Stewart Brand Quotes & Sayings

The great problem with the future is that we die there. This is why it is so hard to take the future personally, especially the longer future, because that world is suffused with our absence. — Stewart Brand

Likewise, with solar, especially here in California, we're discovering that the 80 solar farm schemes that are going forward want to basically bulldoze 1,000 sq. mi. of southern California desert. Well, as an environmentalist, we would rather that didn't happen. — Stewart Brand

Do what's good for humans, modeled on how humans already do things; ignore what's convenient for computers. — Stewart Brand

This is pretty much the infrastructural stuff that comes along with large quantities of energy. Whichever technology we are looking at has serious hazardous issues. — Stewart Brand

[Wind energy] takes a very large footprint on the land, five to 10 times what you'd use for nuclear, and typically to get one gigawatt of electricity is on the order of 250 square miles of wind farm. — Stewart Brand

Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multitasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed - some mechanism or myth that encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where "the long term" is measured at least in centuries. — Stewart Brand

The amusements of broadcast consist mainly of songs, stories, and games, just as in tribal life. The songs and stories are mostly about courtship, the games mostly played by men, just as in tribal life. — Stewart Brand

Want to know where the action in a culture is? Watch where new language is turning up and where the lawyers collect, usually in that sequence. — Stewart Brand

We seem trapped in the Short Now. The present generation enjoys the greatest power in history, but it appears to have the shortest vision in history. That combination is lethal. — Stewart Brand

Redefine the possible. — Stewart Brand

Whenever I hear the word "share" I would reach for a gun if I had one. "Share" is frequently followed by the word "feelings", and I have enough of my own thank you; please do us both a favor and repress yours. — Stewart Brand

Programming (or making music) at night is dreamtime, a period exclusively mental, utterly absorbed, sustained and timeless, placeless, disembodied. — Stewart Brand

One advantage of a solar collector in space: It would be some kind of origami thing that would unfold and be relatively light because it doesn't have gravity to deal with. — Stewart Brand

Climate change. Urbanization. Biotechnology. Those three narratives, still taking shape, are developing a long arc likely to dominate this century. — Stewart Brand

Humans have made a huge hole in nature in the last 10,000 years. [With de-extinction,] we have the ability now, and maybe the moral obligation, to repair some of the damage. — Stewart Brand

If all of your electricity in your lifetime came from nuclear [energy], the waste from that lifetime of electricity would go in a Coke can. — Stewart Brand

The sociologist Elise Boulding diagnosed the problem of our times as "temporal exhaustion": "If one is mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imaging the future. — Stewart Brand

Information wants to be free. — Stewart Brand

The main problem with solar on the Earth's surface is that it is so intermittent, and we don't have decent storage yet. — Stewart Brand

Tool - something with a use on one end and a grasp on the other end. — Stewart Brand

For artists diving into a new technology, it is a triple short-cut to mastery: you get a free ride on the novelty of the medium; there are no previous masters to surpass; and after a few weeks, you are the master. Try that with the violin. — Stewart Brand

In terms of weapons, the best disarmament tool so far is nuclear energy. We have been taking down the Russian warheads, turning it into electricity. 10 percent of American electricity comes from decommissioned warheads. — Stewart Brand

In our researches on the likely economic apocalypse it's become clear what is the prime survival tool for hard times: friends. Good friends. Lots of them. — Stewart Brand

Over the next ten years, I predict, the mainstream of the environmental movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbaninzation, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power. — Stewart Brand

[On technology:] A realm of intimate, personal power is developing
power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. — Stewart Brand

Long-time professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, Chris Alexander — Stewart Brand

A building is not something you finish. A building is something you start. — Stewart Brand

We can influence the future but not see it. — Stewart Brand

Style is time's fool. Form is time's student — Stewart Brand

What does it take to build something so that it's really easy to make comfortable little modifications in a way that once you've made them, they feel integral with the nature and structure of what is already there? You want to be able to mess around with it and progressively change it to bring it into an adapted state with yourself, your family, the climate, whatever. This kind of adaptation is a continuous process of gradually taking care. — Stewart Brand

No one could accuse Building 20 of burying its Services too deep in the Structure. Recabling from office to office, lab to lab, or even wing to wing is largely a matter of do-it-yourself. Rather than a burden, the occupants consider this a benefit. 1990 - The wide wood stairs in Building 20 show wear in a way that adds to its myth. You feel yourself walking in historic footsteps in pursuit of technical solutions that might be elegant precisely because they are quick and dirty. And that describes the building: elegant because it is quick and dirty. — Stewart Brand

To have a second language is to have a second soul," said Charlemagne around 800 AD. "Each language has its own cognitive toolkit," said psychologist/linguist Lera Boroditsky in 2010 AD. — Stewart Brand

Every interview with a public figure should include the question "What have you been wrong about, and how did that change your views?" The answer will tell us if the person is intellectually honest or a tale spinner with delusions of infallibility. — Stewart Brand

The urgent finds you; you have to find the important. Importance is not fast. It is slow. It is not superficial. It is deep. And as a result, it's extremely powerful. When important matters go wrong, they undermine everything. When they go right, they sustain everything. — Stewart Brand

Institutional buildings act as if they were designed specifically to prevent change for the organization inside and to convey timeless reliability to everyone outside. When forced to change anyway, as they always are, they do so with expensive reluctance and all possible delay. Institutional buildings are mortified by change. — Stewart Brand

When the government tries to run innovation, sometimes it does it well and sometimes it doesn't. So setting up a situation where the market runs innovation, which is a cap-and-trade idea, may well have more flexibility. — Stewart Brand

A library doesn't need windows. A library is a window. — Stewart Brand

Reinventing beats inventing nearly every time. — Stewart Brand

Information wants to be free,because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. — Stewart Brand

