Stewart Brand, Silicon Valley’s Favorite Prophet, on Life’s Most Important Principle |
A Dose of Wisdom From Silicon Valley’s Favorite Prophet
Produced by Annie Galvin
Stewart Brand, Silicon Valley’s Favorite Prophet, on Life’s Most Important Principle
This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.
If you were looking for the most influential philosopher of the internet, the person who laid down the way Silicon Valley thought in its more idealistic era, the person you’d find is Stewart Brand.
Brand has had one of these amazing lives. He seemed to be present for almost everything that mattered there in 1960s culture — in the moment of the hippies, in a $20-a-month apartment in San Francisco with other beatniks. There at the mother of all demos — the one that created much of the structure for modern computing, that foresaw many of the places we’re ultimately going to go. There creating The Well, one of the earliest online communities. There with the Whole Earth Catalog, which Steve Jobs described as an early inspiration for what we now think of as the internet.
Archival clip of Steve Jobs: When I was young, there was an amazing publication called the Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand, not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late ’60s, before personal computers and desktop publishing. So it was all made with typewriters, scissors and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Archival clip of Steve Jobs: When I was young, there was an amazing publication called the Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand, not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late ’60s, before personal computers and desktop publishing. So it was all made with typewriters, scissors and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
The list of all the places Brand was and all the things he influenced is very long — from the Clock of the Long Now to his long-running correspondence with Brian Eno. And along the way, Brand has been writing these very beautiful, unusual books. Not only the Whole Earth Catalog but “How Buildings Learn,” in 1994, which I love, and then, more recently, “Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One,” which explores something many of us would rather avoid: the constant and almost spiritually important work of fixing our cars, of doing home repairs, of caring for one another.
Brand makes maintenance sound philosophically potent, even beautiful. And one thing I think is interesting about this book at this moment, written by somebody with the weight of Brand, is that it points toward a different way of thinking about technology. It points toward a different ethos that Silicon Valley can maybe move toward — something a little bit more humble, something a little bit more rooted in the natural relationship we all have to one another and that we all have to aging and to loss.
So I wanted to have Brand on to talk to him about that and so much else that he’s seen and thought over the years.
Ezra Klein: Stewart Brand, welcome to the show.
Stewart Brand: Well, thank you, Ezra. Glad to be here.
I want to start a little bit back in your history. In the 1960s, you were part of a movement that got called the back-to-the-landers, communards ——
What was that? How would you describe the vision there for society?
For various reasons, a whole lot of people in college in the early ’60s and on through, into the early ’70s, thought they needed to reinvent civilization. The ’50s had been so successful, it became kind of bland. The beatnik poets who preceded us showed a revolutionary path of going wild and going deep.
So we figured out ways to go wild and go deep.
Many dropped out of college and decided that since civilization had to be reinvented — they had to do a gathering of their peers and basically go back to the countryside and farm and build their own buildings and have their own rules and start over.
They all failed. But the communes were highly educational.
We learned that free love isn’t free.
We learned that you can’t expect the women to do all of the really hard work, like pioneer women used to have to do — carrying the water and cooking the meals and taking care of the kids and doing everything else — while the guys were building domes and other interesting buildings.
Another thing that we discovered was that the countryside is actually kind of boring, especially if you don’t connect with your neighbors — which we did not, mostly.
So we fled back to the cities. Some of us figured out how to do too many drugs, and some of the rest of us noticed that and didn’t do that.
But it was a wonderfully fearless time. We undertook wild and crazy things. We had this aesthetic of having the most wonderful adventures you could with the least amount of money you could. You have to be creative under those circumstances.
So that was the hippies.
The Whole Earth Catalog was speaking, in a way, to the fact that these were college dropouts who didn’t know how anything worked. They had not been raised on a farm or a ranch.
How would you describe what the Whole Earth Catalog looked and felt like to somebody who has never seen one?
It was pretty big, actually. Bookstores complained about it. It’s about as big as a laptop now, basically folio-size.
And thicker than a laptop. I’ve seen them. It’s big.
Oh, yeah. By the time we get the so-called Next Whole Earth Catalog, it was several pounds of everything.
Steve Jobs, in his famous commencement speech, said it was like Google decades before Google came along.
The Whole Earth Catalog had all those books — on how to be a beekeeper, how to grow sheep, how to make candles. [Laughs.] We were actually candle dipping.
So that was what the Whole Earth Catalog was. It turned out what it really did is what YouTube does now — it conferred agency.
You mentioned that among the communards, some of them did too many drugs.
I’ve always wondered if this story about you is true: that the reason we have NASA’s picture of the whole Earth came from your doing psychedelics on a roof one day?
I was in San Francisco and kind of bored, and one of the things you did with boredom at that time was drop some acid and see what happens.
It was a minor dose — about 100 micrograms. I went up on the roof of the $20-a-month place where I lived in North Beach and ——
[Laughs.] Twenty dollars a month in North Beach?
OK. That’s already hard to believe, but it was true.
Somehow it’s easier to believe that you got NASA to take a picture of the Earth than that anything in North Beach ever cost $20.
Well, it turns out it didn’t really get NASA to do that. We’d been in space for 10 years, at that point — us and the Soviet Union. The cameras had always been looking outward or at pieces of the Earth, but they could have been looking back to see the Earth as a whole.
I was pretty sure that would change everything. I wound up starting a campaign. There was a button that said, “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?”
I know it got looked at by a lot of people at NASA, in Congress and so on. I got to know some of the astronauts, like Rusty Schweickart.
When they took photographs, it came just a year or two later, after my campaign.
Got it. So it was a little coincidental. You had the idea on the roof, but the roof is not what led to the picture.
I think that’s correct. But it led to understanding the picture, I think, for a lot of people.
That metaphor of the camera pointing outward, as opposed to inward — at what we don’t yet have as opposed to what we do have — actually feels like a nice metaphor for maintenance.
I hear this in the Whole Earth Catalog, too. In a way, it feels like a lot of your career and thinking has been building up to this topic, that the Whole Earth Catalog was also a manual for maintaining your life, for maintaining the things you had.
Let’s begin with the most basic question: What is maintenance?
It’s what keeps things going. I’m a biologist by training, so you find that everything alive spends a lot of its time basically maintaining being alive.
Even the extent of reaching outside itself — you’re not just eating. If you’re a beaver, you’re busy cutting down trees to maintain your dam, which is what protects your lodge.
Most plants spend a lot of time basically helping the soil around them do things that work well for the plant. The soil itself is alive.
We’re always maintaining our bodies. We maintain our vehicles and our houses and homes and cities that we live in. We’re catching on that civilization is something to maintain as a whole.
And even the planet — we’ve now stepped up to terraforming. We’ve been terraforming badly, and we need to terraform well. So the levels of maintenance are enormous, and the constancy of it is a given.
How did it come to occupy so much of your mind?
Because I’m a bad maintainer. I brushed my teeth when I felt like it, and, consequently, I lost quite a few.
Looking into the things that you’re not good at, especially intellectually, is one way to stay young, because you’ve got a beginner’s mind.
But I did grow up with a father who was a do-it-yourself kind of guy with a big bench in the basement. And I had a bench in the basement.
As you know, many of the software programmers began by building Heathkit radios and stuff. Well, that was me, too. I was building Heathkit radios.
You grew up in a time when the technologies we used were more intelligible. Something you track in the book is that some of them were designed to be that way.
One of the really interesting stories you tell, that I was hoping you could........