Brand, Stewart

1938–

Countercultural Entrepreneur

For the past three decades, Stewart Brand has worn many hats—soldier, lumberjack, photographer, author, editor, publisher, conservationist, corporate consultant—but most of all, he has been a creator of new ideas. Although his interests are expansive and eclectic, one of the strongest threads running through his work is the liberating potential that he sees in technology for individuals and society.

Brand was born on December 14, 1938, in Rockford, Illinois. He completed his undergraduate work at Stanford University, earning a degree in biology in 1960. He then joined the army, returning to the San Francisco Bay area at the end of a two-year stint and blending into the art and hippie scene that was then fermenting. He hooked up with Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and toured the California coast, a run that was vividly recorded in Tom Wolfe's 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. During this period, Brand gained experience in organizing festivals and events, skills that he would use in diverse settings throughout his career.

One of Brand's best-known projects is the Whole Earth Catalog. Initially published in 1968, it became a bible for counter-cultural groups of that era, offering reviews of books, clothes, stoves, and tools for doing anything from gardening to word processing. The final edition, The Last Whole Earth Catalog, received the National Book Award in 1972. The slogan prefacing the volumes reflects the fusion of wit, arrogance, and American pragmatism that Brand had brought together in the project: “We are as Gods, and we might as well get good at it.”

In 1975, Brand launched a new magazine, Co-Evolution Quarterly, that was modeled on the success story of the Catalog. The new publication provided more room for essay-length tracts, and gave greater attention to computers and software. Brand plowed most of the earnings from his Whole Earth Catalog into the Point Foundation, which he established to support creative individuals. Over the course of three years, the foundation gave away $1 million. Through these initiatives, Brand was practicing basic business principles combined with the counterculture idealism and ideology prevalent in the United States during the 1960s. He was, in other words, a product and advocate of both American entrepreneurship and alternative culture.

In 1984, Brand organized the first Hacker's Conference, bringing together representatives of the different strains of ideology and technology involved in creating the personal computer: the brilliant former Massachusetts Institute of Technology students who'd developed the first computer game, called Spacewar! back in the 1960s; the pioneers who were [Page 38]then working on the development of desktop computers; and the community of software designers populating Silicon Valley in the 1980s.

Stewart Brand with the Whole Earth Software Catalog, 1984. (Roger Ressmeyer/CORBIS).

Brand has repeatedly demonstrated an uncanny knack for envisioning future societal developments. He saw the social potential of computers long before Silicon Valley became what it is today, and was the first to use the term “personal computer” in a publication. In 1984, he also co-founded the very first virtual community, the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link’ (the WELL). Then, as now, emphasis was placed on the support the computers could give to human communication. Once the WELL was up and running, Brand spent a year at MIT's Media Lab; his book reflecting on his experiences there, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, was published in 1987.

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