nly one
person may be able to claim credit for the popularity of both the Grateful Dead and space colonisation: Stewart Brand. He is best known as the founder of thea compendium of tools that listed everything from compost machines to geometry books. Part do-it-yourself guide, part techno-Utopian journal, the periodical was considered essential reading by Americans who wanted to live more sustainably in the 1960s and 1970s.
Mr Brand, who was also a journalist, mingled with early computer pioneers. He helped Douglas Englebart, an inventor, demonstrate the computer mouse to the world. In 1972 he and Annie Leibovitz, a photographer, documented the engineers of the first modern personal computer at Xerox’s PARC laboratory formagazine.
Mr Brand’s technophilia helped shape Silicon Valley. But it drove a wedge between him and his ecologically minded friends. He had always been an outlier, enjoying Ayn Rand’s libertarian books at university. His fascination with humans settling in space—he financed the subject’s first major conference in 1974—widened the divide. In 2009 Mr Brand distanced himself from his fellow environmentalists, advocating for genetically modified organisms and nuclear power.
The documentary’s focus on outlandish projects amplifies the biggest criticism of Mr Brand—that he may be too optimistic about technology and too neglectful of its risks. It derives its title from the’s opening sentence: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” Peter Coyote, a longtime acquaintance of Mr Brand who partied at the Trips Festival decades earlier, offers an alternative characterisation of humanity: “idiot savants”.