stewart brand
almost added page so many times.. (mostly learned about him thru howard i think)
added when trailer (above) came out – first heard via peter leyden fb share:
The new documentary film on Stewart Brand is finished and now ready to get out. This is a film that has to be seen, and needs to be seen by many people at this moment of all moments. With the virus, it now needs a distributor. Check out the trailer on this link to whet your appetite. And then connect this to folks to might help get it out there into the world.
Stewart made a big impact on my intellectual development and yet is still not very well-known outside west coast circles. That is a shame, because he’s one of the wisest folks I know. And his long-term vision is what America needs right now.
https://structurefilms.squarespace.com/we-are-as-gods
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Stewart Brand (born December 14, 1938) is an American writer, best known as editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He founded a number of organizations, including The WELL, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation. He is the author of several books, most recently Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.
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In late 1968, Brand assisted electrical engineer Douglas Engelbart with The Mother of All Demos, a famous presentation of many revolutionary computer technologies (including hypertext, email, and the mouse) to the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco.
Brand surmised that given the necessary consciousness, information, and tools, human beings could reshape the world they had made (and were making) for themselves into something environmentally and socially sustainable
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During the late 1960s and early 1970s about 10 million Americans were involved in living communally. In 1968, using the most basic approaches to typesetting and page-layout, Brand and his colleagues created issue number one of The Whole Earth Catalog, employing the significant subtitle, “access to tools”. Brand and his wife Lois travelled to communes in a 1963 Dodgetruck known as the Whole Earth Truck Store, which moved to a storefront in Menlo Park, California. That first oversize Catalog, and its successors in the 1970s and later, reckoned a wide assortment of things could serve as useful “tools”: books, maps, garden implements, specialized clothing, carpenters’ and masons’ tools, forestry gear, tents, welding equipment, professional journals, early synthesizers, and personal computers. Brand invited “reviews” (written in the form of a letter to a friend) of the best of these items from experts in specific fields. The information also described where these things could be located or purchased. The Catalog‘s publication coincided with the great wave of social and cultural experimentation, convention-breaking, and “do it yourself” attitude associated with the “counterculture”.
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The content of CoEvolution Quarterly often included futurism or risqué topics. Besides giving space to unknown writers with something valuable to say, Brand presented articles by many respected authors and thinkers, including Lewis Mumford, Howard T. Odum, Witold Rybczynski, Karl Hess, Orville Schell, Ivan Illich, Wendell Berry, Ursula K. Le Guin, Gregory Bateson, Amory Lovins, Hazel Henderson, Gary Snyder, Lynn Margulis, Eric Drexler, Gerard K. O’Neill, Peter Calthorpe, Sim Van der Ryn, Paul Hawken, John Todd, Kevin Kelly, and Donella Meadows. During ensuing years, Brand authored and edited a number of books on topics as diverse as computer-based media, the life history of buildings, and ideas about space colonies.
lewis, ivan, ursula, gregory, paul, kevin, donella, ..
He founded the Whole Earth Software Review, a supplement to the Whole Earth Software Catalog, in 1984. It merged with CoEvolution Quarterly to form the Whole Earth Review in 1985
In 1985, Brand and Larry Brilliant founded The WELL (“Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link”), a prototypical, wide-ranging online community for intelligent, informed participants the world over. The WELL won the 1990 Best Online Publication Award from the Computer Press Association. Almost certainly the ideas behind the WELL were greatly inspired by Douglas Engelbart’s work at SRI International; Brand was acknowledged by Engelbart in “The Mother of All Demos” in 1968 when the computer mouse and video conferencing were introduced
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Brand is co‑chair and President of the Board of Directors of The Long Now Foundation. Brand chairs the foundation’s Seminars About Long-term Thinking (SALT). This series on long-term thinking has presented a large range of different speakers including: Brian Eno, Neal Stephenson, Vernor Vinge, Philip Rosedale, Jimmy Wales, Kevin Kelly, Clay Shirky, Ray Kurzweil, Bruce Sterling, Cory Doctorow, and many others.
brian, jimmy, kevin, clay, ray, bruce, cory, ..
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