Stewart Brand: whole earth vision for the 21st century

E: The Environmental Magazine, May-June, 1996 by Kellyn S. Betts

On the other hand, the Media Lab [an interdisciplinary think tank headquartered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the subject of a book, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, by Brand in 1988] is now working on paper which is basically an electronic display medium. It's paper that you can read, write and erase and use over. Whenever you want to read it, you get up-to-the-minute news printed on the paper, and there it is folded up. And the next time you want to use the same paper, it's got a fresh set of news and photographs and everything else. So that seems to be coming. It'll take a while, but that could be a future alternative. I'd ask all sorts of questions about what it's made of, but that's a subject for another conversation.

Any comments on the garbage and the waste that's created by the planned obsolescence of computing equipment?

One of the things that we're headed toward is equipment - hardware - that you rent rather than own. We're already seeing, for example, a company that makes carpeting they rent to you. It comes in square tiles so it's easy to replace parts of it. They always own it, so when you're tired of it or it's worn out, it goes back and they recycle it into fresh carpet. Some German automobile manufacturers are doing the same thing with cars. Again, if environmentalists embrace technology and participate, they can help computer manufacturers take the same approach to their hardware. For example, in airplanes, basically, there are no new air-frames being built. In extreme cases, B-52 bombers which were built in the late '50s and early '60s are still being used and will probably still be used up until 2030 or 2040. They have a very robust airframe, beautifully designed and very effective; they just keep swapping new avionics in and out.

You could probably do this with computers. You can do it, I know, with buildings because I did a whole book on that subject [How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built, published in 1994].

Another example of this kind of thing is glass fiber replacing copper as a major communication medium. So the copper mines have come to a standstill. [Buckminster] Fuller pointed out a while back that the main copper mines are the walls of old houses and wiring that are already out there. It's cheaper to recycle it than to mine new stuff. And glass, we're really not hard up for silicon. So glass is more efficient all around, and most of the rest of the copper will stay in the ground.

Environmental groups have a very limited online presence. Why do you suppose that is?

I'm not surprised that some environmental activist groups are a little slow to move quickly on this because there is often a bias against new technology among some environmentalists. But on the other hand, EcoNet has been around for a long time. EcoNet and PeaceNet were relatively early players on the Net.

It's easy to blame technology in general, and especially computerized technology, as being a major contributor to the reality that three-quarters of all households have had "a close encounter with layoffs since 1980" (as reported in The New York Times). Do you think that's fair?