Tech Won't Save Us - The Real Legacy of Stewart Brand w/ Malcolm Harris

Episode Date: July 28, 2022

Paris Marx is joined by Malcolm Harris to discuss the legacy of Stewart Brand and why the myth we’re often told about him overstates the reality of his impact.Malcolm Harris is the author of Kids These Days, Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit, and his forthcoming book Palo Alto. He also writes for New York Magazine. Follow Malcolm on Twitter at @BigMeanInternet.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:Malcolm Harris wrote a critical review of John Markoff’s Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand.Benjamin Kunkel also wrote a critical review of Whole Earth.The Stewart Brand documentary We Are As Gods about his quest to bring back wholly mammoths to solve climate change is slowly being rolled out after two years of delay and seeming lack of sales interest.Brand’s Long Now Foundation is building a 10,000-year clock in Texas that’s funded by Jeff Bezos.We also mention Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture.Support the show

The outsiders that he backed are now not just the insiders, but really the people who are responsible for the state of the world. And that's a tough situation to be taking responsibility for, considering the state of the world. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Malcolm Harris. Malcolm is the writer of books like Kids These Days, Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit, and his new book that comes out early next year called Palo Alto. That one's available for pre-order now. He also writes for New York Magazine. In this episode, however, we're talking about a review he wrote recently for The Nation of John Markoff's Whole Earth, The Many Lives of Stuart Brand. For people who pay close attention to the

tech industry, they'll be familiar with the name Stuart Brand. He holds a really important position in the narrative that Silicon Valley likes to tell itself about its own history. He founded the Whole Earth Catalog back in the late 1960s, and that became a kind of cultural touchstone. It was something that Steve Jobs and that many other tech founders pointed back to as something that inspired them, something that gave them ideas about, you know, the kind of world that they wanted to see and the technologies that they wanted to create. Markov's new book goes through many phases of Brand's life and how he was feeling in different parts of them, the things that he was doing.

And to be quite honest, even though it's a biography that's written by someone within Stuart Brand's circle who knows a lot of the people around him, it doesn't give the greatest picture of the man who's supposed to hold this really important position in the tech industry's history. In his review, Malcolm pulls this apart and looks at what that actually means for how we should understand Stuart Brand and the role that he actually played in all of these movements and developments that he's often associated with. Was he really driving these things or was he simply along for the ride and intending to benefit because of the position that he's often associated with. Was he really driving these things or was he simply along for the ride and intending to benefit because of the position

that he held in relation to these developments? For me, this was a really fascinating conversation to dig into these aspects of Stuart Brand's life and his legacy and to ask whether he really deserves the attention and the myth in some sense that has been built up around him. As always, if you like this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review

on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also share it on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every single week so that these free conversations can be available to everybody,

you can go to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and become a supporter. Thanks for listening and enjoy this week's conversation. Malcolm, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thanks so much for having me. It's great to have you on the show. You know, I've been following your work for a while. You're the author of like a bunch of great books and a forthcoming book that you'll be back on the podcast to talk about next year, which I'm very excited for, Palo Alto. But you wrote this review of a new biography, I guess, of Stuart Brand, John Markoff's Whole Earth, The Many Lives of Stuart Brand, recently for The Nation. And so, you know, I wanted to discuss Stuart Brand and his life and all these sorts of things.

But before we get into that, I wanted to talk to you about the response to your review. Because, I think a review of a book, even one focused on the particular person that the book is about, doesn't necessarily get the kind of response that your review got. Stuart Brand himself tweeted about the review. And then a bunch of his kind of Silicon Valley followers, the people who kind of hold him up as this key figure in the history of tech in the Valley, also came out of the woodwork to, you know, massage his ego, make him feel better because he thought your review was too harsh. Jeff Bezos, for example, tweeted,

I very much hope the future world gets many more quote-unquote hucksters like you. We will be better for it. And Paul Graham said, wow, someone hating on Stuart Brand. There's proof, if you need it, that literally anyone sufficiently famous can attract haters. What did you make of this response to your review? Well, it showed that they weren't expecting it, that this book, which was produced by Stuart Brand's friends and associates, you know, his literary agent, John Brockman, controls a real corner of the publishing industry, which includes Markoff, who wrote this book. So they're all buddies. So it was, hey, buddy,

write a book about our other buddy. And this is a year of sort of celebration and looking back for Stuart Brand. He's also got a documentary that's coming out that was, again, funded by more of his rich tech buddies. So this is part of a celebratory project around Stuart Brand in his mid 80s now. And I guess they didn't see it coming under that sort of actual critical attention. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I don't know if you've seen that documentary. I got to see it last year. And oh, man, that is terrible. I heard I have not seen it. But I did hear from people who had who said that it that my review sort of fit with what they got out of the documentary. Yeah, no, I was gonna write a review of the documentary when I saw it. But maybe I'll have to return to it now that it's actually

going to come out to the public and write that review. Because, yeah, the idea that bringing back Willie Mammoth is going to save us from climate change is a bit of crazy thinking. Yeah. And he's had his share, you know. And so this is the latest set of notions are no better than the notions he's had throughout his career of notions. And we'll dig into some of those, I'm sure. So, you know, before we dig into these parts of Brian's life, I wanted to talk about, you know, how he is kind of positioned in the Silicon Valley mythology, right? He's one of these figures that's really held up as being key to kind of the history that Silicon Valley wants to tell us about itself. You know,

