whole earth access
the company was founded in 1978 with the purchase of a failing berkeley store called whole earth access .
over - retailed ,
particularly with electronics - one of whole earth access' main product categories .
almost two years after emerging from bankruptcy protection, berkeley' s whole earth access is closing its three remaining stores .
in 1997, whole earth review changed its name to whole earth and the motto from
access to tools and ideas
to
access to tools, ideas, and practices .
peter warshall, the editor at that time said :
one of fastest - growing chains in u. s. : whole earth access stores are' bargain basement' for yuppies
one of fastest - growing chains in u. s. : whole earth access stores are' bargain basement' for yuppies - latimes
berkeley — counterculture capitalist larry farb likes to think of his whole earth access stores as
bloomingdale' s without the frills .
the cost of advertising in a market like san jose, where whole earth access has just one store, is prohibitive, farb said .
whole earth access, the emeryville - based new age retail chain, has closed its concord electronics store and is apparently closing its san jose store .
the three remaining whole earth access stores in san francisco, berkeley and san rafael are going of business, according to officials of the family owned company .
the new urltoken provides several ways for you to enjoy the whole earth catalog online .
the new urltoken provides several ways for you to enjoy the whole earth magazine online .
the whole earth catalog functions as an evaluation and access device. with it, the user should know better what is worth getting and where and how to do the getting .
stewart brand, publisher of the whole earth catalog. photograph: larry busacca / getty images
emeryville - whole earth access, which opened for business 18 years ago with one store in berkeley and grew to seven in the bay area, has filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization .
there hasn' t been a final decision yet ,
farb said. a major factor, he said, will be whether whole earth access can get someone to take over its lease .
an employee at the main concord store said electronics customers were being sent to the whole earth access store in berkeley, but farb said the concord electronics business would eventually be moved to the main concord outlet .
two years later, mr. farb co - founded whole earth access with his wife, his brother larry and sister - in - law laura farb, and politi. mr. farb served as president .
i still remember a place called best and consumers distributing. i bought my dad a seiko watch from there! there used to be a whole earth access near the old goodman lumber on bayshore in san francisco .
history - some of what happened around here for the last three years. - tools ideas environment - whole earth catalog
in particular, whole earth access, which offers everything from housewares to clothing to computers, has taken a battering from specialty megastores such as fry' s electronics, the sprawling warehouse - like seller of computers, stereos and video cameras .
whole earth plans to keep its three stores open in berkeley, san francisco and san rafael while it renegotiates its debts .
over the last quarter - century, we' ve learned that access to tools and ideas is not enough. practice and experience refine handwork and wisdom, make it better, secure a more subtle touch. so, we' ve changed our motto from' access to tools and ideas' to' access to ideas, tools, and practices.'
in fall 1968 american writer and founder of organizations stewart brand of the portola institute, menlo park, california, published the first edition of the whole earth catalog. access to tools, with the goal of providing education and
access to tools
so a reader could
find his own inspiration, shape is own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested .
the counter - cultural whole earth catalog laid a paper trail towards the eclectic world of the internet. image: c. dunn / alamy
this text is about a specific manifestation of integral culture. we might call it
whole earth culture
because it developed around the whole earth catalogs and an affiliated magazine named the whole earth review. both were started by stewart brand, a remarkable man who lives in sausalito, california. i joined the magazine as its art editor in 1977 and continued contributing until about 1990. when i joined the magazine it was called coevolution quarterly - it became the whole earth review later, when it adopted the name of its better - known parent, the catalog .
despite the company' s growth, whole earth access remains very much a family affair. management duties are split among the brooklyn - born farb brothers and their wives. gene, 40, handles electronics and photographic merchandise, while larry, 37, oversees hardware and appliances .