Science is the only news. When you scan a news portal or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same cyclical dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness; even the technology is predictable if you know the science behind it. Human nature doesn't change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly — Stewart Brand

Function reforms form, perpetually. — Stewart Brand

Allen: "One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." Panic — Stewart Brand

Many of my contemporaries in the developed world see subsistence farming as soulful and organic, but it is a poverty trap and an environmental disaster. — Stewart Brand

We are convinced by things that show internal complexity, that show the traces of an interesting evolution. Those signs tell us that we might be rewarded if we accord it our trust. An important aspect of design is the degree to which the object involves you in its own completion. Some work invites you into itself by not offering a finished, glossy, one-reading-only surface. This is what makes old buildings interesting to me. I think that humans have a taste for things that not only show that they have been through a process of evolution, but which also show they are still a part of one. They are not dead yet. — Stewart Brand

Art flouts convention. Convention became convention because it works. — Stewart Brand

Everything looks like a failure in the middle. Any — Stewart Brand

Since the soon-to-be outnumber the living; since the living have greater impact on the unborn than ever before thanks to depletion of natural systems, atmospheric disruption, toxic residue, burgeoning technology, global markets, genetic engineering, and sheer population numbers; since our scientific and historic understandings now comfortably examine processes embracing eons; and now that our plan-ahead horizon has shrunk to five years or less - it would seem that a grave disconnect is in progress. Our everhastier decisions and actions do not respond to our long-term understanding, or to the gravity of responsibility we bear. "The — Stewart Brand

Excessively precise economic analysis can lead to assessing everything in terms of its easily measurable melt value - the value that thieves get from stealing copper wiring from isolated houses, that vandals got from tearing down Greek temples for the lead joints holding the marble blocks together, that shortsighted timber companies get from liquidating their forests. The standard to insist on is live value. What is something worth when it's working? — Stewart Brand

When a generation talks just to itself, it becomes more filled with folly than it might have otherwise. — Stewart Brand

Carbon tax has the advantage of basically being able to subsidize one set of activities that you want with another set of activities that you don't want. It's like a cigarette tax. — Stewart Brand

George ended by looking at the larger picture. He said that computation at present is still parasitic on us, but it probably is in the process of becoming part of life itself
it's just another system of genetics. Evolution, after all, is massively parallel computation, and now the world of code is evolving, perhaps to reshape the tree of life itself. — Stewart Brand

You own your own words, unless they contain information. In which case they belong to no one. — Stewart Brand

Wright is an interesting study of a superstar architect having both right and wrong influence. "All Architecture, worthy the name," he decreed in 1910, "will, henceforward, more and more be organic."12 So inspired by Viollet-le-Duc and Louis Sullivan, he inspired countless others (including young me) toward an organic approach to architecture. At the same time, the very pomposity of his decrees helped inflame a fatal egotism in generations of architects, and his most famous buildings belie his organic ideal. They were so totally designed - down to the screwheads all being aligned horizontally to match his prairie line - that they cannot be changed. To live in one of his houses is to be the curator of a Frank Lloyd Wright museum; — Stewart Brand

Civilization's shortening attention span is mismatched with the pace of environmental problems. — Stewart Brand

If you don't like bacteria, you're on the wrong planet. — Stewart Brand

The one garment in the world with the greatest and longest popularity - over a century now - is Levi's denim blue jeans. Along with their practical durability, they show age honestly and elegantly, as successive washings fade and shrink them to perfect fit and rich texture. Ingenious techniques to simulate aging of denim come and go, but the basic indigo 501s, copper-riveted, carry on for decades. This is highly evolved design. Are there blue-jeans buildings among us? — Stewart Brand

When a fantasy turns you on, you're obligated to God and nature to start doing it - right away. — Stewart Brand

We are as gods and might as well get good at it. — Stewart Brand

How can I throw my life away in the least unhappy way? — Stewart Brand

Historians will consider this a dark age. Science historians can read Galileos technical correspondence from the 1590s but not Marvin Minskys from the 1960s. — Stewart Brand

All buildings are predictions. All predictions are wrong. — Stewart Brand

Certain knowledge of what to fight for, and what to fight against, gives meaning to life and provides its own version of discipline: never give up. That kind of meaning is illusory, I now believe, and blinkered. Fealty to a mystical absolute is a formula for disaster, especially in transformative times. — Stewart Brand

We have wished, we eco-freaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion-guilt-free at last! — Stewart Brand

As you gain elevation [on the mountain] your IQ goes down - but your emotional affect goes up, which is great for having a mythic experience, whether you want to or not. — Stewart Brand

Judaism says, "The Messiah is going to come, and that's the end of history"; Christianity says, "The Messiah is going to come back, and that's the end of history"; Islam says, "The Messiah came; history is irrelevant." One — Stewart Brand

There should always be in sight the draw - a kind of a beacon that draws you on through the labyrinth. — Stewart Brand

There's no unemployment in squatter cities. Everyone works. One-sixth of humanity is there. It's soon going to be more than that. — Stewart Brand

The fashion game is fun for architects to play and diverting for the public to watch, but it's deadly for building users. When the height of fashion moves on, they're the ones left behind, stuck in a building that was designed to look good rather than work well, and now it doesn't even look good. — Stewart Brand

The point is to explore whatever may be helpful for thinking, understanding, and acting responsibly over long periods of time. — Stewart Brand

The technology of synthetic biology is currently accelerating at four times the rate of Moore's Law. It's been doing that since 2005, and it's likely to continue. — Stewart Brand

It seems there is an ideal degree of aging which is admired. Things should not be new, but neither should they be rotten with age (except in New Orleans, which fosters a cult of decay). — Stewart Brand

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other. — Stewart Brand

Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road. — Stewart Brand

Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. — Stewart Brand