Stewart Brand

Overview

Stewart Brand is a writer, editor, and institution-builder whose career is essentially a continuous argument that individuals can build tools — physical, digital, institutional — that change what is possible for everyone. He edited the Whole Earth Catalog (1968–1972), co-founded the WELL (one of the first online communities, 1985), co-founded the Long Now Foundation (1996), and wrote How Buildings Learn (1994), which this wiki heartily endorses.^[1]

Key Ideas

• "We are as gods and we might as well get good at it." The Whole Earth Catalog's opening statement. A claim of responsibility, not hubris.
• Access to tools. The Catalog's subtitle. The premise: give people access to good tools and they will build things you can't imagine.
• Buildings learn. Good buildings are modified constantly by their occupants over decades. A building that resists modification is a building that dies early.
• Pace layering. Civilization consists of layers (fashion, commerce, infrastructure, governance, culture, nature) that change at different speeds. Problems arise when a fast layer tries to dominate a slow one. Also applies to codebases.
• The Long Now. Most human decisions treat "now" as a week or a quarter. Try extending it. Build things to last 10,000 years, or at least, to not be actively hostile to 10,000 years.

Connection to the Builder Thesis

Brand is the patron saint of builders who refuse to specialize. He edited a catalog of tools, helped midwife the online world, wrote about architecture, ran a nonprofit, and never stopped making things. The Whole Earth ethos — that the category of "tools" includes software, hammers, books, and ideas — is the wiki's thesis before it was articulated. See Building Across Mediums.

How Buildings Learn in particular is required reading for anyone interested in the construction-to-software bridge. The concept of "pace layering" is one of the most portable ideas in the whole canon.

Notable Quote

"Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine — too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away." — Stewart Brand, 1984

References