2001 - 06 - 21 04: 00: 00 pdt berkeley - - gene farb, the bay area entrepreneur who co - founded the new age retailer whole earth access, died june 13 at his berkeley home after a long battle with colon cancer. he was 55 .
whole earth locations in concord, foster city, sacramento and san jose were closed. in april 1996, the company filed for protection from creditors .
earlier this year, whole earth opened a 10, 000 - square - foot annex dedicated to computers and electronics equipment across the street from its main 30, 000 - square - foot store in berkeley. as in the main store, whole earth' s unobtrusive salespeople keep customers coming back .
in 1968 stewart brand launched an innovative publication called the whole earth catalog. it was groundbreaking, enlightening, and spawned a group of later publications .
in the window that pops up, you should see blocked or blocked temporarily next to access your location. click the x next to this line .
industry analysts weren' t surprised by whole earth' s announcement, citing poor management. the retailer also suffered from lack of focus, industry sources said .
so this is a story about stewart brand and what he tried to do with whole earth, and a little bit about what i tried to do, too .
the last whole earth catalog was published in 1972. at least, that was the name on the cover. but it was not to be the catalog' s last edition. it was followed by the updated last whole earth catalog, the whole earth epilog, the next whole earth catalog, the essential whole earth catalog, etc. , because there was continuing demand for the information it supplied, and appreciation for its efficient format. the reason that a so - called last catalog was even published then was that stewart had announced at the beginning of the venture that he would only produce the catalog for 5 years and if no imitator appeared during that time, doing the job better, it must not be important enough to continue. (the whole earth name and photograph - symbol were not trademarked, so anyone could offer imitations and variants .) soon after the last catalog appeared, stewart threw a
farewell
party at which $ 20, 000 of publishing profits was given away, and then he tried to retire .
who else has fond memories of this place? i still have my black whole earth access backpack and once got a
oh my god! whole earth access !
comment from a friend of mine (prompting us to figure out how to explain the store to her girlfriend, who was from washington state) and a few smiles and stares from the general public. went to the one in concord quite frequently growing up. i think we bought the first family computer there - - a performa. :) i did a search and saw it' d been mentioned a few times, but didn' t have its own topic. wea is worthy of its own topic !
a lot of other stuff happened too, ask anybody who was there. ask bernie sproch to show you his whole earth stamp collection. it' s quite a collection .
can he remember where the idea for
stay hungry, stay foolish
came from ?
that one is a mystery ,
he says at first. and then ,
oh i know, it' s because of my campaign to get photographs of the whole earth which i did in 1966 and after which the whole earth catalog is named .
polanco ventured to whole earth access in berkeley - - tucked away in the city' s industrial district - - one recent weekday to buy an olympia typewriter for $ 200 ,
the exact same model macy' s had for $ 300 ,
she says. she promptly turned around and invested her savings on a vacuum cleaner and a citrus juicer .
by 1996, the retail landscape in northern california had changed, leaving whole earth weak from too much expansion. the company filed for bankruptcy in 1997, and its last stores closed in 1999 .
but the need for product updates did not stop, and the limitations of the catalog format - exciting ideas were confined to short excerpts from already - published works - suggested a different sort of publication that might push whole earth' s educational ambitions still further. it could, for example, feature original articles and letters from readers (whole earth got lots of mail - many readers felt themselves to be part of the evaluation process, and thus members of the whole earth community). at the same time, a magazine could continue providing the pithy reviews that made the catalog famous .
for this new countercultural movement, information was a precious commodity. in the ’60s, there was no internet; no 500 cable channels. [ the whole earth catalog ] was a great example of user - generated content, without advertising, before the internet. basically, brand invented the blogosphere long before there was any such thing as a blog... . no topic was too esoteric, no degree of enthusiasm too ardent, no amateur expertise too uncertified to be included... . this i am sure about: it is no coincidence that the whole earth catalogs disappeared as soon as the web and blogs arrived. everything the whole earth catalogs did, the web does better
( wikipedia article on whole earth catalog, accessed 12 - 06 - 2013) .
under mr. farb' s innovative direction, laura farb said, whole earth not only built its own computers but also became the first retailer to sell computers and other electronics under the same roof .
basic living products, the family - owned company that operates the whole earth outlets, decided monday to liquidate its inventory after its bank refused to extend additional credit, said larry farb, a vice president and co - owner .
the whole earth concept made sense in 1978, when the company was founded. but it has been eclipsed by modern discount and
category - killer
stores such as costco, circuit city and bed, bath & beyond .
i wish all my accounts were as good as whole earth ,
says sean o' brien, a sales representative for sony' s hi - fi and audio division .
they do a phenomenal job for me .
