Stewart Brand: evaluation

Transcript context

…Thinking back on your entire life, in which ways do you see yourself as a product of the Cold War? I was in a town that was Rockford, Illinois. It was rated as number seven on the list of the American cities to be destroyed by the Soviet Union with bombs because we built machine tools. They thought that was upstream of American industry and, therefore, blah, blah, blah. I was younger than 10 by then, so I had nightmares about wandering around in a destroyed Rockford, where I was the only person left alive. I had a certain built-in apprehension, and among things that led to, as you may remember — I think you’re old enough to remember — when the mushroom cloud of the atomic explosion was this sort of symbol of human civilization at that point. That was the way global everything thought about itself as the threat of nuclear annihilation. The photograph of the Earth from space that came along in ’68 and ’69–’70, from the Apollo program, completely replaced that nuclear cloud with an image of a very hopeful-looking Earth. It’s interesting because I realize now, the Earth is being deployed . . . that photograph, which was so hopeful and green and better than the mushroom cloud, is now evoked a lot in the context of climate change. Once again, it’s an image of a threat rather than of promise. Am I correct in thinking of you as somehow taking the research environment of World War II, the notion of threat, but redeveloping the ideas of the computer and the network forum to put forward some more optimistic, also more decentralized, vision of the future?…

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