I remember Alan Kay writing that at Xerox Park they had the entire Whole Earth Catalog collection. I'm not sure why, but maybe to get the creativity juices flowing? He probably already stated in an interview somewhere.
But Kay had also found the Whole Earth Catalog. He first saw a copy in 1969, in Utah. "I remember thinking, 'Oh yeah, that's the right idea,'" he explained in 2004. "The same way it should be easier to do your own composting, you should have the ability to deal with complicated ideas by making models of them on the computer." For Kay, and for others at Xerox PARC, the Catalog embodied a do-it-yourself attitude, a vision of technology as a source of individual and collective transformation, and a media format—all of which could be applied to the computers on which they were working. As Kay explained, he had already begun to think of the computer as a "language machine where content was the description of things." When he saw the Catalog, it offered him a vision of how an information system might organize that content. He and others at PARC saw the Catalog as an information tool and, hence, as an analogue to the computer; at the same time, they saw it as a hyperlinked information system. In that sense, remembered Kay, "we thought of the Whole Earth Catalog as a print version of what the Internet was going to be." Kay and his colleagues in the Systems Science Laboratory paid particular attention to the Catalog's design. In the Last Whole Earth Catalog of 1971
A lot of it is inspired by the ideas of Christopher Alexander, who also inspired the notion of design patterns in software... it is an interesting rabbit hole to dive into.
> We are gods and might as well get used to it. So far, remotely done power and glory—as via government, big business, formal education, church—has succeeded to the point where gross obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG.
If your workplace is very strict about nudity in internet content, please be advised that the linked PDF does have some very blurry naked people on a couple of pages.
I hate having to type that, but it might save someone a talk with their boss or HR. A very slim chance, to be sure.
Hahaha I found a catalog in my parents' attic as a child, which contained an instructive article on female self-pleasure, complete with a full page nude. Also a story that began like "The sign said 'God wants you to drop acid', so Lizard ate some tabs".
Left it out on the floor, it mysteriously disappeared and parents denied knowledge of its existence. And I need to remember to look for it in the archive outside working hours
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
I thought it was cool too but then I found Brand's response to Joi Ito/Epstein to be super bizarre and inappropriate, so I started looking into him more and found a lot of info like this. From the article:
> As for politics, Markoff notes that leftists who met Brand assumed he was working with the CIA, an accusation that could be rated as indirectly to literally true, depending on the circumstances (later in life Brand would work alongside the CIA doing scenario planning). When he did take an unusual shine to someone political, as he did later in life with the environmentalist Wendell Berry and the cartoonist R. Crumb, Brand quickly turned them off. At a time when revolution gripped the country, the Whole Earth Catalog reflected his right-wing thought by omission. After one young staffer suggested ways to make the catalog more political, Stewart vetoed the notion with a surprising set of rules: “No politics, no religion, and no art.” What was left? Computers and shopping. As a futurist, he had that much right. The Whole Earth Catalog was an underground hit, and with the help of John Brockman
the Whole Earth Review offices near Sausalito in Marin County were a social hub, and mixing ground. By the early 80s, an edition of the Whole Earth Catalog was an established process, with volunteers of every kind showing up in small groups, and plowing through the hundreds of pounds of printed materials supplied in large shipping boxes, writing reviews of whatever struck their interest. Occasionally a tall, bossy guy with grey hair and strong athletic build would walk through without comment. Usually some aspirants of some kind would corner him for a comment or punditry. Thriving on the "commander" presence, Brand would deliver whatever it was they were asking for and then move on. Brand's past military experience and demeanor were obvious, but not in contradiction to the "all views considered" atmosphere, including prominently, his own.
Did counter-culture people work "for the CIA" ? hard to say, certainly not at the level of Eric Schmidt founder of Google, that is for certain! Lots of lips moved freely with gossip or ideas. Some of that gossip or ideas were repeated, maybe written down. Media was in a different age. Famously certain other LSD-oriented individuals did seek out and inform for money. Stewart Brand probably informed for the same reasons he did other things, because he decided it was interesting, that it made him more important, and continued his personal mission of whatever it was he was thinking about.
The role of the "secret mole" is not consistent with the presence of that man, in that project.
Thank you for this, it's super interesting! My admittedly much less informed view was that Brand and people like Leary weren't so much informing, more so shaping culture. Probably along the lines of their personal ideas but also possibly in conjunction with the US government to defang the anti-war and civil rights movements. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that if you have any.
