Stewart Brand is the co-founder and co-chairman of The Long Now Foundation (www.longnow.org). He is the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, co-founder of The WELL computer network, originator of the CoEvolution Quarterly, and co-founder of the Global Business Network. He is on the board of the Santa Fe Institute and maintains connections with Electronic Frontier Foundation, Wired magazine, and MIT's Media Lab, while occasionally consulting for Ecotrust. A substantial item on the Global Business Network site (www.gbn.com) is a list of all the books he has recommended for the GBN "Book Club" since 1988 and several hundred of his reviews.

Stewart is the original editor of The Whole Earth Catalog (winner of the National Book Award) and author of The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility (MasterMinds Series, 1999), How Buildings Learn (1994), The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT (1987), and Two Cybernetic Frontiers (1974) on Gregory Bateson and cutting-edge computer science, which included the first use of the term "personal computer" in print and was the first book to report on computer hackers. Stewart was featured on the cover of the Los Angeles Times Magazine, which described him as "always two steps ahead of others.... the least recognized, most influential thinker in America."