Frank Beacham's Journal

Stewart Brand, editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, is 83 years old today

Stewart Brand, editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, is 83 years old today.

Brand 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.

Brand attended Phillips Exeter Academy, before studying biology at Stanford University, from which he graduated in 1960. As a soldier in the U.S. Army, he was a parachutist and taught infantry skills. He was later to express the view that his experience in the military had fostered his competence in organizing.

A civilian again in 1962, he studied design at San Francisco Art Institute, photography at San Francisco State College and participated in a legitimate scientific study of then-legal LSD in Menlo Park, California.

Brand has lived in California ever since. He and his wife live on Mirene, a 64-foot-long working tugboat. Built in 1912, the boat is moored in a former shipyard in Sausalito.

Brand works in Mary Heartline, a grounded fishing boat about 100 yards away. A favorite item of his is a table on which Otis Redding is said to have written “(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay.” Brand acquired it from an antiques dealer in Sausalito.

Through scholarship and by visiting numerous Indian reservations, he familiarized himself with the Native Americans of the West. Native Americans have continued to be an important cultural interest, an interest which has re-emerged in Brand's work in various ways through the years.

By the mid-1960s, he was associated with author Ken Kesey and the "Merry Pranksters." In San Francisco, with his partner, Zach Stewart, Brand produced the Trips Festival, an early effort involving rock music and light shows.

This was one of the first venues at which the Grateful Dead performed in San Francisco. About 10,000 attended and Haight-Ashbury emerged as a community.

Tom Wolfe describes Brand in the beginning of his 1968 book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

In 1966, Brand campaigned to have NASA release the then-rumored satellite image of the entire Earth as seen from space. He distributed buttons for 25 cents each asking, "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?" He thought the image of our planet might be a powerful symbol.

In 1967, a satellite took the photo. It adorned the first (Fall, 1968) edition of the Whole Earth Catalog. Later in 1968, a NASA astronaut took an Earth photo from Moon orbit, which became the Catalog's next front image in spring, 1969.

In 1970, Earth Day began to be celebrated. During a 2003 interview, Brand explained that the image "gave the sense that Earth’s an island, surrounded by a lot of inhospitable space. And it’s so graphic, this little blue, white, green and brown jewel-like icon amongst a quite featureless black vacuum."

In late 1968, Brand assisted electrical engineer Douglas Engelbart with The Mother of All Demos, a famous presentation of many revolutionary computer technologies (including hypertext, email and the mouse) to the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco.

Brand surmised that given the necessary consciousness, information and tools, human beings could reshape the world they had made (and were making) for themselves into something environmentally and socially sustainable.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, about 10 million Americans were involved in living communally. In 1968, using the most basic of typesetting and page-layout tools, Brand and his colleagues created issue #1 of The Whole Earth Catalog, a book with the significant subtitle, "access to tools.”

Brand and his wife Lois travelled to communes in a 1963 Dodge truck known as the Whole Earth Truck Store, which moved to a storefront in Menlo Park, California.

That first oversize Catalog, and its successors in the 1970s and later, reckoned that many sorts of things were useful "tools": books, maps, garden tools, specialized clothing, carpenters' and masons' tools, forestry gear, tents, welding equipment, professional journals, early synthesizers and personal computers.

The influence of these Whole Earth Catalogs on the rural back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s, and the communities movement within many cities, was widespread throughout the United States, Canada and Australia. A 1972 edition sold 1.5 million copies, and it won the first U.S. National Book Award in category Contemporary Affairs.

To continue this work and also to publish full-length articles on specific topics in the natural sciences and invention, Brand founded the CoEvolution Quarterly (CQ) during 1974. It was aimed primarily at educated laypersons.

In 1985, Brand and Larry Brilliant founded The WELL ("Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link"), a prototypical, wide-ranging online community for intelligent, informed participants the world over. The WELL won the 1990 Best Online Publication Award from the Computer Press Association.

Almost certainly the ideas behind the WELL were greatly inspired by Douglas Engelbart's work at SRI International. Brand was acknowledged by Engelbart in "The Mother of All Demos" in 1968 when the computer mouse and video conferencing were introduced.

