Right Place, Right Time

Some people always seem to end up in the right place, at the right time.

Stewart Brand had a lot of diverse experiences growing up, all of which combined to make him unique. His 2 year stint in the army gave him the discipline he would need for massive undertakings, and his participation in a study on (then legal) LSD opened windows into his mind.

Then, he moved to San Francisco.

San Francisco of the early 1960s was a lot like Athens 2500 years ago, or Florence during the Renaissance. Lots of brilliant minds were converging at the counterculture capital of the world, and this combined with cutting edge tech and scientific innovation of the nascent Silicon Valley in the most useful of ways.

While immersed in the budding world of hippies and drugs, Brand helped launch the Trips Festival, now considered the unofficial beginnings of the hippie movement, putting Haight-Ashbury front and center in the world of counterculture. Light shows and a very early Grateful Dead were among the beneficiaries of Brand’s work.

While on an acid trip on the roof of his house in 1966, Brand became certain that if we humans could see an image of the entire earth—a Whole Earth image—we would change the way we think about the planet, and our role on it. He then relentlessly campaigned to have NASA release a rumored image of the earth as seen from space. He sold and distributed buttons asking, "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?"

Within a couple of years, we had.

Earthrise, taken on December 24, 1968, by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders

This wide range of experiences led up to his famous Whole Earth Catalog in 1968. This compendium of tools, texts, and ideas, inspired by the burgeoning environmental movement and the ethos of self-sufficiency, became a bible for the counterculture movement, and an important step in the environmental movement.

User-generated content. Decentralization. Community connections.

This was "Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along," according to Steve Jobs.

That same year, he helped Douglas Engelbart with the Mother of All Demos, showing off the mouse, word processing, and a baby internet for the first time.

In the 1980s, Brand took the Catalog online with WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), one of the first online communities.

The WELL brought together a diverse group of thinkers, writers, and technologists, fostering discussions that blurred the lines between the physical and digital worlds. This platform not only anticipated the social dynamics of the internet but also influenced the development of digital communities and social media.

In 1996, Stewart Brand did something that really resonates with me today. As a counterpoint to today’s insanely fast culture, where every year things get a little bit faster, Brand co-founded the Long Now Foundation. The Foundation focuses on long-term thinking, encouraging society to consider the deep future (the next 10,000 years) rather than just the immediate future.

One of its most famous projects is the Clock of the Long Now, designed to keep time for 10,000 years. This project epitomizes Brand's philosophy of considering the long-term consequences of our actions and promoting sustainability and responsibility.

Here in my writing, I want to hold some space for the Long Now. While I was growing up, I watched an evolution of information presentation unfold. Headlines got dumber, and news stories on TV got shorter and shorter. 30 second sound bites were eventually replaced by memes and 10 second Tik-Tok videos.

Here, we are all pushing back against this inertia. That’s what this place is for.