Years after I started down the path of studying/reading Bucky Fuller, Robert Anton Wilson, Tim Leary, et al, I came across the Whole Earth catalogs and promptly devoured every bit of them. CoEvolution Quarterly (and later Whole Earth Review) became my favorite periodical, with the later gossip column always being the first section to read. Signal and Fringe (and issue 57) elated me much more than I expected.
I was exposed to usenet and BITnet and FTP in the mid-to-late 1980s and having the Whole Earth dead tree publishings greatly helped guide my opinions on how I wanted the Internet to evolve. They also drove me into the rabbit hole of RFCs and the IETF for a good number of years.
The work of Stewart Brand (+ others involved) and the previously mention individuals provided the major foundation for my career choices and happiness (and a slight frustration at the way the 'net is currently).
This is amazing. I feel embarrassed but I never realized how philosophical and artistic this was.
Also embarrassingly I didn't realize the term "ghost in the machine" went back this far. In case anyone else is in that boat...
> The "ghost in the machine" is a term originally used to describe and critique the concept of the mind existing alongside and separate from the body.
> The term originates with British philosopher Gilbert Ryle's description of René Descartes' mind–body dualism. Ryle introduced the phrase in The Concept of Mind (1949) [...]
> Metal to rubber of asphalt ribbons plugged into Vietnam and the price of aerosolled ketchup thru WDBJ Star City via the chromium telescoping finger. 700 miles of the great highway turn on, 13 hours of keeen-sell survival service and all the gear to keep the wheels flying. ... All the cardboard cities and the X-ray of us all on the giant billboards. And buy me, lay me hot dog-burgers.
I don't know if anyone has ever expressed that idea so succinctly. Beautifully put!
me neither. it's the kind of random gibberish that SEO bots insert into auto-generated pages. but it's in the middle of the page of a catalog from 1968! surprising.
This is great! I remember my dad talking about the Whole Earth Catalog a lot back in the 80s when I was a kid. And the Earth First! movement, Back to Basics, etc.
The difficult thing for me is that mostly nothing has changed today. Based on music/style/culture, this year feels like 1993 to me. We're still talking about the same environmental collapse, the same proxy wars, the same political corruption, the same wealth inequality, just on and on and on. I could count significant innovations on a hand or two: the arrival of the internet (~1995), affordable LCDs, flash drives, blue/white LEDs, ubiquitous GPS, smartphones (barely as evolutionary vs revolutionary tech), lithium-ion batteries, affordable solar panels, mRNA vaccines, ...? The big innovation seems to be that the poors can buy things today that were only available to the uber-rich from the 60s to the 90s. Is that progress? I guess.
Except that we learned where that stuff comes from: children in China and India working for pennies on the dollar to prop up our quality of life in the west. A late-stage capitalism in denial of how dependent it is on communism and stripping resources from developing nations. Now a generation of young people don't want to colonize anyone, and resent being wage slaves in the service industry under a self-colonized US, oppressed under the boot of billionaires who rigged the system through regulatory capture tactics like Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United. It's not that young people don't want to work anymore, but that they don't want to exploit anyone anymore. And the traditional path to wealth in the US was exploitation.
I often wonder what our alternate timeline might look like if we didn't have trickle-down economics under Reagan, the unraveling of the social safety net under Clinton, the outsourcing of 100,000 factories under GW Bush as a backlash to late 90s tech dreams, the stonewalling of most progressive goals under Obama due to the rise of the alt-right, the sabotage of the judicial branch under Trump/MAGA, just on and on and on. Progress has proceeded despite these political machinations, not because of them.
Without those setbacks, we might have saved 20-40 years. That's why I view the 2000s and 2010s as mostly lost decades. But, a handful of people are starting to live that catalog today with the off-grid movement, vanlife, solarpunk, etc. And the post-pandemic spiritual awakening has revealed how time is an illusion, that we may as well be living in The Matrix. And the Boomers are sitting on $100 trillion of generational wealth that's going to transfer over the next 5-10 years. I expect that money to completely evaporate through nepotism and a doubling down on for-profit healthcare that along with the loss of the southern states to global warming will largely bankrupt the US. And potentially create a one-world order where everyone works to pay back debts to previous generations at interest, which of course never ends, by design.
It's strange to be unable to afford to embody any of the ideals of the catalog, when all excess income goes to rents and bills, when all leisure time is interrupted and divided into crumbs by the attention economy, when all opportunities seem to be already claimed and saturated into oblivion, when pulling the yoke under capitalism almost certainly leads to the demise of the natural world.