founder stewart brand, in his 1968 catalog article ,
we are as gods
said ,
at a time when the new left was calling for grass - roots political (i. e. , referred) power, whole earth eschewed politics and pushed grassroots direct power—tools and skills. at a time when new age hippies were deploring the intellectual world of arid abstractions, whole earth pushed science, intellectual endeavor, and new technology as well as old. as a result, when the most empowering tool of the century came along—personal computers (resisted by the new left and despised by the new age) —whole earth was in the thick of the development from the beginning .
i will say a couple of good words for fame. it accelerates access if you want access. you can hang around with famous people, which is fun sometimes. your credit is good with strangers, it' s never hard to meet people. it' s usually easy to find work, make some money. if you' ve withstood fame there' s some things you' re strong at that you might not be otherwise .
whole earth expanded rapidly in the late 1980s and early 1990s until it had stores in berkeley, concord, sacramento, san francisco, san jose, san mateo and san rafael. its sales peaked at $ 180 million in 1992 .
as a museum exhibition, access to tools can only whet the appetite, as it is hard to look at a lot of books in glass boxes. they are, after all, meant to be read. it is by no means clear that brand' s readers were actually doing much of their reading. and that, in the end, may be the whole point. perhaps the whole earth catalog really was the forerunner of the internet and its tools, in that it represented a transmutation of a whole cosmos of radical ideas, crazy stuff and possible lives, all returned to us as little more than an alluring opportunity to sit down and browse. we' ve been browsing ever since .
so was it walden or internet? the best answer may be that it spanned exactly that gamut. if you are wondering how, visit access to tools, a small but engrossing exhibition currently at the museum of modern art in new york. in seven glass cases, together with a homely plywood table scattered with stuff to read, curator david senior has assembled a bibliographic tribute to the' whole earth' phenomenon, and the visionary behind it, stewart brand .
or, as john markoff, a technology writer for the new york times, puts it, the whole earth catalog was
the internet before the internet. it was the book of the future. it was a web in newsprint .
it' s a long explanation but what' s interesting is how it ties in brand' s cosmic view of earth, expanded consciousness (he first started his campaign to get photographs of the earth from space after an lsd trip in which he thought he could see the curvature of the earth), science – the nasa space programme – and personal freedom .
manufacturers - - including those who usually shy away from discounters because they worry about cheapening their image - - share the customers' enthusiasm. ibm selected whole earth as an authorized outlet for its personal computers just before the company froze its number of authorized dealers .
the whole earth catalog was published regularly from 1968 to 1972, but only intermittently thereafter. during its four years of regular publication, the catalog earned a reputation, a following, and a national book award, the only time a catalog has been so honored .
if you want a throw - away magazine, whole earth is not for you. we publish a magazine that readers have hoarded, prowled inside of, stored in garages and cellars. whole earth is a dialog as much as a magazine. staff, readers, citizens, scientists, writers, politicians, kids, inventors, savvy dabblers, clowns, even wildlife and our pets participate. we like readers to take at least three months (we' re a quarterly) snooping around. we' ve changed a bit .
but the milieu that makes the sla and the hearst kidnapping seem like a mythical or fictional phenomenon goes beyond childhood memories. those things belong to a vanished era when “the lord of the rings” and “dune” largely remained the provinces of disreputable geek subculture, when the internet (not generally called by that name) was available via teletype printout at the whole earth access store on shattuck avenue, and when owning even one david bowie album marked someone as almost certainly as gay or bisexual. those may seem irrelevant or trivial correspondences, but i don’t see them that way .
the show emphasizes that the whole earth catalog was, for all the eccentric hardware in its pages, a bookish affair. it advertised them, reviewed them and promoted them: handbooks on blasting and childbirth; the joy of sex and the mind of the dolphin; compendia of native american lore and norbert weiner' s cybernetics. access to tools lovingly reassembles this weird world of print. moving from case to case, one can re - inhabit what was, in its moment, a radical new way of thinking about the planet, the self and the future .
we are as gods and might as well get good at it ,
wrote brand on the title page of the whole earth catalog. up until now, he noted, power has been in the hands of
government, big business, formal education, church
. but now
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 .
whatever they' re likened to, the three whole earth access stores in the san francisco bay area constitute one of the fastest growing - - and most unusual - - retailing phenomena in the nation. sales this year are expected to top $ 35 million, up from $ 25 million in 1985 and just $ 15 million in 1984. that' s not bad for an outfit that began by peddling wood stoves, grain mills and other gear for
alternative life styles
from a 1, 000 - square - foot store that the farbs took over in 1978 .
