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.
A year or two 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 Whole Earth Catalog in the fall of 1968, with a cover featuring NASA's Earth image. It was a comprehensive compilation of resources primarily obtained through mail order from various dealers across the country. 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 by the system. 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, the decision was made 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 intelligence agency created by Brand, Shell, and executives and business consultants from Stanford Research Institute. Its purpose was to provide new ideas and help corporate executives 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 Howard Rheingold, author of "Virtual Communities." Rheingold later became the editor of Whole Earth Review and told The New York Times, "We live in an increasingly unhappy time to leave home. The WELL can help you find kindred spirits." Of course, Wired magazine was a major printing press for 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 investments, but also for the workers in electronic sweatshops, the people living in computer chip manufacturing and pollution areas, the people evicted from the Northern California real estate bubble, and all those living in the widening gap between the rich and the 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 increasingly militant activism 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 explains this in Professor Doyle's book, "Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and 70s," and Langdon Winner's "The Whale and the Reactor" also touches on this.
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 a part of these two traditions: computer and advanced cybernetic scientific thought, as well as intimate rural living and Eastern mysticism. However, as Roszak writes, "The synthesis broke down, and the techno-enthusiastic values of the counterculture won out... After all, they were the values and the vantage point 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, titled "From Counterculture to Cyberculture: How Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog brought us Wired Magazine."
Turner emphasizes the Whole Earth Catalog's integration of high-tech research and countercultural ideology. He says that establishing 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 internet 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 for equality and being highly concerned with futurism and global trend patterns, they overlooked the trend of widening wealth inequality from the 1970s to the 1990s and "manufactured a rhetoric that obscured these trends"; from Stewart Brand's dominant position in the publishing project to the impact of their "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 like to 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 overseas by the network economy.
The Whole Earth Catalog also had an influential role in transforming counterculture into a form of consumer identity. As well as promoting globalization.
So, some 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 a shortage of materials, there will be no more war, and we will enter a new era of peace and wise management.
This design ideology believes in the power of ideas, denying the continued existence of inequality and exploitation, almost like the myth of the internet age - that new technology can bring about a new social order, where everyone effortlessly gains freedom.
It's not to say that people associated with the "Whole Earth" were assimilated and corrupted by so-called libertarian capitalism, but we can also say that they were always libertarian capitalists. When he said "no politics," he certainly meant to maintain the dominance of white people and men.
However, in fact, many excellent people did great work and appeared in the Whole Earth Catalog and magazine, which was very useful. I think their work has a lot of value, linking scientific projects that model the entire system with values of community life and social revolution, Eastern philosophy, and the psychedelic transformation 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 idealistic notions of social transformation, resulting in the project ending 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?