Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

Sorry, typo: "points heavily"
  

    
John, could you describe the path that led from Stewart's insight
about the whole earth perspective to the founding and first
publication of the Whole Earth Catalog?
  

    
(Re Stewart and transhumanism - author Jules Evans considers that
potential connection here:
<https://julesevans.medium.com/stewart-brand-and-the-biotech-boom-5404d69f4735>)
  

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on <25> What struck me most when I began my project at the end of
2016 was that there were several dozen books that all seized upon
various aspects of Stewart's biography to make one point or another.
In reaction to that I set out to try to tell his story, doing the
best that I could not to put him into one ideological box or the
other. Stewart has been adopted by such a wide range of often
conflicting camps: environmentalist, hippie, bohemian, technological
utopian, libertarian. I’ve pointed out previously that he has
changed his mind on things over time. He described himself as a
“conservative” in our conversations, but acknowledged that he was
unable to read the Wall Street Journal because he disliked its
editorial page so thoroughly.. So where would I place him? Probably
somewhere close to Jerry Brown’s worldview. Where do you place Brown
on the political spectrum. I just don’t think Revive & Restore
speaks to Transhumanist values — it is focused on revitalizing
entire ecologies.
  

    
On <23> and the idea of a podcast. The filmmakers got there first
and used their outtakes to do an eight part podcast on Stewart. The
recordings are pretty good -- my intent was not studio quality. I
began by paying to have them transcribed and then after a year or so
speech transcription became good enough that I relied on Otter.ai
for the remaining transcriptions. My plan is to give them to an
Archive, most likely Stanford, since that's where his papers are and
they have expressed interest.
  

    
Peter's point <24> about planetary consciousness is actually one
that has been disappointing to me. That clearly is something that
Stewart helped define and I had hoped might resonate with a younger
audience that isn't familiar with him. What I found is that for
whatever reason -- I have a number of untested theories -- on a
national level there wasn't a great deal of interest. Around the
globe it does seem that nationalism is resurgent -- at just the
wrong time.
  

    
In response to Howard's <27> question about the path to the Catalog:
I’m not sure that I would argue there is a direct path. Perhaps a
very large amount of serendipity. Stewart’s North Beach rooftop acid
trip in the wake of the Trips Festival is of course the stuff of
legend. He was on the roof in the thrall of a half tab of acid,
thinking about his father’s battle with cancer when he had an
insight about the value of seeing the Whole Earth in the spring of
1966. A year later he settled on the Midpeninsula and at the urging
of Dick Raymond, who had founded the Portola Institute — an
educational instigator — he spent six months attempting to organize
an educational technology fair at the San Mateo County Fairgrounds
(think Makers’ Faire 4 decades too early…). That turned out to be a
significant failure because he was unable to organize funding and he
quarreled with his co-organizers (New Lefties heavily influenced by
the Maoist phase of the American student left). At that point he was
wondering what to do next and he came up with the idea of a Truck
Store to sell tools and information to his friends who had gone back
to the land. At one point Raymond asked him what he was going to
name his new project and he responded with the Whole Earth moniker.
It was brilliant but it was also something of an afterthought.
Several trips in the summer of 1968 confirmed to him that his
commune-based friends had no money and so he pivoted to focus on the
Catalog. The deeper point is that Stewart has always had a
remarkable number of “notions” — most die quickly, but every once in
awhile there has been a great one.
  

    
How did the Black Panther edition of Coevolution Quarterly come
about -- especially given Stewart's distaste for the New Left.
  

    
(Hosts have hidden a number of posts that were about process issues
and unrelated to the conversation.)
  

    
<38> Brand had made an effort to cultivate Black interest as early
as the Whole Earth Epilogue where he included pieces by several
Black scholars recommending books on Black issues. He had met Huey
Newton through Richard Baker, but Newton had fled to Cuba when it
came time for the Panthers to guest edit an issue and so the task
fell to Elaine Brown who was leading the Party at that time. I seem
to remember that Stewart used the time travel, but I can’t find that
in my notes at the moment.
  

    
I have to agree that How Buildings Learn is maybe his best book.
What is the through line to writing a book on maintenance now? 
  

    
I loved How Buildings Learn. 
  

    
The remarkable thing that leaped out to me in reading the book was
Brand's ability to arrive on the spot where the party was going to
be, and to leave just when the money guys were coming into the room.
I've listened to part of your conversation on The Long Now podcast
and recall he said that it was the trickles of money from his mother
that enabled him to be so carefree, but I'm wondering what you saw
in his character that made him so unusual in both anticipating the
next big thing (without wanting to do that) and walking away from
the money that he could have made.
  

    
Yes, I had the very same thought, about his ability to show up at the party,
but leave before it got boring.
  

    

when i was younger and hipper and usually ahead of the curve, i was accused
of being a flake, a "magpie", for acting in that same way. with Stewart was
it a virtue?
  

