Stewart Brand
Updated: 11/16/2019 by Computer Hope
Name: Stewart Brand
Born: December 14, 1938, in Rockford, Illinois, USA
Computer-related contributions
- American writer, best known as editor of the Whole Earth Catalog.
- Founded The WELL orgainization, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now foundation.
- Campaigned to have NASA release the then-rumored satellite image of the entire Earth as seen from space (1966).
- Assisted Douglas Engelbart with The Mother of All Demos, a revolutionary computer presentation introducing e-mail, hypertext, and the mouse to the Fall Joint Computer Conference.
- Involved with the development of The Hackers Conference in 1984.
Significant publications
- Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto (2009).
- The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility (1999).
- How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built (1994).
- The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT (1987).
- II Cybernetic Frontiers (1974).
Quotes
"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. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property', the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better."