolly mammoths. Another counterargument came from Brand’s early mentor Paul Ehrlich, who argued that de-extinction is a waste of resources that could be invested in saving endangered species—a crusade that Brand and Phelan are also committed to. (Ehrlich later hedged, acknowledging that there might be some educational value in restoring the butterfly.)[2]

Yet the proposed revival of Xerces is perhaps the clearest way to illustrate Brand’s pragmatic approach and his optimistic philosophy, a literal evocation of the “butterfly effect” that suggests the possibility that the smallest change in the environment can have an immense and nondeterministic effect. It evokes Brand’s access-to-tools philosophy as well as Engelbart’s augmentation philosophy.

It also stakes out the boundaries of Brand’s techno-optimist philosophy. The idea of the butterfly effect was at the heart of Ray Bradbury’s 1952 science fiction short story “The Sound of Thunder,” in which a hunter uses a time travel machine to journey back in history to shoot a Tyrannosaurus rex, only to accidentally crush a butterfly by stepping off the path. He returns to a completely different and much nastier world from the one he left.

A decade later, a meteorologist running a computer model of a weather simulation made a tiny alteration in an initial value and found that it generated a completely different output. That led to the notion that a tornado might trace its origin to the flapping of a distant butterfly’s wings weeks earlier—perhaps a Xerces.

Throughout his life Brand has chosen to view the glass as potentially more than half full—he has believed that a guiding human hand will make it possible to systematically enhance outcomes, whether they are terraforming the Earth or reducing the impact of climate change. His faith in humanity’s identity as tool makers and users was at the heart of his confrontation with his old friend Peter Coyote, and his campaign to revive and restore species is a gamble that technology can be used to gain more than linear leverage in a positive direction.

However, there is an important difference between the “We are as gods and better get good at it” in the 1968 Catalog and the “We are as gods and have to get good at it” in Whole Earth Discipline four decades later. In the preface to the Catalog, Brand was addressing individuals, young individuals of his own generation, many of whom had set out to reinvent society by moving back to the land. In the second case, “we” refers to civilization. To the entire human species.

In part the shift in framing is about growing up. Brand as a thirty-year-old had a different outlook on the world than he did three decades later when he and Hillis formed the Long Now Foundation. The idea of a library capable of persisting across many generations, which Brand brought to the project, is at its heart the concept of creating and maintaining a planetary culture for human civilization.

It is a complement to his original assertion about the value of seeing the whole Earth. In a world increasingly defined by the twin political forces of nationalism and identity politics, Brand’s singular insight into the value of seeing the whole Earth is a significant counterpoint. A planetwide approach had been given form by the League of Nations after World War I and the United Nations at the end of World War II. More recently the global election of an International Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) board of directors in 2000 was a small but meaningful example of global democracy.

Briefly in vogue in the 1970s, the notion of a “planetary consciousness” is an idea that Brand’s work first provoked in the 1960s. A half century later it remains his signature contribution.

In December of 2018, Brand paused to rest at a switchback near the end of a steep trail just a quarter of a mile short of a vertical cliff face on the side of a six-thousand-foot-high mountain in southern Texas.

He showed few of the physical limitations of someone his age. Intellectually and physically active, he remained a public intellectual engaged in crusades that in some cases stretched back throughout much of his life.

As he paused on the path, leaning forward hand on knee, he was exhausted from a three-hour hike that would end just ahead at a tunnel that looked like the entrance to some historical mining operation. The opening in the rock face instead leads to the clock of the Long Now, housed in a five-hundred-foot-tall cylindrical space hollowed out inside the mountain thanks to the largesse of the Long Now Foundation’s largest benefactor, Jeff Bezos, one of the world’s richest people.

The first version of the clock was nearing completion. With Hillis, Brand entered the chamber housing the clock through a roughly hewn door set at the base of the cliff. Like all visitors, he then made a rock scramble in a darkened cavern, passing through a Star Trek–style airlock to reach the base of the clock itself. A circular staircase chiseled from the rock wall that forms a giant cylinder in which the clock hangs ascends to a domed observation room hundreds of feet above near the top of the mountain. Halfway up is a platform where those who come to see the clock can physically wind it by laboring on a platform against rotating large wooden arms. Although the clock is designed to keep time without human intervention, winding is necessary to display the time in an observation room. The act of winding implies the idea of long-term responsibility that both Hillis and Brand are trying to convey with their machine.

Responsibility can take many forms. Social responsibility, for example, is an ethical ideal that mandates that an individual should act to benefit society as a whole. Brand and Hillis are attempting to turn social responsibility on its side, encouraging society itself to consider its obligation to uncountable future generations.

Brand has said that when he first encountered Hillis’s clock idea, he was simply thinking about the long term, “wondering what things might make it worth wondering about.”

It had begun as the idea that a library is a tool with which to communicate knowledge and wisdom to the future. Today, Brand’s message is not merely about blind devotion to tools. The evolution in his thinking has been in his departure from his devotion to Buckminster Fuller’s engineering-centric approach and his embrace of Gregory Bateson’s grasp of the significance of paradox and the importance of understanding “whole systems.” Brand’s sensibility thus emerged from his encounters with Fuller, Bateson, and Doug Engelbart, as well as from studying with Paul Ehrlich and learning about the dynamism at the edge of adjacent populations, confronting the evils of bureaucracy while in the army, and realizing that buildings are more than a snapshot in time from visiting Building 20 at MIT.

Despite his reticence, it is an activist’s sensibility.

It was what Brand told a group of students at the Parsons School of Design on the first Earth Day in 1970: “When we realize that we are as gods, then we will know that we have to assume a god’s responsibilities, and that we are able to. Many good things are very simple.”[3]

Growing up in Illinois in the 1940s, Brand lived for the summers spent each year at Michigan’s Higgins Lake at a family camp. Early on he developed a passion for wildlife and at a young age took the Outdoor Life magazine’s pledge to protect the nation’s forests, lands, air, and water.

The children of upper-class Michigan families, Stewart Brand’s parents, Arthur and Julia, attended MIT and Vassar, but then settled in Rockford, Illinois, where after several years Arthur Brand would start an advertising agency.

Brand followed his older brother, Mike, to Exeter. Although he was not an academic standout, he won a coveted writing prize for an essay on the army’s battle with environmentalists at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where Mike was stationed.

After his freshman year at Stanford, Brand persuaded a cousin to hire him to work for a small-scale logging outfit in the woods northeast of Eugene. He came away convinced that there was a Great American Novel to be written about the loggers. Several years later he was relieved when he realized that Ken Kesey had written Sometimes a Great Notion, detailing the world that Brand had discovered.

On temporary assignment as an army photographer at the Pentagon, Lt. Brand was assigned to photograph a visit by President John F. Kennedy with a group of army nurses. When Kennedy entered the room, he headed directly toward the young photographer, but Brand backpedaled and missed an opportunity to shake the president’s hand.

After leaving the army in 1962, Brand moved back to North Beach and signed up to take part in an LSD experiment being conducted by the International Foundation for Advanced Study, a Menlo Park–based research group founded by several electronics industry engineers and Stanford professors. For Brand his first LSD experience was an intense and unpleasant one. The researchers felt that Brand was an example of someone who did not give in emotionally to the drug, and they increased his dose significantly in an effort to break through his emotional barriers.

Shortly after deciding to become a professional photographer, in early 1963 Brand received an assignment to photograph a wild horse roundup on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in central Oregon. He spent several weeks with the three tribes that had been forced onto the reservation beginning in the 1850s. He came away with his view of the world transformed, finding a people who were more in tune with the natural environment than his own modern American society.

Setting out to explore American Indian culture in 1963, Brand took part in a number of peyote rituals. Eventually he befriended Hola Tso, a vice president in the Native American Church. Tso taught Brand the art of being a “roadman” and eventually gave him a membership card in the Church.

Brand met Jack and Jean Loeffler during an outing on the San Francisco Bay on bohemian artist Jean Varda’s sailboat. Loeffler, also an army veteran, was a jazz musician who worked as a cook and a caretaker at Esalen. Loeffler and his wife helped Brand on his research journeys in the Southwest among the American Indians.

Brand’s most powerful experience with LSD came while he was alone in a remote part of a Navajo reservation in Utah. In the midst of his trip he stood outside a small dwelling called a hogan, staring at Navajo Mountain, which appeared to him to be a giant, friendly deity with its arms outstretched.

The New Games movement, which Brand created in the 1970s, actually had its roots a decade earlier in an observation he made while attending a Me-Wuk Indian festival in the Sierra foothills in 1964. He noticed a group of teenage boys and girls playing an intensely physical game, not separated by gender as was the middle-class American custom. They were having an immense amount of fun and the idea stayed with him.

Brand launched his iconic “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” campaign after spending an afternoon on his apartment roof overlooking the San Francisco skyline in early 1966. He realized that seeing the entire planet would change the frame of reference for humanity. It would take another year for NASA to produce such a photo, and it would become a powerful symbol that united rather than divided humanity.

Brand stands with Ken Kesey in front of Further, the Merry Prankster bus. Leaning out of the window in the driver’s seat is Neal Cassady, the legendary Beat figure immortalized in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Brand would serve as a bridge between the 1950s Beats and the 1960s hippies, but he never fit neatly into either group.

Although Brand was never an “on the bus” Prankster, he is photographed here riding the bus on its way to the Acid Test “graduation” that Ken Kesey organized to mark the end of the LSD era he had helped create.

The events leading up to the “graduation” in October 1966 were described in detail by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. The last of a set of wild LSD-drenched rock concerts that sparked the counterculture was a turning point for Brand as well. At the end of the evening he proposed to Lois Jennings.

In November 1966 Stewart Brand and Lois Jennings were married on the beach in Santa Cruz in a ceremony presided over by Paul Lee, a University of California philosophy professor. They were joined by Jack and Jean Loeffler and Roy Sebern, a Prankster artist who was a friend of Brand’s.

The roots of personal computing were shaped by research done during the 1960s at Stanford Research Institute. Brand became a good friend of Bill English (seated), chief engineer for Doug Englebart’s Augmentation Research Center and the co-inventor of the computer mouse pointing device. Later Brand would officiate at English’s wedding in the backyard of a home on Homer Lane in Menlo Park.

Trained as a mathematician, Lois Jennings was the driving force behind the Whole Earth Catalog. She kept the books, managed the employees, and even worked at the cash register in the store. Here she is with author Gurney Norman. In 1971, his novel Divine Right’s Trip was serialized in the pages of the Last Whole Earth Catalog.

Production for the Whole Earth Catalog took place in a garage in the Santa Cruz Mountains, west of Stanford University. A small crew would typeset and paste up camera-ready copy. Beginning in 1968, they produced two catalogs and four supplements each year until Brand closed the venture down in 1971.

Originally conceived as a way to get goods, ideas, and knowledge to his friends living rurally in communes, Brand soon located the Whole Earth Truck Store adjacent to the Portola Institute near the train station in Menlo Park. The store mostly sold books, along with an eclectic mix of tools and other often quirky gear. It was located in the heart of the late sixties and early seventies counterculture community that emerged on the San Francisco Peninsula.

The staff of the Whole Earth Truck Store worked, ate, and played together. The day was built around a lunchtime volleyball game that took place in the lot behind the store.

In January 1971, the Last Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog was edited by Ken Kesey (far right) and Paul Krassner (left), the editor of The Realist. The issue, which was graced with a Last Supper homage by cartoonist R. Crumb, doubled as an issue of The Realist.

To mark the end of his publishing venture, when Brand shut down the Whole Earth Catalog he decided to throw a party and then surprise the guests with the announcement that he was giving away $20,000 based on a group decision about what to do with the money. He dressed in his father’s monk outfit to make the announcement. The partygoers couldn’t reach an agreement, and so in the early-morning hours most of the money was given to a militantly anti-money draft resister named Fred Moore. Moore would go on to cofound the Homebrew Computer Club several years later.

Brand moved to San Francisco when his marriage with Jennings ended, and then on to Marin County soon after he launched Coevolution Quarterly. He lived in a boathouse in Belvedere and would frequently row to work, sailing home in the afternoons.

When Jerry Brown was first elected governor of California, Brown spent a year consulting, both bringing interesting people to speak with Brown and organizing events ranging from a Space Day to a Save the Whales event. His time with Brown ended his earlier libertarianism. He came away believing that there is value in good government.

Marlon Brando became a fan and supporter of the Catalog and the Coevolution Quarterly. Independently both men had become supporters of American Indians in the 1960s. Later Brando invited Brand to the island he had purchased in the South Pacific to publish the Quarterly. Brand visited but never moved his publication there.

Having convinced his publisher that he would completely edit and produce How Buildings Learn, Brand established his studio in a shipping container he converted. It gave him space to assemble the photographs he wanted to use as well as doing page layout. Despite being a critique of modern corporate architecture, the book was well received by the architectural community.

