81.13. Stewart Brand
You are reading a reference page, not a biography! Individuals are featured in this section if their actions or ideas are referenced in PowerMyth in some way, but this is not intended to reduce their lives to what is written here. Take this page only as a brief summary for how I relate them to other work on the Index, and please seek out other resources to learn more!
Stewart Brand is a figure hugely influential to both Countercultures and Cyberspace.
He founded the Whole Earth Catalog in the late 1960s, which was like... idk, it's a catalog of the whole earth. It's probably just easier to check it out yourself, and good news, it's completely archived and available for free! Each issue made it accessible for readers to go through a collection of tools and information that supported self-sufficiency. This was obviously very attractive to anti-establishment counterculturalists and therefore had a wide readership.
Emerging technology was often featured in the catalog, and Brand himself was an early adopter of computers. He would later found the WELL, an early dial-up bulletin board system of which John Perry Barlow was a member. This early virtual community served as a huge force in setting the culture of Cyberspace (i.e., all the libertarian-flavored echoes of the '60s counterculture). For more on that, check out Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture!
Oh, for those coming from my Game Genealogy project, check out this Spacewar feature he did in 1972!