Stewart Brand: man of ideas and infuriating contrarian

In his 2005 book What The Dormouse Said John Markoff traced the roots of the personal computer industry to the counterculture of the 1960s – a tale that owed as much to Jefferson Airplane as Jeffersonian ingenuity. Constantly popping up in that narrative is the adopted Californian Stewart Brand. Markoff wrote of his ‘Zelig-like penchant’ for being present at turning points in the story. Whole Earth, viewed one way, is an extended apology for that epithet. ‘The Zelig reference,’ Markoff says now, ‘is the wrong way to describe him, for there has been a consistent through line that has connected his various campaigns, crusades and inquiries over more than six decades.’

It is the wrong way to describe him also because Brand is an actor, not a bystander. It is hard to define precisely what he does: essentially, he has been an ambassador between California’s tech culture and its counterculture, sometimes as a journalist, sometimes as a photographer, sometimes as a publisher, sometimes as an artist or an author or a plain provocateur – endlessly bringing people together but also endlessly moving on.

After an acid trip gave him a flash of insight about the fragility of the planet, he distributed badges asking ‘Why Haven’t We Seen a Photo of the Whole Earth Yet?’ He ran the Trips Festival, at which San Francisco’s 10,000 hippies realised there were 10,000 other hippies, kickstarting the Summer of Love. He founded and ran the massively successful Whole Earth Catalog, credited as an inspiration by Steve Jobs. He continued its spirit through two magazines. He helped demo the dawn of personal computing; founded a pioneering online network; told the world that ‘information wants to be free’ – though his corollary, that ‘information wants to be expensive’, is less often remembered.