In 1977 Brand became a father after a long-distance girlfriend, Alia Johnson, visited and told him she was pregnant with their son, Noah. Brand agreed to be a somewhat involved father. Johnson would later marry physicist Robert Fuller, and Brand stayed active in Noah’s upbringing.

Patty, later Ryan, Phelan came to work at the Quarterly and proved to be a skilled organizer of events such as the Whole Earth Jamboree shown here, celebrating the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Whole Earth Catalog. The couple decided to get married after they had purchased and renovated a tugboat as their new home among the Sausalito houseboats. Brand’s motto became “Live small, so you can live large.”

The Mirene began life as a “gasoline schooner” in Oregon in 1912. When Brand and Phelan found it, it was moored and rotting on Richardson Bay. Lovingly restored in several stages, it is now taken out for an annual cruise on the San Francisco Bay.

Brand married Ryan Phelan in 1983 in a Zen Buddhist ceremony at Green Gulch, a rural retreat center and farm in the hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean. To appease Phelan’s mother, a Catholic prayer was read during the ceremony.

Kevin Kelly had the original idea of an event that would allow the characters in Steven Levy’s Hackers to meet one another. Brand and Phelan helped organize the event, which was held in the fall of 1984. In response to a remark by Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, Brand said, “Information wants to be expensive . . . and information wants to be free.” Virtually everyone ignored the first half of his aphorism, and “Information wants to be free” would become the rallying cry of the dot-com era.

Although Brand had first conceived of the idea of an online community even before starting the Whole Earth Catalog, he founded the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link in 1985. Part of the wave of interest in computer networks that preceded the internet, the WELL attracted a small but devoted community. Presaging the clashes over social media by several decades, six years later Brand left the WELL’s board feeling that the online community he had founded was flawed.

Brand had first visited the Black Rock Desert Playa in Nevada with Jack Loeffler in the 1960s. In the 1990s he returned as a participant in the annual Burning Man gathering.

Brand looks at a prototype of the Clock of the Long Now, a project he began with computer scientist Danny Hillis as an exercise to inspire long-term thinking. Significantly, the two set out to build what will effectively be the world’s slowest computer just when Silicon Valley and the world became obsessed with ever quicker internet time. Funded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, a full-scale version of the clock is near completion.

In the summer of 2018, after a long absence, Brand and Phelan returned to visit his boyhood summer retreat at Higgins Lake in upper Michigan.

While in the army, Brand picked up the habit of getting in a quick nap whenever the opportunity arose. The custom has stayed with him throughout his life. Here he is taking advantage of the desert sun during Burning Man.

Acknowledgments

This book was made possible by the generous support of three separate institutions, each of which explores in different ways the societal impact of technology. After leaving the New York Times in 2017, I joined the Computer History Museum. The museum’s director at the time was John Hollar, and he graciously hired me as a staff historian. In the fall of 2017, I became a fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, affording me the opportunity to interact with a remarkable group of social scientists, historians, philosophers, and computer scientists. Director Margaret Levi and associate director Sally Schroeder run a remarkable program, set in the hills west of Stanford, that is both a retreat for scholars and increasingly a forum for exploring the way advanced technologies are intertwined with our economy, political system, and culture. Beginning in the fall of 2018, I was a fellow and writer-in-residence at the then brand-new Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. Codirectors Fei-Fei Li and John Etchemendy are at the forefront of a growing movement to think more deeply about the consequences of artificial intelligence.

I embarked on this project at the suggestion of Kevin Kelly, who is both a longtime friend of Stewart Brand’s and a classic example of someone whose life was set in a completely new direction by his encounter with the Whole Earth Catalog.

Brand has donated his papers, correspondence, and journals to the Stanford University Library Special Collections, and over the course of four years I spent countless hours in the Field Reading Room in Green Library. Michael Keller, Stanford vice provost and head of Stanford Libraries, gave me access and support during an earlier project, and I want to give special thanks to Stanford librarians Henry Lowood, Tim Nowack, and Peter Chan, who assisted me during the current project. Leslie Berlin, project historian for Stanford’s Silicon Valley Archives, offered help on methodology and was also a sounding board. Mark Seiden was a careful reader who offered suggestions on grammar, style, and fact. Scott Moyers, my editor at Penguin Press, was a patient and thoughtful guide. Geoff Shandler helped wrestle a sprawling manuscript into something more compact and more readable.

Joseph Monzel and Paula Terzian aided with research at various points in the project. Fred Turner and Katherine Fulton, both of whom have previously written extensively about Stewart Brand, were kind to help with questions and by making their research materials available. Jason Sussberg and David Alvarado of Structure Films shared research materials with me while they prepared a documentary, We Are as Gods, about Brand’s life.

While doing interviews, research, and writing, I had the benefit of a number of thoughtful friends and colleagues including Adam Fisher, Lynnea Johnson, John Kelley, Art Kleiner, Randy Komisar, Glenn Kramon, Steven Levy, Steve Most, Michael Schrage, Jason Vest, and Gregg Zachary.

John Brockman and Katinka Matson have been my literary agents since 1989. In this case they performed double duty, because they were part of the story.

And to Leslie, always.

Author’s Note

This biography relies on a series of weekly interviews I recorded with Stewart Brand at his office in Sausalito beginning in the fall of 2016. Eventually, over the course of four years, I spoke with him more than seventy-six times, sometimes for three hours or longer. I also conducted dozens of interviews with his friends, colleagues, employees, and acquaintances.

At the same time, my biggest lesson as a biographer came from my hours spent in the Stanford University Special Collections reading room. One thing I discovered after beginning my research was that for much of his life Stewart Brand has been a pack rat and that he has fortuitously kept his journals, correspondence, and papers, simply tossing things into a conveniently located shipping container until the librarians arrived. The lesson is that there is simply no substitute for contemporaneous documents. Although Brand showed no signs of slowing down during our interviews, his memory for events that in some cases had happened more than six decades earlier was understandably sketchy at times.

Because this is not intended as a scholarly volume, I have chosen not to footnote quotes taken from my interviews and from Brand’s correspondence. My apologies to future historians and researchers. I will do my best to curate both the transcripts of my interviews as well as the material that I have digitized from Stanford to make it available to others where appropriate.

Brandisms

“ ‘These are the poetical efforts of a prose writer trying to plant a burr in the mind as it goes by in great haste,’ he says. ‘The mind collects stories, collects experiences, and it’s pretty good at managing aphorisms and slogans and little rhymes.’ ”

—Stewart Brand as quoted by Katherine Fulton, Los Angeles Times Magazine, October 30, 1994

“Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?”

—San Francisco, March 1966

“We are as Gods and we might as well get used to it.”

“We are as Gods and we might as well get good at it.”

—First and second printings of the first Whole Earth Catalog, October 1968

“Who are they: (Who are we?) Persons in their late twenties or early thirties mostly. Havers of families, many of them. Outlaws, dope fiends, and fanatics naturally. Doers, primarily, with a functional grimy grasp of the world. World thinkers, dropouts from specialization. Hope freaks.”

—Alloy Conference, La Luz, New Mexico, March 1969

“I do believe that information is replacing laws.”

—Journal, June 2, 1969

“Obviously truth is not to be found in the past, nor likely in the future, next summer, when the buses race from Stonehenge to the Pyramids, maybe. Truth was good while it lasted.”

—Comments on errors in his account of the Great Bus Race, Summer Solstice 1969

“When You Don’t Know Where to Go Next, Go Back and Start Over. Drop out of specialization. Develop rudimentary skills good for any situation.”

—“Stay Loose,” Earth, December 1971

“When we realize that we are as gods, then we will know that we have to assume a god’s responsibilities, and that we are able to. Many good things are very simple.”

—Parsons School of Design, Earth Day 1970

“If we tried to teach infants to talk, they would never learn. I suspect it is the same with ecology. It must be learned. It is being learned. If you try to teach it to people, you will only teach them to hate it.”

—Letter to the House Committee on Education and Labor, April 14, 1970

“We won’t be successful until we become a religion.”

—Comment made frequently to friend Michael Phillips in the early 1970s

“When you design a tool, the best you can do is fashion a prototype and hand it over to the local evolutionary system: ‘Here, try this.’ ”

—Journal, June 23, 1971

“The Hippie/long-hair thing has brash panache, but it lacks world-based substance. Dope ain’t enough, it raises hopes and dashes them in a kind of fond isolation.”

—Journal, July 16, 1971

“It says here that people working at TV stations during interviews and such watch the program on studio monitors rather than right over there real. Signifying: Reality is only Reality if it is shared. The more the realer.”

—Journal, December 14, 1971

“We can’t put it together. It is together.”

—Back cover, The Last Whole Earth Catalog, 1971

“Don’t talk population control to a man making love.”

—Journal, January 15, 1972

“We are a generation longing for a Pearl Harbor.”

—Journal, March 1972

“Ready or not, computers are coming to the people. That’s good news, maybe the best since psychedelics.”

—Opening sentences from “SPACEWAR: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums,” Rolling Stone, December 7, 1972

“After burning our bridges we reported before the Throne to announce: ‘We’re here for our next terrific idea.’ The Throne said, ‘That was it.’ ”

—Introduction to the CoEvolution Quarterly, April 1974, on why he is restarting the Catalog and the Supplement

“Ecology maintains. Coevolution learns.”

—Whole Earth Epilog, wraparound, Harper’s, April 1974

“Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”

—Back cover, Whole Earth Epilog, 1975 (first found in personal journal, March 1966)

“An old joke says that the lake with the longest name in the world is called—in a single native American word—‘You-fish-on-your-side-we’ll-fish-on-our-side-nobody-fish-in-the-middle.’ ‘Nobody fish in the middle’ is a formula for a perpetually livable planet.”

—From the CoEvolution Quarterly, as quoted in the Los Angeles Times, September 22, 1975

“New York City is without a middle class, which accounts for the excellence of its graffiti and the absurdity of its financing.”

—Journal, April 1977

“On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”

—First Hacker’s Conference, November 1984

“ ‘It’s a small world after all,’ sang Disneyland. We didn’t know it was a threat. Now the world is becoming Disney World.”

—Journal, while preparing to leave for Africa, June 1985

“Charisma is theft. Commitment is a trap. If the group says, and means your life, ‘you’re either on the bus or off the bus,’ get off the bus.”

—Journal, June 1985

“You Own Your Own Words” (YOYOW)

—Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link Guidelines, Spring 1985

“America Needs Indians, I echoed on the uptick. America Needs Computers, I echoed myself, on the down-tick, but still worth doing. Late, I insist, because I didn’t fall back and scan like I am now.”

—Journal, from Africa, July 1985

“When it comes to the point you’re doing it mainly for the money, take steps toward moving on. (Like Whole Earth for me currently.) At a minimum pick up something else you aren’t doing for the money.”

—Journal, November 1985

“Keep it simple stupid, is a good way to keep it stupid.”

—Journal, March 1986

“A major source of learning, maybe the major source, is other people’s mistakes.”

—Journal, August 1986

“Cows are slave deer.”

—Journal, June 1987

“Once a new technology rolls over you, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road.”

—The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, 1987

“We shape our buildings, then they shape us.” (Winston Churchill)

“Then we shape them.”

—Journal, September 1987

“Most of adulthood and its skills consists of adventure prevention.”

—Journal, July 27, 1988

“The Library is a window.”

—Response to John Brockman, who thought the idea of creating an office without windows in a shipping container was “creepy,” 1988

“If I get to heaven, and it’s not a library, I’ll be very disappointed. On the other hand, if I get to hell, and it’s a library, I won’t be surprised.”

—A speech to the Illinois Library Association, April, 4, 1989

“I find things and I found things.”

—Response to Brian Arthur, who had asked who Brant was when the two met at the Santa Fe Institute, 1989

“Hm. Things have shifted from most of the world looking older to most of the world looking younger.”

—Journal, St. Louis airport, May 1990

“Some buildings are born great. Some become great. And some have greatness forced upon them.”

—Journal, the Mirene, May 1990

“Rushing is at the root of all lack of quality.”

—Journal, June 1990

“Buildings don’t just have a history, they are a history.”

—Journal, June 1990

“Judge a new building not just by what it is, but what it is capable of becoming. Judge an old building by how it has played its options.”

—Journal, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, September 5, 1990

“Judge architects by what their buildings may become. Judge organizations in part by what their building is becoming.”

—Journal, October 1990

“Immediacy is addictive.”

—Journal, November 1990

“Trying to go high road with low money is a waste of time. Trying to go low road with high money is a waste of money.”

—Journal, November 1990

“Why are Levi’s Blue Jeans a timeless garment. Because they show time, honestly and elegantly.”

