Stewart Brand and Silicon Valley’s Soul

For decades Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter John Markoff has chronicled how technology has shaped our society. In his latest book, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand, Markoff delivers a biography of one the most influential visionaries to inspire technological and cultural revolutions of the last six decades in counterculture, early computing, and the environmental movement.  

How did Brand become one of the first to realize the significance of the emergence of Silicon Valley and simultaneously influence an entire generation who grew up with the Whole Earth Catalog? For example, Steve Jobs adopted Brand’s famous mantra “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” as his code to live by. 

Don Hoeffler coined the term “Silicon Valley” in 1971. Four years before that Stewart Brand arrived on the San Francisco Midpeninsula with the goal “let my technology happen here.”  He would become a disciple of both Buckminster Fuller and Douglas Engelbart, and in creating the Whole Earth Catalog Brand would be the first to capture and spread the very Silicon Valley philosophy of “Access to Tools,” as the Catalog was subtitled.  

Also in 1971 Brand, who would a year later be the first to use the phrase “personal computer,” wrote a seminal article in Rolling Stone Magazine which was the first inkling for the outside world of the coming power of computers and networks to transform the world. To this day, Brand epitomizes what Markoff calls “the California state of mind.” 

Join John Markoff in conversation with award-winning Journalist Nicole Perlroth to explore how Brand was the messenger who heralded the Valley’s arrival and influenced its soul as well as why Brand’s creation of the symbol of a whole earth and the importance of planetary consciousness makes him just as relevant today. 

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You can catch the full program here and enjoy reading the blog recap here.