in his june 2005 stanford university commencement address steve jobs compared the whole earth catalog to google .
when i was young, there was an amazing publication called the whole earth catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation... . it was sort of like google in paperback form, 35 years before google came along. it was idealistic and overflowing with neat tools and great notions .
during the commencement speech, jobs also quoted the farewell message placed on the back cover of the 1974 edition of the catalog:' stay hungry. stay foolish.'
standing with one foot firmly in the rugged individualism and back - to - the - land movements of the sixties counterculture and the other in the nascent global community made possible by the internet, the whole earth catalog offered an integrated, complex, challenging, thought - provoking, and comprehensive worldview .
also in january we produced our first
difficult but possible supplement to the whole earth catalog
. it was a 32 - page newsprint collection of friends' letters, old pamphlets like abbie hoffman' s
fuck the system ,
a solar heater, new catalog suggestions. we made it at the store .
this diagnosis differs from what whole earth tried to do, mainly because of when it was written. despite that, lasswell is able to explain the unconscious logic of stewart brand' s strategies with exquisite insight. stewart did not read lasswell, but others working towards an integral culture would benefit greatly from doing so .
because of his sense of the importance of the whole earth' s image, the title and cover of the catalog became platforms for promoting this interest. it also demonstrated that the catalog was more than a group of products for sale, selected only by quality. even casual readers could see that the catalog had an agenda: it focused on products that reinforced both a diversification of practice and a holistic understanding of man and nature - a hierarchy of values that defied categorization as either
left
or
right .
the phrase
think globally, act locally
originated as a concise summary of the philosophy underlying the whole earth catalog .
another assumption that was basic to whole earth was that someone could be interested in both abstract ideas and practical things. that may be rarer than we realized. soon after i moved to prague, i showed the last whole earth catalog to a friend in bulgaria. she was fascinated but perplexed .
who is this for ?
she asked. it took me a few moments to reply, as my first impulse was to say ,
everyone .
but instead i answered ,
it' s for practical intellectuals .
she continued browsing through the catalog with her eyes starting to moisten. eventually she said ,
how i wish we had such people .
by constellating the underground magazines, heavyweight theory and quirky publishing universe from which the whole earth catalog emerged, senior gives museum - goers a chance to revisit the extraordinary intellectual, artistic and political ferment of those years, and to weigh, for better or worse, its legacy. it is, in the best sense, a trip .
the catalog quickly became a cultural phenomenon - the
unofficial handbook of the counterculture
as whole earth magazine' s website now says. more accurately, it was an efficient way to spread powerful ideas that altered the interests and lifestyles of millions of people. the following statement appeared on the inside front cover of the first and later editions :
whole earth (the magazine) was published until 2003, though at the end it was only a shadow of what it once was. stewart stopped acting as editor - in - chief in the early 1980s, to let others assert their influence over the magazine' s direction. but it finally exhausted its momentum. the readership dwindled to too few to support the cost of producing it on a quarterly schedule. the cover price was too high, and it was forced to start selling advertising (although only to compatible advertisers). it might make more sense to publish it on the internet. that would be a much better medium for the whole earth catalog, too, if anyone wants to revive it .
for over a year portola institute had been nothing but dick, a secretary he shared, his office, and a few expensive projects with big ideas and little to show. so he rented a nearby set of cubicles hat some architects were moving out of, to give us more room to lake mistakes in. i was working in my cubicle several weeks later when dick leaned in the door and asked ,
by the way, what do you think you' ll call it ?
my head filled with the last success i' d had, 1966 photograph - of - the - whole - earth campaign, which i felt was still incomplete. i told him ,
i dunno. whole earth catalog, or something .
it is hard to believe that whole earth' s time has passed, or that its field of relevance is limited to the english - speaking world - or that only one person was capable of turning a broadly integrative vision into publications that were highly popular and at the same time highly sophisticated. yet as time passes, i' m beginning to wonder where the other great editorial syntheses are. perhaps they have already appeared - in china or iran or central siberia, but are not yet known outside of their language zone. could that zone ever be truly global? or must a whole earth - type publication always be confined by language and distribution systems, undermining its planetary positioning? doesn' t that make integral culture an illusion ?
