Stewart Brand

And I'll read a little bit more about Mr. Illich's From the biographical note, we're actually using an Internet source, the publication of this short speech essay in the Co-Evolution Quarterly in winter 1983.

And this was Stuart Brand's description of what Ivan Illich does.

And it will set up.

It'll set up maybe the essay for our listeners and perhaps set up our discussion as well.

When the system shut down each day for maintenance, there was an hour of volleyball.

When Stewart Brand came by to write about it for Rolling Stone, he said it was the busiest scene he had seen since the acid tests, and a good many of the people at those terminals were deadheads.

A group from the lab and the research institute down the road had been going to see the band together since the ballroom days.

Naturally they started using the lab's electronic mail to sort out rides to the shows.

He had been, years before, one of two doctors riding along with the Hog Farm Buses, Wavy Gravy's traveling commune.

Later he founded a charity called SEVA, and he had a company that sold computer conferencing equipment, which is a very dry phrase for a machine that lets strangers talk to each other in writing.

Brilliant went to Stewart Brand, the man who had made the Whole Earth Catalog, with an idea.

Put the catalogue online, he said, and let the readers write back about the items in it.

The present used to be the unimaginable future.

I think it was Stuart Brand who said this.

And then someone else, I think Alan Kay said, the best way to predict the future is to shape it.

So let's do that.

I also wrote a book called The God Species way back in 2013, which considered geoengineering and this idea of humans as planetary stewards, if you like.

And that was based on Stuart Brand's sort of epithet of we are as gods and have to get good at it.

So, yeah, I took that and sort of tried to figure out what it would mean to be the god species and actually to try to get good at it, which is, again, something you cover a lot, of course, in this show.

Well, we're going to actually cover some of the other things, the wheat planet and the other things you're working on currently.

and um you know including experienced sergeants and he went from that to uh exploring psychedelics in new york city before he's all of a sudden out in san francisco was one of the merry pranksters on this bus and the um number two guy to uh ken kesey who he was often driving the bus you know it was just helping organize everything, was also a pilot in the Marines in Vietnam when it was just shooting and getting started in Vietnam.

And Stuart Brand, his name was, said there was a number of military in the Merry Pranksters, so it was easy to organize things.

So poor Ken Kesey is just being manipulated like hell because the acid makes you more suggestible, they found.

And so that's part of it all.

It's a toolkit, right? It could be applied to anything.

The episode of my podcast that was just released today is kind of a look at Bay Area cyber culture in the 90s, like Mondo 2000 and Wired Magazine and Stuart Brand, who was kind of the nexus for connecting all these people in the counterculture with all these people in business.

And the Mondo people who I...

You know, like, are you serious? Wrote the introduction to my Timothy Leary book.

Bottleneck, I think, is the wrong way of doing this or talking about this.

I think the framing I would use is Stuart Brand's pace layers.

where he has a bunch of nested layers saying government metabolism moves slower than culture and technology has a very fast metabolism.

I think that's the bigger problem.

And there's a lot of...

You know, if you've got Stewart Brand here, they, they know.

Ward Cunningham, who invented wikis, he, he's on one of the 380 invitation lists.

Mm-hmm.