
Stewart Brand Changed the World, Twice - tysone
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/07/opinion/stewart-brand-hippie-silicon.html
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bradneuberg
Funny coincidence: Stewart Brand was actually the camera man filming Douglas
Engelbart's Mother of All Demos as well:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos)

Evidently he helped advise the team on how to present the demo.

~~~
gdubs
There's a good story about this in his interview on The Tim Ferriss Show.

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reneherse
What must have been a side project for him, the book "How Buildings Learn:
What Happens After They're Built", was hugely influential to me as an
architecture student. His observations of built works continually adapting to
the evolving needs of users have obvious parallels in the world of software,
and helped form the basis of how I approach UX and product design.

~~~
alexpetralia
The mental model of "pace layers"[1] is a really insightful one. I've found it
extremely useful to think about problems from a systems perspective - eg. what
layer am I operating in and what layers may I encounter in the future? What
might I expect from this layer (eg. dynamic, spontaneous vs. cautious,
calculating), and how does that inform the decisions I should make?

[1]
[https://alexpetralia.github.io/2018/02/19/NL-2018-02-19.html](https://alexpetralia.github.io/2018/02/19/NL-2018-02-19.html)

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rmason
Actually I'd wager that Stewart Brand has changed the world more than twice. I
was a huge fan of both the whole earth catalog and the Well. Both Tim O'Reilly
and John Battelle have mentioned him as a mentor and influence.

Though it wasn't mentioned in the article he's also along with Kevin Kelly
behind The Long Now foundation
[http://longnow.org/about/](http://longnow.org/about/)

~~~
wpietri
They also have an excellent set of lectures. They're in SF, but available
remotely to members:
[http://longnow.org/seminars/](http://longnow.org/seminars/)

Stewart Brand usually interviews the speakers after, and he's fantastic at it.
I strongly recommend seeing him in action.

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carapace
He's also the fellow who wrote this:

"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."

Source of the "information wants to be free" meme.

I carried around a copy of "The Next Whole Earth Catalog" in my backpack in
high school one year instead of books. Yes, the _big_ one.

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amasad
Stewart Brand is a phenom. Not mentioned in this article but he started The
Long Now Foundation ([http://longnow.org/](http://longnow.org/)) to "foster
long term thinking". I've been a member for over a year and their seminars are
absolutely fantastic.

~~~
malloreon
there's a podcast of those, called "seminars about long term thinking" that is
amazing.

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mmastrac
Fun fact: Stewart's catalog is also the origin of the iconic "Stay Hungry,
Stay Foolish" tagline.

[http://ailiangan.com/post/50201060795/the-origins-of-stay-
hu...](http://ailiangan.com/post/50201060795/the-origins-of-stay-hungry-stay-
foolish)

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Cyph0n
I quickly read through the article, but I was unable to see how Brand changed
the world.

I've lived outside the US for most of my life and I'm probably a bit too young
to have been directly impacted by Brands work.

Based on the article, most of his work involved combining the spiritual and
technological into a cohesive whole. This sounds really cool, but seemed to
only be limited to US culture.

Honestly, I think the usage of the phrase "change the world" involves a much
larger impact on the world than this article describes.

I'd be grateful if another user could perhaps expand upon the article and help
me understand what made Brand so great here in the US.

~~~
tacon
There is something delicious about such a comment on Hacker News. There is a
direct link between The Well and Hacker News, and you would probably feel
quite at home back on The Well in its heyday. What is the old saw, that fish
can't grok the concept of water? Someone had to invent these online forums
that attract smart people and intelligent discussions from around the world.

For a wild ride with Stewart Brand polymath of polymaths, I'd recommend the
Tim Ferriss podcast episode[0].

[0] [https://tim.blog/2017/11/21/stewart-
brand/](https://tim.blog/2017/11/21/stewart-brand/)

~~~
dredmorbius
What's the Well-HN link?

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jtmcmc
The Well was a bbs for tech nerdery, futurism, science fiction, etc... in the
80's. It was massively influential in creating the cyberpunk literary genre
and many tech people from the time were on it and influenced by it.

There is a direct line of ancestry IMO between the well and places like HN.

~~~
dredmorbius
I'm aware of whatvthe Well _is_. And that it pressages much present online
discussion (though Usenet predates it).

But I'd suspected some specific individuals or group.

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masswerk
Notably, Stewart Brands turn to computers was heavily influenced by seeing
people playing Spacewar! at Stanford in Fall 1962.

 _" What I saw was an interaction around computers that was as intense as
anything I saw around drugs or anything else that I knew. People were
absolutely out of their bodies playing. It seemed that computers were doing
everything that drugs had promised. Drugs were much more self-limiting than
computers: the hackers had found something better than drugs, but theirs was
the same bohemian frame of reference."_

[http://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/aug/04/artsandhuma...](http://www.theguardian.com/education/2001/aug/04/artsandhumanities.highereducation)

Ten years later, after editing the Whole Earth Catalog, he wrote "Spacewar –
Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums" (the famous Rolling
Stone piece), which may have helped immensely in popularizing the idea of
computer games.