we were just starting to get files of photographs of the earth, and there was a sequence from a satellite of basically a day in the life of earth from sunrise to sunset, and i wanted that sequence and to make the connection between the view from space of the shadow moving across the earth, and the experience of being on earth and seeing dawn. and for some reason the image i had in my mind was of a hitchhiker at dawn on a road somewhere and the sun comes up and there are trains going by. the frame of mind of the young hitchhiker is one of the freest frames of mind there is. you' re always a little bit hungry and you know you are being completely foolish .
whole earth provision co. was conceived in dallas in the spring of 1970 by jack and linda jones who were living and working in the big ‘d’ after graduating from the university of texas in austin. linda, a math teacher for the dallas isd and jack, a designer working with a furniture manufacturer, were nostalgic for austin and considering their goals and dreams for the future .
robert horvitz joined the staff of coevolution quarterlly in 1977 as the art editor, and stayed with the magazine until 1990, when he moved to eastern europe. robert has been kind enough to share his thought on the culture of whole earth with us. this article, originally written for a speech he gave in the czech republic, is presented here with no changes to his text .
turner' s 2006 book, from counterculture to cyberculture: stewart brand, the whole earth network and the rise of digital utopianism, gives more of a clue. several epoch - making events were going on in the san francisco area in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, and at the centre of them all, linking them together – no surprises here – was stewart brand .
shortly i was fantasizing access service. a truck store, maybe, traveling around with information and samples of what was worth etting and information where to get it. a catalog too, continuously updated, in part by the users. a catalog of goods that owed othing to the suppliers and everything to the users. it would be something i could put some years into .
for instance, there was much talk of the globe in the buzz around the whole earth catalog. it famously featured the extraordinary' earthrise' photos of the blue marble of spaceship earth as seen from the moon. and its contents ostensibly highlighted human togetherness and interdependency. but it is hard to say whether the holistic eco - consciousness of the project amounted to anything more than solipsism. brand' s tagline, after all, was a rip - off from ayn rand: “we are as gods, and might as well get used to it. ” try it on the women looking for firewood in bangladesh .
i like the prices and the attitude of the people on the floor ,
says dennis dillon, an undergraduate at the university of california at berkeley who is shopping around for a new television and came to whole earth after being turned off by the high - pressure sales tactics of the big electronics chains .
they' re here if you need help, but they' re not constantly hassling you .
we had the contents printed at nowels publications, a newspaper press just down the street from portola institute, and the cover printed at east wind in san francisco (using the picture from a whole earth poster we' d already had them print), and the binding done at another place, with us doing the transporting between. it was a terrible arrangement. the 1000 copies we printed were a huge chore to cart around .
the whole earth catalog may have been his most famous creation, but he' s been involved in dozens of other, possibly even more influential, projects since. i interview him at the ted conference in long beach where he' d just delivered a talk (his fifth at ted) on his latest enthusiasm, which is about as radical as they come: de - extinction. he' s trying to resurrect extinct species by retro - engineering their dna .
in 1976, mr. farb and his wife joined stan politi to create the
first new earth exposition
in san francisco. the event showcased alternative lifestyle products and was attended by 50, 000 paid visitors in one weekend .
stewart wanted nasa to release a photo of the whole earth because he believed it would have significant psychological impact: it would be visual proof of our unity and specialness, as our luminous blue ball - of - a - home contrasted dramatically with the dead black emptiness of space. differences in skin color, religion, nationality and wealth, which can seem so important down here on earth, shrink to nothing when viewed from afar. we are all in this together and humanity is but a small part of a miraculous and delicate ecosystem. stewart had studied biology in college, just at the time when ecology was becoming a subject of scientific awareness, and that was one of the ideas which shaped his worldview .
literary critic hugh kenner came to a different conclusion. puzzling in 1971 over this “bizarre shopping - list of glassblower' s torches, swedish looms, $ 50 funerals, wind - driven pumps and books about polyhedra, organic gardening, beekeeping, ” he judged the whole earth catalog to be mere “reading matter” — less a practical tool than “a nubbly multifocused many - voiced meditation on what we might be doing with our lives... a kind of space - age walden. ”
i actually thought i could fit liferaft earth (p. 35) in between the september supplement and the fall catalog. setting up the event was even harder than production. then starving for a week was no way to recuperate. dumb .
i actually thought i could fit liferaft earth (p. 35) in between the september supplement and the fall ca talog. setting up the event was even harder than production. then starving for a week was no way to recuperate. dumb .