figures like Steve Jobs, figures like Jeff Bezos, who want to hold brand up as this really important figure as kind of having these really important ideas that inspire them and inspire the industry more generally. How is his role often positioned in that history? And what do you make of how the tech industry treats him? I mean, you have to give brand himself credit for his self-promotion, right? He's done a good job putting himself at the center of these narratives by befriending the people who are writing these narratives, by putting himself sort of in control of money that's coming out

that was used to write the first drafts of Silicon Valley's history of itself through institutions like the Co-Evolutionary Quarterly and the Whole Earth Catalog itself. And so he was in a good place, not so much to create the valley itself, but to be part of the story that it tells about itself. And then you get him depicted as an important figure by secondary sources or analytical sources. So the most famous is Fred Turner's Counterculture to Cyberculture, which sort of figures Brand as this central connecting figure between different segments of the Bay Area tech milieuc-Mil-Yeu. And so he is figured as this important guy, the whole earth catalog is this really important institution. And even this,

the idea of the whole earth as a like important cultural moment, which I think is vastly overstated. Basically all parts of that are overst. And that I've got a 700 page book about Palo Alto and this whole scene coming out next year. And when it came down to it, he didn't need to be in there. He's just like not that important a figure. He was good of putting himself in the stories. But in terms of the substantial things that are going on, pretty irrelevant. It's really interesting to hear you describe it that way, because one of the things that stood out to me in reading the book was how, you know, I did feel that there was that degree of exaggeration of Brian's role sometimes.

In particular, like the place where it stood out for me was when he was kind of referred to as this key figure in the environmental movement. And like, listen, I'm not a historian in the environmental movement. And like, listen, I'm not a historian on the environmental movement. But before I got into tech and tech politics, climate change was really the issue that kind of like motivated me politically or whatnot. And even like, you know, thinking back to what I knew of like the early environmental movement, I don't remember Stuart Brand being like a figure that I recognized until I started to learn about the history of tech. And all of a sudden he was associated with the history of Silicon Valley and whatnot.

And then as part of that, all of these tech folks were saying, yeah, he was also a key environmental figure. Yeah. I mean, his role in the environmental movement and the role of the environmental movement itself, the role of Americans in the environmental movement is very complicated. Even his role in the local environmental movement, because in the Bay Area, you had the, at the time, a really bifurcated environmental movement where you had the sort of ruling class, save the whales types, which Stuart Brand was the guy in charge of. He was the big, big save the whales dude. And then on the other hand, you had a labor movement that was focusing on environmental issues as a way to approach labor conditions within Silicon Valley chip fabrication because it's one of the most toxic production processes around,

and it led to huge environmental problems in the Bay Area. And so there was this strategic attempt by the Silicon Valley Toxic Coalition, among others, to attack labor problems through this environmental angle. And Stuart Brand had absolutely nothing to do with that. Insofar as he had anything to do with it, it was promoting an environmental movement that was totally distinct from that. And there's a scene, I don't think I talk about it explicitly in the review, but when one of his big environmental actions was going to this international environmental conference, basically on behalf of the U.S. government funded through whatever passed through foundations, the CIA or whatever else was using at the time, going there to try and change the orientation of the meeting away from U.S. imperialism and

the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam to literally save the whales. So his history with the environmental movement, I mean, anywhere you sort of dig down, this guy has been on the wrong side of these issues. I think it's fascinating that you describe it that way, because I feel like you can see it like so many times within the book where there is this kind of politics that would be more oppositional to power and to the actual structures that are causing these problems that Brand ostensibly cares about, but then like doesn't want to be involved with because he wants to take this other approach that is like less oppositional, but also kind of beneficial to him in many ways, especially as his life kind of progresses. And I think that that example from

when he goes to that conference in Sweden is just like, it's just wild. I want to talk more about this divide, about these politics of Brand, but I thought it would be good to get some insight on his earlier life before we do that, you know, before he really gets into the counterculture, into that scene. What is his family life like, you know, and when he goes to university, he makes an attempt at going to the army. What is notable in this period? What do we learn about Stuart Bryan when we look back in this like earlier period of his life before he becomes a more notable figure? Yeah, Markov gets at the issue sort of in spite of himself, right? He reveals more than maybe he was attempting to in the first place, which is that Stuart is sort of this underachieving, younger son of this rich merchant family going back generations to the Western

Timber Boom. And so ultimately, U.S. colonial settlement. And so they're pushing that money forward. His dad ends up running an advertising company. His older brother is a standout at Stanford, you know, frat bro slash early tech guy. He gets hired at Tektronix, which is one of the really early West Coast tech companies. And Stuart attends Exeter Prep, which is one of the best prep schools in the country. And he's got this sort of idea of himself as this elite guy, which makes sense, you know, as he's raised in that community, but he never really seems to be able to pull it off. And starting with his academic career in prep school and going into Stanford, he has this idea of himself as a smart guy, someone who's really interested in learning

stuff and ideas, but he never really seems to be able to make it happen. He doesn't get good grades. There's no area in which he excels. He's really obsessed with himself as an ROTC cadet at Stanford, which is like an insanely nerdy thing to be at the time, right? Especially in a region that's about to see the emergence of the counterculture. He was like the culture, not the counterculture as a college kid. Yeah. It's notable that in the book, Markov says that like, he's always going around in his uniform as well and stuff. Well, and he says this, the character that he gives, and this is where my reading of the book starts to head in this really clear direction is you have this picture of him as a college student who has a hard time, you know, he's got money,