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.

These include "Environmental health requires peace, prosperity and continuity,” "Technology can be good for the environment" and (perhaps most famously) "Information wants to be free."

Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, is 66 years old today

Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, is 66 years old today.

In this photo, from the late 1980s, Gates explains his concept of Microsoft’s “office.”

It was then to be a paperless office. That didn’t quite work out.

Photo by Frank Beacham

More than two million Chinese government employees alone monitor China’s Twitter-clone, Weibo, the Beijing News has reported

More than two million Chinese government employees alone monitor China’s Twitter-clone, Weibo, the Beijing News has reported.

Not all of these people — rather amusingly called "internet opinion analysts" — are actively censoring web content. Instead they are trawling social media for troubling entries that are indexed and collated and then passed on to a presumably smaller group of actual decision-makers.

All of these people are apparently on the government's payroll.

In July, 1981, I went to China when it first opened to Americans. In those days, there was no internet, but still plenty of censorship. In fact, a guide told me a Chinese citizen could be put in prison for possession of a Playboy magazine. (I gave him one as a parting gift, being very careful in the handoff!)

China may be more modern today, but the reigns of censorship remain tight. The internet there is monitored closely — just as in United States and most other countries. Wherever you are in the world today, be aware.

Above, I pose with two Chinese censors in 1981.

Serendipity in Media — A Personal Essay

Serendipity in Media — A Personal Essay

Some observers, such as the late Neil Postman in his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, believe that the attention span of humans has decreased as modern technology — especially the internet and television — has increased in volume.

Internet users, especially young ones, can move from web page to web page at astounding speed. Most now spend only seconds on the average website. So today, a major issue for modern media is how to capture and maintain a user’s attention.

Studies have shown that the neural pathways of seasoned internet users are altered as they experience heightened activity in their pre-frontal cortexes (the area of the brain that is mostly responsible for processing complex thoughts, personality expressions, decision making and social behavior).

However, this fundamental “re-wiring” of the human brain as a result of heightened internet use means that “we read faster and less thoroughly as soon as we go online,” said Nicholas Carr in his seminal Wired article from 2010.

Carr reported that it is not only the span and scope of information that is detrimental to our ability to focus, but the speed and simultaneity at which we are exposed to it.

Hyperlinks, advertisements, share buttons and cues to related content are just some of the distracting influences that drive users away from the seemingly simple act of reading and exploring, not to mention the constant pressure of open chat windows, email updates and social media connectivity.

The bottom line, Carr found, is that attention is a limited resource that must be used wisely on the internet to avoid superfluous visual pathways and exits.

Sadly, this trend subverts the very core idea that Tim Berners-Lee conceived in 1989 when he invented the World Wide Web, the internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing.

The genius of the WWW's hyperlinks was the ability for ordinary computer users to easily discover new places and ideas with a simple click of a computer mouse. The very randomness of discovery through hit and miss surfing is one of the endearing strengths of the web.

Like the best of travel — the kind where there's no preset agenda — open-minded people make personal discoveries through accident and sagacity. It's a modern version of serendipity, the faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.

The issue of serendipity on the internet unexpectedly evolved into a major topic of discussion a few years ago at symposium at the Media Laboratory on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Peter Sellars, a noted director of theater, opera and film, offered memorable insight on the subject.

Hundreds of years ago, Sellars said, people in search of knowledge went on personal pilgrimages for information. The process, he said, could take years. By not having the information at their fingertips, there was experience attached to the search that made the finding of the information far more meaningful.

"The actual act of finding something had value," he said. "It was a beautiful thing because when you found something it meant something."

Now, said Sellars, "we are getting all this information with no experience attached to it. Where there is no pilgrimage, the information itself is debased, devalued and dehumanized. In a sense the ratio of experience to information content is radically altered. What's irritating about the age of information is that it creates this yuppie denial of experience. We have everything at our fingertips, but we don't value anything."

The "untamed quality" of the basic internet structure appeals to Sellars because it allows the user to wander and discover information through personal experience. "To just meander is one of the pleasures of life," he noted.

To have the audience making wrong turns through the information "is exactly the point," Sellars continued. "That's where the juice is."

