Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand

she also represented something far bigger and deeper: the idea that, in every aspect of our lives, we deserved better than the take-it-or-leave-it outputs of establishment power. Getting what we wanted - and getting the best deal - had become a virtue. Innovation would lead to progress and well-being, and since consumer demand would drive innovatio

Earlier I mentioned that Newton and Jobs were great synthesizers. Newton brought together planetary astronomy, laws of motion, differential mathematics—ideas developed by others—and synthesized them into a coherent whole the world hadn’t seen. Jobs brought together design, marketing, and technology into a coherent whole, as few others could do. But

The less-famous history of an ultra-famous icon captures one person’s evolution toward this balance. During Steve Jobs’s first stint at Apple, he called his loonshot group working on the Mac “pirates” or “artists” (he saw himself, of course, as the ultimate pirate-artist). Jobs dismissed the group working on the Apple II franchise as “regular Navy.

Together with Danny Hillis, Brand chairs the board of the Long Now Foundation, an organization devoted to returning us to thinking in generational timescales.