Traveler, Your (Digital) Footprints: Savant Vibes
In Traveler, Your (Digital) Footprints, Chuer Yang ’27 explores the various internet rabbit holes she’s tumbled down.
“Stay hungry, stay foolish,” Steve Jobs said in his 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech. Widely interpreted as an ethos for risk-taking and lifelong learning, these words reach beyond the veneer of idealistic motivation: they are the enigmatic epitomization of the 1960s and 1970s American counterculture movement.
Imagine the hippies along Haight-Ashbury dilly-dallying under the pearlescent sun. Examine electric blues and pinks and yellows seeping into the concrete of San Francisco’s hills. Peek into the inescapable translucent haze and tune in to the background melodies of the Grateful Dead.
Now, juxtapose this with the colorful but essentially ascetic office interiors of Google, Meta or even Oracle (the playrooms and nap pods of the livable office give off an endearing illusion of freedom, after all). The roots of Silicon Valley are necessarily intertwined with the psychedelic soil it germinated in.
Stewart Brand
As I was reading through TLDR, a daily newsletter of interesting stories in tech and startups, I stumbled upon blogger Alexey Guzey’s list of “People who are going to change the world,” which was inspired by Stripe CEO Patrick Collison’s list of interesting people.
Clicking through the repertoire of names, I scanned through blogs, GitHub repositories and Twitter profiles until one particular page caught my eye. The interface wasn’t anything flashy, but Stewart Brand’s ’60 website began my real trip (no pun intended) down a marvelous rabbit hole.
Brand graduated Stanford with a B.A. in biology in 1960 and enlisted in the army that same year. After two years, he went on to study design at the San Francisco Institute for Art and photography at San Francisco State College. Back when acid was still legal, Brand participated in the CIA LSD experiment in Menlo Park, and in an ephemeral flirtation with the road, he journeyed through the great American landscape with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. In 1968, he created the magazine “Whole Earth Catalog,” a bible of sorts for the counterculture movement.
The Whole Earth Catalog
As young people broke away from the fixtures of traditional society in the 1960s and ’70s, the catalog served as a paradigm for alternative technocracies. For many, the catalog — which provided reviews of tools, books and resources for self-sufficiency, sustainability and alternative living — changed the world.
But where did the name “Whole Earth Catalog” come from?
In The Guardian, Brand explained:
“We were just starting to get files of photographs of the Earth, and there was a sequence from a satellite of basically a day in the life of Earth from sunrise to sunset, and I wanted that sequence and to make the connection between the view from space of the shadow moving across the Earth, and the experience of being on Earth and seeing dawn. And for some reason the image I had in my mind was of a hitchhiker at dawn on a road somewhere and the sun comes up and there are trains going by. The frame of mind of the young hitchhiker is one of the freest frames of mind there is. You’re always a little bit hungry and you know you are being completely foolish.”
By now, the roads have been paved and guardrails have been installed, but the information superhighway (the internet) which we tread along every day was, at one point, the vagabond’s acceleration toward some unknown golden land. Brand tweaked traditional positivism by articulating this vision of technology as a “small scale, democratic and free” tool for individual empowerment, according to The Guardian.
The last edition of the Catalog came out in 1971, but if you’re curious, the entire index is available here.
Brand believed that the magnificence and accessibility of knowledge would vitalize our ability to choose authentic projects and live in good faith. As The New York Times technology writer John Markoff wrote, the Whole Earth Catalogue was “the internet before the internet. It was the book of the future. It was a web in newsprint.”
The Long Now Foundation
In 1996, Brand went on to co-found the Long Now Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to fostering long-term thinking and preserving knowledge for future generations, with WIRED founder Danny Hillis. Notable endeavors include the Rosetta Project, Revive and Restore and the Clock of the Long Now, a 10,000 year clock funded by Jeff Bezos.
On the first principles of the internet
The internet’s exigence is the fragrant dust of the open road and the texture of night stars under the redwood forests. The beatnik sings at the heart of the brazen “Wild West” of Silicon Valley. Just as Brand theorized the personal computer as a conduit for absolute freedom, today, the World Wide Web should be wielded as a chisel and hammer for individuals to carve organic shapes of their own choice. The savant is not a mere LeetCode master — they should act with an insatiable palate for experimentation with information and truth.
To live authentically in the age of Big Tech is to abide by Brand’s first principles: stay hungry and stay foolish.
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