In this biography of Stewart Brand, New York Times reporter John Markoff returns to a strain of his seminal work, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (2005). That book documented the connection between the Bay Area counterculture and the emergent industry that transformed global communication and commerce. Markoff’s new book narrows the focus to one man, but in many ways, it builds on his earlier work and connects its major themes to other notable movements and innovations.Markoff tells Brand’s story deftly. Born in 1938, Brand grew up comfortably in the upper Midwest. Impatient, quirky, and cerebral, he was known to friends and family as Screwy Stewy. He attended Exeter and Stanford, where he studied biology, and his youthful outlook reflected that time and place. Brand relished the work of Ayn Rand, but his libertarian streak was tempered by the teachings of Paul Ehrlich, the Stanford biologist who emphasized collective action in the face of the planet’s ecological limits. At the same time, Brand was drawn to the Beat scene in nearby San Francisco, ingested Aldous Huxley’s work on psychedelic drugs, and participated in the human potential movement centered in Big Sur.Despite his bohemian tendencies, Brand joined the U.S. Army in 1960. He left after two years and tapped his modest inheritance, built on the family hardware supply business, to pursue his various interests. Those included the psychedelic revolution promoted by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters in and around Palo Alto. Brand was never a hippie in the classic sense, but he attended the early Acid Tests and helped organize the Trips Festival in January 1966. Brand envisioned that gathering, the largest of the Acid Tests, as a showcase for avant-garde efforts, including his multimedia presentation on American Indians. Yet the Trips Festival is mostly remembered for its combination of rock music, light shows, freestyle dancing, and psychoactivity. (As Brand later admitted, it was the beginning of the Grateful Dead and the end of everything else.) Drawing on that event’s example, Bill Graham began promoting concerts in the city’s underused dance halls and auditoriums, and San Francisco soon became a global rock capital. The Trips Festival also prefigured Burning Man, the annual event that began in 1986 and eventually became a playground for Silicon Valley’s tech elite.Even as the national media descended on San Francisco during the Summer of Love, Brand was moving on to the next big thing. While tripping on the roof of his North Beach apartment building, he wondered why he had not seen a photograph of Earth from space. Such a photograph, he believed, would incite a new form of planetary consciousness. That conviction blended unpredictably with the back-to-the-land movement, whose Bay Area version followed the swift decline of Haight-Ashbury in the late 1960s. The hippie diaspora created new needs among those who wished to live communally in the hinterlands, and in 1968, Brand and his crew published the Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools. Most of its readers would never live off the grid, but the catalog quickly became a franchise. The Last Whole Earth Catalog, published by Random House in 1971, sold over one million copies and won a National Book Award. That success led to other notable publications, but once again, Brand was shifting his sights.In 1972, he wrote an article for Rolling Stone called “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death among the Computer Bums,” which described an early video game and its addictive power. Although he did not yet own a personal computer, Brand announced that device’s advent and predicted its significance. His prophecy was not lost on hippies in the emergent digital culture. One of them was Steve Jobs, who spread the gospel of personal computing with messianic zeal. Much later, Jobs also recalled the Whole Earth Catalog in a graduation speech delivered at Stanford University. For him, Brand’s creation was “Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along.” Looking for ways to combine his catalog with digital technology, Brand cofounded an electronic bulletin board called the WELL (or Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link). Launched in 1985 and still active today, the WELL touts itself as the birthplace of online community.As Markoff makes clear, Brand disdained politics in general and the New Left in particular. New tools, he argued, were a more effective way to foster change. Brand’s critics called out his techno-utopianism and noted that new gadgets had no superpowers over intractable social problems. Markoff defends Brand from that charge by noting that his original utopianism was overtaken by “the PayPal Mafia during the dot.com era” (348), as if that development was unforeseeable. He also maintains that despite Brand’s libertarian leanings, he later accepted the need for bold government action. Although the examples Markoff cites apply to climate change, not to the perils of digital monopolies, he shows that Brand wasn’t oblivious to the dangers of these emergent technologies. As early as the 1980s, Brand privately predicted “financial freak-outs” and “massive false-story propagation” (282). There is little in Markoff’s account, however, to suggest that Brand anticipated or fretted about dangerous concentrations of wealth and power in the tech sector or in American society at large.Brand’s environmental advocacy also met with resistance, especially after he condemned his colleagues as irrational and antiscientific. Some activists decried his preference for vast cities, nuclear power, genetically modified foods, and geoengineering to fend off climate change. Markoff, however, focuses on the continuity in Brand’s thinking. The Whole Earth Catalog famously proclaimed, “We are as Gods and might as well get good at it.” Brand’s book Whole Earth Discipline (2009) tweaked that idea: “We are as Gods and HAVE to get good at it.” The shift is significant, but neither formulation is notable for its intellectual humility, and given Brand’s aversion to politics, he was an imperfect herald for the painstaking and deeply human task of building effective coalitions.Despite the god talk in these manifestos, Markoff depicts Brand as a mere mortal. At various times, he was prone to disabling depression and anxiety, and his relationships suffered. Markoff’s portrait will not endear Brand to most readers, but it comes off as a reliable guide to his life, work, and legacy. And though Brand’s curiosity and restlessness placed him at the forefront of several major developments, Markoff calls our attention to one of Brand’s earliest and most important ideas: “Briefly in vogue in the 1970s, the notion of a ‘planetary consciousness’ is an idea that Brand’s work first evoked in the 1960s. A half century later it remains his signature contribution” (362). For all of Brand’s shortcomings, that contribution has never been more timely.