he's got a car, he's got a place off campus, still can't make any friends, really hanging out with the foreign exchange students who are rich kids from whatever other countries that they're coming from. These are not strivers. These are like, you know, the sons of Kings and et cetera, reading Ayn Rand, thinking about the overpopulation crisis, that picture of that kind of person, like I'm from the Bay area. I know that guy, like, I know who he's talking about because that's still a person who is around. And that's like the worst person you can find. That guy's a dickhead as real, like not any redeeming qualities. The guy it reminds me of that I went to high school with is, you know,

like working at Palantir and has been working at Palantir since he graduated from college. So that's where the character of Stuart Brand really comes into focus, I think, in the book, in spite of the book, with this early formation as a person. I think it's really interesting to hear you describe that because some of the things that kind of stood out to me in that period and, you know, how he's described by Markoff are really the fact that, you know, he always kind of has his family's money to fall back on. Like throughout his life, there are like notes in the book about, you know, how he could rely on his mother to like send him a check or whatever so he could get by even if things weren't working out very well.

So he never really had that kind of fear of really losing it all and like not really having anywhere to turn to. And that enabled him to kind of pursue the types of projects and things that he wanted to get involved in. But then also it talks about how after university, he went to the military and was planning to have this like military career. And there's this like justification that one of the reasons that he gives for why it didn't ultimately work out was that like, he was looking for an experience that would like inspire a good novel and like all these sorts of things. And you kind of say in your review, if I remember correctly, that this sounds more like an excuse for why he just couldn't make it there. Yeah. I mean, it's like he wants to be the highest achiever at whatever he's doing,

which makes sense given his background and given the kind of direction he's been given, given the like historical project that he's really part of, right? This is an elitist historical project. And so if he's going to join the army, he wants to be an army ranger. If he's going to join the army, he wants to be a green beret. And when it turns out, it's really fucking hard to be an army ranger. It's really fucking hard to be a green beret. He doesn't have the metal for it. He drops out of army ranger school. And then they tell him that he says, okay, well then I want to be a green beret. And they said, well, okay, well you got to actually do basic training before you become a green beret. And he says, well, fuck it. Then I don't want it.

And he's able to sort of do this thanks partly to his connections. He's got a very well connected, his brother-in-law, his sister's husband is a very well connected military guy rising fast through the ranks and is sort of able to help him out. And he gets a gig. It's like the most slacker gig in the military to serve out his career, which is like hanging out in New Jersey. The book talks about him literally like falling asleep on duty or whatever. They just like put him in a corner to make sure he wouldn't screw anything up. And he got to like, you know, hang out in New York on the weekends. Yeah. A pretty damning description of his military career. Which, you know, and I say it in the review, it's like, if you think his life is disgraceful, which I think to a certain

degree it is, it would have been much worse if he'd stuck with it and become an army ranger in the early 60s or whatever, you know, those, those guys committed war crimes. So could have been worse if he'd been more the man that So could have been worse if he'd been more the man that he wanted to be, if even more of the man that he was set up to be by this historical project, he probably would have done worse things. So there you go. Yeah, probably good that he failed on that account, then I guess, at least for his soul. Yeah. So, you know, you're talking about how he really wants to be involved in this military project, right? How that is kind of how he sees himself, but then he really kind of fails

out of it. He can't make it through it. So then how does he make that turn from this guy who wants to be like a Green Beret, an army ranger, to then becoming like an important figure, I guess, at least how the history is often told within the counterculture. So he always wants to be a writer, right? Or like, not always, but within his college time, this idea of becoming a writer alights on him. And this is at a time in American history where being a writer was a much better job than it was now, both in terms of the pay and the prestige. Yeah. I was going to say, would you actually get paid?

Oh yeah. No, paid great. Really great prestige. You know, this is at the beginning, this is right before new journalism comes along. Right. So this is our right in the early days of new journalism. So he's thinking about James Agee and let us now praise famous men and thinking about it's a really noble, masculine sort of career that he's imagining, you know, traveling throughout the world and writing and taking pictures. He fancies himself a photographer at the time. And so the military is part of that too. Like you said, that he's thinking about, oh, I'm going to write a novel or I'm going to write a story about this one way or the other, though he thinks there's not going to be any, there's no war right now. So there's no good stories to tell, which is a pretty stupid thing. Think about the

U.S. military in the early sixties. But regardless, he ends up for a class project going to write about the beats because the beatsats are starting to be this national and even international cultural sensation, even though it's really like 20 guys in San Francisco or whatever. So he goes up to go check it out for his class, and he finds that they're way more like him than he imagined, that these guys are actually way squarer than they're being portrayed. And at the same time, the barriers of entry are much lower than the other elite places that he's inquired into, that he's applied to, right? And so to become a beat was sort of the fastest way to the top. And Markov points out that Brand sort of realizes this early, that if he wants to be the best at whatever

he's doing, the key is to pick something that not a lot of other people are doing, because then you can get to be the best faster. Yeah, it makes a ton of sense is, you know, the quickest path to achieve the type of thing, the type of notoriety that I want, and realizing this, okay, this might be the direction to do it. You know, when he then gets involved with that counterculture, you know, one of the things that stands out to me is, you know, referring back to what you were talking about, about, you know, his time in the environmental movement and about how he had a particular conception of what the environmental movement could be that was in opposition to, you know, more of a labor framing of environmental issues,

