Stewart Brand, the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, is often called the most influential philosopher of the internet. His work inspired generations of technologists with a simple philosophy: make tools accessible and knowledge democratic. But as Ezra Klein explores on The Ezra Klein Show, the systems Brand helped inspire have become opaque—even to their own creators.
The Whole Earth Catalog was a bible for the counterculture, offering guides on everything from beekeeping to weaving. "It was like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google," Klein reflects. Yet when he visited OpenAI's offices in 2021, he saw a copy of the catalog on display. The irony struck him: this artifact of enlightenment sat in a place where engineers admitted they didn't fully understand their own AI models.
Modern AI systems are "alien intelligences," Klein notes. They operate at speeds and scales beyond human comprehension. "We feel like redwood trees trying to communicate with a hummingbird," Brand himself has said. The redwood and hummingbird coexist, but the tree cannot perceive the bird's speed or intent. Similarly, we are introducing new "pace layers" into the world—layers that move faster than our brains can follow, using electrons instead of chemicals.
Brand's legacy is a double-edged sword: the tools he championed have empowered humanity, but now we are building systems that even their architects cannot fully interpret. The question remains: can we maintain intelligibility as we push toward ever-faster, ever-more-complex technology?