Stewart Brand portrayed as tech futurist and publisher in We Are as Gods – SF Chronicle Datebook

Stewart Brand, writer and founder of Whole Earth Catalog, portrait inside the Mirene, a converted 1912 tugboat where he and his wife Ryan Phelan call home in Sausalito. Photo: Stephen Lam, The Chronicle

For a devoted futurist like Stewart Brand, who is famous for his projections about technology and the environment, looking at his own past doesnt necessarily come naturally.

Given his fame as creator of the iconic 1960s DIY handbook Whole Earth Catalog (described by Steve Jobs as Google in paperback form), and later as an influential technologist at the forefront of the personal computing revolution, numerous filmmakers have asked the Marin cyberculture legend to make a movie about his life. But Brand never wanted to waste precious time or energy on nostalgia. He said no to the idea of a biopic until filmmakers Jason Sussberg and David Alvarado approached Brand in 2017.

Now their fascinating docu-portrait We Are as Gods is screening at this years San Francisco International Film Festival, available to stream through Sunday, April 18.

We pitched Stewart the idea that instead of just looking backward, wed create a portrait of the futurist as already living in a future others cant yet quite see, said Sussberg in a video interview from his San Francisco home.

Sussberg and Alvarado, based in Brooklyn, N.Y., had already made a short film in 2014 for Time magazine about de-extinction, Brands late-in-life passion project promoting the use of biotech to bring back extinct species like the passenger pigeon, the American chestnut tree, even the woolly mammoth.

They planned to make Brands zeal for genetic engineering central to their proposed feature-length documentary. To their surprise, over an extended conversation with Brand at Skywalker Ranch following a screening of their last film, Bill Nye: Science Guy, Brand said yes.

In We Are as Gods, the two filmmakers travel with Brand, now 82, to Siberia, where hes attempting, with geneticist George Church, to re-wild the ecosystem, and to west Texas, where his Long Now Foundation is building a 10,000-year clock inside a mountain to foster long-term thinking.

Looking forward and looking back are pretty connected, actually, Brand said during a recent afternoon on Sausalitos waterfront.

He and his wife, Ryan Phelan, welcomed The Chronicle onto the Mirene, a 64-foot 1912 tugboat theyve called home at Waldo Point Harbor, Sausalito, for almost 40 years. There Brand explained that when he launched his 1980s think tank, Global Business Network, he started to consider himself a professional futurist.

I got really interested in what the French call the longue dure, the long view of things, he said. You can only feel even remotely comfortable thinking about the future if you have a lot of knowledge of the deep past.

Its a very Brand-ian answer, both surprising and philosophical, to the question of what it felt like to watch his lifes high and low points unfurl onscreen in the new film. (Brand is candid in We Are as Gods about battling depression in the 70s.)

Theres a lot of life to pack into the 94-minute film that gives audiences a whirlwind tour through his irreverent mind and numerous incarnations.

Brand was a self-described free-range kid from Illinois who studied biology at Stanford with notorious doomsayer Paul Ehrlich. He pioneered LSD use with Ken Kesey and co-produced the 1966 Trips Festival. In 1968 Brand launched the Whole Earth Catalog with an iconic cover photo of Earth from space, and a slogan: We are as gods and might as well get good at it.

Brand pivoted to technology after seeing promise and the cool factor in early Stanford gamers excitement. (Ready or not, computers are coming to the people, he wrote in Rolling Stone in 1972.) He put on the first Hackers Conference, and founded the proto-Facebook online community the Well during the dial-up modem days of the mid-80s.

I think Stewart is naturally pulled toward things on the fringe of what could be a possible future, and then he rushes toward it, obsesses about it and feeds off the excitement for about five years, and then gets bored and moves on to the next thing, Alvarado said. That pattern was so interesting to us, and a through line in the film.

Brand has never shied away from controversy, especially when it comes to his belief in using technology to save our planet. The film includes footage of him taking heat from Peter Coyote and others for following his techno-optimism to dangerous lengths. Its a criticism he and Phelan counter persuasively and with heart.

Ive been a conservationist since the 1950s, and I saw the environmental movement go down some primrose paths that blinded them to some important capabilities, says Brand, referring to the knee-jerk environmental backlash against any kind of technological intervention in nature.

But only by trying new stuff can you maybe find a better solution. Think of the alternative trying nothing?

Brand is all too aware where complacency leads on a planet thats growing hotter, more flammable and less habitable by the year.

While still a true futurist, Brand admits to feeling more reflective in his 80s. Hes been working closely with his biographer, John Markoff, and spent hundreds of hours with Alvarado and Sussberg.

The filmmakers were so overwhelmed with material they said they easily could have made an entire film about each part of Stewarts life, and revealed theyre planning on launching a podcast so we can go into even more detail.

In one of the most captivating sections in We Are as Gods, 28-year-old Brand became so fixated on the need for humankind to see a photo of the whole Earth from space that he hitchhiked across the country selling buttons for a quarter each that said, Why havent we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?

He was confident that if NASA released the image, people would appreciate the Earths fragility and do more to protect it.

The image of the mushroom cloud from 1945 on dominated everybodys thinking about the world, Brand says. Its a really simple image, and as a symbol it was a powerful framing device.

Whats interesting is there is so far not one iconic image of climate change. If I could devise one, I would gladly do it.

We Are as Gods is available to stream for $12 as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival through Sunday, April 18. sffilm.org

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Stewart Brand portrayed as tech futurist and publisher in We Are as Gods - SF Chronicle Datebook