# data[].attributes.headline
The New Woman's Survival Catalog, Kirsten Grimstad and Susan Rennie (1973)

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The New Woman's Survival Catalog, Kirsten Grimstad and Susan Rennie (1973)

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New Womans Survival Catalog : Edited by Kirsten Grimstad, Susan Rennie. : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

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Originally published in 1973, The New Woman’s Survival Catalog is a seminal survey of the second-wave feminist effort across the US. Edited by Kirsten…

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Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism by Andrew Kirk (2007)

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Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism by Andrew Kirk (2007)

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A Culture of Connection: How Design Makes Us All Californian by Simon Sadler - BOOM: A Journal of California (2012)

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A Culture of Connection: How Design Makes Us All Californian by Simon Sadler - BOOM: A Journal of California (2012)

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JSTOR is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources.

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From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner (2006)

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From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner (2006)

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An Architecture of the Whole by Simon Sadler - Journal of Architectural Education (2008)

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An Architecture of the Whole by Simon Sadler - Journal of Architectural Education (2008)

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An architecture of the whole | EBSCOhost

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Discover this 2008 paper in Journal of architectural education by Sadler, Simon

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The Whole Earth and Apartheid: Media, peer-production, segregation by Thomas Patrick Pringle - New Media & Society (2023)

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The Whole Earth and Apartheid: Media, peer-production, segregation by Thomas Patrick Pringle - New Media & Society (2023)

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The whole earth and apartheid: Media, peer-production, segregation. | EBSCOhost

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Discover this 2023 paper in New Media & Society by Pringle, Thomas Patrick

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The Seers of Menlo Park: The Discourse of Heroic Consumption in the 'Whole Earth Catalog' by Sam Brinkley - Journal of Consumer Culture (2003)

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The Seers of Menlo Park: The Discourse of Heroic Consumption in the 'Whole Earth Catalog' by Sam Brinkley - Journal of Consumer Culture (2003)

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This article considers the emergence of the postmodern reflexive consumer through an archival case study of one particularly influential lifestyle magazine, the Whole Earth Catalog. This publication is read in the context of the cultural and lifestyle innovations of the 'new cultural intermediaries' (Bourdieu, Featherstone) of the 1970s, expressed in a new print media of lifestyle advice. In this print culture, consumers were taught to cultivate a reflexive awareness of their lifestyles through an enhanced sensitivity to the deeper meanings of market messages and consumer choices. On the basis of the advice of non-traditional lifestyle intellectuals, market choices acquired a sense of 'deep play' (Geertz) in which the well-being of the self and the planet emerged as the specific stake of lifestyle choices. Combining archival research with theoretical and historical analysis, the findings of this study offer an alternative to postmodern studies of the new consumer culture, which focus on the depthlessnessof consumption as a form of 'pastiche' (Jameson).

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Seers of Menlo Park: The Discourse of Heroic Consumption in the 'Whole Earth Catalog'.

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Discover this 2003 paper in Journal of Consumer Culture by Sam Binkley focusing on: CONSUMER behavior; LIFESTYLES; PERIODICALS; CONSUMER preferences; CONSUMER attitudes

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Appropriating Technology: The Whole Earth Catalog and Counterculture Environmental Politics by Andrew Kirk - Environmental History (2001)

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Appropriating Technology: The Whole Earth Catalog and Counterculture Environmental Politics by Andrew Kirk - Environmental History (2001)

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JSTOR is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources.

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"We Are as Gods": The Green Technical Fix, Henry Trim - RCC Perspectives (2016)

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"We Are as Gods": The Green Technical Fix, Henry Trim - RCC Perspectives (2016)

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“We Are as Gods”: The Green Technical Fix The Green Technical Fix on JSTOR

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Henry Trim, “We Are as Gods”, RCC Perspectives, No. 4, ENVIRONMENTAL KNOWLEDGE, ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS: Case Studies from Canada and Western Europe (2016), pp. 55-60

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From Silicon Valley to Wall Street: Following the Rise of an Entrepreneurial Ethos by Jennifer Tyree-Hageman - Berkeley Journal of Sociology (2013)

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From Silicon Valley to Wall Street: Following the Rise of an Entrepreneurial Ethos by Jennifer Tyree-Hageman - Berkeley Journal of Sociology (2013)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
JSTOR is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources.

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From Spaceship Earth to Google Ocean: Planetary Icons, Indexes, and Infrastructures by Stefan Helmreich - Social Research (2011)

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From Spaceship Earth to Google Ocean: Planetary Icons, Indexes, and Infrastructures by Stefan Helmreich - Social Research (2011)

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From Spaceship Earth to Google Ocean: Planetary Icons, Indexes, and Infrastructures on JSTOR

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Stefan Helmreich, From Spaceship Earth to Google Ocean: Planetary Icons, Indexes, and Infrastructures, Social Research, Vol. 78, No. 4, The Image (WINTER 2011), pp. 1211-1242

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The Ecological Colonization of Space, Peder Anker - Environmental History (2005)

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The Ecological Colonization of Space, Peder Anker - Environmental History (2005)

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JSTOR is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources.