—Journal, High Tide, March 1991

“Statement buildings soon are, at worst, making statements no one wants to hear, or, at best, soon tire of hearing.”

—Journal, High Tide, May 1991

“Buildings are like people—Not yet smart when they’re beautiful, no longer beautiful when they’re smart.”

—Journal, June 1991

“Who would you rather be, the guide or the rich client? They would rather be each other.”

—Journal, High Tide, July 1992

“Will the info environment ever stabilize? No sign of that yet.”

—Journal, June 1993

“If I were to write an autobiography, it would have to be Float Upstream. Based on the supposed Morley Clan observation, ‘Toss any Brand into the river and they’ll float upstream.’ ”

—Journal, High Tide, July 1993

“Why is it so hard to get biotech people to talk about the future, when you can’t get computer people to shut up about it.”

—Journal, December 1993

“Evolutionary design is healthier than visionary design.”

—How Buildings Learn, 1994

“Summing up the ’60s in a sentence: We rolled our own cigarettes.”

—Journal, May 21, 2004

“The most proficient knot is one that can be easily untied.”

—Journal, September 6, 2005

“We are as gods and we HAVE to get good at it.”

—Epigraph to Whole Earth Discipline, where Brand endorses nuclear power and GMO foods, 2009

“Living on a houseboat forces you to live small, which forces you to live large.”

—Interview, Sausalito, California, June 21, 2016

“I adore the un-urgency, the realization that it takes time to get things right, and that there is plenty of time to do that. Just keep bearing down.”

—Email to the Long Now board of directors, September 20, 2019

Notes

Prologue

1. Stewart Brand has described his mystic experience on the roof in various publications. The most complete account is in Michael Katz et al., eds., Earth’s Answer: Explorations of Planetary Culture at the Lindisfarne Conferences (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 184–88.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

2. https://archive.org/details/WholeEarthCulture

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Chapter 1: Shoppenagon

1. Laura Ream, History of a Trip to the Great Saginaw Valley, June, 1871; by invitation of the Fort Wayne, Muncie, and Cincinnati railroad, and with the co-operation of the Bee line, Fort Wayne, Jackson and Saginaw, and Jackson, Lansing and Saginaw railroad companies (Indianapolis: R. J. Bright, 1871), 57–59.

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2. Robert M. Hendershot, “The Legacy of an Ojibwe ‘Lumber Chief’: David Shoppenagon,” Michigan Historical Review 29, no. 2 (Fall 2003): 40–68, https://www.jstor.org/stable/i20174030

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3. Arthur W. Rosenau, Lakeside: A History of Lakeside Association on Higgins Lake in Roscommon County, Michigan (Roscommon, MI: Lakeside Association, 1979), 38.

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4. Edward Hoagland, Heart’s Desire: The Best of Edward Hoagland (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 45.

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5. Rosenau, Lakeside, 20.

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6. W. Lloyd Warner, “A Sociologist Looks at an American Community,” Life, September 12, 1949, 108–19.

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Chapter 2: On the Golden Shore

1. https://www.nytimes.com/1985/10/28/books/books-of-the-times-110794.html

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2. Ahmed M. Kabil, “The New Myth: Frederic Spiegelberg and the Rise of a Whole Earth, 1914–1968,” Integral Review 8, no. 1 (July 2012): 44.

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3. Steven M. Gelber, “Sequoia Seminar: The Sources of Religious Sectarianism,” California History 69, no. 1 (April 1990): 36–51. (Published by University of California Press in association with the California Historical Society.)

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4. Myron J. Stolaroff, Thanatos to Eros: 35 Years of Psychedelic Exploration (Berlin: Verlag fur Wissenschaft und Bildung, 1994), 20.

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5. Michel Oren, “USCO: ‘Getting Out of Your Mind to Use Your Head,’ ” Art Journal 69, no. 4 (Winter 2010): 85.

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6. “Woman Found Suicide at the Y,” San Francisco Examiner, May 13, 1961, 5.

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Chapter 3: Acid

1. Jeffrey J. Kripal, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 85.

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Chapter 4: American Indian

1. Sherry L. Smith, Hippies, Indians and the Fight for Red Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 5.

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2. Alfred Frankenstein, “A Landmark of a Flop,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 13, 1963, 6.

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3. Paula L. Wagoner, “The Search for an Honest Man: Iktomi Ȟicala as an Ethnohistorial and Humanistic Conundrum,” in Transforming Ethnohistories: Narrative, Meaning, and Community, ed. Sebastian Felix Braun (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013).

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4. Calvin Fentress, “The Next to Last Book on Earth,” Washington Post, November 16, 1980, https://www.washingtonpost.com/

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5. Ansel Adams, personal letter, February 11, 1964, Stewart Brand Papers, Stanford University Special Collection.

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6. Lyndon Baines Johnson’s inaugural address, January 20, 1965, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/johnson.asp

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7. “Wyoming Indian Powwow Opens,” Lawton Constitution, July 28, 1964, 10.

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Chapter 5: Multimedia

1. Sherry L. Smith, Hippies, Indians, and the Fight for Red Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 5.

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2. Smith, Hippies, Indians, and the Fight, 5.

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3. Alfred Frankenstein, “Surrealist Film Show on Indians,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 23, 1965, 44.

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4. Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), 222.

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5. http://rockprosopography101.blogspot.com/2009/08/december-18-1965-big-beat-palo-alto.html

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6. Phil Lesh, Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead (New York and Boston: Little, Brown, 2005), 67.

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7. Donovan Bess, “Opening the Golden Gate,” Realist, December 1966, 8.

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8. Bess, “Opening the Golden Gate,” 8.

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9. Laurel Graeber, “So Where Is the Lava Lamp Now?,” New York Times, April 6, 1995, sec. C, 6.

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10. Mike Fleiss, dir., The Other One: The Long Strange Trip of Bob Weir (Seoul: Next Entertainment, 2014). Distributed by Netflix, 2015.

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11. Charles Perry, The Haight-Ashbury: A History (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), 41.

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12. Peter Richardson, No Simple Highway: A Cultural History of the Grateful Dead (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2015), 60.

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13. Andrew G. Kirk, Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2007), 42.

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14. Michael Malone, “Stewart Brand: From Hippie Prince to Software Savant,” San Jose Mercury News West Magazine, September 16, 1984, 16.

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15. Yale Joel, “Psychedelic Art,” Life, September 9, 1966, 19.

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16. Kate Daloz, We Are as Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on the Quest for a New America (New York: PublicAffairs Books, 2016), 92.

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17. James Hurd Nixon, “The Experimental College: A Bit of a Memoir,” unpublished memoir, June 2017.

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Chapter 6: Access to Tools

1. Ed McClanahan and Gurney Norman, “The Whole Earth Catalog,” Esquire, July 1970, 120–21.

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2. https://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/peoples-computer/peoples-1972-oct/1972-10-PCC-cover-medium.jpg

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3. Phil Garlington, “Hippies ‘War’ Declared,” Daily Gater, February 10, 1967, 1.

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4. John Markoff, “It’s Moore’s Law, but Another Had the Idea First,” New York Times, April 18, 2005.

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5. Stewart Brand, “History,” The Last Whole Earth Catalog (Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, distributed by Random House, 1971), 439.

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6. Brand, “History,” 439.

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7. Brand, “History,” 439.

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8. Jackson Lears, “Aquarius Rising,” New York Review of Books, September 27, 2018, 8.

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9. Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1970, 1.

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10. McClanahan and Norman, “The Whole Earth Catalog,” 95.

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11. Edmund Ronald Leach, A Runaway World? (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1968), 1.

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12. John Markoff, Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots (New York: Ecco Press, 2015), 107–8.

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13. Thomas Rid, Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016), 171.

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14. Whole Earth Catalog Supplement, January 1969, 19.

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15. Joe Kane, “This Year’s Brand,” Esquire, July 1983, 69.

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16. Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), 2.

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17. Steven Levy, Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything (New York: Viking, 1994), 42.

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18. Philip Morrison, Scientific American 220, no. 6 (1969): 142, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24926396

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19. Andrew Kirk, Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 68.

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20. Kirk, Counterculture Green, 73.

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21. McClanahan and Norman, “The Whole Earth Catalog,” 95.

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22. Alan Cline, “Whole Earth Man Shocks Probers,” San Francisco Examiner, May 2, 1970, 3.

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23. Cline, “Whole Earth Man,” 3.

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24. John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Viking, 2005), 282.

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25. Thomas Albright and Charles Perry, “The Last Twelve Hours of the Whole Earth,” Rolling Stone, July 8, 1971.

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Chapter 7: CoEvolution

1. http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/instree/humanenvironment.html

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

2. Ross Gelbspan and David Gurin, “Woodstockholm ’72: The Subject Is Survival,” Village Voice, May 11, 1972, 29.

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3. The first use of the term was in an advertisement for the Hewlett-Packard 9100A desktop calculator in Science magazine in October of 1968. However, Brand’s use of it in describing Alan Kay’s Dynabook in his 1974 work II Cybernetic Frontiers was the first modern use. The 9100A was programmable but only for numeric applications.

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4. Stewart Brand, “SPACEWAR: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums,” Rolling Stone, December 7, 1972, 33.

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5. Paul Krassner, Sex, Drugs & the Twinkie Murders (Port Townsend, WA: Loompanics Unlimted, 2000), 55.

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6. Paul Krassner, “A Question of Lifestyle: Fond Memories of My Old Roommate Stewart Brand,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, 15, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-12-18-bk-10177-story.html

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7. Krassner, “A Question of Lifestyle,” 15.

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8. Susan Elizabeth Lewak, “Sustainable Gardens of the Mind: Beat Ecopoetry and Prose in Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Publications,” PhD diss., University of California at Los Angeles, 2014, iii.

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9. Quoted in Kevin Kelly, Out of Control (New York: Perseus Books, 1994), 85.

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10. Russell Schweickart, “No Frames, No Boundaries,” in Earth’s Answer: Explorations of Planetary Culture at the Lindisfarne Conferences (New York: Lindisfarne Books/Harper & Row, 1977), 5.

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11. Miriam Pawel, The Browns of California: The Family Dynasty That Transformed a State and Shaped a Nation (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018), 229.

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12. Orville Schell, Brown (New York: Random House, 1978), 140.

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13. Bill Press, From the Left: A Life in the Crossfire (New York: St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 2018), 101nia.

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14. Stewart Brand, “Local Dependency,” CoEvolution Quarterly, Winter 1975, 5.

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15. Thomas Albright, “Stewart Brand Really Knows How to Throw a Party,” San Francisco Examiner, August 20, 1978, 15.

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Chapter 8: Anonymity

1. Art Kleiner, “A History of Magazines on a Timeline,” CoEvolution Quarterly, Spring 1979, 59.

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2. Calvin Fentress, “The Next to Last Book on Earth,” Washington Post, November 16, 1980. https://www.washingtonpost.com/

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3. Stewart McBride, “Stewart Brand and His Five Pounds of Ideas for the ’80s,” Christian Science Monitor, January 15, 1981.

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4. Sue M. Halpern, “Private Jets and Road Kills,” Nation, December 27, 1980.

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5. Katherine Fulton interview with the author, September 1994.

