At 79, Stewart Brand, the man who was wired before WIRED, sizzles and sparks when he talks about the future.
The bad news is cyberwar. It’s looking extremely powerful. It doesn’t have any rules yet. And it will only get rules through some pretty wretched excesses and disasters. And it’s going to take the world pretty much understanding and acting as one—which has never happened before. But I’m hopeful. Kevin Kelly’s line is that it’s pretty obvious we’re going to have to have global governance. That is what it will take to develop the rules of cyberwarfare.
And here’s my hopeful version: Climate change is forcing humanity to act as one to solve a problem that we created. It’s not like the Cold War. Climate change is like a civilizational fever. And we’ve got to find various ways to understand the fever and cure it in aggregate.
All this suggests that this century will be one where a kind of planetary civilization wakes up and discovers itself, that we are as gods and we have to get good at it.
Here’s the thing about Stewart Brand: He has spent a lifetime creating mythic things that stick. The New Games Tournament was a festival of wackadoodle and wild games meant to get people outside, playing, but also—and more important—Brand created them during the Vietnam War to get people thinking about conflict and physicality.
The games happened for a few years in the San Francisco Bay Area. That Earthball was a 6-foot-wide rubber-and-canvas sphere painted with the continents and oceans and clouds. And, as a book about the games explained, it attracted people “like the force of gravity.” “Everyone welcomes the chance to play with the planet, whether they are kicking or hugging it … An all-out game of Tournament Earthball might reveal the very core and essence of world conflict.” (It was also dazzling to me as a 5-year-old.)
Surveying the landscape that formed and energized WIRED, you can’t avoid the mythic stuff of Brand: He was one of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, as immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. He worked with Douglas Engelbart on “The Mother of All Demos,” which in 1968 introduced hypertext, email, the mouse. He created the Whole Earth Catalog and its descendants; he founded CoEvolution Quarterly. He helped start the Well. He’s written tech books and science books (and many, many articles).
He helped start the Long Now Foundationto get people thinking really, really long term. (The group is working on the 10,000-year clock.) He cofounded Revive and Restore, a group using biotech for wildlife conservation, climate adaptation—and to bring back extinct species.
You get the picture.
For our 25th anniversary, I wanted to talk to Brand. Partly because he was an apparitional presence through my childhood; my father, a photojournalist, spent a lot of time with him, shooting the photos for The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and taking pictures for the Whole Earth Catalog and covering other Brandified events like the New Games. But mostly, I wanted to talk to Brand because, at 79, he sizzles and sparks when he talks about the future.
On the Tools he’s excited about:
One of the initiating ideas of the Whole Earth Catalog 50 years ago was Buckminster Fuller’s concept that human behavior was pretty damn stable—as in very, very hard to change. Fuller didn’t have much patience with politics or politicians or various kinds of social engineers who he thought were basically trying to change something that resists change very actively. But tools, he said, are easy to change.
The tools that I’m paying attention to right now: biotechnology. And artificial intelligence. And I’m gradually getting acquainted with blockchain and its possibilities. Those three domains—all of them code-based, two of them digital—are once again potentially revolutionary technologies that are on some kind of an S curve that feels like a J curve right now. How high it goes or how steep it gets is to be seen, but it feels still like early days for each.
Twenty-five years ago we were talking up nanotechnology. It was coming on strong. WIRED was doing articles on nano. Then it just got beat out by the nanotechnology that’s been around for about 3.5 billion years: biology [Laughs]. We figured biotech was coming and nanotech was coming, and whichever one takes off first will determine much of the future.
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