Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Wow.
  

    
<49>. His big shift on Fuller happened very early on. Of course
Fuller’s view that the way you change the world was to give someone
a tool and then teach them how to use it, and that was foundational
for the Whole Earth Catalog. You can see Fuller’s worldview in the
opening passages and in the structure of the catalog.  By the time
he shut down the Catalog in 1971, Brand had shifted his outlook from
Fuller’s engineering-centric worldview to Gregory Bateson’s
ecological outlook. Reading Steps Toward and Ecology of Mind while
on a visit to the East Coast shook Brand out of his originally
orientation and would become the framing principle underlying the
Coevolution Quarterly which he created upon settling in Sausalito.
  

    
A free-for-all discussion among untrained people is the worst
possible venue to attempt consensus decision-making.
  

    
Did Stewart get into detail not covered in the book about how
psychedelics influenced his worldview?
  

    
There's a problem with the short link that we shared earlier in the
conversation. Here's a new short link for social media (etc.)
shares: <https://tinyurl.com/Brand-Whole-Earth>
  

    
I should note that the earlier version of the full link also had a
problem, this is the correct link to the first page of this
discussion:
<https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/524/John-Markoff-Whole-Earth-T
he-Man-page01.html>. 
  

    
<54>  Stewart in the early sixties and Stewart today on the value of
psychedelics are two very different creatures. I think he has said
publicly and frequently that by 1969 he had gotten everything out of
LSD possible and walked away (once again just as many of us were
arriving.  That said, there was a period when he was a true
believer. His letters to his father defending psychedelic use are
very clear and of the “I won’t back down” mindset. Later on his
dependence on nitrous oxide contributed significantly to the deep
depression he feel into as the Whole Earth Catalog workload became
unbearable and his marriage to Lois Jennings began to disintegrate.
He decided to get married to Jennings on the night of the acid test
graduation. He decided it was time to get on with the rest of his
life. Later when he showed Kesey Engelbart’s NLS system at SRI,
Kesey’s reaction was that computing would be.the “next thing” after
acid. Stewart showcased that thought in the opening paragraph of his
SpaceWar! Rolling Stone article. Today I think he has a bit of an
“eye roll” attitude to the significance we all attached to the
insights we achieved with 
  

    
Psychedelics….
  

    
I do think that Magdalen's point in 45 is an interesting one. One man's
moving ahead of the curve is one woman's being a flake or magpie. It's also
the case that beginnings are often seen/often feel like what's supposed to
be interesting, where actually sticking with things for years and years can
be fascinating (or a nightmare.)

I definitely get the "eyeroll" over psychedelic insight, but it is
interesting the move to legalize and therapize it these days.
  

    
Evy slipped in…

First: Howard wow! I had no idea about that motivation for the MWEC.
Excellent.

Second: John I want to ask about your perception (if any) of Stewart
as a contrarian. I had two experiences with him personally in this
regard that have stayed with me. One was at a meeting at Colossal
Pictures where the future of the company was being discussed and
Stewart said more or less “one option is to close it down” and the
other was in (I think) 1994 or 95 when I had started being a
freelance Internet consultant teaching people about the Internet and
a San Francisco political, Republican, firm wanted to engage me. I
abhorred their politics but was torn about what to do. The
California democrats had told me they were not interested. I called
Stewart for advice knowing of his history with the Brown
administration. Stewart told me to do the gig because the only way
the dems would learn was by losing. I couldn’t do it.
Bit I’ve always thought of Stewart as the guy who would calmly pitch
the antithesis.

What’s your experience or view on this?
  

    
Evy and Magdalen, responding to “One man's moving ahead of the curve
is one woman's being a flake or magpie,” one thing that hit me
between the eyes when I read the book was, Brand seemed to move in a
world composed entirely of men. He had girlfriends and wives, but
men were absolutely where the action was
  

    

interesting. i wonder if Stewart, like the Diggers and Beats and many
others of the era, had a whole lot of women making things happen for him,
behind the scenes. (i highly recommend, for those interested in how culture
happens, reading Jay Babcock's interviews with Diggers from the last decade
or so; he goes out of his way to include women who were enormously
influential, but who weren't necessarily celebrated by the media back in
the day. https://diggersdocs.org/ ) 
  

    

and! that story about the money and Moore -- WILD! i love it.
  

    
Here's what the somewhat over-the-top critique of Brand in The
Nation said about this: 

"Here the reader starts to sense the contours of a black hole at the
center of Markoff’s narrative. Throughout the book, people who meet
Stewart Brand often disappear from his life so fast that it’s as if
they were repelled by an unseen force. He had his own car and
off-campus spot, but aside from a pay-to-play adventure on a summer
trip to Paris, Brand remained sexually frustrated into his 20s,
sending his sole female friend of note a letter calling her a
“bitch” when she declined a romantic relationship. His male
friendships faded about as fast. In a place where similarly
bright-eyed young men of all sorts formed ambitious lifelong
partnerships with their chums, Stewart—who had access to plenty of
resources and could have used the disciplined focus of a contrasting
partner—didn’t...."
  