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6. Stewart McBride, “Uncommon Courtesy: Stewart Brand Launches a School of ‘Compassionate Skills,’ ” Christian Science Monitor, August 19, 1982.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6

7. Stewart Brand, “Uncommon Courtesy: Triple Training,” CoEvolution Quarterly, July 1983, 38.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7

8. Stewart Brand, “Gossip,” CoEvolution Quarterly, April 1984, 134.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8

9. Stewart Brand, “SPACEWAR: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums,” Rolling Stone, December 7, 1972, 33.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9

10. Brand, “Gossip,” Spring 1983, 152.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10

11. Brand, “Gossip,” Fall 1984, 143.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11

12. Barbara Kelley, “Whole Earth Founder Strolls into ‘Empowering Field of Mind Tools,’ ” Christian Science Monitor, December 17, 1984.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12

13. Stewart Brand, “Why and How This Magazine Is Non-profit,” Whole Earth Software Review, Spring 1984, 125.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13

14. Stewart Brand, “A Book-in-Progress,” Whole Earth Software Review, Spring 1984, 1.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 14

15. Michael Malone, “Stewart Brand: From Hippy Prince to Software Savant,” San Jose Mercury News, September 16, 1984, 6.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 15

16. Stewart Brand, “Apocalypse Juggernaut, Hello,” Whole Earth Catalog, January 1970, 21.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 16

17. William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1984), 52.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 17

18. David Crook, “Spreading the Silicon Gospel,” Los Angeles Times, February 28, 1984, 32.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 18

19. Crook, “Spreading the Silicon Gospel.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 19

20. Katie Hafner, The Well: A Story of Love, Death & Real Life in the Seminal Online Community (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2001), 9.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 20

21. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 21

22. John Markoff, “Whole Earth State-of-the-Art Rapping,” New York Times, August 15, 1989, A14.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 22

23. Ken Kelley, “The Interview: Whole Earthling and Software Savant Stewart Brand,” SF Focus, February 1985, 76.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 23

24. Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984), 27–32.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 24

25. Fentress,“The Next to Last Book on Earth.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 25

26. John Markoff, “Up to Date,” BYTE, March 1985, 355.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 26

27. Steven Levy, “Hackers at 30: ‘Hackers’ and ‘Information Wants to Be Free,’ ” WIRED BackChannel, https://www.wired.com/story/hackers-at-30-hackers-and-information-wants-to-be-free/

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 27

28. Levy, “Hackers at 30.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 28

29. Stewart Brand, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987), 190.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 29

30. Lawrence Hunter, “Gadgets for Utopia,” New York Times, September 27, 1987.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 30

Chapter 9: Learning

1. “Oil: The 30-Year Anniversary of the 1986 Collapse,” Oil & Gas 360, January 29, 2016, https://www.oilandgas360.com/oil-the-30-year-anniversary-of-the-1986-collapse/

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

2. Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden, “The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980–2020,” Wired, July 1997.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

3. Howard Rheingold, “An Exercise in Perspective,” Deeper News, September 22, 1989.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3

4. Rheingold, “An Exercise in Perspective.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4

5. Stewart Brand with John Aiello, “The Rescue That Failed—Disorganization, Empty Hydrants Killed Janet Ray,” pt. 1 of series of 3, San Francisco Chronicle, April 16, 1990, 32.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5

6. Stewart Brand, “Earthquake Lessons: The Crucial Difference of Volunteers,” Whole Earth Review, Spring 1990.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6

7. Brand, “Earthquake Lessons.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7

8. Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1996).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8

9. Rheingold, “An Exercise in Perspective.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9

10. Katie Hafner, The Well: A Story of Love, Death & Real Life in the Seminal Online Community (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2001), 11.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10

11. John Seabrook, Deeper: My Two-Year Odyssey in Cyberspace (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 161.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11

12. John Markoff, “A Free and Simple Computer Link,” New York Times, December 8, 1993, D1.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12

13. Jane Jacobs personal letter to Katherine Fulton, August 25, 1994.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13

14. Londoner’s Diary, “Jolly Rogers Sails into Architect Row,” Evening Standard, September 9, 1996, 8.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 14

Chapter 10: Float Upstream

1. Paulina Borsook, “The Accidental Billionaire,” Wired, August 1994, http://www.paulinaborsook.com/PDF-disk-1/The%20Accidental%20Zillionaire_WIRED.pdf

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

2. Jeff Bezos letter to shareholders, 1997, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312513151836/d511111dex991.htm

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

3. Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary (New York: Penguin Books, 2010), 78.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3

4. Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security,” Global Business Network, October 2003.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4

5. David Stipp, “The Pentagon’s Weather Nightmare,” Fortune, January 12, 2004.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 5

6. Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, “How Hydrogen Can Save America,” Wired, April 2003.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 6

7. Peter Schwartz and Spencer Reiss, “Nuclear Now!” Wired, February 2005.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 7

8. Felicity Barringer, “Old Foes Soften to New Reactors,” New York Times, May 15, 2005, A1.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8

9. Katherine Seligman, “The Social Entrepreneur,” San Francisco Chronicle, January 8, 2006.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9

10. Joseph Berger, “A Rockefeller Known Not for Wealth but for His Efforts to Help,” New York Times, June 23, 2014, A22.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10

11. John Tierney, “An Early Environmentalist, Embracing New ‘Heresies,’ ” New York Times, February, 27, 2007, https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/27/science/earth/27tier.html

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11

12. Thomas Streeter, “ ‘That Deep Romantic Chasm’: Libertarianism, Neoliberalism, and the Computer Culture,” in Communication, Citizenship, and Social Policy: Rethinking the Limits of the Welfare State, eds. Andrew Calabrese and Jean-Claude Burgelman (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 49–64; and Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12

13. Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto (New York: Viking Penguin, 2009), 20.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 13

14. Brand, Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, 307.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 14

15. John A. Matthews, “The Myths of Renewistan,” chapter 13 in Global Green Shift (New York: Anthem Press, 2017), 145.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 15

16. Brand, Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, 80.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 16

17. Amory Lovins, “Stewart Brand’s Nuclear Enthusiasm Falls Short on Facts and Logic,” Grist, October 14, 2009, https://grist.org/article/2009-10-13-stewart-brands-nuclear-enthusiasm-falls-short-on-facts-and-logic/

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 17

18. Brand, Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, 97.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 18

19. Denis Hayes, “An Environmental Provocateur,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2010, 18.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 19

20. Amol Rajan, “Last Night’s TV: What the Green Movement Got Wrong,” Independent, November 5, 2010, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/reviews/last-night-s-tv-what-green-movement-got-wrong-channel-4ego-strange-and-wonderful-world-self-portraits-bbc4-2125523.html

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 20

21. Lucy Bellwood, “Rogue Environmentalist Draws Protest,” Reed Magazine, March 17, 2011, https://www.reed.edu/reed_magazine/sallyportal/posts/2011/rogue-environmentalist-draws-protests.html

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 21

22. Bellwood, “Rogue Environmentalist Draws Protest.”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 22

23. Impacts of the Fukushima Daiichi Accident on Nuclear Development Policies (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2017), 3.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 23

24. Gar Smith, “Where Is Nuclear Energy Going? A Debate,” Berkeley Daily Planet, July 27, 2011, https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2011-07-27/article/38192?headline=Where-is-Nuclear-Energy-Going-A-Debate

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 24

25. Smith, “Where Is Nuclear Energy Going?”

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 25

Epilogue

1. Tim M. Lenton and Bruno Latour, “Gaia 2.0,” Science 361, no. 6407 (September 14, 2018): 1066–68.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1

2. John Markoff, “The Dust on a Butterfly’s Wings,” Alta Journal, Spring 2021, Issue 15, 30.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2

3. “Talk of the Town,” New Yorker, May 2, 1970.

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3

Illustration Credits

1, 2, 3, 4, 5; 6, 7, 8, 9; 10; 11, 12; 13, 14; 15; 16, 17; 18. 19, 20, 21, 22; 23: Courtesy of Stewart Brand

24; 25; 26: Stewart Brand and the Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries

27: Bill Young / San Francisco Chronicle / Polaris

28: Ted Streshinsky, © Shirley Streshinsky

29: Ted Streshinsky Photographic Archive / Corbis via Getty Images

30: Image courtesy SRI International, www.sri.com

31 and 32: © Photograph by Gigi Carroll Sims

33: © Matt Heron/Take Stock/Topfoto

34, 35, 36: Kevin Kelly

37: John Markoff

Index

The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of the book. Each link will take you to the beginning of the corresponding print page. You may need to scroll forward from that location to find the corresponding reference on your e-reader.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

A

- Abbey, Edward, 109–10, 181

- Abbott, Donald, 46–47

- Acid Tests, 122–23, 125–26, 131, 137, 141, 143

- see also Trips Festival

- Act of Creation, The (Koestler), 92, 219

- Adams, Ansel, 35, 68, 85, 98–99

- Albrecht, Bob, 147, 149, 150, 158

- Alexander, Christopher, 302, 305, 317–18

- Allen, Paul, 321, 323

- Alloy Conference, 178–79, 181, 186, 194

- All Species project, 343

- Alpert, Richard, see Ram Dass

- alternative education movement, 142, 144–46

- America Needs Indians! (Iktomi), 96–97

- America Needs Indians! (SB’s multimedia show), 97, 99–100, 105, 113–14, 115, 116, 117–19, 122, 123, 129–30, 171, 261, 277, 347, 357

- American Indians, 86, 87, 120, 129–30, 336, 340

- SB’s reinterpretation of role of, 9–10, 347

- SB’s research on culture of, 92, 96–97, 105, 107, 116

- time as viewed by, 109–10

- Americans, The (Frank), 179

- Ant Farm (art collective), 191

- anticommunism, of SB, 31–32, 42, 67, 121, 341

- antinuclear movement, 4, 337

- antiwar movement, 53, 149, 152, 177, 184, 187, 205, 295

- SB’s disagreements with, 121–22, 347

- Apple, 278, 292

- Apple II computer, 252, 254

- Apple Macintosh, 151, 267, 268

- architecture, Brand and:

- buildings viewed as living things by, 306

- and GBN building, 323–24

- “low road” vs. “high road” concept of, 291, 301

- MIT’s Building 20 as inspiration to, 290–91, 307

- see also How Buildings Learn (Brand)

- Architecture Machine Group, 272

- Architecture Machines (Negroponte), 262

- Army, US, Brand in, 38, 53, 54–57, 58–59, 77

- in clashes with authority, 59, 60, 61–62, 67

- at Fort Dix, 58–63, 64, 65–68

- at Pentagon press office, 63–64

- reserve status of, 68–69, 90, 100

- ARPANET, 84, 151, 211, 212

- artificial intelligence (AI), 83, 325

- Art of the Long View, The (Schwartz), 291

- Ashby, Gordon, 91, 93, 96, 99, 108, 305

- Astronomia (Hayden Planetarium exhibition), 91, 94, 99, 108

- Atkinson, Bill, 269

- Augmentation Research Center, 146, 151, 158

- Autodesk, 293–94, 298

B

- back-to-the-land movement, 139, 140, 149, 154, 159, 169, 176–77, 225, 246

- Baer, Steve, 162, 177, 180, 186, 229–30

- Baker, Gordon, 16, 21

- Baker, Richard, Roshi, 144, 147, 225, 226, 247–48, 313

- Baldwin, James T. “J.,” 174–75, 177, 179, 180, 223, 229, 233, 305

- Balme, Pamela, 59, 61

- Barlow, John Perry, 325

- Barringer, Felicity, 341–42

- Barthelme, Donald, 201

- Bateson, Gregory, 103, 208, 213, 215, 220, 222, 225, 231, 277

- SB influenced by, 45, 46, 92, 208, 216–17, 219, 222, 232, 269, 363–64

- SB’s Harper’s profile of, 213, 216–17

- Bateson, Mary Catherine, 289

- Beat poets, Beat culture, 3, 16, 33–34, 35, 37, 47–49, 126

- Be Here Now (Ram Dass), 107, 139

- Bellwood, Lucy, 355

- Benign Genres, SB’s concept of, 251–52, 290

- Berg, Peter, 206

- Berry, Wendell, 232

- “Better Than the Next Best Thing to Being There” (Kleiner), 240

- Bezos, Jeff, 148, 328, 331–32, 335, 363

- Big Ben, SB’s visit to, 327

- Big Sur (Kerouac), 71

- Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (Miller), 71

- Big Sur Hot Springs, 34–35, 51, 71, 72, 84, 97, 138

- Biosphere 2, 288, 294

- “Birth of a Network Nation, The” (Kelly), 255

- Black Panther Party, 229

- Black Rock Desert, 109, 203, 328, 329

- Boise, Ron, 129

- Bonner, Jay, 184–85

- Bonner (Dwarka), Joe, 170–71, 178, 184

- “Both Sides of the Necessary Paradox” (Brand), 46, 216–17

- Bourke-White, Margaret, 12

- Bradbury, Ray, 361

- Bradbury Building (Los Angeles), 306–7

- Brademas, John, 191

- Brand, Arthur “Bob” (father), 12–13, 103–5, 132–33, 134, 153, 327

- Brand, Gale (Mike’s wife), 24, 209

- Brand, Julia Morley (mother), 11, 13, 192, 235

- Brand, Lois Jennings, see Jennings, Lois

- Brand, Mary Clare, 11, 12

- Brand, Mike (brother), 6, 9, 11, 14–15, 17, 19, 24, 33, 37, 40, 90–91, 209

- Brand, Noah (son), 235, 289–90, 312, 316, 355

- Brand, Peter (brother), 11, 12, 62, 135

- Brand, Stewart:

- as avid reader, 13, 27

- boredom as issue for, 210, 249, 312, 323

- childhood and adolescence of, 7–21, 23

- contrarian philosophy of, 3, 17

- depression battled by, 84, 188, 190, 204, 205–6, 207, 210, 213, 338

- Earth from space vision of, 1, 6

- eye problem of, 214

- family inheritance of, 10, 16, 159, 160–61, 173, 187, 277, 343

- intellectual restlessness of, 6, 198, 271

- Jennings and, see Jennings, Lois

- living-off-the-land experiments of, 138–39

- logging short story of, 35–36

- in on-again/off-again call to activism, 39–40

- panic attacks of, 210, 213, 337

- Phelan and, see Phelan, Patty

- philanthropic ideals of, 202–3

- psychoanalysis of, 194, 202, 213

- in psychotherapy, 194, 202, 213

- relentless curiosity of, 2, 6, 17, 37, 91, 290, 301, 323

- as role model and symbol, 3, 188–89

- vertigo episodes of, 337–38

- “We are as gods” hypothesis of, 2, 39, 165, 232, 294, 347–48, 358, 360, 361–62, 364

