The Whole Earth editor, present in this archive entirely at one remove. Bob never discusses Brand's own ideas; what he uses is Brand's position in a network. The Media Lab is the book Theall read after being pushed out of Trent, in which he found MIT talking about Joyce and McLuhan and saw how to make his own Finnegans Wake expertise current again — the archive's clearest case of a reputation being recovered by a shift in the environment rather than by new work. Brand is also the hub Bob routes Kevin Kelly and John Brockman through. Start at dialogue 49.
Across the dialogues
Enters only as the author of a book someone else read, and that indirection is the role — a conduit through which McLuhan comes back to a scholar who had put him down
An intellectual turn is given an entirely external cause — Theall's insight arrives as market intelligence about who is currently citing whom, which is how the series accounts for revivals without crediting rediscovery.
"And he got Stewart Brand's book, The Media Lab, and he read that and he said, oh, they're using McLuhan down there. They talk about Joyce and McLuhan. And that gave him this big idea about Finnegans Wake as the key to postmodern culture that he started to write about and became quite well known in the early 90s."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 49 (19 May 2022), 1:27:28
Widened from one book into a social position, the fixed point a New York literary network is described by
Brand is used as a coordinate rather than a subject, fixing Brockman's position in a scene — the archive's habitual method of establishing that people it cares about were in the room.
"But they inspired John Brockman, who went on to publish everybody in the Edge series. He's the major literary agent that came out of that scene. He was a friend of Stewart Brand."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 52 (7 Jul 2022), 29:27
Becomes an institution rather than a person, the stable a generation of digital editors is said to have come out of
The metaphor does the work — a stable implies a proprietor and a line of succession, which converts the counterculture's publications into a training system that produced the people who framed the internet.
"He is known as the first editor of Wired Magazine. And he came out of Stewart Brand stable at the Whole Earth Review and the Co-Evolution Quarterly."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 53 (21 Jul 2022), 0:19
Returns to the Theall story with the stakes named — the book that let a deposed university president convert old expertise into a new role
Retold thirty dialogues later with the calculation made explicit, and the candour is the point — the same anecdote that earlier described a flash of insight now describes a career move, which is where the archive's sympathy for Theall runs out.
"So he read Stewart Brand's, the Media Lab, saw that they were using McLuhan and Finnegans Wake, and then he realized, ah, I can bring back my Finnegans Wake expertise and have a new role."Bob Dobbs, The Resonant Interval, Dialogue 79 (7 Dec 2023), 2:09:28
Connections
Theall read Brand's The Media Lab after leaving Trent, and found his way back to Finnegans Wake through it.
Kelly came out of Brand's Whole Earth Review and Co-Evolution Quarterly before founding Wired.
Brockman, the Edge literary agent, is placed in Brand's circle.