    
<43> the spookiest example of Stewart being at the right place at
the right time was whatever “spidey sense” led him to decide to
settle in Menlo Park in the middle of 1967. He could never give me a
good explanation, but if you ever wanted to be at the right place at
the right time, it was to be present while Silicon Valley was being
formed. (Brand moved to Sausalito the year after Silicon Valley was
named, but everything was playing out during the four or five years
that he created the Whole Earth Catalog. I don’t think I can give
you a single pat answer. He was early to psychedelics while in the
Army, but his decision to drive to Esalen for a discussion of LSD
which led him to the International Foundation of Advanced Study was
more or less happenstance. Organizing the Trips festival was also a
bit of serendipity. One of the other Merry Pranksters showed up at
Stewart’s apartment with idea, and he took it upon himself to do the
organizing, because he knew the Pranksters weren’t good at logistics
and planning. He was fortunate to run into people like Buckminster
Fuller, Douglas Engelbart, Paul Ehrlich (his thesis advisor at
Stanford) and Gregory Bateson. It was a happenstance visit to the
Stanford computing center in 1962 that introduced him to SpaceWar
where he watched to young hackers having “an out of body
experience.” I would argue that that was the first inkling of the
arrival of cyberspace. He would write about it a decade later in
Rolling Stone. To the point on “trickles” of money, during a crucial
decade after he got out of the Army his family supported him in an
“as needed” way. He was completely curious and he got bored easily,
so he would move on from each of his notions quickly. At a couple of
points he almost got a “day job,” but avoiding that was a key.
  

    
A note about the Spacewar piece Stewart wrote, included in the small
book "Two Cybernetic Frontiers." I once suggested to Stewart that
the book should be digitized and put online, and he thought that was
a good idea. I see that John Gilmore added a digital copy to the
Internet Archive, downloadable in multiple formats, for those
interested in reading it:
<https://archive.org/details/iicyberneticfront00bran>
  

    
In 1971 I tagged along with some members of the Black Mountain
commune to the end-of-the-WEC party at the Palace of Fine Arts.
Stewart stood on stage there and said that he had $15,000 of seed
money to start the project that would succeed the Whole Earth
Catalog, and threw the floor open to suggestions of what to do with
it. This struck me as unrealistic because the amount of money was so
small and there was no chance that people would converge on a single
use for it. The audience proved me right on the second point by
bringing up one idea after another until the meeting ended in
exhaustion. My friend Jan Sutter told me years later that after the
discussion died down he took the money home for safekeeping.

Did Stewart say why he did this? Was it to give the Whole Earth
contributors to choose the next big project collectively and
democratically? Why would anyone expect that to work in a group that
was built as an exercise in eclecticism? Was that seed money used in
a memorable way?
  

    
The recent biography of Buckminster Fuller makes him out to be
largely a self-aggrandizing fraud. On the other hand, he got a lot
of people thinking. Has Stewart's thinking on Fuller changed over
time?
  

    
<48> Stewart didn’t take the money home from the Demise Party. It
was actually a little over $20,000 and his idea was that an
experiment in consensus planning might yield an interesting outcome.
Afterwards he changed his mind and decided it had been a terrible
idea.  It began after midnight and went on for the rest of the
night.  I would argue it is a wonderful example of how unplanned
serendipitous outcomes occasionally perturb the world in interesting
ways. 

During the evening people began making various proposals. At one
point someone said we should give the money to the Indians and
Stewart’s wife at the time, Lois Jennings, who was half Ottawa
Indian, ran to the microphone and said she didn’t want the money.
During the evening a young draft resistor, Fred Moore, who was
living in a garage and working as a peace activist in Menlo Park,
went to the microphone and burned one of the two dollars he had to
his name in an effort to make the point that this was not about
money, that money divided people from each other. At another point
the remaining group took a vote on what to do with the money and it
came out a tie.  At some point in the evening some one went to the
microphone and began handing out bundles to the audience. Stewart
rushed to the microphone and said that it would be a better
experiment to work as a group. Most of the money, but not all, came
back to the stage.  

At the end of the evening the group gave up and the money was give
to Moore, who was the guy who didn’t believe in money. As he left
that night Stewart remembered thinking, “maybe he will write a
postcard from Mexico…”

But it didn’t work out that way. It was like Frodo and the ring. The
burden was off Stewart and Moore ended up being forced into becoming
a Movement banker. He had taken the money home and buried it in his
backyard in a coffee can. Some activists learned of this and forced
him to loan the money with various results. 

I think the key point is that it indirectly helped Moore, who was an
electronics hobbyist and was a member of a young generation who were
fascinated by computers, to become one of the cofounders of the
Homebrew Computer Club, which led directly to the emergence of the
personal computer industry.  Moore had wanted to build his own
computer to support his organizing activities. He believed that if
he had a small personal database he would be more effective in his
outreach. The money he received at the Demise Party played a role in
sending him down that path.