Stewart Brand_ The dawn of de-extinction. Are you ready_
178 views · Published 14 April 2013 · 18:25 · Indexed 23 September 2026
Channel: D Loclynn · 2013 · Education
Stewart Brand (born December 14, 1938 in Rockford, Illinois) is an American writer, best known as editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He founded a number of organizations, including The WELL, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation. He is the author of several books, most recently Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto A few of Brand's aphorisms (on which he has elaborated) are that "Civilization's shortening attention span is mismatched with the pace of environmental problems"; "Environmental health requires peace, prosperity, and continuity; "Technology can be good for the environment"; and (perhaps most famously)[15] "Information wants to be free": "Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine -- too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property', the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better." —spoken at the first Hackers' Conference, and reprinted in the May 1985 Whole Earth Review. The quotation is an elaboration from his book, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, published in 1987.
