Stewart Brand: prediction

Transcript context

…How is it that you became such a decentralist? Oh, God, decentralist? That’s actually right. I think you probably have seen this with the artists that you study. I got a degree in biology from Stanford, and then I was going off to be an army officer. But in the course of that, I started hanging out with artists in Bohemia and North Beach in San Francisco. This is the late ’50s, early ’60s. My first calling was as a professional photographer that then turned into a so-called creative photographer doing art. I was doing multimedia with a group called USCO in New York and, basically, took on the role as an artist in the world. That stuck, and so my media would change a lot. I would start nonprofits and sometimes businesses and various things, but it was always not part of a hierarchical organization, and not trying to build a hierarchical organization. It was basically enhancing creativity at the individual level. With the Whole Earth Catalog, that led to a kind of lazy libertarianism that I later got over when I worked for Governor Brown of the State of California. Remember also, as a biologist, Darwinian evolution is the most decentralized thing that you can imagine. It’s way beyond the market economy. It is something that runs itself and is self-organizing at every level and at every scale. I haven’t answered that question before, so answering it this time, I think I’ve talked myself into being a Darwinian. What was the influence of Nikos Kazantzakis on your thought? A Greek author, Zorba the Greek, right?…

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