He would later recall it as a night apt for visitations from God, he thought, maybe for murdering kings.
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“We are faced continually by choices,” he told the group. “Yet we never have complete knowledge of what the alternatives consist or involve. We choose out of partial knowledge and frequently are wrong. This, I maintain, is excusable and certainly educational. The only evil is not to choose. There is our responsibility.” He ended by citing The Little Prince. In the novel the fox notes, “You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”
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“I’ve taken psilocybin three times,” Fadiman said quietly. The professor walked across the room, shut his office door, and said, “We’d better talk.”
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Brand decided Koestler’s framework was a good metaphor for his own life—not a carefully plotted arc of ambition, or even a narrative, but rather doing one different thing after another, each of which seemed like a good idea at the time and which, hopefully, would evolve into something profound.
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Indeed, there is a straight line from the Trips Festival to the creation of the Haight-Ashbury scene and the Summer of Love.
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However, years later he would encounter a NASA security officer who told him that he had been tasked by headquarters to investigate an odd fellow in California asking about why there was no photograph of the whole Earth. He had done a thorough investigation and concluded that Brand was harmless. At the end of his report he inquired, “By the way why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?”[14]
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“Computers are mostly / used against people instead of for people / used to control people instead of to free them / time to change all that— /we need a . . . / People’s Computer Company.”[2]
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“We can’t put it together. It is together.”
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Telling someone they had to get to a particular place was ultimately much less effective than providing them the tools by which they might leapfrog from curiosity to curiosity until they got there—or somewhere else that was even better.
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In Rockford, at long last, Stewart Brand had made it.
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“In 100 years, ‘The Last Whole Earth Catalog’ probably will be the only book of 1971 to be remembered,”
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Loeffler succeeded in getting a group of four Hopi Indians safely to Stockholm by finding some old paper that looked like parchment and making home-brewed passports, binding them in buckskin. The back of each passport said its bearer was a citizen of the Hopi Independent Nation and that “this passport is valid as long as the sun shines, the water flows, and the grass grows.”
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The implication, of course, was that computing was the next thing after LSD—something
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“the New Yorker of Sausalito.”
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“Technology, kiddo,”
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“We are as Gods and might as well get good at it.”
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they’ll merge into a steady flow of information, stories, pictures, design, photographs. You might never have to stop reading.[1]
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The Point should explore the humanitarian uses of “applied laziness,” by which he meant that the amount of work wasn’t the issue, rather the degree of impact was. A decade later he wrote, “Most of the real good done is accomplished by amateurs in their spare time with their left hand and the corner of their eye.”
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West with the Night.
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The clang and the bang and the visibility of machinery—it felt designed for old school experts, much like the early NASA.
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“We shape our buildings; then they shape us,”
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“the street finds its own uses for things,”
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“dotcom neoliberalism”—a blending of hippie libertarianism and conservative economics.
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