Stewart Brand: preference

Transcript context

…How did your year working with California Governor Jerry Brown make you less libertarian? Hasn’t California governance turned out to be a big mess? No, California governance was, and still is, pretty damn good. What I learned is that the libertarians I knew — they clustered around the Whole Earth Catalog because, in a sense, the catalog was saying . . . This is right after Jack Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” We said, “Ask not what your country can do for you. Do it your damn self.” So, there was a do-it-yourself thing that translated for many as “screw the government.” Then the whole hippie period was counterculture, and a lot of that was played out politically in the new left and so on. Working in the governor’s office in Sacramento and wearing a three-piece suit, one of the things that I started was a water atlas of California, and then the research that we set in motion from the governor’s office to bring about this actually quite beautiful and somewhat influential book. California is a hydraulic civilization, as you know, and we move our water around. That’s what makes agriculture the main event here. It’s what makes Los Angeles possible, and so on and so forth. I saw the people at the water resources department. I saw what they did all day, and we would show up, saying, “Look, we need some data on the Smith River, which is the only undammed river in California. What are the patterns of flow in that, and how deep do your records go?” Somebody’s deputy assistant would say, “We thought you’d never ask.” They had been carefully keeping this data and trying to correlate it with things and keep it up to date in the various computer systems and so on for decades. The low-paid, high-quality, selfless work that these folks were doing. In the governor’s office, you always knew who was Republican, who was a Democrat and why, and all this stuff. Down in the departments, nobody knew and nobody cared. There were Republicans and Democrats scattered throughout the whole system, and it was part of the ethic that that part of government should just not be political in the divisive sense at all. I finally got the perspective of what is now vilified as the deep state, and the deep state, at least in California, is damned impressive. I came out being way less interested in who was the governor. I basically came out saying, “Well, Jerry’s a good governor as near as I can tell.” But then later on, Schwarzenegger was a pretty good governor. Reagan had been a pretty good governor. And the realization I had is, Donald Duck could be governor, and it wouldn’t be the end of the state. Trump finally proved that you could have somebody — as a president in that case — who could be really destructive, and the deep state was not as successful as it usually is of working around it, but that’s reflective of a whole bunch of other stuff going on that I do not comprehend, frankly. You’ve said a good deal about architecture. Do you view the forthcoming smart home as a blessing or a curse?…

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