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The Prophet of Silicon ValleyStewart Brand, an author and visionary, deeply influenced the internet era from the 1960s onward. Yet the systems he inspired have become fundamentally unintelligible to their creators. The Opinion columnist Ezra Klein explores the tension between Brand\u2019s \u201chow to\u201d philosophy and the black-box reality of modern A.I. on \u201cThe Ezra Klein Show.\u201d<\/p>\n
I think if you\u2019re looking for who is the most influential philosopher of the internet, who laid down the way Silicon Valley thought, at least in its more idealistic era, the person you come up with is Stewart Brand. \u201cWhen I was young, there was an amazing publication called the Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the Bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand.\u201d The Whole Earth Catalog had all those books: \u201cHow to Be a Beekeeper,\u201d \u201cHow to Grow Sheep,\u201d \u201cHow to Weave\u201d and do all of the \u2014\u00a0goddamn, make candles. We were actually candle dipping. \u201cIt was sort of like Google in paperback form 35 years before Google came along.\u201d You mentioned the Whole Earth Catalog, which is this remarkable, deep catalog of all these ways, tools and ways to fix things. And the first place I ever saw one physically was in the offices of OpenAI when I visited them \u2014\u2014 – Really? – Before ChatGPT. This was probably 2021 or 2022. And I remember thinking that there was something almost ironic about this catalog that was so dedicated to making the world intelligible at this place where they were explaining to me that they didn\u2019t understand the fundamental center of how their systems worked that they were creating something that one of its most fundamental characteristics was unintelligibility. They\u2019re kind of alien intelligences, in a way. It\u2019s going to move beyond human thought pretty quickly, and it\u2019s certainly reaching out in terms of data space much wider than any human can in a much shorter time. And that fact alone puts us feeling like redwood trees trying to communicate with a hummingbird. They\u2019re linked. They live together; the hummingbird maybe lives in the redwood tree. But the redwood tree isn\u2019t capable of paying much attention to who\u2019s in its branches or how fast they\u2019re moving. And so these \u2014\u00a0we\u2019re introducing new kind of pace layers into the world we live in. And the cellular, the brain moves really quickly. And they use computers because they don\u2019t have to use chemicals the way our brain does. They go a lot faster. We can engineer at these levels more than we can understand.<\/p>\n
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Stewart Brand, an author and visionary, deeply influenced the internet era from the 1960s onward. Yet the systems he inspired have become fundamentally unintelligible to their creators. The Opinion columnist Ezra Klein explores the tension between Brand\u2019s \u201chow to\u201d philosophy and the black-box reality of modern A.I. on \u201cThe Ezra Klein Show.\u201d<\/p>\n
By \u2018The Ezra Klein Show\u2019<\/p>\n
April 24, 2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"new video loaded: The Prophet of Silicon Valley transcript Back transcript The Prophet of Silicon ValleyStewart Brand, an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":209363,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[66,9,11,10,3448,82951],"class_list":["post-209362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-space","tag-stewart-brand"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209362"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209362\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/209363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}