Stewart Brand Reflects | Sustainable Industries

In an interview with Stewart Brand at West Coast Green, Brian Back of Sustainable Industries started with a few questions about Brand's experiences in the '60s and '70s (mp3).

The Whole Earth Catalog was a counter-countercultural organization, in the sense that: We were trying to bring intellectual seriousness to the countercultural, then hippie, domain – and technology, when it was appropriate, and science across the board. And [we] pulled it off. I guess I’m trying to do the same with the new book, where I’m trying to move the whole environmental movement more toward science and to engineering. …

Jimmy Wales (of Wikipedia) did something that we failed to do at CoEvolution Quarterly and Whole Earth. When people would show up, sort-of wanting to join the team, we would look at them like: “We’re old hands here; you’re newbies; just send in your money and don’t bother us.”

And the deal at Wikipedia – one of the reasons it has scaled so well, against all theories of why something like that could possibly work – … is that everybody who is part of the community that runs Wikipedia is engaged to ensure that anybody who starts participate, starts to invite themselves into the process, gets aggressively welcomed and thanked. That takes a lot of effort.  …

Typically, most things kill themselves by getting stratified with a certain age-group, and as that age-group ages, no new people come in. To make any organization work [so that it is] open and excited when new people show up, that’s the thing that anybody would do well [to learn].

We did it very badly, and we eventually went out of business.