Stewart Brand – MRQE

“All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”

Thu, 21 Aug 2025 04:00:00 +0000

We have been colonised by the machines we have built. Although we don’t realise it, the way we see everything in the world today is through the eyes of the computers.

We Are As Gods

Thu, 21 Aug 2025 04:00:00 +0000

We are as gods and might as well get good at it. This is the audacious opening line of the Whole Earth Catalog, a compendium of wonderful tools compiled by counterculture legend Stewart Brand. A psychedelic experimenter, cyberspace pioneer, and environmentalist, he is now urging humanity to use our god-like powers to reframe our relationship with time and life itself. Today, Stewart is using biotech to resurrect extinct species. He and a team of scientists travel to Siberia to collect ancient DNA in an effort to make a hybrid Woolly Mammoth. Former allies in the environmental movement vow to stand in his way, but Stewart forges ahead in his life-long mission to conserve the whole earth.

Pandora’s Promise

Thu, 21 Aug 2025 04:00:00 +0000

The atomic bomb, the specter of a global nuclear holocaust, and disasters like Fukushima have made nuclear energy synonymous with the darkest nightmares of the modern world. But what if everyone has nuclear power wrong? What if people knew that there are reactors that are self-sustaining and fully controllable and ones that require no waste disposal? What if nuclear power is the only energy source that has the ability to stop climate change?

Hackers: Wizards of the Electronic Age (TV)

Thu, 21 Aug 2025 04:00:00 +0000

All interviews in this documentary were shot over a long weekend at a 1984 hacker conference by the Whole Earth Catalog editors Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelley in Sausalito, California. The event itself (the hacker conference) was inspired by Steven Levy’s classic book “Hackers – Heroes of the Computer Revolution”

Das Netz

Thu, 21 Aug 2025 04:00:00 +0000

More of a film essay – of the type pioneered by Orson Welles and Chris Marker – than a standard documentary, German filmmaker Lutz Dammbeck’s The Net: The Unabomber, the LSD and the Internet begins with the typical format and structure of a nonfiction film, and a single subject (the life and times of mail bomber Ted Kaczynski). From that thematic springboard, Dammbeck branches out omnidirectionally, segueing into a series of thematic riffs and variants on such marginally-related subjects as: the history of cyberspace, terrorism, utopian ideals, LSD, the Central Intelligence Agency, and Cuckoo’s Nest author Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters.