Alexis Rondeau

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand

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Cover of Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand
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John Markoff

146 highlights · 37 notes · last read March 2025

Highlights I wrote a note on are shown in full. The other 109 are scrambled: the words are the author's, so here you only see where in the book I underlined something.

Brand decided that even though he had been paralyzed in fear, he had learned something: keep moving—he who hesitates suffers. Momentum builds and will help. This was his bridge, narrow and high, and if he fell, he died.

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My note "He who hesitates suffers"

On the other hand, his son already had a substantial amount of property and would have considerably more in the future, making him a capitalist, with responsibility for “the protection, good use, and growth of this wealth.”

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My note A capitalist: protects, uses and grows his wealth

Think of our world as it looks from that rocket that is heading toward Mars. It is like a child’s globe, hanging in space, the continent stuck to its side like colored maps. We are all fellow passengers on a dot of earth.[6]

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My note Also: Spaceship Earth

Brand would visit Millbrook on at least three occasions. After his first visit, he described it as “a lovely glimpse of how it might be,” an intentional psychedelic community composed of twelve adults and ten children “without romanticism.” Ultimately, however, he became disillusioned. In July the Pranksters had visited the imposing Victorian manor but departed quickly with an overriding sense that the Millbrook crowd was boring and elitist. Brand was ultimately put off by the way Leary treated women. While at Millbrook he heard about how Leary had callously abandoned a series of women and concluded that he was a cad.

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My note Leary misogynist ?

Contribution of Stephen, Gerd, and myself. Take the NO out of NOW Then Take the OW out of NOW Then Take the THEN out of NOW Then

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My note Take the NO out of NOW
Then
Take the OW out of NOW

“If you would know an Indian feeling, try this: Move slowly.”

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My note "Move slowly" like a native American

Now his peyote experiences ratified his conclusion that for whites, time was a rapid sequence, whereas Indian time was land time. It was geological and astronomical. It was much slower.

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My note "LAND TIME"

She was someone who did not fit neatly in any single category. She would say, “Among whites, I’m an Indian, among Indians I’m an Ottawa, among Ottawas I’m Thunder clan, among Thunder clan, I’m Wasaquam [her mother’s birth name], among Wasaquam, I’m Lois.”

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My note Not fitting in: among germans i am american, among americans i am german, among business i am a programmer, among programmers i am a business person, etc.

Finally, prompted by an unusual mixed message from the I Ching one night, he took the “medicine”—LSD.

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My note "An unusual mixed message from the I Ching"

“I feel more freedom and joy nowadays with Kesey and the Hells Angels than anywhere. Perhaps in part because it’s not given, provided there. You have to find it.”

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My note Freedom with Hell's Angels"

As the Vietnam War raged on and protests tore the country apart, Brand did his best to stay above the fray. When he set out to become a publisher in the fall of 1968, just months after Chicago police beat and tear-gassed protesters, he decreed the new publication would have nothing to say about the Vietnam War, and he stuck to what he believed was a no-politics editorial policy for the first three years he published the Catalog.

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My note No-politics policy

Now he thought about it in the context of what he might do that would be helpful to his friends who were busy going back to the land and creating communes.

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My note i got money, what about my friends?

Brand realized that many of the challenges that his friends were facing came down to a question of access. What they needed, he decided, was a means to acquire a particular tool or service or knowledge about how to perform some task—not via piecemeal tips passed on from person to person but in a coherent, systematic, easily transferable manner. The Whole Earth Catalog would be subtitled Access to Tools, a bold statement implying the intent to enable skills—to reinvent, initially, the individual and, ultimately, civilization.

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My note On the fligt back from his fathers funeral, the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG was born from the question: What do my friends need out there?

Recalling Fuller’s admonition that you have about ten minutes to capture an idea “before it recedes back into dreamland,”

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My note 10 minutes for an idea

“What I’m visualizing is an Access Mobile (accessory?) with all manner of access materials + advice for sale cheap. Including performances of stuff, books, dandy survival and camping equipment, catalogs, design plans, periodical subscriptions, copy equipment (+ other gathering equipment—some element of barter here). Prime item of course would be the catalog.”