I guess. And, you know, we see that again within this kind of moment when he gets involved with the counterculture where, you know, there is the new left that, you know, is involved with the student protests and pushing back against the Vietnam War and things like that. But Brand himself describes himself as anti-communist. He's opposed to these protests. You know, when he gets involved with some of these kind of hippie groups, he's looking for ways to turn a profit out of them, he gets involved with or he starts taking LSD, and these other kind of psychedelics. How should we think about brand in this moment? And I guess the part of the counterculture that he actually gets involved with and comes to represent in a

way? Yeah, I mean, the counterculture is this very tricky group, partly because they've written a lot of their own history. And Markoff's book, What the Dormouse Said, sort of links the early tech world to this counterculture milieu, has done a lot of work in solidifying that connection in people's minds. You know, he's got a peace sign on the cover of the book. But then Brand, he's one of the main characters in this milieu, you realize, is not just pro-war and anti-communist, but had been trying to be a soldier, right?

Like, it's not just, like, pro-war, but, like, wants to carry out the war. And that's an important way to see ultimately what the counterculture is doing. And he's not alone in this, right? Ken Kesey is the same way, pro-war, doesn't like the anti-war people, doesn't like communists, very patriotic American. And so the depiction of the counterculture as equivalent to the anti-war movement, more equivalent to the hippies, but then the equivalence between the hippies to the anti-war movement, more equivalent to the hippies, but then the equivalence between the hippies and the anti-war movement is just incorrect. And so if you actually look at what the relationship was between the

tech milieu in the Bay, counterculture aligned, and the new left and the communist left at the time, they were fighting. They were literally engaged in fights. The new left and the communist left at the time, they were fighting. They were literally engaged in fights. The new left was throwing rocks at the labs that Stewart Brand is writing about or ultimately bombing them. And so the conflation of these things is very misleading and you end up mixing the politics all around in a way that doesn't reflect the actual struggles that animated the period. Do you feel that Fred Turner's book does a good job of kind of separating those out and kind of making two particular categories that is this more kind of political left wing strain and this other strain that's more like, I don't know, focused on the individual and having these

psychedelic experiences and that being like the route to change in like a very naive, but kind of self-serving way. Yeah. The Turner book is much more serious than Markov's other one. And even though I don't, I don't like its use of brand as the central figure. And I think the, like the focus is kind of blinkered because you really have to look at the war in Asia and the long span of the war in Asia to make sense of those periods and the historical tasks that these people were embedded in. Because when you talk about like people taking LSD or whatever, they weren't taking LSD to do communism or whatever. They were taking LSD as part of an experiment by U.S. intelligence authorities, especially at the beginning. So when Brand is

introduced to these drugs or when Brand pays to get himself introduced to these drugs, because again, Brand usually finds himself at the front of the line because he could pay to be there. And LSD is a perfect example. He's a soldier in this broader war against the communist world. And part of the one front of that war was the experimentation with these substances. So Stuart Brand was still a soldier in that way. You know, when you're still when you're with the counterculture, you're still part of the U.S. military effort against communism and against the Soviet Union, which we see over the course of his career, how many times he becomes useful in one way or the other. No, I think it's a really good point. And, you know, just to note for for listeners as well, Brian pays $500 for his kind of first experience

with LSD. And that would be the equivalent of about $5,000 today if you adjust for inflation, just a little bit under that. So, you know, that's quite a bit of money to pay just to like take a drug and have this experience with the military to then go on and kind of preach it to everyone. One of the moments in that kind of period before he starts up the catalog, or at least I believe it's before he starts the catalog, is the Trips Festival and his involvement with that. And one of the things that stands out based on what you have been describing

is how Bran comes from this, you know, family with money. And his father in particular is concerned about the direction that he's taking, that it's not like a serious direction, that he's very kind of lost and doesn't seem to have an idea of like what he's doing with his life. And then he uses the trip festival in this letter to his father, as I remember, to show like, look, you know, the hippie movement can be a capitalist enterprise. I can make money off of it. You know, what do you make of how he at least positions that or rather thinks about it? Yeah, I think it's important to think about his family money not as something that he has to fall back on, right? Because I don't think it plays that role throughout the story.

It's not like, oh, I screwed up or I need some help or whatever. It's that he's a steward of this intergenerational fortune. That's his job, right? And it's understood, it seems in the letter with his father, that he's never expected to have a job because he has access to this fortune and that he'll always be, in terms of his living expenses, be living off family money. But then in a larger sense, that it's his job to be a steward of this fortune, to invest it well and to put it into things.

