In conjunction with the UN-led Stockholm+50 conference on the environment recently, there have been a few articles reminiscing about the original conference 50 year earlier.
The 1972 UN conference had been set during the war in Vietnam, and a topic at the time had been US' military's use of the herbicide Agent Orange.
Stewart Brand had been there (with his top-hat on), as a leader of a large group of American hippies that had been flown in.
They were widely seen as a nuisance by the other activist groups at the time, there to discredit the environment movement with their behaviour and to direct attention away from the "ecocide" in Vietnam. In one incident, Stewart Brand himself forcefully removed a speaker from a podium for mentioning Vietnam, even.
I find it interesting that the article on Brand in The Nation mentions the CIA, because there had been several indications that Brand's and the hippies' Stockholm visit in 1972 would have been funded and organised by the CIA.
I watched a pretty good docu in German which follows Ted Kaczynski's targets and they connect them to the edge foundation (some were members, like David Gelernter and John Brockman). They act like they're just asking rote interview questions, then they drop the ted k connection on the interviewees which is hilarious cause they get pretty mad a most of the time that they would draw such a thread. Stuart Brand is included as an interviewee. Isn't it interesting how the edge foundation kind of ended up in a real pickle because of Jeffrey Epstein hanging on?
The docu was entitled Das Netz: Lutz Dammbeck und der Unabomber
David Gelernter is a whole other piece of work. He did co-author a pretty good textbook on parallel programming (_How To Write Parallel Programs_), but the guy was basically a huckster when it came to distributed systems research. The real ironic thing is that it can be hard to tell Gelernter's Wall Street Journal op-eds from Kaczynski's manifesto.
Stewart Brand had been there (with his top-hat on), as a leader of a large group of American hippies that had been flown in. They were widely seen as a nuisance by the other activist groups at the time, there to discredit the environment movement with their behaviour and to direct attention away from the "ecocide" in Vietnam. In one incident, Stewart Brand himself forcefully removed a speaker from a podium for mentioning Vietnam, even. I find it interesting that the article on Brand in The Nation mentions the CIA, because there had been several indications that Brand's and the hippies' Stockholm visit in 1972 would have been funded and organised by the CIA.
<https://stockholmplus50.se/1972-2/> (In Swedish)