- see also specific projects and publications

- Brand family:

- Higgins Lake camp of, 7, 8, 9, 10–11, 21, 30, 209, 289–90, 326, 327

- Rockford home of, 11, 12–14

- Brando, Marlon, 174, 207, 233

- Bread and Wine Mission, 47–48, 74

- Breakthough Institute, 340

- BriarPatch Food Co-op, 158–59

- Brilliant, Larry, 189–90, 263–64

- Brockman, John, 136, 160, 177, 216, 252–53, 294–95, 297, 344

- as SB’s literary agent, 240, 253, 258, 280, 299, 303, 346

- Broderbund, 271, 292

- Brown, Elaine, 229

- Brown, G. Spencer, 216

- Brown, Jerry, 98, 225–27, 230, 231, 348

- Brussell, Mae, 215

- Burning Man festival, 109, 328

- Burrows, George Lord (great-grandfather), 8–9

- Burrows, Lorenzo (great-great-grandfather), 7

- Butler, Katy, 247–48

- butterfly effect, 361

C

- Caffe Trieste, 48, 74

- California, University of, at Berkeley, 25, 135, 302

- California Museum of Science and Industry, 91

- California Water Atlas, 227

- Callahan, Michael, 94, 106–7, 137

- Calthorpe, Peter, 129, 246, 256, 302, 305, 306, 307, 318, 341

- Cannery Row (Steinbeck), 18, 46, 243

- Cape Breton Island, Canada, Jennings and SB’s home on, 199–200, 207–9, 218, 234–35

- Capra, Frank, 28

- Capra, Fritjof, 295, 297

- Carlston, Doug, 271, 325, 328–29

- Carroll, Jon, 357

- Cassady, Neal, 69, 126, 131–32, 143

- Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, 45–46, 208

- Chappell, Walter, 116, 119

- Chernobyl nuclear disaster, 282

- Chicago 8, trial of, 177, 188

- Chippewas, 7

- choice, freedom of, 42–43

- Church, George, 360

- Churchill, Winston, 291

- CIA, 202, 298

- City Lights Books, 37, 50, 74

- Clear Creek, 205

- climate change, 338–39

- SB and, 4, 338, 339, 342, 347, 348–50, 357, 361

- Schwartz and, 338–40, 342

- Clock Library, 314, 325, 326, 327–28, 329, 362

- Coate, John, 309

- coevolution, 46, 217, 219, 222, 223, 232

- CoEvolution Quarterly, 6, 85, 175, 208, 221–22, 227, 229, 230, 236, 240–41, 251, 254, 255–56, 257, 289

- Black Panther–edited issues of, 229

- Butler’s article on Baker scandal in, 247–48

- demise of, 261

- Gaia hypothesis story in, 230, 349

- Kelly’s cover article in, 254

- Kleiner’s cyberspace article in, 240

- as money-losing venture, 233, 240

- O’Neill’s space colonies story in, 231–32

- provocative viewpoint of, 228–29

- SB’s idiosyncratic editorial style at, 229, 249

- SB’s separation from, 271

- Schweickart’s “No Frames, No Boundaries” reprinted in, 225

- Co-Existence Bagel Shop, 37, 48, 74

- Collyns, Napier, 277, 295

- Commoner, Barry, 206

- commune movement, 139–40, 154, 177

- communications technology, 133, 241, 282, 290, 298

- Community Memory, 265

- complex systems, learning by, 274, 277, 279–80, 284, 289

- computer conferencing, 151, 240, 251–52, 263, 264, 265, 266

- computer networks, see cyberspace; internet

- computers, computing:

- counterculture and, 185–86

- Engelbart’s “bootstrapping” vision of, 151, 153

- hobbyists in, 147, 158, 196, 198, 213, 230, 266–67

- personal, see personal computers

- predicted exponential increase in powers of, 152–53

- SB’s growing interest in, 145–46, 168, 266, 280

- conservationism, of SB, 4, 340

- Contact Is the Only Love (Stern), 93, 136

- counterculture, 2, 10, 71, 75, 143, 146, 176, 177–78, 202, 216, 228

- computing community and, 185–86

- demise of, 181, 241

- political-psychedelic divide in, 145, 152

- SB’s negative reassessment of, 297

- Trips Festival as catalyst for, 127–28, 130

- Whole Earth Catalog in, 173–74

- Counterculture Green (Kirk), 135

- Coyote, Peter, 127, 225, 226, 287–88, 297, 358, 361

- Creative Initiative Foundation, 41

- Creative Philanthropy seminar, SB’s organizing of, 250

- creativity, LSD and, 72, 76–77

- Crooks family, 65–66

- Crosby, David, 189–90

- Crumb, R., 215, 228

- Curwen, Darcy, 22, 23

- cybernetics, 2, 4, 169, 208, 213, 216–17, 226, 273

- Cybernetics (Wiener), 169, 226

- cyberspace, 54, 84, 212, 240, 254–55, 258, 261, 279, 298–99

- anonymity and pseudonymity in, 266

- dangers of, 293, 315

- dystopian aspects of, 308, 310–11

- gold rush mentality and, 293, 323

- impact of, 295–96

- SB and, 4, 251–52, 282, 293

- see also internet

D

- Dalton, Richard, 261

- Daumal, René, 186

- Deadheads, 265–66

- Defense Department, US, 315, 338

- de Geus, Arie, 274, 285, 289

- Delattre, Pierre, 47, 74

- deserts, SB’s attraction to, 108–10, 114

- Desert Solitaire (Abbey), 181

- desktop publishing, 164–65

- Detroit Free Press, 10, 172–73

- Dick Cavett Show, SB’s appearance on, 192

- Diehl, Digby, 200

- Diggers, 206

- Direct Medical Knowledge, 326, 333, 342

- DiRuscio, Jim, 324–25

- Divine Right’s Trip (Norman), 193, 223

- DNA Direct, 343

- Dome Cookbook (Baer), 162, 180

- Doors of Perception, The (Huxley), 28

- dot-com bubble, 296, 326, 333–34, 348

- Doubleday, 253, 256, 257

- Drop City (commune), 154, 162

- “Drugs and the Arts” panel (SUNY Buffalo), 177

- Duffy, Frank, 319

- Durkee, Aurora, 180

- Durkee, Barbara and Stephen, 61, 105, 119–20, 137, 139, 162, 177, 179, 180, 186, 229

- Garnerville studio of, 60, 66, 69, 105, 106–7

- SB’s friendship with, 51–52, 59–60, 66, 67, 133

- in USCO, 106–7

- Dvorak, John, 259, 260

- Dymax, 147–48

- Dynabook, 212

- Dyson, Esther, 315, 325

E

- Eames, Charles, 44–45, 96, 113

- Earth, viewed from space:

- SB’s campaign for photograph of, 134–35, 164

- SB’s revelatory vision of, 1, 6, 362

- Earth Day (1970), 182, 190, 364

- Edson, Joanna, 75–76

- Edson, John, 14, 18–20, 38–39, 75

- education:

- intersection of technology and, 144, 145

- see also alternative education movement; learning, act of

- Education Automation (Fuller), 169

- Education Innovations Faire, 149

- Ehrlich, Paul, 46, 177, 341, 360–61, 364

- SB as influenced by, 28, 45, 47, 187, 188, 206, 222–23

- EIES (Electronic Information Exchange System), 240, 251–52, 264, 266

- Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The (Wolfe), 5, 88, 111, 121, 125, 170, 181

- “Electric Kool-Aid Management Consultant, The” (Fortune profile of SB), 297

- Electronic Frontier Foundation, 325

- endangered species, 2, 360–61

- Engelbart, Douglas, 83, 138, 146, 151–53, 158, 186–87, 230, 292, 361

- “Mother of All Demos” by, 171–72

- oNLine System of, 151, 156, 197, 212

- SB influenced by, 150, 153, 185, 364

- English, Bill, 160, 171, 185, 203, 211

- English, Roberta, 160

- Eno, Brian, 305, 306, 314, 319, 320, 325, 327, 336, 342, 353, 354

- “Environmental Heresies” (Brand), 341–42

- environmental movement, 2, 71, 159, 204

- activist approach to, 181–82, 187, 188, 201–2, 297, 347

- conservation vs. preservation in, 340

- SB’s break with, 246, 336, 341, 347

- SB’s role in, 4, 9–10, 180, 181–82, 201, 202, 204–7, 284, 347

- Esalen Institute, 71–72, 84, 138, 176, 185

- Esquire, 88, 146, 183, 247, 250

- Essential Whole Earth Catalog, 286

- Evans, Dave, 146, 156, 180, 185–87, 212

- Exploratorium, 194–98

- extinct species, revival of, 359–60

F

- Fadiman, Jeff, 38, 44, 59, 62–63, 64

- Fadiman, Jim, 72–73, 77–78, 80, 84, 89, 97, 98, 101

- Fall Joint Computer Conference (San Francisco; 1968), 171–72

- Fano, Robert, 46, 273

- Fariña, Mimi, 141, 237

- Farm (commune), 257

- Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 50, 71

- Field, Eric, 44, 53

- Fillmore Auditorium (San Francisco), 125–26, 128, 130

- filter bubbles, 279, 308

- Fluegelman, Andrew, 220, 221–22, 269

- Foer, Franklin, 5

- Foreign Policy, 356

- Fort Benning, SB at, 53–58

- Fort Dix, SB at, 58–63, 64, 65–68

- Fortune, 297, 339

- “Four Changes” (Snyder), 187

- Francis, Sharon, 105, 112

- Frank, Delbert, 86–87

- Frank, Robert, 179, 188, 199–200, 218

- Fraunhofer, Joseph Ritter von, 108

- Free Speech Movement, 135, 175

- From Bauhaus to Our House (Wolfe), 304–5

- “Fruits of a Scholar’s Paradise” (Brand; unpublished), 45–46, 208

- Fukushima nuclear disaster, 355–58

- Fuller, Buckminster, 134, 147, 162, 169, 175, 176, 217

- SB influenced by, 132, 138, 146, 150, 168–69, 222, 243–44, 363–64

- Fulton, Katherine, 318

- futurists, 262, 273

- SB as, 258–59, 280, 323

G

- Gaia hypothesis, 230, 349

- games, SB’s interest in, 84, 120, 129–30, 149, 210, 211, 217, 219–21, 236–37

- Gandhi, Mohandas K., 53

- Garcia, Jerry, 128, 158

- Garnerville, N.Y., Durkee/USCO studio at, 60, 66, 69, 105, 106–7, 136, 154

- Gaskin, Stephen, 257

- Gause, Gregory, 46

- GBN, see Global Business Network

- genetic engineering, 341, 344, 360–61

- geodesic domes, 176, 217

- Georgia-Pacific, 9, 29

- Gerbode Valley, Calif., 219–21, 236–37

- Getty Museum, 329

- Gibbons, Euell, 138

- Gibson, William, 262, 294, 315

- Gilman, Nils, 297–98

- Gilmore, John, 325, 352

- Ginsberg, Allen, 33–34, 50, 69, 77, 94, 177, 237

- Global Business Network (GBN), 291, 295–300, 311, 313, 335, 340

- Brand and Schwartz as co-founders of, 291–92

- climate change scenario of, 338–39

- SB consulting position at, 296, 298, 305, 314, 315–16, 323–24, 343, 354

- globalization, 295–96, 346

- global warming, see climate change

- GMO foods, 2, 344, 347, 357

- Godwin, Mike, 308

- Golden Gate National Recreation Area, 237, 360

- Gone (Kirkland), 359

- Gottlieb, Lou, 140

- government, SB’s evolving view of, 166, 227, 348

- Graham, Bill, 124, 125, 128, 130–31, 143

- Grand Canyon, SB’s visit to, 19–20

- Grateful Dead, 24, 123, 125, 126, 130, 131, 141, 158, 160, 189, 265–66

- Great Basin National Park, 329–30

- “Great Bus Race, The,” SB at, 181

- Gregorian, Vartan, 27

- Griffin, Susan, 295, 297

- Griffith, Saul, 349–50

- Gross, Cathleen, 286, 289

- Grossman, Henry, 63

H

- hackers, hacker culture, 25, 84, 147–48, 150, 261, 267, 268–69, 273, 293, 294

- SB’s Rolling Stone article on, 46, 211–13, 217, 250

- Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Levy), 266–67, 268, 270

- Hackers Conference, 266–70, 326

- Haight-Ashbury (San Francisco neighborhood), 74, 75, 128

- Halpern, Sue, 241–42

- Harman, Willis, 41, 42, 72, 73, 77, 273

- Harner, Michael, 101, 118, 129

- Harper’s Magazine, 46, 213, 228

- SB’s Bateson profile in, 216–17

- Whole Earth Epilog proposal of, 218, 219, 222

- Harris, David, 149, 162, 299

- Harvey, Brian, 268–69

- Hawken, Paul, 247–48, 250, 281, 286, 290, 299, 332, 333, 334

- Hayden Planetarium, 91, 92, 105

- Hayes, Denis, 351

- Healy, Mary Jean, 205, 206, 207

- Heard, Gerald, 41–42, 84

- Hells Angels, 120

- Herbert, Anne, 230–31, 241, 255

- Hershey, Hal, 183

- Hertsgaard, Mark, 357

- Hertzfeld, Andy, 267

- Hewlett, William, 156

- Hewlett-Packard, 147

- Hickel, Walter, 206

- Higgins Lake, Mich., Brand family camp at, 7, 8, 9, 10–11, 21, 30, 209, 289–90, 326, 327

