Stewart Brand - My Hero

I've been a fan of Stewart Brand for many years. Though I was never a hippie, I was a computer hobbyist back in the 1970s and a believer in space habitats in the early 1980s, so I regularly enjoyed the free-for-all in the pages of CoEvolution Quarterly.

One of the great things about Mr. Brand, one of the things that makes him a hero, is summed up in this statement:

“Any time that people are forced to acknowledge publicly that they’re wrong, it’s really good for the commonweal. I love to be busted for apocalyptic proclamations that turned out to be 180 degrees wrong. In 1973 I thought the energy crisis was so intolerable that we’d have police on the streets by Christmas. The times I’ve been wrong is when I assume there’s a brittleness in a complex system that turns out to be way more resilient than I thought.”

How refreshing!