    
If that's the review I remember from several months ago, that was
less a review than an anti-Brand screed.
  

    
John as long as we’re talking about the article in The Nation, I
wonder if you could comment on it. In my own view, the article was
too harshly written and painted a picture of Brand that we can
charitably call less than flattering. But in reading your own book,
I found myself struggling to find aspects of his earlier life that
made him stand out as someone with a fierce dedication to even a few
quasi-idealistic principles, someone to admire perhaps for
courageously attempting to change the contours of contemporary
thought based on a set of foundational values. Interesting? Yes
very. Inspiring? Perhaps a different story.

One hesitates to call him an opportunist as the article in the
Nation seems to be saying. And the question still remains (as I
alluded to earlier) how can someone with obviously bedrock core
conservative values position themselves to be widely perceived as
someone leading the deep social and cultural transformation of the
60’s and 70’s? 

I certainly, for a time at least, had that perception until in
writing Digital Mythologies, my research turned up countervailing
evidence. In this sense, Brand seems part chameleon, changing his
value systems to suit opportunities and situations. How else to
explain why he ended up working for the CIA and an oil company (an
issue I brought up earlier which I’m still hoping you’ll address at
some point.)

The article in The Nation was also overly harsh because, I think, it
didn’t give Brand full credit for his influence in some very
important cultural transitions, whether we believe those transitions
to be ultimately beneficial or not. He was certainly what I’ll call
a Zeitgeist explorer and by being at the forefront of various
historically important cultural shifts, he perhaps acted as a
catalyst to those shifts. He also seemed to be in those earlier
times a “connector” as Malcolm Gladwell described this role in his
books and articles --- a connector of people and ideas. In this
sense I must disagree with the article in the Nation that he doesn’t
deserve a role as a key figure in a short-term historical context.
Further, Brand was also able to attract talented individuals around
him that made strong, thoughtful, and solid intellectual
contributions to his publications and generally added a certain
cachet of rigor to the loosely defined values of the sixties.(I’ll
include Howard in this number even though he and I disagree strongly
on the subject of transhumanism.)
  

    
Stewart turned me on to so many ideas, people, books, tools and
theories I couldn't begin to count them all. And that was all before
I started working there.  I have been deeply involved in the
'counterculture' since I was a teen in the 60s.  I don't care what
some Nation writer thinks about his influence. I saw that influence
with my own eyes over decades.  It was very large indeed.
  

    
<60> I had originally wanted to title the biography “Floating
Upstream,” taking from a bit of Brand family wisdom:  “if you toss a
Brand in the river, they will float upstream.” So yesterday there is
a strong tradition of contrarianism in his family which he
inherited.  He described learning the lesson in high school that the
way to standout was go where others weren’t, as a why to achieve
without having to directly compete. His break with the environmental
movement is probably the clearest example — his shift on nuclear
power and GMO food led to him being ostracized by friends an allies.
  

    
<62>  On the question of whether Stewart “had a whole lot of women
making things happen for him, behind the scenes….”  Stewart came of
age during the 50s, a decade before my generation. I think it is
worthwhile examining his first marriage to Lois Jennings. At the
50th anniversary of the Whole Earth Catalog Stewart acknowledged
that Lois should be seen as the Whole Earth Catalog co-founder. In
their marriage and at the Truck Store much was played out before the
impact of the feminist movement. They had traditional values and a
traditional division of labor, where Lois would do the housework
(mostly in a small trailer).  At the Truck Store she was clearly the
COO, organizing the workers and keeping the books. It was made
somewhat more palatable because they had a very egalitarian pay
structure — everyone was paid the same amount. In the seventies
Stewart broke free of his marriage in part because of all the
various aspects of the sexual revolution and, knowing that a number
of the women he was involved with were extremely independent and
outspoken feminists, I would have to say it was more complicated.
  

    
<64> Let me break my response to Tom’s questions based on the
Malcolm Harris Nation review into two parts, one about the review
and one about Stewart.

Reviews of “Whole Earth” generally fell into two categories,
reviewers who were writing about the book were virtually uniformly
positive, on the other hand in reviews where the reviewers had
issues with Stewart, I was usually collateral damage. For example,
the New York Times reviewer, a Princeton environmental historian,
couldn’t get Stewart’s about-face on nuclear power out of his craw,
and the book suffered according.

The Malcolm Harris review is an outlier, but I find it fascinating
for reasons that may not be obvious to most of you. Both Harris and
I grew up in Palo Alto and we both attended Palo Alto High School
about four decades apart. Next month Harris is publishing a book
titled “Palo Alto” which purports to be a takedown of global
capitalism. The book is interesting for a number of reasons, one
being that it is the second of these self-loathing compilations (the
first written by actor James Franco who also graduated from Palo
Alto High School at roughly the same time as Harris — is  a
collection of short stories). Both describe a place that I don’t
recognize.

