Printable Biography of Stewart Brand

Stewart Brand is a cofounder of Global Business Network. Best known for founding, editing, and publishing the Whole Earth Catalog (1968-1985; National Book Award, 1972), he also has a long-standing involvement in computers, education, and the media arts. From 1987 to 1989, Brand ran a series of private conferences on "Learning in Complex Systems." In 1988 he joined the Board of Trustees of the Santa Fe Institute, an organization dedicated to multi-disciplinary research in the sciences of complexity. In 1987, Brand wrote The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, which Brand\'s book became a QPB Selection, won the Eliot Montroll Award, and has been translated into Japanese, German, Italian, and Spanish.

From 1974 to 1985, Brand founded, edited, and published CoEvolution Quarterly, and from 1983 to 1985 he served as editor-in-chief of the Whole Earth Software Catalog. During this time, Brand organized the first "Hackers\' Conference," which was televised nationally and has since become an annual event. He also founded The WELL (Whole Earth \'Lectronic Link) a computer teleconference based in the San Francisco Bay Area. It now has 10,000 active users, and is considered a bellwether of the medium.

After receiving his degree in biology from Stanford in 1960, and spending two years as a US Infantry officer, Brand became a photojournalist and multimedia artist, performing at colleges and museums. In 1968, he was a consultant to Douglas Engelbart\'s pioneering Augmented Human Intellect program at SRI, which devised now familiar computer interface tools. In 1972, for Rolling Stone, he wrote the first article about the computer lifestyle, entitled "Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums," chronicling the fringes of computer science at Xerox PARC, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and MIT. That article became part of his book, Two Cybernetic Frontiers, which also introduced anthropologist/philosopher Gregory Bateson to a wide audience. In 1974 he organized a "New Games Tournament," which generated three books and became a genre in experiential education.

In 1994, eight years of research by Brand into how buildings change over time (a form of organizational learning) came together in a richly illustrated book, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They\'re Built. Referred to as "a classic and possibly a work of genius," the book has been used as a text by computer systems designers as well as building preservers, architects, and many lay building users.

Since co-founding The Long Now Foundation with Danny Hillis in 1996, Brand has been hard at work on several projects, including building a monumental timepiece inside a mountain in eastern Nevada, a 3-inch nikel disk with 1000 languages micro-etched into it, and an attempt to catalog every life form on Earth within the current human generation.