And so when he tells his dad about, you know, you worry that I'm out here becoming a communist, basically, don't worry. I'm not a communist. This isn't commie stuff. In fact, this trips festival, which was basically like a drug concert. So they'd be doing these, uh, the acid tests. You'd come to the acid test and they'd give you acid and trip out. And that's how they were spreading acid. And when the state started to crack down on the distribution of acid, the trips festival came in where instead of giving people acid, people would be expected to bring their own drugs and you'd set up sort of the trippy experience for them to enjoy being high on, which included at the beginning,

a Grateful Dead performance, which was really the, ended up being very successful. And so you're not even, you don't even have the cost of your drugs, but people are paying for it like it's a drug experience. So you can actually make a fair bit of money. And it was Bill Graham, who, if you're from the West Coast, the name is still stands for concerts and events. Bill Graham got his start doing this promo for the Trips Festival. And so Stuart could go to his dad and say, you know, you're worried about what kind of

capitalist I'm becoming, that I'm out here with these smelly hippie people. But actually, a lot of them are much squarer than you'd think. And this is a growth industry. This is California mid-century. Stuff's booming out here. You can really make some money. And he was. And so he was showing the connection between the counterculture and capitalist logic that was maintained throughout the whole time, even if we think of hippies and the back to the land types as sort of anti-capitalist or something along those lines, the money behind it was, was still capital. Yeah, I think it's a really good point. And I think you can in particular

see it, you know, as Brian kind of gets himself into, I guess, more corporate life after these kind of counterculture experiments, these kind of hippie movement experiments, and how this larger movement, many of them also move into kind of corporate America afterward. You know, obviously, the Whole Earth Catalog is, I guess, a defining moment in Stuart Brand's life. I think that's fair to say. One of the things that stood out to me in the book was how Stuart Brand kept asserting

that the catalog itself didn't have politics. But then I can't remember if it was someone close to him or if it was Markoff himself who just notes that like, it wasn't so much that the catalogue didn't have politics, but rather that the catalogue had Stuart Brand's politics. And so, you know, he just kind of ignored that fact about it. Can you describe what the catalog was, what the significance of it was, and what kind of ideas it was trying to push onto its readers, I guess? Yeah, so the catalog is a catalog. So it's a big, large format book, basically, that had pages on pages of mostly products. it had other you know tips cool things to know or whatever and lots of items that would be appealing to the back to the land types

about you know building a tent or you guys had a tie rope or although like cool, innovative tools that would allow them to be in their back to the land communes away from, you know, mainstream American life, you know, through these products that they were buying in a, in a catalog. So it's kind of funny in that it seems incongruous, but it wasn't, you know, back to the land hippies were not involved in the global communist project or whatever. They were a certain type of American consumer. And these were the things that might appeal to them. But really, if you look through it, the core of the catalog are these cool 60s books about new ideas and because it was a catalog not a creative endeavor or whatever whatever kind they felt able to appropriate all these really cool images from all these crazy wacky 60s books about all the new ways that people were looking at the world whether it's buckminster fuller's

domes or whatever else, and include the coolest diagrams from all of these books in their catalog. And so the catalog didn't actually sell that much stuff. And it was itself kind of expensive. It was $5, which at a time when paperbacks cost 50 cents, was a real amount of money. So it was like an expensive hardcover book now that took pictures of all these other books. And you got to sort of gloss the culture, the counterculture as it existed. And it presented this, by implication, this figure of the kind of person who would be

buying these things and reading the whole earth catalog. And a lot of people built their sort of identities around that during the period, even though, like I said, they didn't sell that much stuff out of it. That's so interesting. And, you know, when he is, is making the catalog, when this thing is taking off, like, I'd like you to talk a little bit about, you know, how it becomes this kind of, I guess, phenomenon. That's how it's kind of presented and how, you know, people like Steve Jobs and all these folks in tech end up becoming like associated with or inspired by the catalog, end up referencing it as something that inspired them. So how does it kind of go from being this catalog that's selling stuff to like the back to the lab movement to this broader thing that all of a sudden gets this like big readership, gets a lot of attention within the American media because Stuart Brand ends up going on, you know, talk shows and things like that to talk about it.

So how does it kind of take on this life beyond the back to the land movement? Well, it does become this bestseller because though not many people become actual back toto-the-land hippies, a lot of people are interested in that vibe, you know? And paying $5 to get this document that had the whole thing in it where you can go page to page to page to page, imagine yourself as part of this movement, that's a much bigger consumer base than the actual people who went back to the land, who if you only sold it to them, they wouldn't have that many copies to sell. And part of that group that was intrigued by this lifestyle, even though most of them were not living it at all, in fact, were living as close to the opposite in some ways, was this nascent tech industry in the Bay Area. And so the whole truck store gets set up in Palo Alto or in Menlo Park next to SRI and has this really, you know, Stuart's been part of this

milieu since the Trips Festival and all this history. And so they're following along, right? And so this provides a cultural component for this early tech industry. And they really embrace it as, you know, we're the whole earth people. Of course, they're also working for the CIA while they're embracing this whole earth agenda. And part of the reason they're able to do that is because they're not incompatible, right? Unlike most of the work that's coming out that's going to say, you know, victory to Ho Chi Minh, that's not what the Whole Earth Catalog's agenda is at all. The politics, as you said, are implicitly Ayn Randian, basically, right? Implicitly American consumerist individualist. And so the people who are engaged in this longer term American project,

