Stewart Brand: evaluation

Transcript context

…Now, if I try to place you in the earlier part of your career, and if I compare you to Buckminster Fuller, Norbert Wiener, Gregory Bateson, what are the key variables where you disagree with them? How should I sum up intellectually that difference? I bought Norbert Wiener, I guess, first, and he sold up very well. Buckminster Fuller — the artists I was hanging out with were paying close attention to him and to Marshall McLuhan, and he was an amazing thinker who revolutionized his whole behavior and his whole thought patterns around what he thought was a more productive way to behave and think in the world. The only person I know who’s that radical with himself is Kevin Kelly, who occasionally takes a notion and goes all the way down just to see what’s there. Bucky only really changed himself once, but it was an impressive change. When I came across Gregory Bateson, he was sort of the corrective for Buckminster Fuller for me, because Fuller was so totally an engineer, what Bateson would call the input-output approach to understanding and solving everything. Whereas Bateson was much more. He was aware that every system is basically self-referential to some degree — that’s the thing Fuller would never take on — and hierarchically organized at a very deep conceptual level, that we are always immersed in the system that we think we were isolating something from. Gregory was wonderfully dubious about engineering solutions, about naive intention, and went a little farther in the mystical direction for me, so there were later cracks for that for me. Besides, I’d gone a mystical route back when I studied comparative religion at Stanford, and that turned out to be eventually nonproductive and, I think, counterproductive. Often people go down a mystical or romantic route. But that was all stuff that was working through, and I got to know Fuller. I got to know Gregory Bateson very well. I never met Wiener, but I hung out later with people like Marvin Minsky, another part of the MIT intelligentsia who are really still my frame of reference. In 1968, the Whole Earth Catalog — you had the view that what the world needs is a photo of the Earth appearing to be one thing. What is the photo we need today?…

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