(2021-03-20) The Backwardlooking Futurism Of Stewart Brand

The Backward-Looking Futurism of Stewart Brand. In a new documentary about his life, We Are As Gods, the famous tech prophet looks to his—and Earth’s—past.

In We Are As Gods, Brand emerges as one of the signature players of the technological age, in and out of the most important rooms at just the right moments in history. Most casual followers of his will know the rough trajectory. What they might not know are the tools of Brand’s farsightedness. Drugs, for starters. Also a gift for harnessing boredom. Finally, expert networking. Through the catalog, Brand linked up with Doug Engelbart, from whom he learned the potential of networked communication, which got him thinking about early social media, and so on. “The intellectual Johnny Appleseed of the counterculture,” someone calls him, seeding the land with thought-trends.

Unprobed throughout We Are As Gods is the odd backwardness of Brand’s current circumstances, both personal and professional. Personally, he’s participating in a documentary about his 80-plus years on the planet, an inherently anti-futurist project. Professionally, he’s now a champion of the so-called de-extinction movement, and that work forms the doc’s narrative through line.

maybe there’s no contradiction after all. Both futurism and conservationism entail what Brand would call “long-term thinking.”