what' s more, later that same year he published the first edition of what came to be the magnum opus of the entire counterculture, the whole earth catalog – a book that some people, turner included, believed changed the world. though it wasn' t exactly a book, it was a how - to manual, a compendium, an enyclopedia, a literary review, an opinionated life guide, and a collection of readers' recommendations and reviews of everything from computational physics to goat husbandry .
in recent years, he established the long now foundation, which aims to promote long - term thinking (projects include building a clock that will keep time for 10, 000 years, ticking once a year and chiming to mark each millennium). he' s written on architecture in how buildings learn, he' s shaken up the ecology movement with whole earth discipline – in which, among other things, he espouses mass urbanisation and nuclear power and then of course there' s
de - extinction
.
chris anderson, the later editor of wired, who is younger than both brand and kelly, says that he is absolutely the inheritor of the catalog' s
chain of influence
.
the whole earth catalog inspired the homebrew computing club, who inspired steve wozniak to build the apple 2, who inspired the personal computer movement, who in turn inspired the original web. who inspired the open - source software movement. who inspired the open - source hardware movement which inspired the maker movement who inspired me .
but what to call it? it could easily have been called something obvious, like best books and tools, but instead stewart chose something quirky and tendentious - because his motives were rather more political and educational than commercial. a few months earlier, he had started a quixotic campaign to build public pressure on nasa, america' s space agency, to release a photograph showing the earth as single object isolated in space. he made a placard that said something like
nasa: why haven' t we seen a photo of the whole earth yet ?
and he carried it around the campus of the university of california at berkeley. manned spaceflights in the early 1960s had not gone far enough away from the earth to bring back photographs showing our planet hanging isolated in space. some people suspected that there were spy satellites which could do that, but their images were top secret. in 1968, nasa was already preparing to launch the first manned rockets to the moon. test flights had begun. these could carry automatic cameras, if nasa wanted them to, and sooner or later, the apollo astronauts would be able to look back at the earth and snap pictures on their way to the moon. so stewart' s was a reasonable request, even if it puzzled passers - by in berkeley .
note: this was written for
wilderness as a phenomenon of integral culture
( divočina jako fenomén integrální kultury), a conference in klenová, czech republic, 4 - 5 may 2002, which was part of a multi - museum exhibition entitled
divočina - přiroda, duše, jazyk
( wilderness - nature, soul, language) curated by jiří zemánek. my text - written for an audience unfamiliar with whole earth publications - was translated into czech and published in 2004 with the other conference presentations in isbn 8086217825 .
so far as i can tell, harold lasswell was the first social scientist to offer a comprehensive explanation for the political dynamics of symbols like the whole earth. his theories also relate directly to the idea of integral culture. building on a century of research by others into the role of symbols in nationalist and revolutionary movements, lasswell summarized his analysis in a book entitled world politics and personal insecurity (mcgraw - hill, 1935). out - of - print since the 1970s, it is now available again, online, at
in retrospect what i particularly appreciate was dick raymond' s help and comfort, which was none at all he' s an unusually mercifui soul. he said out loud to esquire ,
you have to let people have their own nervous breakdowns .
correct. i jittered through the january 70 production and then asked gurney norman to handle march. he did, and with bells on. guest editorship had come to whole earth. joe bonner left on the mystical road, and i was worried, but hal hershey more than filled his shoes on layout .
the whole earth catalog got started in a plane over nebraska in march 1968. i was returning to california from my father' s long dying and funeral that morning in illinois. the sun had set ahead of the plane while i was reading spaceship earth by barbara ward. between chapters i gazed out the window into dark othing and slid into a reverie about my friends who were starting their own civilization hither and yon in the sticks and how could help. the l. l. bean catalog of outdoor stuff came to mind and i onderisd upon mr. bean' s service to humanity over the years. so lany of the problems i could identify came down to a matter of ccess. where to buy a windmill. where to get good information n bee - keeping. where to lay hands on a computer without forfeiting freedom ...
