Whole Earth

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From one of our greatest chroniclers of technology and society, the definitive biography of iconic serial visionary Stewart Brand, from the Merry Pranksters and the generation-defining Whole Earth Catalog through to the marriage of environmental consciousness and hacker capitalism and the rise of a new planetary culture-the story behind so many other stories. Stewart Brand has long been famous if you knew who he was, but for many people outside the streams of the counterculture, computer culture, and the environmental movement, he is perhaps best-known as the punchline to Steve Jobs's Stanford graduation speech, in which Jobs held up Brand's famous mantra, "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.", as the code Jobs sought to live by. This is fitting, over the course of his shapeshifting life Brand has played many roles, but one of the most important is as a model for how to live. The contradictions are striking: A blonde-haired WASP with the modest cushion of a family inheritance, he went to Exeter and Stanford and was an army veteran, but in California in the 60's he was in the thick of the LSD revolution with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, impresario for the legendary Acid Tests, and an artist and photographer whose multimedia art installations epitomized the moment. While tripping on acid on the roof of his building, he envisioned the value for humans to see a photograph of the entire world from space, and he made that a cause, which led to a movement, which in the end landed that image on the cover of his Whole Earth Catalog, the defining publication of the counterculture. He married a Native American woman and was committed to protecting indigenous culture, which connected to a broader environmentalist mission that has been a through line of his life. At the same time, he has outraged purists because of his pragmatic embrace of useful technologies, including nuclear power, in the fight against climate change. The famous tagline promise of his catalog was "Access to Tools": with rare exceptions he rejected politics for a focus on direct power-tools and skills for the individual. It was no wonder, then, that he was early to the promise of the computer revolution and helped define it for the wider world. Unlike most people, who make a mark in one field, Brand's life can be hard to fit onto one screen. John Markoff, himself one of our great chroniclers of tech culture, has done something extraordinary in unfolding the rich, twisting story of the life against its proper landscape, so that its meaning comes into focus for the first time. Brand himself dodges efforts at such definition-"I find things and I found things" is how he once described himself. But as Markoff makes marvelously clear, the streams of individualism, respect for science, environmentalism, and embrace of Eastern and indigenous thought that flow through his entire life form a powerful gestalt, a very particular California state of mind that has a hegemonic power to this day. At its best, it is the wellspring for a true planetary consciousness that may be the best hope we humans collectively have.