Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
<121> Not being a physicist I will defer to you. (of course Sam
Altman bet 1/3 of a billion dollars that they would figure the
fusion thing out)

:)
  

    
I'm not a physicist either. I've been following the subject for
decades.
  

    
My understanding from Mitch Kapor and John Barlow was that they met
on the WELL and started brainstorming EFF here. This followed a 1989
discussion on computers and privacy that happened on the WELL and
was edited and published in Harper's magazine. It included a couple
of young hackers, Phiber Optik and Acid Phreak. This apparently got
Barlow thinking about technology policy and how it would likely be
created by people who don't understand the technology they're
presuming to regulate. There was the potential for law enforcement
to confuse a prank with a more serious crime. EFF would promote
understanding of Internet and related technologies and lobby for
well-informed policy development.
  

    
(We might be drifting off-topic, unless we consider any discussion
of the WELL relevant to the discussion of John's book and its
subject, Stewart Brand.)
  

    
>My understanding from Mitch Kapor and John Barlow was that they met
on the WELL and started brainstorming EFF here.

That was Barlow's story, certainly, replete with the deathless
phrase "blind as cave fish".
  

    
John thanks for your comments about the Turner book earlier. I
haven’t read the Dormouse book but I’m putting it on the list. I do
have another question. On page 355, you write about Brand’s interest
in terraforming. However, unless I missed it, there’s not a lot of
discussion in your book about exactly what his vision of
terraforming would entail other than the statement that we need to
“do it well.” Can you expand on this a bit?
  

    
Before trying to grapple with <131> I have to confess I just
stumbled on this quote from Hunter Thompson. No topic drift here, I
would argue…

“San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and
place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the
long run … but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories
can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in
that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant …

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the
Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda.…
You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal
sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning …

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory
over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense;
we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no
point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we
were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave …

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in
Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can
almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally
broke and rolled back.

Hunter S. Thompson
Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas (1971)
  

    
<131>    On terraforming, I think that Stewart has been pretty
consistent on this all the way through. He realized early on that
American Indians saw themselves as stewards of the land they lived
on. He had taken the Outdoor Life Pledge and he addresses
terraforming specifically in “Ecopragmaist Manifesto.” On Page 19 he
argues that we have been terraforming “inadvertently” for ten
millenia, but that it has been unintentional. His We Are As Gods
point is that we should get good at it.  Are you asking about this
in a different context?
  

    
That HST passage is Really impressive 
  

    
Yup. 
  

    
Thanks for this fascinating peek behind the scenes, John. Can't wait
to dig into the book.

I'm especially curious about how you approached the challenge of
writing a biography of a living person. This seems especially tricky
when the person in question has been thinking about writing their
own autobiography! Were there any moments where you surprised SB
with something from the archives that he'd forgotten or
misremembered? 
  

    
133: Just a quick follow-up. Would it be fair to say that Brand’s
vision of terraforming includes large-scale genetic modification of
plant and animal species? 

On a separate matter, an older article appearing in MIT Technology
Review talks about Brand’s ideas about DDT. The article says: “He
opposes doctrinaire forms of environmentalism like the campaign to
globally ban the pesticide DDT–a decision that, according to malaria
expert Robert Gwadz of the National Institutes of Health,
contributed to the deaths of 20 million children worldwide.” Do you
have any sense of whether Brand’s thinking night have changed or
evolved on this matter over the years?
  

    
<136> Oh My God I was bringing documents to Stewart that he either
didn't remember or misremembered all the time. In his defense from a
distance of a half century it’s hard to remember anything with
precision. That said, I was super lucky as a biographer that Stewart
was a packrat and simply threw everything in a shipping container on
Gate 5 Rd. until the Stanford librarians arrived. I have never
trusted memory, mine or any else’s.

I was learning the art of biography as I went along. I read a number
of books, my favorite being James Atlas’s Shadow in the Garden and I
was acutely aware of Caro’s “turn every page” dictum — and having
struggled through Stewart’s documents with the help of Joseph
Monzel, who just showed up one day and volunteered, I’m skeptical
that it is actually possible. I spent almost two years in the
Stanford collection and I’m sure I missed a lot. My favorite story
from the archive: When I looked at Stewart’s papers for the first
time in 2000, right after they had been donated, his original
journals were accessible. When I returned in 2017 they had been
replaced and a poor librarian had been forced to go through the
entirety of his collection with a black marker and remove all of the
spicy stuff. “What’s this?” I asked Stewart. He had no idea, and so
he asked Mike Keller, Stanford’s librarian what had happened. We
never got a complete answer but I suspect the black markings were
there to protect Stewart’s girlfriends during the 1970s. When
Stewart asserted that he had nothing to hide, the journals magically
came back, which was a pain in the ass because I had to read them
again.
  

    
<137>  He would probably quibble with the phrase "large scale,"
perhaps "targeted" would be more appropriate. If you look at a
species that is either extinct or endangered as is the case for
Revive & Restore, I imagine you could make the case for "large
scale" even when only a handful of creatures remain.  On the DDT
issue, we discussed it in the context he argued in Ecopragmatist
Manifesto, and I don't remember him backing away from his contention
that the decision cost lives in aggregate.
  

    
Thanks to John Markoff, Howard Rheingold, and all who participated
in this conversation. If you have anything to add, please feel free
to drop by and post anytime - the formal end of the conversation was
yesterday, but the topic will remain open. 
  

    
Thanks again to johnm for the book and for coming here.