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My note Mobile with ACCESS and PRIME ITEM: CATALOG

In history, some years acquire what cultural historian Jackson Lears describes as a “numinous” quality.[8] He points to 1789, 1861, 1914, and 1968 as unique historical branch points. The same can be said of places.

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My note "NUMINOUS" places and times

There are particular geographical locations where cultural, economic, political, and technological forces intersect and conspire to throw the world in a new direction. Venice and Florence lit the spark that led to the Renaissance, and pre–World War I Vienna served as an extraordinary cultural and scientific hotbed for modernism.

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My note NUMINOUS where forces intersect

Dave Evans took the system through its paces, showing the writer how it would be possible to manipulate text, retrieve information, and collaborate with others. At the end of the demonstration, Kesey exhaled and said, “It’s the next thing after acid.”

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My note PERSONAL COMPUTING IS THE NEXT ACID

LSD might expand your mind, but computing gave you a steering wheel. So would the Catalog.

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My note Steering wheel for your mind

When Brand decided to abandon any notion of going back to the land and instead returned to Menlo Park to explore his “technology,” the location of the Whole Earth Truck Store would prove to be fundamental.

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My note Location! And doing something you are already past / isnt your life design (going back to the land)

Despite his grand plan to become a tool supplier and educational library on wheels, another round of commune visits had provided ample market research that it wasn’t a business; the communards simply had no money.

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My note Vision vs. Market vs. Cash

On the face of it, the Truck Store was a hardware store, its mission to sell things that appeared in the Catalog.

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My note Wait. The catalog already exists and we have not learned anything about its creation?

Set just across El Camino Real from the Menlo Park business district in four thousand square feet of retail space with a volleyball court in back, the Truck Store was a storefront with a large warehouse space, where at one point Brand constructed a small bedroom, and another common room that served as a lunchroom off to one side.

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My note Errr... How did we get here?

By the spring of 1970 most of its goods consisted of books found in the Catalog, but on display could also be found Ashley stoves, a Corona corn mill, Aladdin lamps, Snugli baby carriers, and a few magazines.

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My note We just skiped FOUR YEARS

The Truck Store was also only a few blocks from Douglas Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center laboratory at the Stanford Research Institute, and near where Bob Albrecht soon would open the People’s Computer Company,

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My note Store in the middle

Years later Brand would adopt the mantra “Live small, so you can live large.”

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My note Live small so you can live large

His wife, Roberta, was working as a secretary for Engelbart (and as a result was probably the first secretary to ever use an interactive word processor with video display).

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My note Like Von Neuman's wife who was the first programmer

Although Brand had underwritten the project with his family inheritance, it was operated as a nonprofit and rooted in the egalitarian values of its time and place.

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My note Fathers death > Inheritance > Catalog

“The function of this program is improving access to tools for self-dependent self-education, individual or cooperative,”

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My note The Nutzen

the Truck Store would travel to intentional communities, experimental schools, and design departments during the summer to do market research.

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My note Stationary store, truck for research and spreading the word

The philosophy was simple as was spelled out in the Catalog: “We don’t carry ads anymore, if you have a product, let us see it, if we like it, you don’t owe us anything.”[9]

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My note No ads, just good products

Brand took his inspiration for the size and format of the first Catalog from Steve Baer’s oversize Dome Cookbook, which had been published the previous year, and drew together his drawings of geometric shapes, handwritten memories of building various domes, typewritten instructions, and black-and-white photos.

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My note DOME COOKBOOK a template for the catalog

Brand became highly dependent on this instant rush that quickly brought you right back to reality—until one day he just kept flashing.

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My note Got addicted to nitro!

To be listed in the Catalog, an item must be useful as a tool; relevant to independent education; high quality or low cost; not already common knowledge; and easily available by mail.

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My note Criteria

Now a “realm of personal power” was ready to “find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.”

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My note The realm of personal power

And there it was: How many people heading to northern New Mexico to start their commune had ever thought of the dilemma of poorly excavated potholes before arriving?

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My note "And there it was" plumbing for the communities who by now had a shit show

From the outset, while much of the counterculture rejected computing technology for being a central component of the bureaucratic mainstream world they dismissed, Brand embraced it.

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My note Computing rejected - they were about acid and communes

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