Stewart Brand

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Stewart Brand (December 2010)

Stewart Brand (born December 14, 1938 in Rockford (Illinois) ) is a Californian activist, author and entrepreneur as well as an essential mediator between the hippie scene of San Francisco and the hacker and cyber culture of Silicon Valley . Brand initiated the Trips Festival in 1966 , was editor of the National Book Award- winning Whole Earth Catalog between 1968 and 1972 and founded the first online community, The WELL , in 1984 . Brand was immortalized literarily in the opening scene of Tom Wolfe's documentary novel The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test . Brand founded several organizations such as the Global Business Network and the Long Now Foundation .

Live and act

origin

Stewart Brand was the youngest of four children. The father was a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and worked in an advertising agency, the mother had studied at the elite Vassar College . After graduating from high school, Stewart studied biology at Stanford University .

Army service

From 1960 to 1962, Stewart Brand served in the US Army as a paratrooper , the last year as a photographer. As he later explained himself, he developed leadership qualities and skills in “small-unit management” in the army at the expense of the state. While still serving in the army, he made the acquaintance of mescaline on a few weekends in New York . After retiring, Brand moved to Menlo Park , California to study design and photography, and befriended psychologist and Harvard graduate James Fadiman. Jim Fadiman introduced Brand to the mysteries of LSD on December 10, 1962 as part of a legal study .

Native Americans

He was interested in Native American culture and visited several reservations . His turn to the Indians played an important role in his work. His first wife, Lois Jennings, was a member of the Odawa tribe .

Acid Test and Trips Festival

In the mid-1960s he became friends with Ken Kesey and became a member of his commune Merry Pranksters . With Zach Stewart, he produced the three-day Trips Festival in January 1966, one of the first San Francisco events to feature the Grateful Dead . 10,000 visitors attended the festival, and as a result Haight-Ashbury became an important hippie commune, in the immediate vicinity of which Jefferson Airplane , Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin lived. At the beginning of his 1968 documentary novel The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test , Tom Wolfe described Brand.

The Whole Earth

In 1966, Brand ran a campaign calling on NASA to publish photos of all over the world taken from space . He also sold buttons that read: “Why Haven't We Seen A Photograph Of The Whole Earth Yet?” (For example, “Why haven't we seen a photo of the earth yet?”) In 1968 a NASA astronaut took such a picture.

The Mother of All Demos

On December 9, 1968, Brand supported computer technician Douglas Engelbart in a presentation at the Fall Joint Computer Conference (FJCC) that would later become famous as "The Mother of All Demos". Among other things, they presented the first computer mouse and technologies on which video and teleconferencing are based today.

The Whole Earth Catalog

Also in 1968, Brand began supplying local authorities across the country with goods such as: B. to supply tents and clothing and to offer them a mobile library and small schools. Building on this, Brand published the first edition of the Whole Earth Catalog in the same year - not a sales catalog, but a compilation of systematically assessed product recommendations and information about the relevant dealers. It listed the first synthesizers and personal computers as well as methods for alternative energy generation from wind power and the sun. Steve Jobs , founder of Apple Inc. , called the catalog the forerunner of search engines on the web. The Whole Earth Catalog found great resonance among alternative counterculture and urban exodus communities in the 1970s. The 1972 edition sold 1.5 million copies and was the only book in this category to receive the National Book Award . After 1972 the catalog was no longer published annually, but at irregular intervals until the last time in 1998.

The WELL

In 1984 Stewart Brand founded The WELL (German "Der Brunnen" or "Die Quelle"), the first online community. The acronym The WELL stands for The Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link ( something like "The electrical connection with the whole world"). The company was in serious deficit and could only be saved from ruin thanks to financial donations from the Deadheads , fans of the Californian band Grateful Dead . The Deadheads recognized in The WELL a suitable forum to exchange their - predominantly - musical preferences.

All Species Project

At the turn of the millennium, Stewart Brand began raising $ 3 billion for his All Species Project . The aim of this project was to find and describe all living beings on earth in order to get a concept of biodiversity .

Later years

Brand has been a proponent of nuclear energy and green genetic engineering since the late 1990s and expects the environmental movement to change its direction on these issues . He also predicts that the main direction of the environmental movement will change its positions on population growth and urbanization .

Fonts

  • A Vision of a Whole Earth. In: James Fadiman: The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide. Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys , Rochester, Vermont, 2011, ISBN 978-1-59477-402-7 .
  • Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary . Viking Adult, 2009, ISBN 978-0-670-02121-5 .
  • Clock Of The Long Now: Time And Responsibility: The Ideas Behind The World's Slowest Computer . Basic Books, 1999, ISBN 0-465-04512-X .
    • The ticking of the long now: time and responsibility at the beginning of the new millennium , Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, ​​2000, ISBN 3-518-41150-0 .
  • How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built . Viking Adult, 1994, ISBN 0-670-83515-3 .
  • The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT Viking Adult, 1987, ISBN 0-670-81442-3 .

literature

  • Jesse Jarnow: Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America. Da Capo Press, 2016, ISBN 978-0-306-82255-1 .
  • Walter Isaacson : Steve Jobs. The Authorized Bio of the Apple Founder. Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-442-74491-6 , pp. 81-82.
  • Fred Turner: From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. University of Chicago Press, 2006, ISBN 0-226-81741-5 .
  • John Markoff : What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry. New York 2005, ISBN 0-670-03382-0 .
  • Bill Graham , Robert Greenfield: Bill Graham presents: A Life Between Rock & Roll. Two thousand and one, Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-86150-156-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Walter Isaacson: Steve Jobs - Biography. P. 81.
  2. ↑ Andrew Brown: Whole Earth visionary In: The Guardian . August 4, 2001.
  3. ↑ James Fadiman in the English language Wikipedia
  4. ^ John Markoff: What The Dormouse Said. Pp. 58-65.
  5. ↑ Events in San Francisco- Trips Festival. ( Memento from August 17, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ) In: Sixties Information Center.
  6. ↑ Tripticon: Stewart Brand of May 27, 2018 (German)
  7. ↑ Alex Needham: Acid trips, black power and computers: how San Francisco's hippy explosion shaped the modern world In: The Guardian, August 21, 2016.
  8. ↑ 'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says. Commencement address of Steve Jobs, June 12, 2005.
  9. ↑ Andrew Brown: Whole Earth visionary. In: The Guardian. August 4, 2001.
  10. ↑ Andrew Brown: Whole Earth visionary In: The Guardian . August 4, 2001.
  11. ↑ Environmental Heresies. In: MIT Technology Review. May 2005.
personal data
SURNAME Brand, Stewart
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American author
DATE OF BIRTH December 14, 1938
PLACE OF BIRTH Rockford, Illinois