Today's electronic media reflects only a single point of view. "A very narrow group of people are creating this insane gridlock" on information about human experience, Sellars said. "We are aware there are many, many voices that we don't hear today at all. The CBS Evening News represents only one voice."

Thinking, creative people, Sellars said, "must break out of the official information structure" to find new ways to express important subjects that mainstream media refuses to address. "You get the feeling that huge parts of human experience are going undocumented and unrecognized," he continued.

"Aristotle wrote about the attempts to touch the totality of an experience. As human beings, we are complex, divided and multilayered. Therefore, what satisfies us is complex, multilayered and has all these built-in conflicts just as we do. How do with set up (new media) structures that show how we really feel?"

We are only a few years into the science and art of web site design. Are most new web sites simply not complex, divided and multilayered enough to sustain a demanding audience?

Or, perhaps, is it that modern audiences are not as adventurous as they'd like to believe they are — quietly preferring the comfort of simplified, shorthand information delivery over a more demanding, thoughtful exchange of ideas?

These fundamental Internet questions are still on the table and have yet to be answered.

On this day in 1861 — 159 years ago — the Western Union Telegraph Company linked the eastern and western telegraph networks of the nation at Salt Lake City, Utah, completing a transcontinental line that allowed instantaneous nationwide communication

On this day in 1861 — 159 years ago — workers of the Western Union Telegraph Company linked the eastern and western telegraph networks of the nation at Salt Lake City, Utah, completing a transcontinental line that for the first time allowed instantaneous communication between Washington, D.C. and San Francisco.

Stephen J. Field, chief justice of California, sent the first transcontinental telegram to President Abraham Lincoln, predicting that the new communication link would help ensure the loyalty of the western states to the Union during the Civil War.

The push to create a transcontinental telegraph line had begun only a little more than year before when Congress authorized a subsidy of $40,000 a year to any company building a telegraph line that would join the eastern and western networks.

The Western Union Telegraph Company, as its name suggests, took up the challenge, and the company immediately began work on the critical link that would span the territory between the western edge of Missouri and Salt Lake City.

The obstacles to building the line over the sparsely populated and isolated western plains and mountains were huge. Wire and glass insulators had to be shipped by sea to San Francisco and carried eastward by horse-drawn wagons over the Sierra Nevada.

Supplying the thousands of telegraph poles needed was an equally daunting challenge in the largely treeless Plains country, and these too had to be shipped from the western mountains. In the summer of 1861, a party of Sioux warriors cut part of the line that had been completed and took a long section of wire for making bracelets.

Later, however, some of the Sioux wearing the telegraph-wire bracelets became sick, and a Sioux medicine man convinced them that the great spirit of the "talking wire" had avenged its desecration.

Thereafter, the Sioux left the line alone, and the Western Union was able to connect the East and West Coasts of the nation much earlier than anyone had expected and a full eight years before the transcontinental railroad would be completed.

The Telegraph Office in the photo below shows where the east and west coasts lines were joined in 1861.

More than two million Chinese government employees alone monitor China’s Twitter-clone, Weibo, the Beijing News has reported.

Not all of these people — rather amusingly called "internet opinion analysts" — are actively censoring web content. Instead they are trawling social media for troubling entries that are indexed and collated and then passed on to a presumably smaller group of actual decision-makers.

All of these people are apparently on the government's payroll.

In July, 1981, I went to China when it first opened to Americans. In those days, there was no internet, but still plenty of censorship. In fact, a guide told me a Chinese citizen could be put in prison for possession of a Playboy magazine. (I gave him one as a parting gift, being very careful in the handoff!)

China may be more modern today, but the reigns of censorship remain tight. The internet there is monitored closely — just as in United States and most other countries. Wherever you are in the world today, be aware.

Here I pose with two Chinese censors in 1981.

Mexico and the United States began the first telephone between the two countries on this day in 1927 — 93 years ago.

President Calvin Coolidge and his Mexican counterpart, Plutarco Elías Calles, exchanged pleasantries via telephone to celebrate the start of new telephone service between the two countries. Previously, a dispute over land rights in Mexico had soured relations.

