Stewart Brand

Founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, cofounder of the Well and the Long Now Foundation, writer, editor, and game designer, Stewart Brand has helped to define the collaborative, data-sharing, forward-thinking world we live in now.

Since the 1960s, he has maintained that—given access to the information we need—humanity can make the world a better place. One of his early accomplishments: helping to persuade NASA to release the first photo of the Earth from space. The iconic Big Blue Marble became the cover for his Whole Earth Catalog, a massive compendium of resources and facts he thought people might like to know. And we did: The 1972 edition sold 1.5 million copies. In 1987, he wrote The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT; in 1994, How Buildings Learn.

Currently Mr. Brand is working with computer scientist Danny Hillis to build the Clock of the Long Now, a 10,000-year timepiece; his Long Now Foundation also runs a number of spinoff projects, including the Rosetta Project, cataloguing the world’s languages, and the Long Bets website. He’s also busy with the Global Business Network (part of the Monitor Group), helping businesses plan for the near and way-far future.