Stewart Brand Changed the World, Twice | Hacker News Reader

Stewart Brand Changed the World, Twice

nytimes.com

95 pointstysone20 comments

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

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

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

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.

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

video documentary of the book with Stewart Brand hosting for anyone that's interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvEqfg2sIH0

Saw the documentary and now reading the book, it's good.

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/

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

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

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.

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

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

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...

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.

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/

What's the Well-HN link?

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.

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.

Surprised myself but looks like it's still going strong. Never made the transition from the BBS, the web provided new hangouts for me like HN.

https://www.well.com/

It's $15 dollars a month to join. Anyone here members? Is it worth it?

I’ve been a member since 1986. I keep my membership mainly to read a few of the regional Well conferences. And for nostalgia. These days there are only a few conferences with regular discussions. It’s a treasure trove of historical cultural conversations on hundreds of topics. Think of it as a moderated usenet with an emphasis on tech & social communication. Many very interesting dialogs in the late 80s to mid-90s but the web and social networks superseded it by the turn of the century. It still has a feel of home. <g>

To the question, it’s probably not worth joining anew unless you have a deep interest in the history of social computing and online communities.

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...

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.

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