but who still have a sense of themselves as outsiders to the American mainstream, can glom onto this and say, yeah, we identify with the whole earth people. We're like the back to the land people, even if what we're ultimately designing is, you know, missile systems. It allows these people who are within the system to make themselves feel as though they are outside it and, you know, not trying to support it and further it in a really harmful way, I guess. You know, when I think about the catalog, I think that there are many things that, you know, we could point to or that we could talk about in relation to it. But I think that there are two in particular that really kind of stand out and that I'd like to discuss with you. And that's first of all, how, you know, the catalog takes on this life of its own, it becomes this, you know, bestseller, as you say, it's really important to Stuart Brand's kind of life. And then as I was reading

through Markov's book, it felt to me as though, you know, he was kind of just jumping from thing to thing afterward. And it was always kind of the catalog, he was kind of just jumping from thing to thing afterward. And it was always kind of the catalog that he went back to and tried to use to like legitimize something else that he was doing. But like he was always constantly relying on that to try to build new projects on it because he couldn't get anything else going that wasn't related to the catalog yeah it'd be a little harsh to call him a one-hit wonder because the the co-evolutionary quarterly you know had its own following and the trips festival something he was you know involved in but that really was the the thing that made his name and it's kind of funny that it's not like he wrote the thing, right? It's not like he sat down and did the whole thing. He paid people $10 a piece for their reviews.

And then his wife at the time, Lois Jennings, did, it seems like, a lot of the heavy lifting for actually putting it together. But Stuart Brand was the whole earth guy, right? He was the guy who's, and we didn't talk about the whole earth meme in the first place, who put forward this whole earth brand. And it's funny that his name is brand, right? But convenient for a family that was part of an ad company or whatever his father was. Yeah, right. The brand family.

But he really does turn this picture of the whole earth into his brand in a really clever way. Got to give the guy credit for that, even if I think it's ultimately pretty stupid. And not only stupid, but politically misleading, right? So to see the earth as one whole thing, to see us as one whole species or whatever, is obfuscating at a time when you've got a bifurcating world conflict between capitalist and anti-capitalist nations and powers in the world. So his viewpoint was very useful for the American project, which is why I think it's had this kind of staying power. That makes a lot of sense because, you know, the other thing that I wanted to get to in relation to the catalog is because it becomes this like huge thing that,

you know, so many people end up reading that becomes influential, even the people beyond the back to the land movement is that it also allows him to kind of form these relationships with really powerful people, people who would generally be outside of like, you know, they're not back to the land types, they would be even promoting a very different politics. What are some of the, I guess, important relationships that Brand forms through that and that come to define his life after the catalog? So the co-evolution catalog or the co-evolution quarterly is one that gets glossed over in most of the histories, earth project that is itself leads to sort of the wired magazine kind of world. And so a lot of the people who work with brand on the co-evol end up

filling the early ranks of the Silicon Valley storytellers. Right. And so he becomes this godfather to the people who are telling the stories of Silicon Valley because he sets up this infrastructure. And the book makes clear that he doesn't really run these things or certainly doesn't do a very good job running these things. And that like multiple times, the people who are managing his projects, whether it's whole earth or co-evolve have to call him up wherever he is in the world doing whatever he's doing and say

look man uh we can't really afford to keep cutting you these checks and he always says oh it doesn't matter you know i don't need money but fine whatever and so partly that's that ability to not need money that helps him maintain this role as this godfather character, as opposed to struggling with people over managerial control over these projects. So he builds up a lot of connections there. And I do encourage people to check out the Turner book to like, see how he is playing this role within this network. But it's also important to think about the institutions themselves that are involved. And he ends up forming this global business network, the GBN,

which is a corporate consultancy. And that's who ultimately has the biggest use for his kind of outside-of-the-box thinking. It's not useful for people who are rebelling against the system. It's useful for people who are trying to update the system to accommodate new realities. I think it's a really important thing to outline, right? And it brings to mind something that Markov writes in the book about Brian's kind of trajectory or his development over, you know, the number of years that he's kind of, you know, active, you know, the number of years that he's kind of, you know, active, you know, an influential figure, so to speak, where, you know, he kind of says that Turner and these other people who kind of talk about brand or write about brand have it

wrong in that he was this kind of libertarian figure that was that was interested in these personal technologies that had this kind of impact on how we think about technology in, you know, the particular kind of, I guess, ideology that emerges from Silicon Valley, as Turner would describe it. But Markoff says that that part of the story misses how Brand's thinking evolves in that he goes from this kind of more libertarian phase to having a greater relationship with the state, embracing these kind of larger scale technologies in the sense that, you know, he pisses off some of the people who previously supported him when he embraces Gerard O'Neill and his ideas for these big, like, space colonies that Jeff Bezos now embraces and is trying to supposedly realize, and also, you know, his embrace of

things like nuclear energy. I guess, what do you make of how Markov describes that and Brand's trajectory? Like, do you think that Markov describes it properly? And what should we make of that? Yeah, I mean, so Markov is doing an approved history, and you can sort of feel Brockman looking over his shoulder as he writes it, which makes it kind of funny because every once in a while he'll accidentally say something true, true on a deeper level than he's supposed to be writing, I guess. And so I don't think he does a bad job necessarily

describing this turn. There aren't maybe enough accounts of the people around him who have a better perspective of what that shift looked like. But it was a general social shift, too, among the ruling class, right? Where you have in the Reagan era, they come in and say, all right, we're going to use the coercive power for the state. We're going to do the Star Wars missile program. We're going to spend tons of money doing defense. And at the same time, we're going to undermine the regulatory functions of the state. But the right was certainly eager to get their hands on state power and be the guys with the missile button. So his transition was in keeping with his milieu, right? It wasn't a strange path for him to get on. Although at the same time, you look at something like nuclear energy, where he used to be like, you know, nuclear waste is bad. We need to go back to the land.

