 One of the most popular, heartfelt, and stupid critiques of modern society is that technology is destroying our civilization. The plain truth is that technology isn't enslaving our minds or killing the planet. It's an extension of who we are as humans and massive advances in energy creation, food production, computer programming, and industrialization are the reasons why the planet supports billions of people who live more prosperously and peacefully and why global life expectancy keeps growing. Humans actually have been getting better at a lot of things for a long time, in terms of heading off various diseases, poverty, and heading off a lot of things. For the past 60 years, Stuart Brand has been one of the biggest champions of experimenting with technology to solve humanity's biggest problems. You can't count on the past ways of making it better to fix whatever the current problems are. You have to keep discovering new ones. In his early days, he was one of Ken Kesey's merry pranksters, using psychedelics, music, and light shows to expand consciousness. By the late 1960s, he started the Whole Earth Catalog, which quickly became a bible to hippies and techno geeks such as Steve Jobs, who famously quoted its parting message, Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish. Dubbed the intellectual Johnny Apples seed of the counterculture, Brand's ideas and activism helped inspire the first Earth Day, and his early reporting on the personal computer revolution turned machines that were once synonymous with centralized bureaucratic oppression into devices of individual empowerment. His life is the subject of a new documentary film that takes its name from a famous Brand mantra. He had an understanding that humans were on a trajectory towards greater and technical possibilities. And he made an important statement, we are as gods, so we might as well get good at it. His current passion is Revive and Restore, an organization that is leading the de-extinction movement by using biotechnology to bring back extinct plants and animals, including the passenger pigeon, the woolly mammoth, and the once-dominant American chestnut tree. This is what killed five billion American chestnut trees. These trees are functionally extinct because they can't reproduce and make a forest like they used to. But genetically, they're not extinct at all. They've got all the variety they ever had, and they're about to get one more bit of variety, which is one or two genes that will help them add off the diseases that we brought here. Not on purpose, but the cure is on purpose. As the film shows, Brand's techno-optimism isn't without its critics. I would love to see a mammoth. Wouldn't that be cool? That we can do it is so much fun and so fascinating for people who love technology. At the same time, we ought to be asking, should we do this? Is this a good idea? It's a criticism Brand rejects throughout the documentary. Genetically modified organisms were first created. Most environmentalists were just automatically against it, and that actually makes me pretty mad because that's taking ideology more seriously than the ecosystems you're trying to protect. While Brand's vision for de-extinction has struggled with the very environmental movement he helped create, he takes solace in the historic cycles of rejection and acceptance. In vitro fertilization, first came for humans, there was all the usual resistance. It's the university playing God, all those in vitro babies are going to be sick somehow, they're going to be fucked up, and as soon as you had a couple of your in vitro kids who are adorable and healthy, and you had ecstatic parents who could not otherwise have children, that just flipped and just turned off. When we clone now a black-footed ferret or a Shemalsky's horse, people are going, oh, they're an adorable animal, and you say, well, it's cloned, you know, oh, really? Can I do that to my pet, and it flips? Yeah, it's more about optimism versus pessimism, it's more about the world you want to live in versus the world that you're running from. The co-directors of We Are As Gods, David Alvarado and Jason Susper, whose previous work profiled transhumanists experimenting with immortality, find value in Brand's perspective. Actually what's more interesting is the use of technology, the discussion between whether technology got us to this problem where we have global warming, where we have an economic system in ruin, and whether or not we can use technological tools like Bitcoin or other sort of financial technology to get us out of the current mini-depression that we're in, or using geo-engineering or other technologies to get us out of climate change. I think that it's just really easy to just say it's technology's fault. Well, what's the solution here? What are we talking about? What is the solution that that kind of person would be suggesting? Because I just feel like we need to be working on it together and building better tools, which goes right back to the 60s and what Stuart was talking about. It's been a long, strange trip for Stuart Brand, and the planet he helped us recognize from outer space by goading NASA into releasing images of the whole earth. What has kept him on the forefront of what comes next, from psychedelics to the Internet, to reviving extinct species, is his undying belief that technological progress will help us triumph over our largest problems. Now in his 80s, Brand still believes in progress and the need not just for individuals but whole civilizations to keep experimenting, to keep pushing, to stay hungry and to stay foolish. Try everything. Take nothing off the table.