"Let's help fight high-rise buildings in San Francisco." Welp...

But on another note, if you're fascinated by this history, I highly recommend Fred Turner's excellent 2008 book, "From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism" (https://books.google.com/books?id=2SNFpgX_WigC). His more recent article, "Burning Man at Google: a cultural infrastructure for new media production," is also a great read (http://nms.sagepub.com/content/11/1-2/73 ; http://web.stanford.edu/~fturner/Turner%20Burning%20Man%20at...)

If you're interested, Stuart Brand released a book in 2009 that he calls an "eco-pragmatist manifesto". ( http://www.amazon.com/Whole-Earth-Discipline-Ecopragmatist-M...) the thrust of it is that it's too late to save the earth from humanity; its time to focus on saving humanity from the earth. He comes out in favor of cities, nuclear power, and GM foods in great detail, with enough footnotes to keep you busy for weeks. Interesting and entertaining read... And loaded with tidbits you can throw at your less savvy friends at dinner parties.

I grew up with this book (TWEC) in the house, and I found this arrival interesting, but it left me hanging. Anyone know whatever became of the 14800 that left with the one guy? Did they ever regroup to put it towards something?

As if a sober Raoul Duke wrote it.