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. 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 .
what was the whole earth catalog? it was a paper periodical, published in the united states in the late 1960s and early 1970s, full of information about things you could buy. it was more than just a catalogue. technology guru and apple co - founder steve jobs suggested in 2005 that this counter - cultural handbook should properly be understood as a forerunner of google. in its crumbly newsprint pages, which advertised the eclectic accoutrements of tuned - in america in those years — macrobiotic food, macramé patterns, yurt plans — jobs spied a radical rethinking of the connection between information and community .
kevin kelly, the founding editor of wired magazine, tells me how he first came across the catalog when he was still in high school
and it changed my life. but then it changed everybody' s life. it inspired me not to go to college but to go and try and live out my own life. it was like being given permission to invent your own life. that was what the catalog did. it was called' access to tools' and it gave you tools to create your own education, your own business, your own life .
in the early years, the first section of coevolution focussed on the coming apocalypse. like most
green intellectuals ,
stewart thought we were on the brink of a worldwide social collapse that would be caused by resource depletion, pollution, overpopulation and the proliferation of military technologies whose power exceeded our sense of responsibility. but he was also among the first to be persuaded by futurist herman kahn that this was contrary to the dominant historical trends, which were overwhelmingly positive. kahn was virtually alone in predicting that the next 20 years would be a period of sustained prosperity and dramatically improving quality of life for a growing percentage of humanity and many whole earth readers were upset by his arguments. but they demonstrated coevolution' s commitment to challenging consensus beliefs, even its own. note, too, that this was followed by a gradual shift away from the promotion of a
back to nature
lifestyle in coev. however esthetically appealing that way of life might be, it actually accelerates the loss of wilderness and is less energy - and transport - efficient than living in large cities. these fundamental re - orientations probably prevented coev from becoming as popular as the whole earth catalogs, but it also gave the magazine a reputation for bold, fresh thinking, and a loyal readership among independent - minded intellectuals .
it is in no way hard to find people who have been inspired by the whole earth catalog and by stewart brand. chris anderson, curator of ted, the conference series for
ideas worth spreading
, tells me that
in my own mind, he' s my intellectual hero
. chris anderson – yes, there' s two of them – a former editor of wired and leading light in the
maker movement
of industrial diyers – describes him as
an international treasure
and
one of my gods
. he actually thanks me for writing about him. stewart brand, it turns out, is the hero' s hero .
stewart and his team put out several issues of the whole earth catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. it was the mid - 1970s, and i was your age. on the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. beneath it were the words:' stay hungry. stay foolish.' it was their farewell message as they signed off. stay hungry. stay foolish. and i have always wished that for myself. and now, as you graduate to begin anew, i wish that for you .
i was operating without pay but keeping track of my time, to pay nyself back - wages of $ 5 / hr if we ever started to make money. in july 68 i printed up a mimeographed 6 - page
partial preliminary tooklist
of what i' d gathered so far (tantrn art, cybernetics the indian tipi, recreational equipment, about 120 items). with amples of each in the back of our truck lois and i set out to visit the market - familiar communes in new mexico and colorado. in about a month the whole earth truck store did a stunning $ 200 of business. no profit, but it didn' t cost too much and was good education ,
within each section, individual items followed one another in logical sequence, like words in a thesaurus. the importance of an item was suggested by the amount of page - space it got, although the same could not be said of the length of the review. often it was the opposite, as when a hero is introduced with a simple ,
here is someone who needs no introduction .
hundreds of people wrote reviews for whole earth - most of them were readers, never met by the editor, who argued persuasively for the value of what they reviewed. but stewart' s reviews were the most memorable, and usually disarmingly brief. they set a standard that we all tried to follow :
in his mind, he says, he had
diderot and his encylopédie and this enlightenment idea that basically knowledge had been held back by the aristocrats and all the rest. the whole thing was to keep people from knowing how to do things. so diderot was in my mind. and so was the ll bean catalogue which was full of outdoors stuff .
i told him this access catalog was what i wanted to do now. dick stened gravely and asked a few questions i had no answers for (who do you consider as the audience for this' catalog'? what kind f expenses do you think you' ll have in the first year? what will e in the catalog? how often would you publish it? how many copies ?). all i could tell him was that i felt serious enough about he project to put my own money into it, but not for a while yet. wanted to move into the scheme gradually, using portola' s office, phone, stationery, and finances (which were dick' s personal saivings, dwindling fast). he said okay .
purposive systems (heinz von foerster, etc. , 1968 )
you' re a purposive system. so am i. we' re very good at it, and not as good as we' d like to be. humanity, as a whole, is lousy at it, and worried. this collection of recent cybernetic thoughts can cheer you up and give you better concepts to worry with .
this year marks its 45th anniversary. i have a slightly later, yellowing and decrepit edition, from 1971, though it' s the same oversized format. it' s the edition that sold 2m copies and won a us national book award, and the tips on spot welding, home remedies for crabs (not the marine kind, i don' t think), dealing with drug busts, and building your own geodesic dome are rather delightfully quaint. (i especially like an extract from the underground guide to us colleges which states that, at the university of illinois :
the hip chicks will do it. it is easier to find a chick who will have sex now than it was two years ago when things were extremely difficult .
