Futurist Stewart Brand Wants to Revive Extinct Species

This summer it was announced that the WELL, a revolutionary online community founded nearly 30 years ago, had been put up for sale by its current owner, web magazine Salon. If no buyer emerges, this historic online watering hole will likely have to close up shop. It would mark the end of an erabut no matter what happens, the WELLs legacy will continue to live on all around us, in the rollicking conversations we enjoy every day on social networks and comment threads.

In that regard, the WELL is just one of many world-bending triumphs in the long, strange career of its cofounder, Stewart Brand. A Merry Prankster in the early 1960s, Brand went on to found the Whole Earth Catalog, a bible for both the back-to-the-land movement and the first computer hackers. Indeed, the community that sprang up around the catalog was what formed the seed of the WELL (an acronym of Whole Earth Lectronic Link), an early BBS that became an Internet service provider at the dawn of the web.

In addition to his many entrepreneurial ventures, Brand has also been a vocal visionary on technology and its future, famously coining the phrase Information wants to be free (though it also wants to be expensive, he immediately added in a far less-quoted caveat). Hes written extensively and perceptively about alternative energy, the environment, and bioengineering. Today Brand heads the Long Now Foundation, a group devoted to thinking about what humanity and Earth will look like in 10,000 years.

As part of our 20th-anniversary Icons series, we sent Kevin Kellya longtime writer and editor for Wired as well as an early member of the WELL and a former contributor to the Whole Earth Catalogto chat with Brand about the legacy of his online community and the challenges of trying to peer into the future.

Kevin Kelly: There was an event in San Francisco in 1968 that has come to be called the mother of all demoswhen Stanfords Doug Engelbart showed off a computer with a mouse and graphical interface. You were there. What significance did that event have for you?

Stewart Brand: It made me perpetually impatient. I saw a bunch of things demonstrated that clearly worked, and I wanted some right now, please! That demo gave a really accurate look at what was coming and made it seem so easy. But decades would go by, and it just kept not coming.

Kelly: Does that give you pause that maybe all kinds of things that look to be around the corner todaydrones, magic glasses, self-driving carsare just premature promises?

Brand: The lesson was that this is exponential technology. I dont mean that just in terms of power or capacitydriven by Moores lawbut also in that it starts out slow as consumers find ways to put it to use.

Kelly: Another harbinger of the digital age is on the ropes right now. In June, Salon announced it was selling the WELL, which you cofounded. How would you describe the WELL?

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Futurist Stewart Brand Wants to Revive Extinct Species