Stewart Brand paused near the end of a steep trail just a quarter of a mile short of a cactus-laden vertical cliff face on the side of a 6,000-foot-high mountain in southern Texas.
He had hiked three hours to check on a project and now stood near a tunnel opening that looked like the entrance to some old-time mining operation.
It wasn’t old, though. Inside was something new, meant to encourage society to consider its obligation to uncountable future generations.
The opening in the rock face led to something called the Clock of the Long Now. It’s housed in a 500-foot-tall cylindrical space, hollowed out inside the mountain, and is designed to keep time without human intervention — for 10,000 years.
Mr. Brand is the president of the Long Now Foundation, and the work grew out of his desire to focus on what he calls long-term responsibility and thinking. But the clock itself is possible because of the largess of the foundation’s largest benefactor, Jeff Bezos, one of the world’s richest people.
The clock is still under construction. But when it is complete, it will represent the longest of long-term thinking, made possible by money from a man who provides near instantaneous satisfaction with one-click shopping.
Mr. Brand was at the forefront of predicting the world that made a fortune like Mr. Bezos’ possible — a place where technology connected everyone.
His writing, ideas and the community he created in Menlo Park, Calif., in the late 1960s were an integral part of the forces that coalesced in the region that would be named Silicon Valley in 1971.
Mr. Brand’s biggest innovation, though, may be the way he has taught people to look at the world.
In the 1960s he put an image of planet Earth on “The Whole Earth Catalog,” which became a bible for the baby boom generation. It won the National Book Award in 1972 and sold three million copies in the first three years after publication. Modeled in part on the L.L. Bean catalog, it was originally intended as a source for Mr. Brand’s friends who were going back to the land. Instead, it touched a nerve and became a manual for reinvention for an entire generation — including Apple’s Steve Jobs.
In 2005, Mr. Jobs gave a commencement address at Stanford, cited Mr. Brand as a major influence in his life and explained what “Whole Earth” was to a younger generation: “It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along,” he said. “It was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.”
Mr. Brand coined the term “personal computer” in 1974, several years after writing an article for Rolling Stone that drew a picture of the future of the digital world. Computers, he predicted, would be the next important trend after psychedelic drugs: “That’s good news, maybe the best since psychedelics. It’s way off the track of the ‘Computers — Threat or menace?’ school of liberal criticism but surprisingly in line with the romantic fantasies of the forefathers of the science,” he wrote.
Now Mr. Brand, considered by many to be one of the nation’s pre-eminent futurists, is busy helping to build that 10,000-year clock — a path toward what he believes will be a long-term future for civilization.
Mr. Brand has long had an eerie knack for being able to spot trends early on or show up in the midst of them like some high-I.Q. Forrest Gump, only to leave for the next big thing just when everyone else catches up.
For example, in 1967, just when many of his friends were going back to the land to found communes, Mr. Brand arrived squarely in the middle of the region soon to be named Silicon Valley. In his journal at the time, he wrote that he was living in Menlo Park “with the intent to let my technology happen here.”
His “Whole Earth Catalog” was subtitled “Access to Tools,” and recently, as the national zeitgeist soured on Silicon Valley, a wide variety of authors, including Franklin Foer in “World Without Mind,” Jill Lepore in “These Truths” and Jonathan Taplin in “Move Fast and Break Things,” have all pointed to Mr. Brand as the original technological utopian. His words and ideas, they argue, seduced and inspired the engineers who created the modern digital world.
Mr. Brand, who considers himself a relentless pragmatist, winces at the label. “All utopias are dystopias,” he said during a conversation this month in the ramshackle office he has inhabited on the Sausalito, Calif., waterfront since the early 1970s.
“The utopians say: ‘I figured it out, I’ve got a system. I’ve got a plan. It’s really going to work now. We’ve just got to get people to understand and appreciate it and then abide by the plan.’” That was not, he emphasized, how he thought.
