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A library doesn't need windows. A library is a window.
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Stewart Brand |
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Function reforms form, perpetually.
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Stewart Brand |
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The sociologist Elise Boulding diagnosed the problem of our times as "temporal exhaustion": "If one is mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imaging the future."
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Stewart Brand |
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The mathematician and physicist Freeman Dyson makes a related observation about human society: The destiny of our species is shaped by the imperatives of survival on six distinct time scales. To survive means to compete successfully on all six time scales. But the unit of survival is different at each of the six time scales. On a time scale of years, the unit is the individual. On a time scale of decades, the unit is the family. On a time s..
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Stewart Brand |
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Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multitasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed--some mechanism or myth that encourages the long view and the ..
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Stewart Brand |
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Everything looks like a failure in the middle." Any"
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Stewart Brand |
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Starting anew with a clean slate has been one of the most harmful ideas in history. It treats previous knowledge as an impediment and imagines that only present knowledge deployed in theoretical purity can make real the wondrous new vision.
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Stewart Brand |
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Art flouts convention. Convention became convention because it works.
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convention
art
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Stewart Brand |
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Buildings keep being pushed around by three irresistible forces--technology, money, and fashion.
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Stewart Brand |
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In the genre of science fiction it is more important to be fruitfully mistaken than dully accurate. That's why we are science fiction writers, not scientists.
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Stewart Brand |
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if the Net is so crucial, what happens if the Net goes down? It may have to go down a few times before we learn how to defend it properly, before we catch on that civilization depends on it for survival.
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Stewart Brand |
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The product of careful continuity is love....Trust, intimacy, intense use, and time are what made these buildings work so well.
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Stewart Brand |
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Imagine a world in which time seems to vanish and space becomes completely malleable. Where the gap between need or desire and fulfillment collapses to zero.
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Stewart Brand |
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More and more I find I want to be living in a Big Here and a Long Now.
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Stewart Brand |
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It seems there is an ideal degree of aging which is admired. Things should not be new, but neither should they be rotten with age (except in New Orleans, which fosters a cult of decay).
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Stewart Brand |
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We are convinced by things that show internal complexity, that show the traces of an interesting evolution. Those signs tell us that we might be rewarded if we accord it our trust. An important aspect of design is the degree to which the object involves you in its own completion. Some work invites you into itself by not offering a finished, glossy, one-reading-only surface. This is what makes old buildings interesting to me. I think that hu..
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Stewart Brand |
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Art must be inherently radical, but buildings are inherently conservative. Art must experiment to do its job. Most experiments fail. Art costs extra. How much extra are you willing to pay to live in a failed experiment? Art flouts convention. Convention became conventional because it works. Aspiring to art means aspiring to a building that almost certainly cannot work, because the old good solutions are thrown away. The roof has a dramatic ..
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Stewart Brand |
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What does it take to build something so that it's really easy to make comfortable little modifications in a way that once you've made them, they feel integral with the nature and structure of what is already there? You want to be able to mess around with it and progressively change it to bring it into an adapted state with yourself, your family, the climate, whatever. This kind of adaptation is a continuous process of gradually taking care.
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Stewart Brand |
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I'm a lifelong environmentalist. My voice piped at age ten: "I give my pledge as an American to save and faithfully to defend from waste the natural resources of my country--its air, soil, and minerals, its forests, waters, and wildlife." I got infected by that Conservation Pledge through the magazine Outdoor Life and proceeded to paste it on everything and everyone around me. Since the concept of pledge has long been rendered meaningless b..
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Stewart Brand |
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Whole Earth Discipline carries on something that began in 1968, when I founded the Whole Earth Catalog. I stayed with the Catalog as editor and publisher until 1984, adding a magazine called CoEvolution Quarterly along the way. The Whole Earth publications were compendia of environmentalist tools and skills (along with much else) and explicitly purveyed a biological way of understanding. Peter Warshall wrote and reviewed about watersheds, s..
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Stewart Brand |
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for the next century could raise the world's temperature some 4degC (7.2degF), bringing serious coastal flooding and other damage." The Conservation Foundation urged renewed funding for Keeling's CO 2 project and pressed the National Academy of Sciences to pay attention to the subject. From then on, awareness of climate change ascended right along with the Keeling Curve. In 1971 Barry Commoner's environmentalist bestseller, The Closing Circ..
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Stewart Brand |
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At present, the best low-carbon source is nuclear.
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Stewart Brand |
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Science has long informed the environmental movement. Now it must take the lead, because we are forced to enter an era of large-scale ecosystem engineering, and we have to know what the hell we're doing. That sermon gets a chapter. Beavers are benevolent ecosystem engineers; so are soil-enriching earthworms; so were American Indians, who terraformed a continent; so are all of us who work on restoring natural infrastructure. A chapter on tha..
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Stewart Brand |
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Unfortunately for the atmosphere, environmentalists helped stop carbon-free nuclear power cold in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States and Europe. (Except for France, which fortunately responded to the '73 oil crisis by building a power grid that was quickly 80 percent nuclear.)
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Stewart Brand |
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Eternity is the opposite of a long time.
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Stewart Brand |
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When Brian Eno approached the father of Anthea Norman-Taylor for permission to marry her, he was told, "What you have to ask yourself is, 'Would I wish this woman to be the grandmother of my grandchildren?"
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Stewart Brand |
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Bateson proposed that the metaphor of "mother Earth" is no longer accurate or helpful. Human impact on nature is now so complete and irreversible that we're better off thinking of the planet as if it were our first child. It will be here after us. Its future is unknown and uncontrollable. We are forced to plan ahead for it. Our first obligation is to keep it from harm. We are learning from it how to be decent parents."
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Stewart Brand |