I remember when it wasn't like this, or more accurately, when these realities could still be denied. But I also remember my parents warning me from my earliest memories that this was all coming. Nobody listened to the radicals, so now we're all radicalized.
That's a lot of hand-wavy doom and gloom posturing to unpack there...
Your long and somewhat rambling comment includes numerous cliche phrases that oversimplify cause and effect for the problems we have today and falls into exactly the sort of tired obsessions with simplistic political catchphrases as causes for the problems we still have (really, reaganomics is one of your big reasons for the modern world being less than ideal? Let's get over a few absurdly simplified, old progressive/conservative biased talking points by just a bit).
More importantly though, your comment also completely bypasses the enormous material gains in general human well-being that we've achieved even in the last 30 years. Absolute poverty rates have dropped enormously, mortality from numerous causes has as well and a whole list of other things have gotten better for billions of people, including both absolute and relative levels of material wealth.
I could cite the specific sources but as a good starting source, perhaps easier to recommend a book like Factfulness by Hans Rosling, or just go look at the WHO and UN human development stats for yourself across nearly any category for human development between the 1990's and today. This is not to even mention the even more dramatic improvements between the year 1970 and now.
With all that said, I don't entirely disagree that we could have had a better world by now if certain things had been done differently on numerous corporate, regulatory and political fronts.
> I could count significant innovations on a hand or two: the arrival of the internet (~1995), [...] smartphones
I get the broader tone of the comment, and I don't disagree, but I think you're dramatically understating the revolutionary nature of just those two.
It is now the case that any piece of information is available to any person anywhere on the planet instantly wherever they are. That is an unbelievable transformation, and it's visible in things like the turnaround on the COVID vaccine, as well as a dozen other different little things. The ability to share knowledge instantaneously to all parts of the globe for practically no cost is truly a revolution.
Like I said, I agree with a lot of the rest of what you say, but discounting the internet and the proliferation of smartphones is a thing you can do if you don't really remember life before them.
To wit, the internet has obviated the need for eclectic catalogs of knowledge, ideas, and products like this one. They were limited answers to the problem of discovery, and the internet is an _unlimited_ answer.
Almanacs are gone. Phonebooks barely exist, replaced by searchable maps, with reviews, live estimates of how busy they are, and directions for how to get there customized to where you are this moment and live traffic conditions. Humdrum mailer catalogs full of onesies, novelty dinner plates, custom checks, and other bric-a-brac are seldom seen. The model and scope for an encyclopedia has been upended, greatly expanded, and made free for all mankind.
Need to tie a knot? Here are all of the ones known to exist, sorted by application or any other conceivable way, instantly, at no cost.
Remember six to eight weeks from mailing a form to delivery of goods? Usually reduced to under a week.
Yeah, a cataclysmic change. All of these are obvious observations but it still humbles me to think of how ridiculous a revelation it has been, and it happened suddenly in my lifetime, and I take it all for granted.
I think some of why this stuff gets overlooked is because in many cases, it's reducing the friction to do a particular thing, not necessarily enabling a new thing - we want to know what the weather is like in Peru, suddenly we know, and there wasn't any tangible process involved in getting it. It's not surprising, because we expected to know about Peruvian weather, and now we do, and that's what we'd expect, so it doesn't get noticed. We want to know what restaurants are over there, and we do. We want to know what's on their menu, and we do. We want a new spatula, and we've got one. It doesn't feel magical, it feels frictionless, which feels like the way things should be, so we don't notice it.
I was reading The Road to Wigan Pier (copyright 1937) by the socialist George Orwell and I was struck by how current a few phrases seemed:
[Machines] would even encroach upon the activities we now class as 'art'; [they are] doing so already
there is the horrible--the really disquieting--prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England. [snip] To this you have got to add the ugly fact that most middle-class Socialists, while theoretically pining for a class-less society, cling like glue to their miserable fragments of social prestige. For every person [at the I.L.P. branch meeting], male and female, bore the worst stigmata of sniffish middle-class superiority.
Establish Socialism--remove the profit principle--and the inventor will have a free hand. The mechanization of the world, already rapid enough, would be or at any rate could be enormously accelerated. And this prospect is a slightly sinister one, because it is obvious even now that the process of mechanization is out of control. It is happening [not] for any clearly understood purpose, but simply from the impulse to invent and improve, which has now become instinctive. Put a pacifist to work in a bomb-factory and in two months he will be devising a new type of bomb.
https://archive.org/details/whole-earth-fall-1968/page/n1/mo...
Additional issues:
https://archive.org/search?query=whole+earth+catalog