Chad WoodfordStrategic AI Counsel & Advisor | Attorney | Technology Philosopher

A Poem: Stewart Brand and the Commodification of the Counterculture #technology #counterculture

6 May 2026 · 3 min

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2:38

In this spoken‑word piece, the narrator reflects on an Ezra Klein interview with Stewart Brand, positioning Brand as a bridge between 1960s counterculture and today’s Silicon Valley techno‑utopianism. The poem weaves together references to iconic figures (Brand, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Sam Altman) and cultural symbols (Buckminster Fuller, Grateful Dead, Che Guevara shirts) to critique how the original spirit of dissent and communal experimentation has been transformed into a market‑driven, data‑powered industry. It highlights the paradox of “hippie” ideals repackaged as productivity tools, meditation apps, and sustainable branding, while pointing to the hidden labor of African data labelers and the ongoing violence of the tech machine. The narrator ends with a satirical prayer‑like litany that merges religious language with tech jargon, underscoring the deification of data centers and the loss of genuine agency in the modern tech ecosystem.

Chapters

Ezra Klein recently interviewed the legendary Stewart Brand, a sort of Forrest Gump of the 1960s counterculture and Silicon Valley. I was thinking about his outsized role in shaping the techno-utopian tech bro Silicon Valley culture of today, and this inspired me to write a little poem. So here it is. Stewart Brand, who art in San Francisco, hallowed be thy catalog. Merry prankster full of Buckminster, Give us this information, our daily scroll. Hippie boomer Pied Piper, hapless harbinger of computers are the new LSD for the whole Earth. Your geodesic revolution was so groovy and so gold. War machines of loving grace out of sight. Computer-headed hippies burning for the modern heavenly connection to the robot dynamo and the machinery of Madison Avenue, architecting the counterculture industry. Though you walk through the Silicon Valley of the Grateful Dead, you fear no machines, for thou art with John Perry Barlow and Kevin Kelly, spreading the gospel of wired neoliberalism, a civilization of the mind in a cybernetic forest. An artificial revolution? The commodification of dissent ain't so bad, yuppie. Feminist revolutionary CEOs wearing your Che Guevara t-shirt at the gym, on your bicycle for the mind, with your sustainable Starbucks coffee, Black Power energy drink, meditation app for productivity, for humans flourishing on the backs of African data labelers who lie awake at night from the horror show of ultraviolence and the old in-out, in-out of the machine. This is the real world. So meta. The logic of transgression. Turn on, log in, and zone out. Human 2.0. A revolution of the machine. 8 billion revolutions per second, in fact. Tech bro whose mind is pure machinery, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Silicon Valley. Give us this day Our daily tokens. And forgive us our agency, as we forgive those who think for themselves. Sam Altman, lead us not into stagnation, but deliver us the singularity. For thine is the data center and the power and the water, forever and ever. White men.