Stewart Brand Rethinking Silicon Valley

Met Stewart Brand Way back when, through company connections at the Institute for the Future.  Spent quite a while those days at Stanford and the Silicon Valley, visiting AI startups, seeking to discover AI.   Bringing it back to the Enterprise.  Was always interesting

 Rethinking Silicon Valley: Stewart Brand's Lost Journal, By John Markoff

Communications of the ACM, November 2022, Vol. 65 No. 11, Pages 32-34  10.1145/3530988

Stewart Brand,  Credit: Andrij Borys Associates, Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 2.O)

During the fall of 2000 I visited the Special Collection room in Green Library at Stanford University, eager to read Stewart Brand's personal journals. I was researching the political and cultural world surrounding three computer science laboratories that were located adjacent to Stanford during the decade during which the technologies that led to the creation of the personal computer industry and the modern Internet emerged.

On my initial visit I came away disappointed and it would take almost another two decades before I discovered a missing piece of the puzzle that reframes the early history and impact of Silicon Valley.

Although he has not a technologist, Brand, the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, is an intriguing figure in the history of the modern computing world and the Valley. He was the author of a seminal article in Rolling Stone magazine, "Space War: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums," which had been the first hint a wider non-technical audience had of the emerging digital world. He would be the first writer to use the term "personal computer" in his 1974 book II Cybernetic Frontiers. A decade later Brand would help organize the first Hackers conference as well as establishing an early online community known as the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (WELL).

William English, who was chief engineer for Douglas Engelbart's legendary oNLine System (NLS) project at Stanford Research Institute told me that he invited Brand to participate in the demonstration that Engelbart was preparing to give at the ACM/IEEE Joint Fall Computer Conference held in San Francisco in December 1968. English had seen an early multimedia (at that time "multimedia" meant three slide projectors, an audio tape, and a single shared projection screen) production Brand created titled "America Needs Indians," and wanted his expertise to help prepare for the watershed event that Steven Levy would later describe as "The Mother of All Demos."

Brand would operate a camera in Menlo Park, relaying a video feed to the stage where Engelbart sat in front of a huge screen with a keyboard, mouse and chord keypad, introducing the world's leading computer scientists and engineers to interactive computing.

Later, however, I realized that Brand's actual role in helping prepare for the Demo had been minimal and I found no mention of the event in his journal, which at that point was filled with observations more in tune with a 30-year-old in the midst of the turmoil of the Vietnam War and the 1960s counterculture.

Although Brand had been a prominent figure during the 1960s and 1970s, he was famously resurrected by Steve Jobs in his 2005 Stanford Commencement speech when he commended Brand's philosophy of life highlighted on the closing page of The Whole Earth Epilog to the new graduates: "Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish."

He might have remained a historical figure, however in 2017, with Donald Trump's election, the national zeitgeist shifted abruptly and Silicon Valley went from being able to do no wrong, to doing no right. Two books that appeared that year, Franklin Feuer's World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech and Jonathan Taplin's Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy both opened their accounts of Silicon Valley with biographical sketches describing Brand as Silicon Valley's first "digital utopian." Feuer and Taplin, and the following year the historian Jill Lapore in These Truths: A History of the United States, all attempt to make the case that there is a straight cultural through-line from Brand to an unregulated Silicon Valley that has brought about the perilous state of the world today—underscored by the role of social media and the Internet in fomenting both Brexit and the election of Donald Trump.

They all make the claim that the Valley's original ideology—or sin depending on your point of view—can be traced back to Brand and the Catalog, expanding on his opening argument in the Catalog: "We are as gods and might as well get good at it. A realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested."  ... ',