[HN Gopher] The Zen Playboy: The Life and Times of Stewart Brand
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The Zen Playboy: The Life and Times of Stewart Brand
Author : conanxin
Score : 34 points
Date : 2022-06-11 14:54 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.thenation.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.thenation.com)
| gardenfelder wrote:
| https://archive.ph/wKe2X
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| More than a little-jaundiced take on Brand and the WEC as seen
| from a great distance, more in the spirit of that other Lebowski.
| The tools in the catalog were indeed practically counter-
| cultural, and its environmental focus was indeed prophetic (if
| widely ignored by the mainstream as long as possible). Compare
| the _shelter_ s of Lloyd Kahn to today's out-of-reach-of-most
| real estate. Whatever Brand's role was, the WEC's prophecy rings
| true. For better or worse: the Long Now has begun.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Wow, it'd be one thing to point out Brand's shortcomings, but to
| review a biography that does some of that in order to produce a
| non-stop stream of snark and putdowns seems excessive. It could
| well be that Brand is a jerk (I haven't met him), but I think
| it's flippant to dismiss his accomplishments - WEC, The Well,
| even books like _How Buildings Learn_ are all real contributions.
| sammalloy wrote:
| > It could well be that Brand is a jerk
|
| This is something I have wondered about having listened to a
| lot of the Long Now Talks. If you listen to Brand in these
| talks, he has the aura of an elder statesman. This book review
| raises far more questions than it answers, and doesn't really
| show an understanding of the history that has occurred.
|
| Tom Wolfe and John Markoff both portrayed Brand as a likable
| figure in their earlier works. Both Wolfe and Brand are
| contemporaries from the Silent Generation. Markoff was the
| boomer. There wasn't much distance between the three. Now enter
| Malcolm Harris.
|
| Harris gives us a new review with an altogether different
| viewpoint than his predecessors. Harris, a Millennial who was
| born in 1988 and who came into his own during the turbulent
| 2000s, sees the world that the boomers built and perceives its
| failures upon class lines--and he's not wrong.
|
| The problem with this well-written book review is that it fails
| to take into account the world Brand came from in 1938. Harris
| glosses over this historical dichotomy in favor of his own much
| more recent account. It's something every generation tends to
| do to the ones before them, not realizing that someone will
| eventually do it to them in their later years. And so, the
| tradition continues.
| golemotron wrote:
| Agree. The tone is ridiculous and disrespectful. Horrible thing
| to do to someone in their 80s who has never courted
| controversy.
| TaylorGood wrote:
| I check comments first for this reason. Skipped reading.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| It isn't really that bad until the end, FWIW. Mostly. The
| D.C.-based author is apparently writing a book titled Palo
| Alto; I bet we're gonna love that one...
| Geonode wrote:
| Do these websites really think people are going to subscribe to
| them? What you get is my attention.
| Findecanor wrote:
| In conjunction with the UN-led _Stockholm+50_ conference on the
| environment recently, there have been a few articles reminiscing
| about the original conference 50 year earlier. The 1972 UN
| conference had been set during the war in Vietnam, and a topic at
| the time had been US ' military's use of the herbicide Agent
| Orange.
|
| Stewart Brand had been there (with his top-hat on), as a leader
| of a large group of American hippies that had been flown in. They
| were widely seen as a nuisance by the other activist groups at
| the time, there to discredit the environment movement with their
| behaviour and to direct attention away from the "ecocide" in
| Vietnam. In one incident, Stewart Brand himself forcefully
| removed a speaker from a podium for mentioning Vietnam, even. I
| find it interesting that the article on Brand in The Nation
| mentions the CIA, because there had been several indications that
| Brand's and the hippies' Stockholm visit in 1972 would have been
| funded and organised by the CIA.
|
| <https://stockholmplus50.se/1972-2/> (In Swedish)
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| I watched a pretty good docu in German which follows Ted
| Kaczynski's targets and they connect them to the edge
| foundation (some were members, like David Gelernter and John
| Brockman). They act like they're just asking rote interview
| questions, then they drop the ted k connection on the
| interviewees which is hilarious cause they get pretty mad a
| most of the time that they would draw such a thread. Stuart
| Brand is included as an interviewee. Isn't it interesting how
| the edge foundation kind of ended up in a real pickle because
| of Jeffrey Epstein hanging on?
|
| The docu was entitled Das Netz: Lutz Dammbeck und der Unabomber
| sedachv wrote:
| There is a whole lot more to John Brockman's involvement with
| Jeffrey Epstein than just Brockman's Edge Foundation:
|
| https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/05/investigative-
| reports/t...
|
| David Gelernter is a whole other piece of work. He did co-
| author a pretty good textbook on parallel programming (_How
| To Write Parallel Programs_), but the guy was basically a
| huckster when it came to distributed systems research. The
| real ironic thing is that it can be hard to tell Gelernter's
| Wall Street Journal op-eds from Kaczynski's manifesto.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| Heh I love Whitney Webb, I actually read that whole article
| out loud to someone over some whiskey once
| la64710 wrote:
| I love how almost everything is getting paywalled more and more
| ... back to the good old days of news underload !!
|
| /s
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