{"id":270576,"date":"2021-03-21T05:16:11","date_gmt":"2021-03-21T09:16:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=270576"},"modified":"2021-03-21T05:16:13","modified_gmt":"2021-03-21T09:16:13","slug":"review-we-are-as-gods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/review-we-are-as-gods\/","title":{"rendered":"REVIEW: \u2018We Are As Gods\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"float:left\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">10<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Freview-we-are-as-gods%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=270576&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/fb_image-2445.jpeg\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\" \/><\/div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A sense of techno-optimism pervades <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We Are As Gods<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, a new biopic on the environmental icon, futurist, and iconoclast Stewart Brand. Though not a household name, Brand is one of the key instigators of multiple utopian movements, from America\u2019s environmental awakening in the 1970s to the DIY movement to early hacker culture. The film is a piece of propaganda, but a self-aware one, and at times marvelously enjoyable.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Brand doesn&#8217;t fit comfortably into existing buckets, political or cultural. As a young photographer, he is swept into the world of Ken Kesey&#8217;s Merry Pranksters and even orchestrates the Trips Festival, an LSD-fueled bash that by some accounts kicked off the hippie movement in San Francisco. Shortly afterward, Brand trips and is struck by the realization that we haven&#8217;t seen a photograph of the whole earth, despite winning the space race. How different would things be? he asks. It&#8217;s a strangely successful rallying cry for the burgeoning environmental movement. Then he puts together the <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Whole Earth Catalog<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, a massive magazine\/encyclopedia focused on ecology and DIY techniques (the slogan is &#8220;access to tools&#8221;). Steve Jobs calls it &#8220;Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"posts-content__category-widget md:hidden -ml-4 -mr-4 my-8 px-4 py-6 bg-gray-100\">\n<h4 class=\"mt-0 text-red-600 font-medium font-sans uppercase\">Recent Stories in Culture<\/h4>\n<ul class=\"list-none p-0 \">\n<li class>\n\t\t\t\t<a class=\"text-black block mb-3 pb-3 border-b border-white\" href=\"https:\/\/freebeacon.com\/culture\/review-we-are-as-gods\/\"><strong>REVIEW: \u2018We Are As Gods&#8217;<\/strong><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/li>\n<li class>\n\t\t\t\t<a class=\"text-black block mb-3 pb-3 border-b border-white\" href=\"https:\/\/freebeacon.com\/politics\/heartland-republicans-unite-to-defend-meat-against-liberal-attack\/\"><strong>Heartland Republicans Unite to Defend Meat Against Liberal Attack<\/strong><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/li>\n<li class>\n\t\t\t\t<a class=\"text-black block mb-3 pb-3 border-b border-white\" href=\"https:\/\/freebeacon.com\/culture\/review-jordan-b-petersons-beyond-order-12-more-rules-for-life\/\"><strong>Review: Jordan B. Peterson&#8217;s \u2018Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life&#8217;<\/strong><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Later, Brand leads early efforts to popularize the internet, refurbishes a tug boat, and oversees the building of a &#8220;thousand year clock.&#8221; The movie leaves out several more projects: his attempt to catalog all species of life on earth with his All Species Foundation, his time as an adviser to California governor Jerry Brown, and his campaigns <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">for<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> nuclear power. He&#8217;s everywhere. You may not buy the claims that he kickstarted the environmental movement, or that startup culture was born directly out of the <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Whole Earth Catalog<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, but plenty of his contemporaries sure do.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Brand is an iconoclast, but also inescapably a product of his time: The sequence where he explains how a years-long, drug-fueled depression destroyed his first marriage would be apt material for Helen Andrews&#8217;s <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Boomers<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">At its best,<\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> We Are As Gods<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">&nbsp;portrays Brand&#8217;s infectious enthusiasm for a particular brand of futurist techno-optimism. Though he studied under Paul Ehrlich, a &#8220;notorious doomsayer&#8221; (that&#8217;s from Ehrlich in the film), Brand thinks humans can be a net positive in the ecological web. He&#8217;s not a stereotypical movement leader: He&#8217;s lanky, quiet, understated, even silly. But his vision attracts followers wherever he goes and creates a series of ideological clashes with more doctrinaire environmentalists.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Brand\u2019s entrepreneurial attitude repeatedly puts him at odds with compatriots who are generally more skeptical of human-driven projects. Like Brand&#8217;s former mentor Ehrlich, they can&#8217;t quite trust anthropocentric solutions to climate change and degradation. More than once, we see Brand sitting, quietly, as an activist levies war against Brandian hubris. <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We Are As Gods<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> does a good job of presenting Brand\u2019s vision without undercutting the more traditional environmental arguments. It\u2019s clear Brand is an iconoclast even within the movements he helped start.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What gets Brand going today\u2014and for the past two decades\u2014is one of those anthropocentric solutions: what he describes as biological geoengineering. Brand wants to use all the tools of genetic engineering at human disposal to restore creatures, like the American chestnut tree and the woolly mammoth, that filled important niches in their old ecosystems. The chestnut project is eminently feasible through existing grafting techniques; the mammoth more quixotic.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We Are As Gods<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> premiered at the South By Southwest film festival this past week. It is the first movie out from Stripe Press, the content arm of a rapidly growing Silicon Valley finance<\/span> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">company. The film is a clear continuation of Stripe\u2019s attempts to build a coherent West Coast techno-optimistic aesthetic. The company has previously produced a set of beautifully bound books that address how technology and popular culture fit together, including Martin Gurri\u2019s <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Revolt of the Public<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> and Richard Hamming\u2019s <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Art of Doing Science and Engineering<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Stripe is also taking a Brandian<\/span> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">approach toward environmental challenges, offering a new platform for<\/span> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">technologies that capture carbon and remove it from the atmosphere. It\u2019s a goal seemingly as utopian as Brand\u2019s deextinction projects.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That said, the film remains an inspiring look at a character who has spent his life trying to convince us that, given the right tools and a hefty dose of optimism, we might just make it out all right.<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"my-8 hide-print\">\n\t\t<!-- \/339474670\/Freebeacon\/InContent --><\/p>\n<div id=\"div-gpt-ad-1526555381173-4\" class=\"mobile-250 desktop-90\"><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A sense of techno-optimism pervades We Are As Gods, a new biopic on the environmental icon, futurist, and iconoclast Stewart Brand. Though not a household name, Brand is one of &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1893549,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-270576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270576"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270576\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1893549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}