Everyone seems to be talking or thinking or reading (about) Stewart Brand right now, which I presume must mean he’s made or making or about to make some new intervention in the culture, any knowledge of which I have largely been spared, other than these peripheral encounters themselves, of course. It’s a little like being a coulrophobe who hears that the circus has come to town; you can just make a mental note to avoid the area for a while.

My disagreements with Brand’s work are numerous, though I reserve a special loathing for his “pace layers” model, which was the form taken by no less than three of his synchronicitous irruptions into my recent consciousness. One of these involved someone asking me if I’d written substantively about my beef with the model, which it turned out I hadn’t, other than in rambling emails. By way of remedying that for future reference, here’s how I summed it up in that particular rambling email:

“… the model of concentric spherical layers is useful, but the labels of the layers are overdetermined and the order is wrong, as is the assumption that any one order (or set of labels) would ever be universally applicable to all problems. You’d want to build the orrery on a case by case basis. It’s not even apparent where the model’s attention is directed: do you use it to look at things in the outer layer, the base layer, one of the middle ones? Where exactly is the system being observed from? This […] is a very important question; one suspects, perhaps rather uncharitably, that the implicit answer for The Man Himself is “from a very nice house in California, thank you very much”.

(This model was at the back of my mind when I was working on my own model of sociotechnical change during my PhD, if only as a sort of folk version of the more rigorous yet equally ill-thought-out determinisms that I was formally tilting at.)

My complaint is mirrored rather neatly by Pete Ashton’s summation of Brand as “a kind of Zelig figure, appearing in the background of loads of things I’m interested in, [and someone who’s] so often right about the problems but hilariously, tragically wrong about the solutions, believing the worst people in the world will save us.”

There’s a whole cluster of similar types—perhaps most typically of all, Kevin Kelly—for whom Ashton’s observation would be almost as good a fit. That the cluster is both generational and geographical (Boomers in California) is no accident: they are the Johnny Appleseeds of the Californian Ideology, and ours is therefore the house that Brand built.

No wonder, then, that the house is crammed full of gimmicky tech, but nothing actually works properly.