Stewart Brand on how progress happens
newyorker.com33 points by bookofjoe 5 days ago
33 points by bookofjoe 5 days ago
Website as of May 02013 [sic]: https://sb.longnow.org/SB_homepage/Home.html
Books in Progress: https://books.worksinprogress.co/
I had the incredible pleasure of spending a cocktail party seated next to Stewart Brand back around '94. I did not know who he was, but by the end of the evening I was convinced this was the most witty, empathetic genius I'd ever encountered. And I've met quite a few. At one point, astonished at his quick wit, a group of us throw topics at him, and he knew them all, and the biting sarcastic jokes about them was how he let us know. Extremely fun guy.
He also was the A/V guy for the "mother of all demos".
> In order to provide live two-way video between the lab and the conference hall, two microwave links were used. English also commanded a video switcher that controlled what was displayed on the big screen. The camera operator in Menlo Park was Stewart Brand, who at the time was a non-computer person, best known as the editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. Stewart Brand advised Engelbart and the team about how to present the demo. Engelbart got to know Stewart Brand when they experimented with LSD at the same lab.
Last sentence is epic.
No fucking way. Wow.
I believe that when people are in high contact with things that look to the uninformed like serendipity, it's a sign of something in them as a sensory organ, and something they are tapped into in the information environment... though perhaps we don't have good enough language to label it yet.
Whatever a "sense of smell" is for information (and surprise, and comedy, and aliveness...), this confirmed to me that Stewart Brand totally has it.