Compiled from: The rise and fall of the Whole Earth Catalog
According to Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, the story of the Whole Earth Catalog began with Buckminster Fuller. In 1967, influenced by Fuller's "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth" and the effects of approximately 200 micrograms of hallucinogens, Brand believed that spreading NASA's space planet photos was an important way to promote a new understanding of people as planetary managers.
After inheriting a large sum of money, his second idea was to connect commune residents with useful goods.
After visiting Drop City, Libre, the Lama Foundation, and other visionary communes in the Southwest, Brand launched the first issue of the Whole Earth Catalog in the fall of 1968, featuring a NASA Earth image on the cover. It was a comprehensive compilation of resources primarily obtained through mail order from different dealers nationwide. Wood stoves, well-digging equipment and manuals, as well as family medical handbooks, were listed alongside books on education, Taoism, electronic music, cybernetics, and feedback processes. The book began with a manifesto:
We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far, remotely done power and glory — as via government, big business, formal education, church — has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains brought about. 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.
Therefore, there were some major themes: empowering individuals, focusing on personal development, and providing tools as means of social change.
The Whole Earth Catalog was published annually, with more or less quarterly supplements filled with reader corrections and suggestions. In 1971, the project was completely closed and the remaining funds were donated.
In 1974, Brand restarted the project, publishing a new edition of the catalog and distributing a magazine called CoEvolution Quarterly in the same manner. CoEvolution Quarterly focused on ecology, sustainability, predictions for the future of the Earth, and appropriate technology.
Brand had little connection to computer technology, and neither did the magazine, until 1983 when his agent convinced him to join the Whole Earth Software Catalog. The Whole Earth Software Catalog and its accompanying magazine, the Whole Earth Software Review, were a huge failure, but they marked a significant change for the "Whole Earth" project.
In 1985, when the "Software Catalog" failed and the "Software Review" was about to be released, it was decided to merge the "Software Review" with CoEvolution Quarterly.
Afterwards, the new magazine, Whole Earth Review, focused more on ecology, with increased attention to flexible business management, scientific ideas about complex systems and self-organization, as well as computer software and networks. During this period, the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (WELL) was also launched, which was a computer bulletin board for Bay Area residents to communicate and connect with each other. The staff of WELL was mainly composed of former residents of The Farm, a commune led by Stephen Gaskin in Tennessee.
In the 1990s, Stewart Brand became primarily involved in the Global Business Network, an intellectual network created by Brand, Shell, and executives and business consultants from Stanford Research Institute. Its purpose was to provide business executives with advice on new ideas and help them adopt flexible management strategies, network forms, and self-organizing processes.
In 1992, Kevin Kelly, the editor-in-chief of Whole Earth Review, was hired to run a new magazine called Wired, which featured contributions from some "Whole Earth" contributors, including Brand, internet freedom advocate John Perry Barlow, virtual reality entrepreneur Jaron Lanier, and author of "Virtual Communities" Howard Rheingold. By the way, Rheingold was the editor of Whole Earth Review after Kelly, and he told The New York Times, "We live in an increasingly unhappy time to leave home. The WELL can help you find like-minded souls." Of course, Wired magazine was a major print organ of the dot-com bubble. During Kelly's tenure as editor-in-chief, Wired featured right-wing heroes George Gilder and Newt Gingrich on its cover.
Whole Earth Review and its successor, Whole Earth, struggled for about 10 more years before the magazine folded. Wired magazine continues to this day.
In recent years, Stewart Brand has begun promoting nuclear power as the best solution to global warming and energy policy, saying "the personal computer is the only thing the hippies got right."
So, the Whole Earth Catalog project began as a tool of the counterculture in the 1960s, helping people build a new society, and ultimately promoting the network economy, which was a disaster not only for those who lost their investments, but also for the workers in electronic sweatshops, the people living in areas polluted by computer chip manufacturing and processing, the people evicted from the Northern California real estate bubble, and all those living at the bottom of the ever-widening gap between rich and poor.
How did this happen? How should we understand the ultimate outcome of the Whole Earth Catalog and its status as a relic of the late 1960s?
The Whole Earth Catalog appeared in 1968, seemingly moving away from the increasing militancy represented by the anti-Vietnam War movement, the New Left, the Black Panthers, and the Weathermen, and shifting towards an emphasis on lifestyle and consciousness change. Andrew Kirk in Professor Doyle's book "Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and 70s" and Langdon Winner in "The Whale and the Reactor" both elaborate on this point.
Theodore Roszak in his 1986 book "From Satori to Silicon Valley" points out two coexisting traditions in utopian thought: one calling for a return to nature and a more primitive or pastoral way of life, and the other promoting progress and new technologies as the hobby of technophiles. In his view, the Whole Earth Catalog attempted to synthesize part of these two traditions: computer and advanced cybernetic scientific thought along with intimate rural living and Eastern mysticism. However, as Roszak wrote, "the synthesis broke down, and the techno-enthusiastic values of the counterculture won out... After all, they were the values and the high ground of the mainstream, and it turned out that these forces were far more tenacious than most counterculturalists had guessed."
More recently, Fred Turner has detailed this history in a paper published at the University of California, San Diego. His paper is titled "From Counterculture to Cyberculture: How Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog brought us Wired Magazine."
Turner emphasizes the joining of high-tech research and countercultural ideology in the Whole Earth Catalog. He argues that making this connection allowed both to legitimize each other, connecting different communities - cybernetics and computer researchers, as well as commune residents - and creating a lingua franca that allowed ideas to flow between the two realms. This was crucial for redefining the image of the computer from a tool of centralized control and oppression to a tool of personal and political liberation. This hybrid image became the core of the myth of the network age.
