Critiquing Stewart Brand’s Californian Ideology
Dale Carrico has a fascinating three-parter, which we won’t reproduce here, but below is the introduction.
The original article has the links.
Intro:
“I read an article attributing to futurologist Steward Brand “heretical” views that were presumably shocking given that Brand is an “icon” of the environmentalist movement, but which seemed to me not only not shocking but not even the least bit surprising. I started tossing off an annoyed post explaining why I felt this way and soon discovered it had grown to frightful proportions, and so I have divided it into three separate parts.
The first part, Stewart Brand, King of Pop Futurology, written while I was still feeling annoyed explains why I am ambivalent about describing Stewart Brand as an “icon” or “godfather” of environmentalism (although of course he has as much right to describe himself an environmentalist as anybody does, more than most do in fact). I would describe Brand as a futurologist, and I think his “heretical” views are pretty much neoliberal-futurological conventional wisdom, and I think he is part of a larger movement of California Ideologists and digirati and technophiles about whom it is actually obfuscatory rather than clarifying to describe them as greens or libertarians or hippies, even if they are connected to these movements and subcultures. While I still stand by what I wrote here, I think there is probably more snark than substance in it.
The second part, Surveying Brand’s Greenback-Green Futurological Litany, actually addresses itself directly to the four claims attributed (I am assuming accurately) to Brand which triggered my annoyance in the first place. By the time I got to this part I have to admit that I wasn’t particularly annoyed anymore, and the discussion seems to me more substantial there. I don’t doubt that, as is usually the case, interest in what I have to say will diminish directly in proportion to the diminishment of the snark.
The third part, All Futurisms Tend to Be Functionally Retro-Futuristic in Their Political Substance draws from the foregoing a more general case that provides a more systematic formulation of a point (captured in the title) that I often declare here on Amor Mundi, but rarely elaborate as much as I should. By the time I arrived at part three I will admit that I had lost all interest in Stewart Brand and had become intrigued by the theoretical ideas that had churned up to the surface in the process of writing the preceding sections. It was at this point that I realized I’d been writing for over an hour and that my post had become yet another of my sprawling scattered speculations. That’s when I decided to try breaking it into separate parts for a change, and hence the present experiment.”