Now saying, actually, nuclear waste is good for the land. He's not the only one to make that shift, but it's definitely a convenient shift for some people. Yeah, I think that describes it really well, especially when you look at, you know, the other kind of people or whatnot that he gets involved with, like by making this turn to business consultants through the Global Business Network. I guess it's pre-Global Business Network. He works with Shell as a consultant. And then I think that's like the inspiration for the GBN. But it kind of stands out to me, at least in reading the book, that one of the things that happens after the catalog is all of a sudden he forms these relationships with kind of these wealthy people, these influential people. And they, in some cases, they'll bankroll

his projects like Jeff Bezos and the Long Now Foundation or whatever it's called. Or, you know, he'll get in with Negroponte at the MIT Media Lab and then end up writing about that and kind of legitimizing it because he has this particular role or position or what have you. Like, I guess, what do you make of the role that he plays in that position and in those years after the catalog when certainly he has these projects, as you're describing, but he's not always close to them and always looking for the next thing to get involved with that is going to be kind of of interest to him? He's been a pretty low percentage shooter later in life in terms of the projects that he's backed. Even nuclear power, which he's put a lot of weight behind, has not been a huge growth stock

in terms of the alternate fuels. But stuff like the woolly mammoth resurrection or the giant clock or whatever, just increasingly ridiculous, still doing his sort of whole earth act, excited about the future, always an optimist. And they get sort of morally self-righteous about, you know, oh, there'll always be naysayers, but we're always got to be optimistic about the future or whatever. And it's sort of gone on for too long to the point where the outsiders that he backed are now not just the insiders, but really the people who are responsible for the state of the world. And that's a tough situation to be taking responsibility for considering the state of the world. And so this sort of celebratory lap that I don't know how

long he'd been planning, right, or the people around him had been planning, but the book and the movie and whatever else they had planned for this year is really strange. It's really incongruous to watch, right? Because you have people celebrating themselves, celebrating this life set of accomplishments when the outcome has been disaster, like real total disaster. And so you have someone like Jeff Bezos being like, oh yeah, Stuart Brand was the one who taught me that you always got to stay weird or whatever. And it's like, dude, you exploit labor all over the world. You're like the face of labor exploitation. You're Darth Vader. And so pointing to this guy and being like, yeah, that's my ideological influences or my court gesture

also, which I think he's sort of the figure that he plays is discrediting. And it's discrediting in a lot of people's eyes, not in their own, of course. And, but so I think the reaction to my review and maybe in the future, I know Ben Kunkel at New Republic also had a pretty harsh read of the book. They don't have a great perspective on what they've accomplished in their lives. And I feel a little bit bad being one of the ones to sort of show it back to them. But you got to give an honest, objective analysis of the situation. And that sucks. No, absolutely.

I was interested. You noted there that the New Republic had a review out recently as well. I believe the book came out in March. Am I right? Yeah, the end of March. Yet these two critical reviews kind of fell right around the same time. I filed mine ages ago, so I don't know about Ben, but mine was just the vagaries of the publishing industry.

Ben and I would both describe ourselves as Marxists, I would imagine, and that's really contrary to the read that Brand had. And so if you told him 30 years ago that your accomplishments would be critiqued, you know, the people who would be evaluating your life in American publications are going to be Marxists. I think you've been surprised, right? So it does not surprise me that he's going to get a couple of negative reviews. And I think he'll probably see more, right? It sounds like the movie's not very good. And it sounds like there's going to be more reckoning with the forces that he's aligned himself with. So in some ways, as I write in the review, he lived too long, right? That he could have been the paragon of a different kind

of capitalism. But now when you're aligned with Jeff Bezos, you're just capitalism. Yeah, no, that's a good way to put it. And yeah, I would say that the documentary definitely shows like the, I don't know, naivete, like just how fundamentally wrong his kind of perception on technology and how technology can and how he kind of publishes this manifesto that is based around these kind of tech solutions to climate change and how capitalism is going to save us from climate change. And like, if we look back at the past few decades and look how much of a terrible failure that has been, it really doesn't say very much good about that perspective at the same time as people like Bill Gates, for example, continue to tell us that this is the route that is going to save us from climate change. And there's really no evidence of that. Yeah. I've got another review coming out sometime soon of Doug Rushkoff's new book. And Rushkoff is

someone who'd been an associate of Brand's who thanks him on a book that he wrote a decade ago called Present Shock. But the new book, Rushkoff, is very directly critical of Brand. I was kind of surprised to see it, where he's singling out Brand as an example of this tech solutionist ideology that comes in for a really pretty harsh treatment by Rushkoff, someone who could have been described as maybe more on the tech solutionist side in the past, but who's looked at the situation and looked at the tendencies and said, this is a real bad way of looking at the world. Yeah. Someone who can really see how it's actually evolved and change how they think about it

in response to that, I guess. And then it's become so dramatic that he's willing to point at someone like Brand, someone he knows personally and say, you fucked up. Yeah. So, you know, one of the pieces that is really important as the book kind of comes to a close is the long now foundation, right? This idea of building this 10,000 year clock and like a library associated with it that would promote long-term thinking. So they say, and I feel like this kind of obsession with long-term thinking goes back. I remember seeing it mentioned like early on in

