WHOLE EARTH

Tech journalist Markoff, who has covered Silicon Valley since 1977, delivers an admiring portrait of the “quixotic intellectual troubadour” Stewart Brand.

“Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” So asked Brand after taking one of countless excursions into space courtesy of LSD. He pressed the question, sending homemade buttons bearing that slogan to every member of Congress—and, for good measure, to the Soviet Politburo, Russian scientists, and the U.N. In time, that picture would come. Meanwhile, Brand was busily acting as an entrepreneur, with his Whole Earth Catalog, initially launched in 1968 as a marketing brochure, acting as a kind of proto-Google mixed with a Sears catalog, nascent personal computers, and lashings of psychedelics. “The function of this program is improving access to tools for self-dependent self-education, individual or cooperative,” read the Catalog’s prospectus, which would soon be supplemented by another Brand maxim: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” By Markoff’s account, the Zelig-like Brand was at the right place at the right time to catch rising trends and to amplify the ones he liked, particularly when it came to things like software and early computers such as the KayPro II. In some ways, Markoff continues, Brand is a father of a 1960s counterculture that evolved into technological and small-l libertarian directions in the decades since, for better or worse. However, Markoff notes that Brand was politically quite conservative, and he lost some readers and fans when, in the early 2000s, he began to advocate for nuclear power, genetically engineered foods, and other taboo items. Now in his 80s, Brand continues his explorations, now involved with a “long clock” project that shows every promise of outlasting humankind, given current trends.

A sturdy, readable study of a fellow who’s had considerable press devoted to him—but who can still surprise.