) but it doesn' t even begin to convey the revolution that the whole earth catalog represented .
dick raymond had introduced me to joe bonner, a talented teenage artist looking for work. he preferred to do layout than janitor for portola so i took him to gordon ashby' s design studio in san francisco for a 10 - minute course in layout. in october 68 we started production on the first whole earth catalog in the garage at ortega. sandy fell in love with the ibm composer while joe nailed together light tables out of scrap plywood. we got some electric heaters and started work. joe did layout, sandy typed, and i researched, reviewed, edited, and photographed. whenever the typewriter, heaters, camera lights, and fry - pan of wax were on simultaneously the electricity went out. we' d spend an hour on projects like making an exotic border with the composer. a leisurely production. a month or so for 64 white - spacey pages .
steve jobs' s stanford commencement address, a short talk that he gave in 2005 and which went viral after his death in 2011, is, in many ways, the ne plus ultra of jobsian wisdom. it encapsulated his thoughts on life, love and death. it expressed his lifelong philosophy and motivation. and it ends with a moving tribute to brand and what he calls
an amazing publication called the whole earth catalog
, which he describes as
one of the bibles of my generation
. it' s worth quoting the rest of it in full :
it was created by a fellow named stewart brand not far from here in menlo park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. this was in the late 1960s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. it was sort of like google in paperback form, 35 years before google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions .
coevolution quarterly was born in the spring of 1974 .
coevolution
(
evolving together
) was a word coined by biologists paul erlich and peter raven to describe the mutually - interdependent development of caterpillars and plants, predators and prey; it quickly became a core ecological concept. publishing 4 issues per year allowed more time for finding good content than weekly or monthly magazines enjoy, and it also forced that search to focus on ideas that stayed important over a longer timeframe. (a common saying among the staff was
interesting is not enough .
) a more radical aspect of coevolution - at least from an american perspective - was that it carried no advertising, like the whole earth catalogs. this was to ensure that readers perceived the editorial policy as undistorted by commercial concerns, and to make it so in fact. we also reported our income and expenses in every issue. a further protection against both the perception and reality of commercialism was that a nonprofit foundation - point - was created to own both the catalogs and the magazine .
writing in 1935, he could not seriously consider the impact of photographs of the earth from space, so he is unable to cite any visual symbol capable of emotionally uniting everyone. instead he argues that experience always differentiates us and historical change keeps us insecure, producing a never - ending search for
they symbols
to turn into scapegoats. our best hope, he says, is a quasi - buddhist detachment from our immediate surroundings, based not on religious philosophy, but on (unspecified) technologies that
internalize our fantasies .
on a larger scale, america felt like a big joke too, a vibrant but decadent nation that had careened off the rails, where any damn thing could happen and probably would. it was also the decade of maximum white flight and maximum urban blight, when the whole nation saw the south bronx burning on live tv during a world series game at yankee stadium. when i consider the strange combination of nihilism and idealism in my demographic slice — the disaffected middle class of the patty hearst generation that came of age with disco, punk, watergate and aids — i’m inclined to be forgiving.
the whole earth access ( 1978 - 1998 ) started as a countercultural retail store in berkeley , california . in the early 1990s , whole earth access had 7 stores in northern california . after filing for bankruptcy in 1996 , all stores closed in 1998 . 
the whole earth access (1978 - 1998) started as a countercultural retail store in berkeley, california. in the early 1990s, whole earth access had 7 stores in northern california. after filing for bankruptcy in 1996, all stores closed in 1998.
the whole earth access (1978 - 1998) started as a countercultural retail store in berkeley, california. in the early 1990s, whole earth access had 7 stores in northern california. after filing for bankruptcy in 1996, all stores closed in 1998.