Stewart Brand: Save the Slums

Some people see a squatter city in Nigeria or India and the desperation overwhelms them: rickety shelters, little kids working or begging, filthy water and air.

Stewart Brand sees the same places and he's encouraged. The pioneering environmentalist, technology thinker, and founder of the Whole Earth Catalog has written a new manifesto, Whole Earth Discipline, in which he defends genetic engineering, nuclear power, and other longtime nemeses of the green left as good for the planet.

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EDGE 203

EDGE 203

This EDGE edition, which includes graphics and links, is available online at here and includes these following stories and more.

Falling In Love
By Marvin Minsky
What is Love, and how does it work? Is this something that we want to understand, or is it one of those subjects that we don't really want to know more about? And should machines have feelings, too?

An Early Environmentalist, Embracing New 'Heresies'
By John Tierney
Stewart Brand who is now 68 and lives on a tugboat in Sausalito, CA, has stayed ahead of the curve for so long that as a publisher, writer, techno-guru, enviro-philosopher, supreme networker, he's become a cottage industry in academia. Read what he says about environmentalism and the direction in which it should be going. When Stewart talks, everybody tunes in.

Mosh Pit Meets Sandbox
By David Brooks, who declares Fatwa on hipster dads
Can we stop hearing about downtown parents who dress their babies in black skull slippers, Punky Monkey T-shirts and camo toddler ponchos until the little ones end up looking like sad-parody club clones of mom and dad? Can we finally stop reading about the musical Antoinettes who would get the vapors if their tykes were caught listening to Disney tunes, and who instead force-feed Brian Eno, Radiohead and Sufjan Stevens into their little babies' iPods? I'm over the 'hipster dad' stories, too, but only because it's been done to death. I don't know how I feel about an actual Hipster dad because I don't believe I know of any.

A Familiar and Prescient Voice, Brought to Life
By Dennis Overbye
Carl Sagan has rejoined the cosmic debate from the grave, with "new" words on the boundary between science and religion. The respect people had for Carl Sagan bordered on cult worship-- but in a good way. Nice to hear that his words live on.

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From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism

Deerskin jackets and potter’s wheels, geodesic domes and star charts, instructions on raising bees and on repairing Volkswagens, advice on building furniture and cultivating marijuana: all this can be found here, along with celebrations of communal life and swipes at big government, big business and a technocratic society.

Can this encyclopedia (Last Whole Earth Catalog) of countercultural romance have anything to do with today’s technological world, a world of broadband connections, TCP/IP protocol and the Internet?

How could the romantic, utopian culture of the 1960’s, with its deep suspicions about modernity and its machinery, be closely linked to one of the most important technological revolutions of the last hundred years?

link
login: bozetta
password: rednose

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THE UNDERGROUND PRESS

Did you ever read/see any of the great underground newspapers of the late 1960's - mid 1970's in the US? There was The East Village Other (NY), The Great Speckled Bird (ATL), Black Panther, Berkeley Barb (Berkeley, CA), LA Free Press, The Paper, of East Lansing, Michigan, and many more?

I was a faithful Speckled Bird reader. We bought these most of the time from people on street corners in Atlanta; on the corner of 14th St, where all the other freaks hung out. As surely as you'd see a Bird vendor around there, you'd also see someone selling flowers for a small fee to wear in your hair or wherever. And you knew who was selling "what" "where". And someone was in a doorway playing guitar; a few bumming spare change passing by. All waiting for the next musical, sexual, or pharmaceutical experience.

Receiving The Last Whole Earth Catalog was a spiritual experience. Sort of a hippie Sears catalog and was one of the very few books we had at Peace Tree (a lakeside commune in Tennessee) when we first began. It was all about survival, metaphysics, learning to grow organic, live natural, how to build a shelter-- how to build or make just about anything. Stewart Brand (Burning Man) was the founder. We've still got one around the house someplace.

Many college libraries have some of these newspapers on Microfilm. Some are for sale on Ebay. Why are there no equivalent newspapers/websites? "Where is that one great progressive balls to the wall website that has it all?" Music, protest and boycott info, in-depth interviews, sex (& relationships), drugs, literature? more»

from the archives

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Don't Date Him Girl
Women bent on revenge and on saving others from their fate can anonymously post their dating horror stories on the 2-month-old site, complete with names and pictures. They can also check the database of cheaters for a suspected player.

Thanks for the warning, although no explanation necessary for this fine specimen. I posted something similar on Sept 7 about a Dickhead Registry Actually, it's been a veritable parade of dicks and drugs around here lately. Link - via

Live Blogging Martha
11:10 We understand that the hurricane shout-out is obligatory and basically unavoidable, but Martha’s flat voice is about as warm as George W’s. “Yesterday was also 9-11.” Thanks, we had no idea. Let’s fucking cook something… via

If President Bush is going to exclusively play to military audiences, he must carry a golf club like Bob Hope and tell the Marines that the mess in Iraq is bigger than Dolly Parton's boobs. Why is there a troop shortage in Iraq? Because so many of them have to be here doing photo-ops with this clod. This guy has shown his ass to more servicemen than a bar girl in Thailand. --Bill Maher

Queerty is a fun, new site that's agenda-free. If it were any gayer it would be Elton John's fanny pack.

"NAPS is all about laughs. We are not degenerates or Pervs, we are PREverts with a good sense of humor and want share some laughter." Brand new site that's really taking off. Link

100 days without Sex - Belle de Jour scandalised literary society with her candid diaries of life as a prostitute - and her admission that she enjoyed sex with strangers. So how would she cope with celibacy? Link

Drawn curtain reveals naked emporer, fiddling.

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{Clock Of The Long Now}

Some of you know about Stewart Brand's Clock Of The Long Now. If not, you may want to see what this visionary has been up to lately.



Brian Eno recently released a cd of bells sounds he designed for the 10,000 Year Clock and profits will go to the Long Now Foundation. You can hear the cd here.



Also initiated by the Long Now Foundation, The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to develop a contemporary counterpart of the historic Rosetta Stone.



He does everything in such grand fashion.

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THE UNDERGROUND PRESS

Did you ever read/see any of the great underground newspapers of the late 1960's - mid 1970's in the US? There was The East Village Other (NY), The Great Speckled Bird (ATL), Black Panther, Berkeley Barb (Berkeley, CA), LA Free Press, The Paper, of East Lansing, Michigan, and many more?

I was a faithful Speckled Bird reader. We bought these most of the time from people on street corners in Atlanta; on the corner of 14th St, where all the other freaks hung out. As surely as you'd see a Bird vendor around there, you'd also see someone selling flowers for a small fee to wear in your hair or wherever. And you knew who was selling "what" "where". And someone was in a doorway playing guitar; a few bumming spare change passing by. All waiting for the next musical, sexual, or pharmaceutical experience.

Receiving The Last Whole Earth Catalog was a spiritual experience. Sort of a hippie Sears catalog and was one of the very few books we had at Peace Tree (a lakeside commune in Tennessee) when we first began. It was all about survival, metaphysics, learning to grow organic, live natural, how to build a shelter-- how to build or make just about anything. Stewart Brand (Burning Man) was the founder. We've still got one around the house someplace.

Many college libraries have some of these newspapers on Microfilm. Some are for sale on Ebay. Why are there no equivalent newspapers/websites? "Where is that one great progressive balls to the wall website that has it all?" Music, protest and boycott info, in-depth interviews, sex (& relationships), drugs, literature? more»

from the archives

Read more...