Hacker Cinema
We Are As Gods
2022 · Film · documentary · 90 min
Directed by David Alvarado, Jason Sussberg
“We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” This is the audacious opening line of the Whole Earth Catalog, a compendium of wonderful tools compiled by counterculture legend Stewart Brand. A psychedelic experimenter, cyberspace pioneer, and environmentalist, he is now urging humanity to use our god-like powers to reframe our relationship with time and life itself. Today, Stewart is using biotech to resurrect extinct species. He and a team of scientists travel to Siberia to collect ancient DNA in an effort to make a hybrid Woolly Mammoth. Former allies in the environmental movement vow to stand in his way, but Stewart forges ahead in his life-long mission to conserve the whole earth.
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7 comments on Hacker News
excerpt from the film recently made about Stewart, "We Are as Gods". part of the film talks about the giant clock he is building in a mountain. https://youtu.be/pKuJBGb_pN4?si=5Y5EUw0Ecihqmopn
By Stewart Brand, editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, author of The Media Lab, co-founder of the Long Now Foundation, one of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, assistant to Douglas Engelbart on The Mother of All Demos, and subject of the recent film We Are as Gods. Glad to see he's still busy!
The fantastic documentary “We Are As Gods” about Stewart Brand spends a considerable amount of time on this topic as he is involved in many of these efforts.
https://www.weareasgods.film/
Can you point me to a stream / site to buy the film "we are as gods"? I don't see any button on the the stripe press page nor anywhere else on the net.
This is awesome!
Thank you so much for publishing/producing/making (?) 'We are as Gods' – I had of course read 'From Counter-Culture to Cyberculture' and 'What the Dormouse said' but not yet seen the movie.
Learning about Stewart Brand's history helped me better understand and appreciate my personal story and my relationship with systems. I have an original 1969 Whole Earth Catalog! It's one of my most treasured possessions :D
I had the same question - it appears the We Are as Gods documentary is not out yet. According to IMDB, it will be released in March 2021 at the SXSW film festival (March 16-20).
The argument is that the wooly mammoth actually helps counteract the release of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere:
"When the herds of northern megaherbivores were killed off by humans ten millennia ago, Zimov says, the largest biome on earth, called the “mammoth steppe,” converted from grassland to boreal forest and tundra. In these days of global warming, thawing tundra is releasing greenhouse gases, whereas grassland fixes carbon." [0]
There is a really great documentary about Stewart Brand, We Are as Gods, that also covers this project. [1]
[0]https://e360.yale.edu/features/the_case_for_de-extinction_why_we_should_bring_back_the_woolly_mammoth [1]https://www.weareasgods.film