Stewart Brand paused near the end of a steep trail just a quarter of a mile short of a cactus-laden vertical cliff face on the side of a 6,000-foot-high mountain in southern Texas.
He had hiked three hours to check on a project and now stood near a tunnel opening that looked like the entrance to some old-time mining operation.
It wasn’t old, though. Inside was something new, meant to encourage society to consider its obligation to uncountable future generations.
The opening in the rock face led to something called the Clock of the Long Now. It’s housed in a 500-foot-tall cylindrical space, hollowed out inside the mountain, and is designed to keep time without human intervention — for 10,000 years.
Mr. Brand is the president of the Long Now Foundation, and the work grew out of his desire to focus on what he calls long-term responsibility and thinking. But the clock itself is possible because of the largess of the foundation’s largest benefactor, Jeff Bezos, one of the world’s richest people.
The clock is still under construction. But when it is complete, it will represent the longest of long-term thinking, made possible by money from a man who provides near instantaneous satisfaction with one-click shopping.
Mr. Brand was at the forefront of predicting the world that made a fortune like Mr. Bezos’ possible — a place where technology connected everyone.
His writing, ideas and the community he created in Menlo Park, Calif., in the late 1960s, were an integral part of the forces that coalesced in the region that would be named Silicon Valley in 1971.
Mr. Brand’s biggest innovation, though, may be the way he has taught people to look at the world.
In the 1960s, he put an image of planet Earth on “The Whole Earth Catalog,” which became a bible for the baby boom generation. It won the National Book Award in 1972 and sold three million copies in the first three years after publication. Modeled in part on the L.L. Bean catalog, it was originally intended as a source for Mr. Brand’s friends who were going back to the land. Instead, it touched a nerve and became a manual for reinvention for an entire generation — including Apple’s Steve Jobs.
In 2005, Mr. Jobs gave a commencement address at Stanford, cited Mr. Brand as a major influence in his life and explained what “Whole Earth” was to a younger generation: “It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along,” he said. “It was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.”
Mr. Brand coined the term “personal computer” in 1974, several years after writing an article for Rolling Stone that drew a picture of the future of the digital world. Computers, he predicted, would be the next important trend after psychedelic drugs: “That’s good news, maybe the best since psychedelics. It’s way off the track of the ‘Computers — Threat or menace?’ school of liberal criticism but surprisingly in line with the romantic fantasies of the forefathers of the science,” he wrote.
Now Mr. Brand, considered by many to be one of the nation’s pre-eminent futurists, is busy helping to build that 10,000-year clock — a path toward what he believes will be a long-term future for civilization.
Mr. Brand has long had an eerie knack for being able to spot trends early on or show up in the midst of them like some high-I.Q. Forrest Gump, only to leave for the next big thing just when everyone else catches up.
For example, in 1967, just when many of his friends were going back to the land to found communes, Mr. Brand arrived squarely in the middle of the region soon to be named Silicon Valley. In his journal at the time, he wrote that he was living in Menlo Park “with the intent to let my technology happen here.”
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