- Hillis, Danny, 289, 301, 305, 315, 336

- Long Now Clock and, 313–14, 316–17, 325–26, 327, 328, 329, 330, 333, 362, 363

- Thinking Machines founded by, 279–80, 288

- Hippies, Indians, and the Fight for Red Power (Smith), 118

- Hoagland, Edward, 201

- Hoffer, Eric, 32

- Hoffman, Abbie, 177–78, 214, 299

- Hog Farm commune, 159, 181, 186, 188, 202, 205, 206, 220

- Homebrew Computer Club, 147, 158, 198, 230, 266–67

- Homo Ludens (Huizinga), 220

- Hopcroft, David, 275

- Hopi Indians, 100, 139, 205

- Horvitz, Robert, 6

- House Committee on Education and Labor, SB at hearing of, 190–91

- Household Earth, see Life Forum

- How Buildings Learn (SB’s UC Berkeley seminar), 302

- How Buildings Learn (BBC documentary), 320

- How Buildings Learn (Brand), 291, 300–301, 304–7, 310, 312, 317–19, 323, 324, 331

- How to Be Rich Well (SB book proposal), 344–46

- Hubbard, Al, 42, 77, 273

- Huerfano Valley, Colo., 139–40

- Huizinga, Johan, 220

- human potential movement, 71, 73, 84

- humans:

- freedom of choice of, 42–43

- as morally responsible for care of natural world, 42, 347, 349, 360, 361

- SB’s speculations about fate of, 38–39

- Human Use of Human Beings, The (Wiener), 160

- Hunger Show (Life-Raft Earth), 187–88, 189, 203, 263

- Huxley, Aldous, 28, 33, 41, 72, 144, 226

- hypertext, concept of, 172, 230, 292, 293

I

- IBM, 91, 92, 96, 108, 211

- I Ching, 89–90, 117, 153, 197, 253

- Idaho, University of, 21

- identity, fake, cyberspace and, 266

- II Cybernetic Frontiers (Brand), 46, 213, 217, 221

- Iktomi (Ivan Drift), 96–97

- Illich, Ivan, 196

- Independent, 353

- information, personalization of, 279

- information sharing, 180

- information technology, 299–300, 315

- information theory, 273

- “Information wants to be free,” 270, 299, 301

- information warfare, 315

- In Our Time (Hemingway), 11

- Institute for International Relations (IIR), 27, 34, 35, 37

- Institute for the Future, 315

- intelligence augmentation (IA), 83, 185, 187

- International Federation of Internal Freedom, 89

- International Foundation for Advanced Study, LSD experiments at, 42, 72, 73, 76–82, 273

- internet, 146, 151, 279, 293, 314, 316, 326

- ARPANET as forerunner of, 212

- impact of, 295–96, 323

- libertarianism and, 5, 348

- see also cyberspace

- Internet Archive, 330, 332

- Internet of Things, 279

- Interval Research Corporation, 321–23

- “Is Environmentalism Dead?” (Shellenberger and Nordhaus), 340

- Italy, SB’s book tour in, 353–54

J

- Jacobs, Jane, 305, 317–18, 344

- Japan, SB’s 1988 trip to, 292

- Jennings, Lois, 115, 119, 124, 145, 159, 164, 178, 185, 195, 218

- breakup and divorce of SB and, 194, 209–10, 214, 216

- at Cape Breton with SB, 199–200, 208–9

- as driving force behind Whole Food Catalog and Truck Store, 160, 170, 182–83

- in living-off-the-land experiments with SB, 138–39

- marriage of SB and, 144, 152, 163, 170, 189, 193, 194, 202, 203, 205, 208, 249

- pregnancy and miscarriage of, 133

- SB’s first meeting with, 111–12

- and SB’s whole Earth photo campaign, 134–35

- in trips with SB, 135–36, 138–39

- Wolfe’s portrayal of, 125

- Jicarilla Apache Indians, 100

- Jobs, Steve, 3–4, 25, 71, 173, 252, 254, 263, 355

- Johnson, Alia, 234–35

- Johnson, Huey, 203, 220, 226, 271, 348

- Johnson, Lyndon, 106, 111

- Johnson, Noah, see Brand, Noah (son)

- Josephy, Alvin M., Jr., 107, 115, 118

- journalism, by Brand:

- “Both Sides of the Necessary Paradox,” 46, 216–17

- contemplated as career, 23, 35, 44, 55, 57

- “The Native American Church Meeting,” 109

- “SPACEWAR,” 211–13, 217, 250, 321

- see also CoEvolution Quarterly; photojournalism

K

- Kaehler, Ted, 267–68

- Kahle, Brewster, 330, 332

- Kahn, Herman, 152–53, 273, 285

- Kahn, Lloyd, 129, 175–76, 179, 180, 186, 223, 305

- Kane, Joe, 247, 258

- Kaphan, Shel, 148, 328, 331

- Kapor, Mitchell, 325, 331, 335

- Kay, Alan, 212, 213, 277–78, 281, 289

- Kaypro II computer, 250–51

- Kazantzakis, Nikos, 33, 39, 48

- Kelly, Kevin, 261, 270, 286, 300, 310, 314, 322, 325, 335, 336, 343

- Christian faith of, 255–56

- Hackers Conference and, 266–67, 268

- Quarterly article of, 254

- as Quarterly editor, 255–56

- at WELL, 276

- Whole Earth Catalog’s impact on, 253–54

- at Whole Earth Review, 276

- Kennedy, Roger, 329–30

- Kent State killings, 190

- Kenya, Phelan and SB’s trip to, 271–76

- Kepler, Roy, 158

- Kerouac, Jack, 69, 71, 126

- Kesey, Ken, 2, 9, 24, 30, 87–88, 97–98, 124, 148, 156, 177, 181, 190, 212–13, 268

- antiwar movement criticized by, 121, 347

- La Honda home of, 88, 120, 128

- legal problems of, 128, 131, 141, 143

- LSD and, 88, 122–23

- psychedelics renounced by, 143

- see also Merry Pranksters

- King, Peter and Fox, 37, 50, 74, 75, 81

- King Must Die, The (Renault), 52

- Kirk, Andrew G., 135, 180, 340–41

- Kirkland, Isabella, 234, 242–43, 359

- Klee, Helmi, 61

- Kleiner, Art, 239, 240, 241, 251, 255, 257, 261, 264, 294

- Koestler, Arthur, 92, 219

- Krassner, Paul, 121, 136, 177, 181, 214–16, 223

- Kurzweil, Ray, 335

L

- LaDuke, Winona, 357

- La Luz, N.Mex., 178–80

- Lama (commune), 139, 154, 186

- Lane, Bill, 161

- Lanier, Jaron, 294, 325

- Last Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog, 215

- Last Whole Earth Catalog, The, 161, 169, 192, 223, 233

- financial success of, 193, 210, 213

- National Book Award given to, 200

- Latour, Bruno, 360

- Laws of Form, The (Brown), 216

- Leach, Edmund, 165

- learning, act of:

- in complex systems, 274, 277, 279–80, 284, 289

- SB’s enduring focus on, 137, 144, 153, 166, 191, 274, 277, 279–80, 284, 288–89, 290, 301

- see also alternative education movement; education

- Learning Conferences, 288–89, 291, 294, 298

- Leary, Timothy, 50, 72, 79, 89, 106, 178

- LeBrun, Marc, 147–48, 230

- Leibovitz, Annie, 212

- Leonard, George, 211, 220

- Leopold, Aldo, 349

- Lesh, Phil, 123

- Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Agee and Evans), 86

- Levy, Steven, 266–67, 270

- libertarianism, 5, 42, 53, 67, 348

- SB and, 4, 42, 53, 67, 217, 227, 348, 352

- libraries, SB’s fascination with, 312–13

- Libre (artists’ commune), 139–40

- Librium, SB’s use of, 205, 213

- Liddle, David, 321–22, 324

- Life Forum, 201–7, 347

- Life-Raft Earth (documentary film), 179, 194, 347

- Lindisfarne Association, 224

- Little Prince, The (Saint-Exupéry), 43, 119

- L.L. Bean catalog, 154, 167, 219

- Loeffler, Jack and Jean, 51, 76, 97, 98–100, 101–2, 108–9, 110, 112, 114, 116–17, 119, 133, 144, 200, 205

- logging, SB’s summer job in, 29–30

- Loma Prieta earthquake, 303

- London, Ann, 93

- Long Bets, 335

- Long Now Clock, 313–14, 316–17, 323, 325–26, 327, 328–29

- location search for, 329–33, 335–36

- Texas site of, 363

- working prototype of, 333

- see also Clock Library

- Long Now Foundation, 33, 328, 332, 334–35, 342–43, 360, 362, 363

- Lovelock, James, 230, 349, 350

- Lovins, Amory, 341, 350, 352

- Lovins, Hunter, 335

- LSD, 41–42, 50, 72–73, 84, 88, 103, 156, 160, 212

- academic experiments with, 42, 72, 76–82, 273

- creativity and, 72, 76–77

- criminalization of, 140–41, 143

- SB’s use of, 1, 79–80, 101, 117, 134, 162–63, 181

- SB’s warnings about cultural impact of, 85

- Trips Festival and, 127, 129

- Lynas, Mark, 354

- Lynda (SB’s girlfriend), 70–71

M

- McCarthy, John, 83–84, 169, 211, 272

- McCarthy, Joseph, 17, 31

- McClanahan, Ed, 24, 146, 160, 183

- McClure, Matthew “Cappy,” 182, 257–58, 264

- McClure, Michael, 33–34, 205, 228

- McCord, William, 47–49

- McCulloch, Warren, 46, 273

- McGovern, George, 225

- McIntyre, Joan, 206, 207

- MacKay, David, 350

- McKim, Robert, 78

- McLuhan, Marshall, 93, 94, 106, 110, 112, 124, 132–34

- Mailer, Norman, 231

- Malone, Michael, 261

- Malone, Tom, 315

- Mandelbrot, Benoit, 262

- Mander, Jerry, 123–24, 133–34, 142, 162, 182, 203

- Margulis, Lynn, 230

- Markham, Beryl, 271–72, 275

- Marshall, Andy, 315, 338, 339

- Marty (SB’s girlfriend), 49–50, 52

- Masai Mara game reserve, 271, 275

- Mason, Ben, 21

- Mathematics: A World of Numbers...and Beyond (museum exhibition), 91

- Matrix (San Francisco nightclub), 123, 129

- Matson, Katinka, 253

- Matthiessen, Peter, 272

- Media Lab, 290, 291, 306–7

- long-term impact of, 278–79

- Negroponte as founder of, 262, 272

- SB’s lectures and research at, 273, 277, 278–79

- Media Lab, The: Inventing the Future at MIT (Brand), 278, 280–81, 283, 286, 289, 292, 318

- Megatrends (Naisbitt), 262

- Meilstrup, Ann, 24–25

- Merry Pranksters, 2, 24, 88–89, 97–98, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125, 126, 129, 131, 141, 143, 160, 181

