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Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive.

Stewart Brand

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Stewart Brand
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: December 14
Biologist
Essayist
Journalist
Writer
Rockford
Illinois
Expensive
Wants
Information
Free
Also

More quotes by Stewart Brand

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As you gain elevation [on the mountain] your IQ goes down - but your emotional affect goes up, which is great for having a mythic experience, whether you want to or not.
Stewart Brand
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There's no unemployment in squatter cities. Everyone works. One-sixth of humanity is there. It's soon going to be more than that.
Stewart Brand
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On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.
Stewart Brand
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Redefine the possible.
Stewart Brand
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Want to know where the action in a culture is? Watch where new language is turning up and where the lawyers collect, usually in that sequence.
Stewart Brand
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Certain knowledge of what to fight for, and what to fight against, gives meaning to life and provides its own version of discipline: never give up. That kind of meaning is illusory, I now believe, and blinkered. Fealty to a mystical absolute is a formula for disaster, especially in transformative times.
Stewart Brand
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Civilization’s shortening attention span is mismatched with the pace of environmental problems.
Stewart Brand
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For artists diving into a new technology, it is a triple short-cut to mastery: you get a free ride on the novelty of the medium there are no previous masters to surpass and after a few weeks, you are the master. Try that with the violin.
Stewart Brand
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There should always be in sight the draw — a kind of a beacon that draws you on through the labyrinth.
Stewart Brand
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Humans have made a huge hole in nature in the last 10,000 years. [With de-extinction,] we have the ability now, and maybe the moral obligation, to repair some of the damage.
Stewart Brand
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A building is not something you finish. A building is something you start.
Stewart Brand
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Historians will consider this a dark age. Science historians can read Galileos technical correspondence from the 1590s but not Marvin Minskys from the 1960s.
Stewart Brand
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The great problem with the future is that we die there. This is why it is so hard to take the future personally, especially the longer future, because that world is suffused with our absence.
Stewart Brand
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Whenever I hear the word share I would reach for a gun if I had one. Share is frequently followed by the word feelings, and I have enough of my own thank you please do us both a favor and repress yours.
Stewart Brand
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This is pretty much the infrastructural stuff that comes along with large quantities of energy. Whichever technology we are looking at has serious hazardous issues.
Stewart Brand
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Programming (or making music) at night is dreamtime, a period exclusively mental, utterly absorbed, sustained and timeless, placeless, disembodied.
Stewart Brand
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When a fantasy turns you on, you're obligated to God and nature to start doing it right away.
Stewart Brand
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One advantage of a solar collector in space: It would be some kind of origami thing that would unfold and be relatively light because it doesn't have gravity to deal with.
Stewart Brand
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Many of my contemporaries in the developed world see subsistence farming as soulful and organic, but it is a poverty trap and an environmental disaster.
Stewart Brand
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We are as gods and might as well get good at it.
Stewart Brand