However, he has remained unwavering in his optimism about the future. Today, at 83, Mr. Brand no longer tracks the computing world as closely as he once did. At the same time, he has not backed away from his certainty that humanity’s future lies in our ability to develop technology: New tools to address the challenges of everything from climate change to repairing the threat that social media has posed to democracies.
In the past decade he has focused on two things — the Clock of the Long Now and Revive & Restore, a project that he created with his wife, Ryan Phelan, in 2012 to support efforts to protect endangered species, and possibly revive extinct ones, using advanced technologies.
He has recently begun advocating the idea of “intended consequences” — a term coined by Ms. Phelan and the Revive & Restore organization — as an antidote to the widely shared fear about the unintended consequences of new technologies.
Mr. Brand was closely associated with the emergence of the environmental movement in the 1960s, but he has found himself at odds with it, as it has often been opposed to technologies that he favors.
When he first arrived in Sausalito in the 1970s, he started CoEvolution Quarterly. The idiosyncratic periodical once published a cover story about the possibility of building space colonies, in the process horrifying some of its loyal readers, who believed passionately that the human species should repair the damage it had done on earth before heading to space.
That type of work led many to label Mr. Brand a futurist, a category that in the 1980s and 1990s became closely associated with Silicon Valley’s generally rosy view of the world.
Mr. Brand, however, shies away from futurism, preferring the idea of “long-term thinking.”
“If you change your perspective from futurist to long-term thinking, everything gets better,” he said. “Because long-term thinking invites you to consider at least an equal amount of past to whatever amount of future you’re considering.”
Mr. Brand’s optimism can on occasion prove a stumbling block. He saw the dark side of online anonymity in the early 1980s and attempted to design a virtual gathering place that he called the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, or the WELL. He envisioned it as a convivial community that would avoid the pitfalls presented by the new world of virtual gathering places.
In 1985 he told KQED Focus magazine: “Computers suppress our animal presence. When you communicate through a computer, you communicate like an angel.”
Sadly, that very quickly was shown to be untrue on almost every level. Although at the time, that optimism — technology only made people better — was a viewpoint widely shared by a generation of computer network pioneers.
Six years later, after being repeatedly and personally attacked over problems with WELL, he quit the board in disgust.
He remains sanguine, however, about the potential for fixing the daunting problems that modern online communities have faced.
“The opprobrium that came on Twitter and Facebook and so on has sort of paid off,” he said. “They are putting serious time and money and people into trying to alleviate the worst offenses.”
Mr. Brand learned to avoid making specific predictions about the future in 2002, when he toured the nuclear waste storage facility in Yucca Mountain.
Through the 1990s Mr. Brand opposed nuclear power, but he began to rethink his opposition after he discovered, during that tour, that some experts believed some new nuclear technologies would be found to use what is now considered nuclear waste. That changed the way he thought about the future in general.
“It showed us that long-term thinking is at its best, not in terms of long-term planning century by century or utopian planning,” he said. “But you’re trying to keep all the kinds of options that are currently available open — don’t lose options. What progress consists of is adding more options.”
Mr. Brand opened the original “Whole Earth Catalog” by writing, “We are as Gods and we might as well get good at it.” In his 2007 book, “Whole Earth Discipline,” he modified his call to arms: “We are as Gods and HAVE to get good at it.” His book endorsed nuclear power, genetically modified crops, dense cities and geoengineering.
The book was greeted by many environmentalists with outrage, and many still view him as a turncoat.
Nonetheless he has held fast to his view that nuclear power will be necessary to make the transition away from fossil fuels. At the same time, he acknowledges that he has been surprised by the rapid progress being made in other sustainable technologies. Solar got better faster than he ever expected, he said, as did battery capacity. In the end, for Mr. Brand it remains a question of perspective.
Not long ago he tweeted: “Interesting: how much bad news is anecdotal and good news is statistical. (And how invisible the statistical is.) Still, if only one of the two can be good news, I would rather it be the statistical. It accumulates toward qualitative change that lasts.”
John Markoff, who reported on science and technology for The Times from 1988 to 2017, is the author of “Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand,” from which this article is adapted.
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