Whole Earth :
The Many Lives of Stewart Brand
The definitive biography of iconic serial visionary Stewart Brand, from the Merry Pranksters and the generation-defining Whole Earth Catalog to the marriage of environmental consciousness and hacker capitalism and the rise of a new planetary culture—the story behind so many other stories.
Stewart Brand has long been famous if you know who he is, but for many people outside the counterculture, early computing, or the environmental movement, he is perhaps best known for his famous mantra “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” Steve Jobs’s endorsement of these words as his code to live by is fitting; Brand has played many roles, but one of the most important is as a model for how to live.
The contradictions are striking: A blond-haired WASP with a modest family inheritance, Brand went to Exeter and Stanford and was an army veteran, but in California in the 1960s he became an artist and a photographer in the thick of the LSD revolution. While tripping on acid on the roof of his building, he envisioned how valuable it would be for humans to see a photograph of the planet they shared from space, an image that in the end landed on the cover of his Whole Earth Catalog, the defining publication of the counterculture. He married a Native American woman and was committed to protecting indigenous culture, which connected to a broader environmentalist mission that has been a through line of his life. At the same time, he has outraged purists because of his pragmatic embrace of useful technologies, including nuclear power, in the fight against climate change. The famous tagline promise of his catalog was “Access to Tools”; with rare exceptions he rejected politics for a focus on direct power. It was no wonder, then, that he was early to the promise of the computer revolution and helped define it for the wider world.
Brand’s life can be hard to fit onto one screen. Whole Earth unfolds the rich, twisting story of Brand’s life against its proper landscape. Markoff’s biography of Brand captures streams of individualism, respect for science, environmentalism, and Eastern and indigenous thought that flow through Brand’s entire life form a powerful gestalt, a California state of mind that has a hegemonic power to this day. His way of thinking embraces a true planetary consciousness that may be the best hope we humans collectively have.
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About John Markoff
John Markoff became the national computer writer for The New York Times in 1988 and worked there until 2017 covering the Internet, cybersecurity and science and technology. He worked in the paper’s San Francisco bureau beginning in 1992.
Before working for the Times he reported for Pacific News Service, InfoWorld, Byte Magazine and The San Francisco Examiner.
In 2013 he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting as part of a New York Times project on labor and automation. The Times had previously nominated him for a Pulitzer Prize in 1995, 1998 and 2000. The San Francisco Examiner nominated him for a Pulitzer in 1987. In 2005, with a group of Times reporters, he received the Loeb Award for business journalism. In 2007 he shared the Society of American Business Editors and Writers Breaking News award. Also that year he was named a fellow of the Society of Professional Journalists, the organization’s highest honor.
He left the Times in 2017 to research and write a biography of Stewart Brand. Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand was published by Penguin Press in March of 2022. While researching the biography he was a Berggruen Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 2017 and 2018. In 2018 and 2019 he was a fellow at the Stanford Institute of Human Centered Artificial Intelligence where he is now a Distinguished Fellow.