Stewart Brand changed my life. At my local library as a teenager, leafing through the massive 1980 edition of the Whole Earth Catalog—the countercultural guide to ideas and tools that Brand originally launched in the late ’60s—I felt as if I’d stumbled across the best book in the world. It introduced me to the architect Buckminster Fuller, who would become a lifelong obsession, and to works that shaped my thinking forever. An encouraging blurb from Brand was enough to send me in search of A Pattern Language, Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics, and many other revelatory reads. Just browsing through the Catalog made me feel like a generalist, and I identified with its charismatic editor, who signed his comments with the initials “SB.” When I looked into Brand himself, I grew even more intrigued. Raised and educated in the establishment—Phillips Exeter Academy, Stanford, a stint in the Army—he found an early spiritual home with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, and even had a memorable cameo in Tom Wolfe’s tour of 1960s psychedelia, …