Both leaders needed interpreters, but they each saw promise in the communications advancement. Calles hoped it would aid “an era of good will and mutual understanding, which cannot fail to put an end to all those needless misunderstandings.”

The American president praised the engineers who completed the critical piece of infrastructure that made the call possible — a telephone line system more than 780 miles long linking Mexico City with Laredo, Texas.

The music at the festivities celebrating the telephone connection was also notable. Mexico’s national anthem was played for Coolidge in Washington. In Mexico City, “The Star Spangled Banner” was performed at the National Palace for the first time since 1846.

The same year commercial transatlantic telephone service also began. And, the first AT&T videophone call was also made that year between Washington, D.C and New York City by then-Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover.

Thanks New York Times!

Peter Sellars: A Memorable Encounter

It’s Peter Sellars 63nd birthday today. He is noted for his unique contemporary stagings of classical and contemporary operas and plays. But I remember him for another reason.

I met Sellars at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge in the 1990s and heard him give some insightful comments on the issue of serendipity on the internet. Not only have his early perceptions proven true, but they were memorable and have stuck with me over time.

Hundreds of years ago, Sellars said, people in search of knowledge went on personal pilgrimages for information. The process, he said, could take years. By not having the information at their fingertips, there was experience attached to the search that made the finding of the information far more meaningful.

"The actual act of finding something had value," Sellars said. "It was a beautiful thing because when you found something it meant something."

Now, said Sellars in the 1990s: "We are getting all this information with no experience attached to it. Where there is no pilgrimage the information itself is debased, devalued and dehumanized. In a sense the ratio of experience to information content is radically altered. What's irritating about the age of information is that it creates this yuppie denial of experience. We have everything at our fingertips, but we don't value anything."

The "untamed quality" of the basic internet structure appeals to Sellars because it allows the user to wander and discover information through personal experience. "To just meander is one of the pleasures of life," he noted.

To have the audience making wrong turns through the information "is exactly the point," Sellars continued. "That's where the juice is."

Today's electronic media reflects only a single point of view. "A very narrow group of people are creating this insane gridlock" on information about human experience, Sellars said. "We are aware there are many, many voices that we don't hear today at all. The CBS Evening News represents only one voice."

Artists, Sellars said, "must break out of the official information structure" to find new ways to express important subjects that mainstream media refuses to address.

"You get the feeling that huge parts of human experience are going undocumented and unrecognized," he continued. "Aristotle wrote about the attempts to touch the totality of an experience. As human beings, we are complex, divided and multilayered. Therefore, what satisfies us is complex, multilayered and has all these built-in conflicts just as we do. How — with set up (new media) structures — do we show our real feelings?"

The World Wide Web, as conceived by Tim Berners-Lee, offered the promise of a new media structure for a greater diversity of voices and ideas. But it has since been hijacked by not only by traditional media, but by commerce and narrow demagogic political voices. Even the most creative new works remain invisible — hidden under a cluttered sea of political and commercial noise?

Peter Sellars saw this early on and sadly it has not changed all these years earlier.

For his innovative collected work in the field of opera and music productions, Sellars was awarded the prestigious Swedish Polar Music Prize of 2014 alongside Chuck Berry.

It's the Story, Stupid

Our society’s storytellers — including musicians, actors, writers, artists, photographers and the backstage people that support their work — are going to have to rethink their places in the future.

How? I have some preliminary thoughts on the question. It’s not meant to be complete by any means, but only a baseline to begin thinking about the future.

What do all artists have in common? We are storytellers — in one form or another. Through our work as “communicators,” we seek to create stories that reflect on the human condition.

Some artists provoke, others make us reflect, some soothe us with beauty while others make us laugh. It’s a real hodgepodge, but in the end it is all storytelling.

Telling stories is an essential human need. It has been with us since the beginning of time — whether painting on the walls of caves, writing on stone tablets or telling stories around a campfire.

What is constantly changing is the technology used for presenting that art. In the pandemic of 1916, people had few ways to communicate. Today, we have the internet. It is not only keeping many of us sane, but offers one of the few ways today for artists to tell their stories to the world. This is a major plus.