the biography as well with some of the things that Brand was interested in or some of the topics that were kind of central to his thinking in particular periods. And it seems like the way that Markov describes it, like as kind of the internet revolution is happening, as these things are changing with, you know, these new tech companies and what have you, that brand is not so much focused on that, but is focused on trying to get this foundation started and these other like wacky ideas, like bringing back the woolly mammoth. You know, I think one of the things that I'm concerned about in thinking about that is how this supposed interest in long-term thinking to me doesn't seem actually interested in thinking about what is going to solve these problems for the long term. example, that are against the interests of humanity today because they might make some difference in the future if you have this like completely imagined idea of what future humanity

might be. And so, you know, what do you make of how Brian thinks about this and his interest in projects like Long Now? Yeah, at certain ends, it becomes really dangerous, right? Where you say, oh, well, you know, we can lose 90% of humanity because in a thousand years, that 10% of humanity will create a whole new world. And so from long-term perspective thinking, nothing really matters that much, which I think is sort of tied to where Brand is coming from and his ideology since the beginning, right? And you think about the whole earth picture as this encapsulation of how he thinks about things, which is as this removed holistic conception

that is separate from politics, separate from the divisions and disputes that characterize our world as it exists today, and instead much more philosophical, and then tries to make a life out of that. And that's very appealing to the people who are on the wrong sides of the conflicts that actually characterize our world, because it reconfigures them such that those things don't matter. You know, if you're Jeff Bezos and you're fighting against unions and making lives worse for the people who work for you, in terms of the struggle between capital and labor

that describes our world today, you're not just a bad guy, but like the bad guy. But if you think about the history of humanity among the stars, right? Like maybe you're the guy who makes a spaceship that gets us to the colony that contacts some other world or whatever. And then no one cares about the labor conditions in your distribution warehouse back in 2020 2020 because you're the founding father of intergalactic civilization or whatever. Now that's a ridiculous fantasy, like a very ridiculous fantasy, but you can see how people can orient their thinking about themselves in that way. And if someone is coming to you and saying, Hey, Jeff, other people say you're a real scumbag. But when I think about history, here's how I think about you.

You're actually super great guy. Of course, you want to, you know, give them millions of dollars to set up their giant clock. Sure. Why not? Yeah, it makes perfect sense. You know, it also makes me think of Elon Musk, like impregnating his executive or whatever and saying, oh, yeah, you know, I'm just solving global underpopulation or low birth rates or whatever. It's like, what are you talking about, dude? But I want to bring this to a close. You know, we've talked about many aspects of Brian's life, what kind of impact he has actually had, the politics that he has actually pushed through the course of the various projects

that he has taken on and the people that he's been involved with the course of the various projects that he has taken on and the people that he's been involved with. So I want to end with kind of a broader question, right? Do you think that when we think about the history of Silicon Valley, that Brand's role is overstated? And how should we actually think about the impact that he has had on the tech industry, but I guess more broadly on the world that we now live in. Yeah, I think it's vastly overstated. And I think there are some people that you should look up instead, right? And there are places that you should be looking instead. I think Myron Stolleroff, one of the first employees at Ampex, which is one of the first Silicon Valley companies

that goes off and becomes this LSD evangelist is a much more interesting figure than Stuart Brand in terms of his role connecting the like tech and the countercultural worlds. And like Ampex is this very, very interesting institution that's, you know, founded by this white Russian fighter pilot after he escapes from the Bolshevik revolution. So like there's like a lot much more interesting things that are happening at the time than I think Stuart Brand and the counterculture's idea of itself. I think part of the problem was these people were not that smart and so they didn't have a very sophisticated understanding of like what was going on in the world. And so we've adopted their sort of unsophisticated understanding of what was going on in the world. And so we've adopted

their sort of unsophisticated understanding of what was actually happening in the world. And I hope that that changes over time. And I think as it does, figures like Stuart Brand will be deprioritized in the telling of history. And that's certainly how I found myself doing it, where I had drafts of my Palo Alto book where Stuart Brand is playing some role and he's a character in the story. And then as I went through and edited it, realizing that, like, oh, I felt compelled to do that because the other histories of Silicon was actually going on, he's not very important, right? It's an idea of themselves. And so the failure of this book project of the whole Earth story maybe puts a different cap on Stewart Brand than they thought they were doing. But now maybe we can start to move on to a more sophisticated understanding of the period.

Yeah, it gives you a different story if you want to look for it. I'm sure for people like Jeff Bezos, who might read through it, they'll be like, oh, yeah, this guy's awesome. This is so great. But it's fascinating to hear you describe it that way. And certainly, you know, I'm looking forward to your history, Palo Alto, reading that to see how, you know, you talk about this period. And obviously, I'll be looking forward to having you back on the show to talk about it. But thanks so much for spending the time with us today to chat about Stuart Brand. Absolutely.

Thanks for having me, Paris. Malcolm Harris is the author of Kids These Days, Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit and the new book Palo Alto that comes out next year. You can follow him on Twitter at at Big Mean Internet. You can follow me at at Paris Marks, and you can follow the show at at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is produced by Eric Wickham and is part of the Harbinger Media Network.

If you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.