It was a worldview that both resonated and broke with the New Left, for Brand rejected traditional politics and focused instead on what he called direct power—a focus on tools and skills for the individual—emerging from his early libertarian sympathies.

Steve Jobs fastened onto the Brand approach in recounting his own life in his influential 2005 Stanford commencement address. He found inspiration in the closing page of Brand’s Whole Earth Epilog. It captured the sensibility that emerged on the western edge of the continent during the sixties. The back cover of the 1974 edition of the publication

he first figuratively and then literally set out to “play God,” initially by making the claim that humans had the power of gods and then during the past decade by creating an organization to save and restore endangered species with modern biotechnology.

The school was legendary for its skeptical academic mantra, “Go to primary sources,” an outlook that was repeatedly conveyed to Brand through the maternal side of his family.

A quixotic intellectual troubadour, he has prosecuted a series of discrete visions united only by a potent sense of curiosity and a provocative optimism.

Stewart Brand has described his mystic experience on the roof in various publications. The most complete account is in Michael Katz et al., eds., Earth’s Answer: Explorations of Planetary Culture at the Lindisfarne Conferences (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 184–88.

People who met him then described him as socially awkward, overly earnest, and cerebral.

It was like a Nick Adams boyhood taken from the pages of Ernest Hemingway’s short story collection In Our Time. Indeed, Brand’s childhood was in many ways parallel to Hemingway’s. Several decades earlier Hemingway had grown up in the suburbs of Chicago and summered at Windemere Cottage on Walloon Lake in northern Michigan, less than a two hours’

he first figuratively and then literally set out to “play God,” initially by making the claim that humans had the power of gods and then during the past decade by creating an organization to save and restore endangered species with modern biotechnology.