The immense accumulation of wealth that happened beginning in the
1990s in Silicon Valley seems to have bred a generation of
upper-middle class white kids who have both a dark view of the world
and their own homes.

The Harris attack on Brand is poorly written and poorly reasoned,
wrong on many points of fact and without any real understanding of
the era that he writes about.

Harris clearly sees himself as a young Christopher Hitchens, while
lacking the intellectual chops, sense of irony or humor to pull it
off. A bit of interesting history about his ethical background can
be found by anyone who wants to look at his behavior as an Occupy
Wall Street activist.
  

    
<66> To Tom’s broader question about Stewart’s bedrock values and
whether he is a “chameleon” in a moral sense.  In “What the Dormouse
Said” I described Brand as a Zelig. As his biographer I came to feel
that was inappropriate and do think there is an ethical through-line
has been consistent through all of Stewart’s adventures and
mis-adventures.  The most important and most consistent piece of
Brand’s worldview is the Outdoor Life Pledge, taken at age 8: “I
give my pledge as an American to save and faithfully to defend from
waste the natural resources of my country—its soil and minerals, its
forests, waters, and wildlife.”  This is an explicitly activist
articulation of a set of values that have framed much of Stewart’s
life. Is it “bedrock conservatism?” Hardly. Brand would call it
“conservationism” in distinction from “environmentalism.” It is
clearly not John Muir’s view of protecting the natural world. It is
much more akin to Gifford Pinchot’s notions of active management of
the natural world. When I try to pin down where I think Stewart
should fall on the political spectrum, I keep coming back to Jerry
Brown. Where do you place him?
  

    
Thank you, John.

It strikes me that Stewart Brand and Barack Obama both suffer (if
that's the right verb) from the expectations of their followers. We
wanted Obama to be way more progressive than he was, and we want
Steward to be a "visionary". Both deserve our admiration and respect
but don't deserve either our mythologizing or our attacks for not
being the heroes we wanted to make them out to be.
  

    
I think of both Brand and Brown as paleoliberals.
  

    

and that coming from a geologist! very nice, alden.

> At the
> 50th anniversary of the Whole Earth Catalog Stewart acknowledged
> that Lois should be seen as the Whole Earth Catalog co-founder.

as a former Well employee and Whole Earth Review contributor, i was
extremely sad to miss the 50th anniversary. (for those who were miffed at me
for not turning up, after i'd, say, urged you to fly in from the other
countries where you now live? i couldn't explain then but i can now: i had
severe mold illness and mold sensitivities at that time, so it was hard to
travel. a "mold-safe" house had been offered for me to stay in: the home of
our <wickett>. but then, bam, she found out about her cancer, and she
didn't want me to tell anyone else about her diagnosis. i then got a cold,
and didn't want to potentially infect <wickett> with it. and that is the
story of how i never got to stay with dear <wickett> before her far too
early death, and how i missed the 50th.)

i'm glad to hear Stewart acknowledged Lois at the event. i wasn't
necessarily pointing to any particular relationship or to Stewart per se,
just noting that men who sometimes appear to be great pillars of loner
genius visionary strength, etc., were not always so, and that the real
leaders/workers behind the scenes have sometimes been women. given
<renshin>'s comment on the maleness of the book's cast of characters, it
would indeed be interesting to hear any stories about women being involved.
  

    
<73> "Paleoliberal"  Wow. I had to look it up.. :) 
according to Urban Dictionary:

paleoliberal
Old school, pre-1960's style liberal; center-left populist. 
A paleoliberal typically espouses the following: 
1. protection of the right of workers to organize and bargain
collectively 
2. protection of the interests of the underdog against the whims of
the powerful. 
3. supports the right to individual privacy within reasonable
limits; does not include abortion rights (see definition #2) or gay
marriage, but does include keeping the government from snooping on
your reading habits. 
4. The right for minorities to be free from discrimination in
employment, housing, public accomodations, etc., thus protecting
their rights from the tyranny of the majority without diluting
majority rule. 
5. the inherent, affirmative right to vote and have your votes
counted as you intended, without interference from fraudulently
programmed voting machines designed to "flip" votes. 
6. The right to life means the right to a decent life, for both born
and unborn. Paleoliberals don't divorce the sanctity of life from
the quality of life, unlike Christofascists or left-liberals. 
7. May or may not support the death penalty, although I personally
oppose it except for war criminals, deposed dictators, wartime
traitors, and/or serial killers who pose an escape risk. 
8. Embrace gender equity. Man and woman are to be treated as equals
under the eyes of the law and their differences are to be respected,
not derided.