But let’s face the hard truth. It is going to be a long time before audiences gather again, even after venues reopen. There will be fear of infection until a vaccine is readily available. Regardless of what the government tells you, it is going to be a very difficult period ahead.

Depending on how artists use the internet will determine the ultimate success...or failure.

For writers, videographers and still photographers, little has changed in the way we distribute our work. Most of us were already using the internet. In the coming days, each of us will use our creative sensibilities to tell stories that will seek to connect with people in crisis.

For musicians, the internet landscape is most interesting. Some big name performers are blowing it — with poor production values and really bad audio and video quality in presenting their work. Viewers will put up with poor technical quality for a very short time...after that all video is judged on its quality.

Many younger, amateur musicians are using the internet far more effectively than successful musicians used to working before live audiences. A shakeup may come from this in music. Video may be the great equalizer before this pandemic is over.

Judy Collins once told me that audiences want her to tell a personal story in performances after she sings a couple of songs. This is because people want to know behind the scenes anecdotes about the music they love. For some successful musicians, perhaps there is more power in stories than songs right now.

For actors, performing on stage isn’t going to happen soon. Who’s going to pay big money to be crammed close to others in a theatre? It will be a hard sell — at least for a while.

Again, it is interesting to see actors informally on video. Many big “stars” are awkward and incredibly uninteresting when out of character. Others are charming and delightful people that we see in a totally new way.

There is an opportunity to reinvent the concept of acting as storytelling. New opportunities are open to aspiring actors during this crisis. One person performances on video may be the future for some actors. Others may find their way to communicate effectively as real people. Creative thinking is needed here.

As to behind-the-scenes workers who know audio, lighting and stagecraft, there is a growing opportunity to help creative artists set up small scale home video studios.

Streaming media is the future (at least for now) and the rules of good production have not changed.

If I were a lighting designer, I would be using small, inexpensive LED lights to create home studio packages. A lot of entertainers definitely need help with audio and out of work sound operators could help. And surely there are better set backgrounds for video from homes than bookcases and cluttered home offices.

As a community of storytelling artists, the goal always has been to tell good stories from a unique point of view. Those stories may be local, national or global. But they are the “stuff” of all human communication. The need for good stories never goes away.

Humans always adapt to new situations...as the old ways disappear. The art will never change, but the way we deliver it to people is in play. This what we should be thinking about.

The 30th Anniversary of Apple's Macintosh

The 30th anniversary of the Macintosh computer probably means little to most young people today. But to me, it was a pivotal moment in my working life—one that allowed me to ditch the office job forever and truly operate independently as a productive freelancer.

I bought the first 128K Macintosh right after seeing IBM pummeled in that famous Apple Super Bowl commercial in 1984. I was angry with computers in general at the time and that commercial hit the right spot. Before that day, I owned a Xerox 820. It was a truly awful machine.

The Xerox was an 8-bit clunker that cost me about $4,000 plus the freelance consultant it took to set it up to do anything of value. It used what was known as a CP/M operating system with an unintuitive word processor called Wordstar. It had big eight-inch disks to store data. The operating manuals (there were several) took up an entire bookshelf. It was definitely BIG IRON.

The Macintosh changed all that forever. First, the money-grubbing consultant was shown the door. I had all the software I needed and it was easy to use. The mouse was pure genius. I could write documents, work with numbers and even manipulate pictures with ease.

The Mac was small, light and simple to understand and that room full of arcane documents was replaced with a very basic manual written in language “for the rest of us.” Apple had hit a chord with me.

I once thanked Steve Jobs in person for the Mac. I told him it enabled me to do what I wanted to do. He responded that’s exactly what it was designed to do. Since 1984, I’ve been through dozens of Macs and never once has a Mac let me down. It has been one hell of a run.

When I first bought my Mac, I had a professional video edit suite in Los Angeles that was valued at more than $1 million. Today, with iMovie and Final Cut Pro, my Macintosh does far more than that edit facility ever did in 1984. You just can’t beat that.

This is why the 30th anniversary of the Mac matters to me. The Mac set me free and there are few other things you can compare to it in today’s world.