In addition to the shift from opposing centralized and hierarchical systems to promoting government deregulation and concentrated political and economic power, Turner points out some ironies in the history of the "Whole Earth" project. While advocating equality and being highly concerned with futurism and global trend patterns, they ignored the trend of increasing wealth inequality from the 1970s to the 1990s, "creating a rhetoric that obscured these trends"; from Stewart Brand's dominant position in the publishing project to the impact of their advocated "flexible" business activities on employees, they have been obscuring existing power hierarchies. Finally, they created a business model that, starting from the original Whole Earth Catalog and WELL, blurred the boundaries between company and customer, fundamentally encouraging customers to create products and then selling customers and their work to each other while maintaining profits.
I would add that from serving visionary rural community projects to promoting "virtual communities," they also contributed to the destruction of real communities in the Bay Area and beyond by the network economy.
The Whole Earth Catalog also had an influential role in transforming counterculture into a form of consumer identity. And in promoting globalization.
So, some of the people I've talked to say, "Well, Brand, you know, he just got old, sold out, like Jerry Rubin and others." Indeed, he did change in the 1980s. But there is also a lot of continuity.
Returning to the beginning: the patron and inspiration of the Whole Earth Catalog was Buckminster Fuller; it says so on its first page. Fuller's central position was that the modern world has so much specialized knowledge that if we choose, we can eliminate scarcity and depletion of resources through intelligent design. He said that when people realize there is no longer any material shortage, there will be no more war, and we will enter a new age of peace and wise management.
This design ideology, believing in the power of ideas and denying the continued existence of inequality and exploitation, is almost as mythical as the myths of the network age - that new technologies can bring about a new social order where everyone effortlessly gains freedom.
It's not that no one raised the issues that the Whole Earth Catalog ignored. Let me share a letter from the January 1970 supplement. It was written by a person named Jay Bonner:
Sometimes I don't care about anything, but now I do. It makes me sick to think that over 150,000 people will pick up the Whole Earth Catalog and think it's great, just like I did. The function of the Whole Earth Catalog is to provide tools for "the whole earth." About 80% of the world's people are being swallowed up by various capitalist countries in the world. However, for some reason, the problems of these "Third World" people are not even mentioned in the Whole Earth Catalog. There are books and various publications written by educated and experienced writers about these problems and their solutions. At this point, I really don't think the title "Whole Earth" is appropriate for the Whole Earth Catalog. Stewart Brand, the man who originally created and conceived the Whole Earth Catalog and the Truck Store, apparently didn't think that books of this type and various publications should be included in it. Once, when I was working on the Whole Earth Catalog with him, I asked Mr. Brand if he would carry some politically oriented underground newspapers. In answering my question, he told me that the third restriction he made for the Whole Earth Catalog was no art, no religion, and no politics. What I want to point out is that, although Mr. Brand apparently doesn't think so, all three of the basic rules he set for himself at the beginning (which he told me about over three months ago) have been broken. Starting with art... then we turned to religion... and finally, we got into projects with political implications. We found quite a few in this area:
- Handbook for Conscientious Objectors
- The Population Bomb
- Population Evolution and Birth Control
- Birth Control Handbook
- Atlas Shrugged
- The Wall Street Journal and many "future" books.
I can understand why Mr. Brand makes a distinction between books like the Handbook for Conscientious Objectors and a good book on Marxist theory, because he is a capitalist. Books with these themes would hinder the sale of the Whole Earth Catalog, after all, it doesn't serve the people he is interested in, but to make money, believe me, he has a lot of money. Furthermore, this goes against all his economic beliefs. Yes, Mr. Brand's personal feelings are really reflected in what should be called "Stewart Brand's Catalog." In all 128 pages of the Whole Earth Catalog, there is one unmentioned political viewpoint. The whole escapist feeling that the Whole Earth Catalog conveys is unfortunate to me.
...The idea of the Catalog is good. People need the Whole Earth Catalog, but not the one they get! If you feel the same way, write to Stewart Brand.
Stewart Brand's response:
[Jay and his brother Joe did layout for the fall Whole Earth Catalog and were not rehired for the January production because there were too many technical errors on their pages. Jay was 17. (I'm 31. How old are you? That's more important than anything else to us.) Yes, I have some money, thanks to my parents, and I'm putting that money into work like the Whole Earth Catalog. My salary is $5 an hour. The Whole Earth Catalog is nonprofit, so our income... can only be used for further educational projects.] The capitalism issue is interesting. I haven't quite figured out what capitalism is, but if this is what we're doing, I would understand it. [Oppressing the people: What I know is that I have become radicalized by doing more political involvement than being an artist on the Whole Earth Catalog. My background is white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP), and my wife is Native American.] The work I did with Native Americans a few years ago convinced me that taking any criminal action against anyone (individual or institution) only makes things worse... I fight for people's rights and take responsibility for people...
This is different from attacking Shell Oil, but I do think that it's not that the people of "Whole Earth" were assimilated and corrupted by so-called libertarian capitalists, we can also say that they were always libertarian capitalists. When he says "no politics," of course, he means letting white people and men dominate.
But, in fact, many excellent people did good work that appeared in the Whole Earth Catalog and magazines and was very useful. I think there was a lot of value in the work they did, connecting scientific projects that modeled entire systems with values of communal living and social revolution, Eastern philosophy, and psychedelic transformations of consciousness. I believe, or at least I want to believe, that these connections have a lot of value.
As happened in this history, valuable insights from systems theory and ecology combined with uncritical promotion of technology, belief in progress, and an idealistic notion of social transformation, leading the whole project to end in corruption and destructiveness.
Is it possible to integrate advanced technological knowledge and human social transformation without falling into these traps? It seems to happen again and again. What would this project look like?