- Metric Conversation Council, 230

- Metzner, Ralph, 177

- Me-Wuk Acorn Festival, 120

- Michigan, timber boom in, 8–9

- Microsoft Office, 151

- Microsoft Windows, 268

- Midpeninsula Free University, 158

- Millbrook, N.Y., 78–79, 106

- Miller, Henry, 35, 50, 71

- Mills, Stephanie, 182, 222

- SB’s affair with, 203–4, 209, 210, 213–14

- Mind and Nature (Bateson), 277

- Minsky, Marvin, 277, 278, 289, 324

- Mirene (SB’s houseboat), 46–47, 249, 256, 271, 282, 302, 307, 334, 338, 343

- MIT, 135

- Artificial Intelligence Lab of, 266–67, 272

- Building 20 at, 290–91, 307

- Media Lab at, see Media Lab

- Mogar, Robert, 78, 103

- Monbiot, George, 354

- Monitor, 296

- “monkey wrenching” (sabotage), 181

- Moore, Fred, 196–97, 198

- Moore, Gordon, 152

- Moore’s law, 152

- Morley, AJ, 8–9

- Morley, Ed, 29

- Morley, Ralph Chase (grandfather), 8–9, 16

- Morley Brothers wholesalers, 8, 157

- Morley family, 7–9

- Mornell, Pierre, 194, 202, 213

- Morningstar commune, 140

- Morris, Robert Tappan, 293

- Morrison, Philip, 172, 281

- Moss Tents, 175

- Mountain Girl (Carolyn Adams), 125, 128, 131

- Mount Analogue (Daumal), 186

- Move Fast and Break Things (Taplin), 5–6, 10, 348

- Muir, John, 340

- multimedia, 106, 137, 306

- see also specific events and exhibitions

- Mumford, Lewis, 162

- Murphy, Dennis, 35

- Murphy, Michael, 40, 71, 76, 83, 84–85, 97, 101, 211

- Mutiny on the Bounty (film), 233

- Myhrvold, Nathan, 328, 331

N

- Naisbitt, John, 262

- NASA, 135, 191

- National Book Awards Ceremony, SB at, 200–201

- National Congress of American Indians, 1964 convention of, 107, 110–11

- National Park Service, 237

- Native American Church, 100, 112

- “Native American Church Meeting, The” (Brand), 109

- Native Americans, see American Indians

- nature:

- humans as morally responsible for care of, 42, 347, 349, 360, 361

- SB’s childhood immersion in, 10–11

- Navajo Mountain, 117

- Negroponte, Nicholas, 262, 272, 279, 281, 287, 289, 290, 292

- Nelson, Ted, 230, 292, 293, 294

- Network Technologies International (NETI), 263

- Neuwirth, Robert, 341

- New Age Journal, 255

- New Age movements, 35, 41, 225

- New Games, 210, 211, 217, 220, 221, 236–37

- New Jersey Institute of Technology, 240

- New Left, 143, 225

- SB’s antipathy for, 4, 142, 145, 341, 347

- Newton, Huey, 229

- New Urbanism, 129, 246, 307

- New Yorker, 190, 219, 311

- New York Times, 259, 265, 280, 314, 341–42

- SB profile in, 344–45

- New York Times Magazine, 45, 46

- Next Whole Earth Catalog, The, 240, 241–42

- Nin, Anaïs, 50

- nitrous oxide, 163

- Nixon, Cynthia, 142, 144, 145, 152

- Nixon, James, 142–45, 150, 151–52

- Nixon, Richard, 225

- “No Frames, No Boundaries” (Schweickart talk), 224–25

- No More Secondhand God (Fuller), 162

- Nordhaus, Ted, 340

- Norman, Gurney, 146, 183, 193, 223

- North Beach (San Francisco neighborhood), 50, 99

- Beat culture of, 3, 34, 35, 37, 47–49

- SB’s apartment in, 1, 74–75, 83, 89–90, 98, 134

- Nuclear Energy Institute, 342

- nuclear power, 2

- SB’s defense of, 2, 5, 337, 338, 339, 341–42, 344, 351, 353–54, 356

- Schwartz’s endorsement of, 339–40

- nuclear war-gaming, 273

- nuclear waste storage, 335–36

- nuclear weapons, US-Soviet standoff over, 31

O

- Office of Naval Research, 111

- Ogilvy, Jay, 295

- “Ohio” (song), 190

- Oliveros, Pauline, 94

- Omidyar, Pierre, 336

- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Kesey), 87–88

- O’Neill, Gerard K., 231–32

- oNLine System (NLS), 151, 156, 197, 212

- On the Road (Kerouac), 69, 126

- Onslow Ford, Gordon, 50

- Oppenheimer, Frank, 194

- Oppenheimer, Robert, 17–18

- Oraibi, Ariz., 116

- Oregon State University, 355

- Orlovsky, Peter, 237

- Osborn, Fairfield, 28

- Osborne, Dan, 114, 117

- Osborne I computer, 251, 267

- Ostwind, Dorothy, 88, 97, 98

- Other One, The (film), 126

- Our Mr. Sun (film), 28

- Our Plundered Planet (Osborn), 28

- Outdoor Life, 10, 187, 346

- Out of Control (Kelly), 300

- outlaw areas, 243–44, 261

- outlaw designers, 178–80, 182

- Outlaws, Musicians, Lovers & Spies (Brand book proposal), 299–300

- Overhoff, Jacques, 74

- overpopulation, 179, 187

P

- pace layering, SB’s concept of, 291, 319

- Packard, David, 156

- Paglia, Camille, 322

- Paiute Indians, 86

- Palme, Olof, 204

- Palo Alto Mental Research Institute, 77

- Papago Indians, 100

- Papert, Seymour, 277, 289

- PARC (Xerox Palo Alto Research Center), 203, 211–12, 268, 321

- Paris, SB’s loss of virginity in, 36–37

- Parsons School of Design, 190, 364

- passenger pigeon, 359, 360

- Pattern Language, A (Alexander), 305

- Pei, I. M., 272, 291, 306–7, 319

- People’s Computer Company, 148–49, 158

- Peradam conference, 185–87

- Perry, David, 101–2

- personal computers, 147, 168–69, 211–13

- advent of, 185

- Albrecht and, 149

- early models of, 250–51

- Fred Moore and, 196–97

- hackers and, see hackers, hacker culture

- hobbyists and, 148–49, 252

- Quarterly features on, 230

- SB’s early use of term, 212

- transformative impact of, 239, 241, 252, 259, 280

- see also cyberspace

- peyote, SB’s experiences with, 100–101, 109, 112, 119

- Phase Raga (Brand), 136

- Phelan, Kathleen, 353

- Phelan, Patty, 262, 268, 281, 290, 313, 317, 324, 332, 333, 338, 353, 360, 361

- background of, 235–36

- Baker scandal and, 247–48

- Direct Medical Knowledge founded by, 326, 342

- DNA Direct founded by, 343

- Equestrian Catalog business of, 291, 312

- failed pregnancy of, 312

- health problems of, 238, 311

- in London with SB, 286

- at Long Now Foundation, 342–43

- marriage of SB and, 246–47, 312

- at Planetree, 245–46

- Ponzi scheme losses of, 334

- Quarterly’s hiring of, 236

- SB dated by, 237–38

- with SB in Kenya trip, 271–76

- Phillips, Michael, 128, 149, 203, 250

- Phillips Exeter Academy:

- Mike Brand at, 14–15, 17

- SB at, 15–18, 20–21, 23

- photography:

- of SB’s Indian reservation visits, 86–87, 95, 96, 97–98, 118

- SB’s interest in, 68, 90, 93, 199

- photojournalism, Brand’s pursuit of career in, 3, 15–16, 44, 53, 55, 57, 63–64, 70, 75, 83, 85–87

- Pinchot, Gifford, 340

- planetary consciousness, 6, 362

- Planetree, 245–46, 326

- Point Foundation, 203, 210, 216, 233, 249, 250, 271, 276, 289, 292, 333–34, 343

- Pomo Indians, 101

- Pontin, Jason, 341

- Pool, Ithiel de Sola, 279

- Pope, Carl, 340

- Population Bomb, The (Ehrlich), 45, 177, 187, 206, 341

- Pork Chop Hill (film), 39

- Portola Institute, 146, 147, 150–51, 155, 158, 161–62, 170, 196, 273

- pragmatism, of SB, 4, 77, 340–41

- Price, Richard, 71, 84

- Prime Computer, 259

- print media, computers’ transformation of, 239, 241

- privacy, SB’s warning on cyberspace threat to, 315

- Project Jonah, 206

- Project One, 197–98

- psychedelics, 28, 194, 241

- SB and, 101, 104, 162–63, 177–78

- see also LSD; peyote

- Pyramid Lake, 108

Q

- Question 7 (film), 62

R

- Ram Dass (Richard Alpert), 72, 79, 89, 103, 107, 139, 160, 216

- Ramparts, 158, 202

- Rancho Diablo, 164, 188, 189

- Rand, Ayn, 31, 132

- Randall, Doug, 339

- RAND Corporation, 273

- Random House, 193, 200, 201, 213

- Rathbun, Emilia, 40

- Rathbun, Harry, 40–41

- Rawn, William, 305

- Ray, Janet and William, 304

- Raymond, Ann, 170

- Raymond, Dick, 85–86, 113, 146, 147, 151, 158, 160, 163, 164, 170, 188

- and creation of Whole Earth Catalog, 155, 157

- education fair project of, 150, 151, 152

- Point Foundation and, 202–3

- SB’s friendship with, 23–25, 83, 149, 150, 152

- see also Portola Institute

- Realist, 136, 162, 234

- Reality Club, 294–95

- Rear Window (film), 15

- Reddy, Raj, 268

- Red Scare, 17

- Reed College, 355

- Reiss, Spencer, 340

- Remy, Danica, 287–88

- Renault, Mary, 52

- renewable energy, 167, 223, 297, 346, 349–50, 351, 356

- Resource One, 197

- Revive & Restore, 360

- Rexroth, Kenneth, 66, 70

- Rheingold, Howard, 265, 310, 311

- Rhode Island School of Design, 217

- Richards, M. C., 93

- Richardson, Fred, 182

- Ricketts, Ed (char.), 18, 23, 46, 243

- Riverside Museum (New York City), We R All One exhibition at, 136–37

- Rockefeller, Richard, 343

- Rockford, Ill., Brand home in, 11, 12–14

- Rockford River, 14

- Rockwell International, 227

- Rodale, Robert, 277

- Rogers, Richard, 318–20

- Rolling Stone, SB’s SPACEWAR article in, 46, 211–13, 217, 250, 321

- Romney, Hugh, Jr. (Wavy Gravy), 148, 159–60, 188, 220, 237

- Roosevelt, Teddy, 340

- Root, Gloria, 217–18

- Roscoe, Frederick, 50

- Rose, Alexander, 328–29, 330, 333, 336, 356

- Rose (SB’s girlfriend), 76

- Rosemary’s Baby (film), 178

- ROTC, SB in, 25–26, 27, 31, 53

- Royal Dutch Shell, 273–74, 277, 285

- SB as consultant for, 280, 283–87

- Rubin, Jerry, 177

- Runaway World?, A (Leach), 165

- Russell, Steve, 84

S

- Saffo, Paul, 315, 325, 330, 356

- Safra, Jacqui, 325, 328, 331

- Sagan, Carl, 224

- Saginaw, Mich., 7, 8–9

- SAIL (Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory), 83, 146, 147–48, 211–12

- sailing, SB’s interest in, 69–70, 242

- Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de, 119

- Salisbury, Harrison, 200

- Saltonstall, William Gurdon, 17

- Sampson, Donald, 12, 37, 60, 67

- Sandberg-Diment, Erik, 259

- Sand County Almanac (Leopold), 349

- San Francisco, Calif.:

- Summer of Love in, 2, 75, 128

- see also Haight-Ashbury; North Beach

- San Francisco Art Institute, 68, 69, 70, 90, 118, 323

- San Francisco Chronicle, 48, 94–95, 119, 135, 258, 303, 318

- San Francisco Mime Troupe, 124, 125, 127, 206

- San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 93–95

- San Francisco State University, 68, 69, 70, 141, 142, 145, 149, 174

- San Francisco Tape Music Center, 94

- San Francisco Zen Center, 203, 208, 210, 247–48, 250, 313

- Santa Fe, N.Mex., 110, 116

- Santa Fe Institute, 304, 321, 324

- Sausalito, Calif., 299

- SB’s homes and offices in, 69, 221, 234, 242, 243–45, 276, 302, 329 see also Mirene

- waterfront community of, 69, 244–45, 246, 280, 294, 299, 307

- Savage, Charles, 78, 103

- Savage, Melissa, 203, 205–6, 207, 210

- Save the Whales, 204, 206, 227

- scenario planning, 273, 277, 285, 295, 296, 297–98

- Schell, Orville, 225, 226, 299

- Schneider, Stephen, 339

- Schumacher, E. F., 231

- Schwartz, Peter, 273, 277, 281, 284–86, 289, 291, 294–95, 296, 298, 315, 317, 325, 335, 336, 350

