[HN Gopher] Whole Earth Catalog (1968) [pdf]
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Whole Earth Catalog (1968) [pdf]
Author : doener
Score : 116 points
Date : 2023-11-07 12:25 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (monoskop.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (monoskop.org)
| brylie wrote:
| The Internet Archive has a copy of the Whole Earth Catalogue from
| 1968 with text selection, read aloud, and search:
|
| https://archive.org/details/whole-earth-fall-1968/page/n1/mo...
|
| Additional issues:
|
| https://archive.org/search?query=whole+earth+catalog
| hypeit wrote:
| More background on Stewart Brand:
|
| https://www.thenation.com/article/society/stewart-brand-whol...
| pstuart wrote:
| Wow, I had no idea -- thanks for the insights. I loved looking
| at the Whole Earth Catalog when I was a kid.
| hypeit wrote:
| 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_
| mistrial9 wrote:
| 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.
|
| source: was there in the 80s in Marin, California
| hypeit wrote:
| 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.
| zztop44 wrote:
| A really interesting read, and super fun to boot. One feels the
| reviewer enjoyed themselves.
| ishtanbul wrote:
| 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
| liampulles wrote:
| Stewart Brand also wrote a book and made a docuseries about
| bottom-up architecture called "How Buildings Learn":
| https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrg__Ji1S58TnecKCIFNskj-Q...
|
| 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.
| CaptWillard wrote:
| They recently put all of them up here: https://wholeearth.info/
|
| Lots of history and related publications, too.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| 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.
|
| Edit: https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/817415_chap4.html
|
| Here is a little text snippet:
|
| 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
| pictureofabear wrote:
| Whole Earth Catalog was pretty expensive.
|
| $5 in 1968 is $45 today!
| ljlolel wrote:
| Physically it is very large and thick. It's the size of 4
| textbooks.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| How large and thick is a "textbook"?
|
| As I recall, it was roughly foolscap format, and about an
| inch thick.
| hypertexthero wrote:
| Nice! The ones at https://wholeearth.info/ start at 1970.
|
| Purpose statement:
|
| > 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.
| bloopernova wrote:
| 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.
| xkcd-sucks wrote:
| 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
| bloopernova wrote:
| Yeah that catalog seems to be almost from a parallel universe
| where sexuality and body positivity were not considered
| scandalous.
|
| I think I'd like to see how that universe turned out; what
| would they be doing differently in their 2023?
| Rediscover wrote:
| 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).
| zackmorris wrote:
| 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.
| roughly wrote:
| > 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.
| Clamchop wrote:
| 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.
| roughly wrote:
| 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.
| robocat wrote:
| 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.
|
| http://george-orwell.org/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier/10.html
| pkdpic wrote:
| 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 Rene Descartes' mind-body dualism. Ryle introduced
| the phrase in The Concept of Mind (1949) [...]
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_machine
| mwattsun wrote:
| It's also the title of the best album by The Police
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Q73LMKKxbc&list=PL6vwnon3sI...
| MrFin wrote:
| On p65 of the PDF, URLs are included. This must be an edited
| facsimile of the 60s publication.
| fernly wrote:
| This PDF is from a rather poor scan, with low resolution and lots
| of moire in the half-tone prints.
|
| The one at TIA is much sharper, altho still some moire.
|
| Interesting that at wholeearth.info the earliest they show is the
| 1970 issue. But very sharp, photographed in color rather than a
| monochrome scan.
| knodi123 wrote:
| I like page 16, where it says
|
| > 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!
| sockaddr wrote:
| What is this referring to? I can't understand any of this.
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