Sublime

IT’S BEEN well-documented that there is a growing sense of entitlement among young people today.

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

human tastemakers,

Technology is not popular nowadays. As I write these words in early 2018, it even appears to be an enemy of our entire way of life: it disrupts whole industries; it displaces jobs; it widens the inequality gap; it endangers our privacy; it undermines the economic security that was at the heart of the post-war social compact; it even threatens

Although he was largely an observer of the technical community that created Silicon Valley, his various ideas and crusades around the Whole Earth Catalog, which he created in the fall of 1968, foreshadow and resonate with the techno-utopian culture that the Valley spawned.

The tycoons of social media have to stop pretending that they’re friendly nerd gods building a better world and admit they’re just tobacco farmers in T-shirts selling an addictive product to children.5 Because, let’s face it, checking your “likes” is the new smoking.