- climate change and, 338–40, 342

- at Royal Dutch Shell, 273–74

- Schweickart, Russell “Rusty,” 224–25, 227, 234, 299

- Science Application International Corporation, 314

- Seabrook, John, 311

- Sebern, Roy, 144

- self-sufficiency, SB’s rejection of, 217, 232

- Sender, Ramon, 93–94, 124, 128, 140

- Sequoia Seminars, 40–43, 72, 77

- Sergeant, The (Murphy), 35

- Seva, 263

- Shadow Cities (Neuwirth), 341

- Shaftel, Fannie, 147

- Shannon, Claude, 46, 273

- Sharman, Henry B., 40

- Sharp, Andrea, 256, 275–76

- Shellenberger, Michael, 340

- Shockley, William, 156

- Shoppenagon, David, 7, 8, 9

- Shugart, Diana, 145, 159, 174, 183–84, 218, 221

- Sierra Club, 85, 99, 112

- Silberman, Jim, 201

- Silicon Valley, 2, 34, 41, 144, 156, 159, 230, 252, 321, 322–23

- Simon & Schuster, 252

- singularity, 325, 335

- Slatkin, Reed, 334

- Slaughter (game), 217, 220

- Sleepwalkers, The (Koestler), 91

- Small Is Beautiful (Schumacher), 231

- Smalltalk, 268

- Smith, Gar, 357

- Smith, J. D., 148, 179, 223

- Smith, Sherry L., 118

- Snyder, Gary, 33–34, 50, 74, 85, 187, 203, 205, 336

- Snyder, Masa, 203

- SoftCon, 255

- “Softwar” (Brand), 221

- software, economic value of, SB on paradox of, 269–71

- Sometimes a Great Notion (Kesey), 9, 30, 89

- “Sound of Thunder, The” (Bradbury), 361

- Source, 265

- Soviet Union, 31

- Space Colonies (Brand, ed.), 232

- Space Day, 227–28

- Spaceship Earth (Ward), 154, 155

- Spacewar! (first video game), 84, 210, 294

- SB’s Rolling Stone article on, 46, 211–13, 217, 250, 321

- Special Forces, US (Green Berets), 62, 65

- Spiegelberg, Frederic, 33–34, 40, 76

- sport parachuting, SB’s enthusiasm for, 90–91, 92

- Squires, Joan, 37, 44, 47

- SRI (Stanford Research Institute), 24, 273, 295, 339

- Augmentation Research Center at, 146, 151, 158

- Stalking the Wild Asparagus (Gibbons), 138

- Stallman, Richard, 269

- Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), 83, 146, 147–48, 211–12

- Stanford University, 15, 26, 73, 135, 267

- Stanford University, Brand at, 23, 26, 27, 29, 32, 33–34, 46, 208

- as freshmen adviser, 44, 47

- and IIR, 27, 34, 35, 37

- letters home from, 25, 43, 49

- in McCord’s seminar, 47–49

- off-campus cottage of, 43, 44

- in ROTC, 25–26, 27, 31, 38, 53

- State Department, US, SB’s talk at, 346–47

- Steal This Book (Hoffman), 299

- Steinbeck, John, 18, 35, 243

- Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Bateson), 208, 217

- Stern, Gerd, 35, 69, 73, 94, 105, 108, 118, 136, 137

- San Francisco Museum of Modern Art happening created by, 93–95

- SB’s stay on houseboat of, 69, 74

- in USCO, 106–7

- Stewart, Zach, 85, 93, 100

- SB and, 113–14, 119, 122, 130

- “Stewart Brand, Slow Thinker” (Brand; college essay), 32–33

- Stieglitz, Alfred, 90

- Stolaroff, Myron, 41, 42, 77, 84

- Stone, Robert, 160

- Streeter, Thomas, 348

- Strong, Maurice, 204, 206

- Students for a Democratic Society, 273

- Subotnick, Morton, 94

- Summer of Love, 2, 75, 128

- SUNY Buffalo, “New Worlds” conference at, 177–78

- sustainability, 154, 284

- Sweden, environmental movement in, 201–2

- Sweet Home, Oreg., 29

- Sweet Thursday (Steinbeck), 18

- Swimmer, The (film), 185

- Szares, John, 67

T

- Taos, N.Mex., 116

- Taplin, Jonathan, 5–6, 348

- Taylor, Hank, 18–20, 21

- Taylor, Robert, 211

- Tcherepnin, Sandy, 163–64, 182

- Technologies of Freedom (Pool), 279

- technology:

- corrupting influence of, 281

- intersection of education and, 144, 145

- SB’s evolving optimism about, 109–10, 138, 144, 168, 227–28, 231–32, 280, 283–84, 346, 351, 358, 361

- SB’s self-education in, 145–46

- utopianism and, 2, 5–6, 231, 262, 348

- see also communications technology; computers, computing; information technology

- TED Conference (1984), 262

- Tektronix, 24

- Temple Beautiful (San Francisco), 243

- Tetiaroa, 233–34

- THC, 216

- Thieriot, Angie and Richard, 245–46, 274

- thinking, slow vs. fast, 33

- Thinking Machines, 279, 280, 288

- This Is the American Earth (Adams), 86

- Thompson, Hunter S., 51, 120, 212

- Thompson, Irwin William, 224

- Tierney, John, SB profile by, 344–45

- Tilley, Phillip, 275

- Time, 224, 252

- time, American Indian view of, 109–10

- Today show, SB and Barbara Durkee on, 137

- Tolkien, J. R. R., 110

- Tongue Fu (Krassner), 223

- tools, access to:

- and back-to-the-land movement, 154–55

- Fuller on, 138

- SB’s enduring focus on, 4, 71, 137, 153, 154–55, 172, 185, 191, 232, 361, 363 see also Whole Earth Catalog

- Traub, Joseph, 315

- Tree-O (logging firm), SB’s summer job at, 29–30

- Trips Festival, 127–31, 149, 298

- Kesey’s inadvertent promotion of, 128

- LSD use at, 127, 129

- profits from, 130–31, 132

- SB as organizer of, 123–25, 126, 128, 134, 298

- True Believer, The (Hoffer), 32

- Tso, Hola, 112

- Turing test, 335

- Turner, Fred, 348

U

- Udall, Lee, 115

- Udall, Stewart, 95, 98–99, 105, 107, 111, 112, 117

- Uncommon Courtesy: School of Compassionate Skills, 249–50

- Understanding Media (McLuhan), 93, 112

- United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (Stockholm), 201–2

- SB at, 201, 202, 204–7, 347

- urbanization, SB’s embrace of, 341, 344, 346

- urban planners, 318

- USCO (Company of Us), 106–7, 118, 136–37, 154

- Usenet, 265

- utopianism:

- of SB, 2, 5–6, 139–40, 220, 231, 232, 280, 348

- technological, 2, 5–6, 231, 262, 348

V

- van der Ryn, Sim, 226, 302, 305

- Van Kan, Hubert, 63, 64–65

- Varda, Jean, 35, 37, 50–51

- Varda, Joan, 74

- Vassar College, 13

- Venice, Phelan and SB in, 274–75

- Veterans Administration Hospital (Menlo Park), 77, 88, 160

- Vietnam Day Committee, 121

- Vietnam War, 53, 54, 68, 121–22, 149, 205, 241

- growing US involvement in, 65

- Whole Earth Catalog’s silence on, 122

- see also antiwar movement

- Viking Penguin, 233, 346

- Vinge, Vernon, 315

- virtual reality, 293, 294, 298

- von Hilsheimer, George, 234

- von Hoffman, Nicholas, 172

W

- Wack, Pierre, 273

- Walker, Jay, 328, 331

- Walker, John, 293

- Wallace, Bob, 269

- Walloon Lake, Mich., 11

- WAR:GOD (multimedia project), 161–62, 171

- Ward, Barbara, 154

- WarGames (film), 267, 273

- Warm Springs Indian Reservation, 85–86

- SB’s trip to, 86–87, 88, 95–98, 106, 228

- War Resisters League, 149, 211

- Warshall, Peter, 289, 353

- Wasco Indians, 86

- Washburn, Sherwood, 45

- Washington, DC:

- SB’s climbing near-disaster in, 95–96

- SB’s stays in, 63–64, 115–16

- Washington Post, 172, 241, 268

- Watts, Alan, 33, 50, 216

- Wavy Gravy (Hugh Romney), 148, 159–60, 188, 220, 237

- wealth, SB’s evolving views of, 343–45

- WebMD, 326, 342

- WELL (computer network), 151, 264, 286, 306, 308, 348

- culture of, 265–66

- customers’ frustration with, 309–11

- SB’s creation of, 264

- SB’s departure from, 310–11

- “you own your own words” (YOYOW) policy of, 264, 307–8

- Wenner, Jann, 211

- We R All One (museum exhibition), 136–37

- Werbach, Adam, 353

- West Coast Computer Faire, 252

- Western Behavioral Sciences Institute, SB on faculty of, 251–52, 263, 264, 266, 270

- Western Logging Company, 9, 29

- Weston, Edward, 90

- Weston, Erica, 76, 97

- West with the Night (Markham), 271–72, 275

- Whatever It Is (happening), 141–42

- What’s Actually Happening, 226–27

- What’s Happening? (happening), 94

- Where the Greens Went Wrong (documentary), 352–53

- White, George, 268

- White, Minor, 68, 90, 116

- White, Theodore H., 4

- Whole Earth Catalog, 1, 67, 71, 129, 132, 142, 146, 148, 160, 170, 175, 181, 182, 187, 199, 207, 235, 264, 283–84, 287

- access to tools as essence of, 138, 154

- back-to-the-land movement and, 139, 169, 176–77, 225

- books and magazines in, 167–68

- CD-ROM version of, 292–93

- Demise Party for, 194–98, 202, 343

- Earth-from-space covers of, 6, 166

- as financial success, 192, 202, 240, 343

- function and purpose of, 165–66

- germination of, 99, 105–6, 145, 147, 150, 155, 162

- launch of, 161, 162, 163, 164–69, 171–73

- no-politics policy of, 122, 165, 184, 187

- personal computing embraced by, 168–69

- SB’s epiphany about, 154–55

- as silent on Vietnam War, 122

- in sixties counterculture, 173–74

- tenth-anniversary celebration of, 236–37

- toll on SB of, 174, 183–84, 185, 189, 192–93

- transformative impact on readers of, 173, 189, 198, 253–54

- “We are as gods” hypothesis of, 2, 39, 165, 232, 294, 347–48, 358, 360, 361–62, 364

- Whole Earth Catalog supplements, 169–70, 177, 180, 182, 191, 218–19, 244

- Whole Earth Discipline (Brand), 246, 346–55, 357, 360, 361–62

- Whole Earth Epilog, 3, 126, 190, 218, 219, 233

- Whole Earth Review, 261, 266, 271, 276, 300, 303

- Whole Earth Software Catalog, 253, 256, 257, 259, 260–61, 294

- Whole Earth Software Review, 253, 255, 259–60, 261

- Whole Earth Truck Store, 148, 156–59, 170, 174, 176, 178, 181, 182–83, 192, 203

- whole-systems thinking, 132

- Who R U? (happening), 94

- Wiener, Norbert, 160, 169, 222, 226, 273

- Wiesner, Jerome, 272

- Wilkinson, Lawrence, 295, 301, 302

- Williams, Cecil, 137

- Willis, Garry, 200

- Wolfe, Tom, 5, 88, 111, 121, 125, 170, 212, 304–5

- Wolpman, Jim, 157

- Women Building the Earth for the Children’s Sake, 41

- Woodstock, 128, 181, 188

- woolly mammoth, 359, 360

- World Future Society, 231

- World’s Fair (1964; New York), 96, 113

- “World War IV,” 149, 211

- World Wide Web, 151, 172, 230, 279, 292, 314, 330

- World Without Mind (Foer), 5–6

- Wozniak, Steve, 25, 252, 268–69, 325

- Wright, Frank Lloyd, 305, 307, 319

X

- Xerces blue butterfly, 359, 361

- Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, see PARC

Y

- Year with Swollen Appendices, A (Eno), 306

- Yucca Mountain, 335–36

Z

- Zen Buddhism, 33, 77, 98, 194, 225–26

- SB and, 207–8, 210, 218, 225

- see also San Francisco Zen Center

- Zihuatanejo, Mexico, Leary/Alpert project in, 89

- Zoloft, 338

- Zomeworks, 203

- Zuni Indians, 100

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

About the Author

John Markoff was one of a team of New York Times reporters who won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. He has covered Silicon Valley since 1977, wrote the first account of the World Wide Web in 1993, and broke the story of Google’s self-driving car in 2010. He is the author of five books, including What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry and Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots.

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[*] There is an enduring controversy over whether to call America’s indigenous people American Indians or Native Americans. In keeping with Stewart Brand’s original usage, I have used the former identifier.