Stewart Brand

Foreword

By Edo Segal ^ Opus

The layer I kept ignoring was the one holding everything up.

I don't mean that metaphorically. I mean it the way an engineer means it when she realizes the foundation she never thinks about is the only reason the building stands. For months after taking the orange pill, I was obsessed with speed. The twenty-fold multiplier. The thirty-day sprint. The collapsing distance between imagination and artifact. I celebrated the fast layers — the new models, the new capabilities, the new things my team could suddenly build — because the fast layers are where the excitement lives. They are where I live.

Stewart Brand drew a diagram in 1999 that should have stopped me cold. Six layers. Fashion on top, nature on the bottom. The fast layers innovate. The slow layers stabilize.