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The Last Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand (January 1971)

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The Last Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand (January 1971)

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The Last Whole Earth Catalog, January 1971

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Here lies a nearly-complete archive of Whole Earth publications, a series of journals and magazines descended from the Whole Earth Catalog, published by Stewart Brand and the POINT Foundation between 1968 and 2002.

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Here lies a nearly-complete archive of Whole Earth publications, a series of journals and magazines descended from the Whole Earth Catalog, published by Stewart Brand and the POINT Foundation between 1970 and 2002.

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Beyond Technology: Juan Downey’s Whole Earth by Julieta Gonzalez - Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry (2014)

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Beyond Technology: Juan Downey’s Whole Earth by Julieta Gonzalez - Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry (2014)

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Beyond Technology: Juan Downey’s Whole Earth on JSTOR

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Julieta González, Beyond Technology: Juan Downey’s Whole Earth, Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, Issue 37 (Autumn/Winter 2014), pp. 14-27

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Stewart Brand: On Government, Guilds, and Getting Things Done by Stuart Kendall - Boom: A Journal of California (2012)

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Stewart Brand: On Government, Guilds, and Getting Things Done by Stuart Kendall - Boom: A Journal of California (2012)

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Stuart Kendall, Stewart Brand, Boom: A Journal of California, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Spring 2012), pp. 65-71

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'Whole Earth Catalog' Recycled as 'Epilog' - The New York Times (1974)

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'Whole Earth Catalog' Recycled as 'Epilog' - The New York Times (1974)

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′ Whole Earth Cataog’ Recycled as ‘Epilog’; New Group to Serve

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″ The Whole Earth Catalog,” which folded its dome three years ago at the height of its success, is back, chock full of the latest ideas. in organic gardening, mills, ecology, solar energy, marijuana, ceramics and sexual techniques.

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Clock Of The Long Now: Time And Responsibility by Stewart Brand (2000)

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Clock Of The Long Now: Time And Responsibility by Stewart Brand (2000)

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The Whole Earth Network, Bruce Clarke - Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene (2020)

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The Whole Earth Network, Bruce Clarke - Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene (2020)

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Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene on JSTOR

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A groundbreaking look at Gaia theory’s intersectionswith neocybernetic systems theoryOften seen as an outlier in science, Gaia has run a long andvaried cou…

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The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT by Stewart Brand (1987)

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The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT by Stewart Brand (1987)

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WorldCat Discovery helps people navigate their research journeys to find and get resources from Salve Regina University Library and libraries worldwide.

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San Francisco Video Collectives and the Counterculture, Deanne Pytlinski - West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977 (2012)

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San Francisco Video Collectives and the Counterculture, Deanne Pytlinski - West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977 (2012)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965–1977 on JSTOR

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JSTOR is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources.

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Whole Earth Catalog, 1971 production in Saline Valley, CA by Kevin Kelly (2013)

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Whole Earth Catalog, 1971 production in Saline Valley, CA by Kevin Kelly (2013)

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Whole Earth Catalog, 1971 production in Saline Valley, CA

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From Counterculture to Cyberculture: The Legacy of the Whole Earth Catalog by Stanford University Libraries (2011)

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From Counterculture to Cyberculture: The Legacy of the Whole Earth Catalog by Stanford University Libraries (2011)

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From Counterculture to Cyberculture: The Legacy of the Whole Earth Catalog

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Whole Earth 50th Anniversary Celebration by Long Now Foundation (2018)

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Whole Earth 50th Anniversary Celebration by Long Now Foundation (2018)

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Whole Earth 50th Anniversary Celebration

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Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog, the book that changed the world by Carole Cadwalladr - The Guardian (2013)

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Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog, the book that changed the world by Carole Cadwalladr - The Guardian (2013)

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Stewart Brand didn't just happen to be around when the personal computer came into being; he's the one who put "personal" and "computer" together in the same sentence and introduced the concept to the world. He wasn't just a member of the world's first open online community, the Well; he co-founded it. And he wasn't just another of those 60s acid casualties; he was the definitive 60s acid casualty. Well, not casualty exactly, but he was there taking LSD in the days when it was still legal, with the most famous hipster of them all, Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters.

For nearly five decades, Stewart Brand has been hanging around the cutting edge of whatever is the most cutting thing of the day. Largely because he's discovered it and become fascinated with it long before anyone else has even noticed it but, in retrospect, it does make him seem like the west coast's answer to Zelig, the Woody Allen character who just happens to pop up at key moments in history. Because no one pops up like Stewart Brand pops up, right there, just on the cusp of something momentous.

I discover this for myself when I go and hunt down my ancient copy of Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. It's one of the defining pieces of new journalism, a rip-roaring ride through 1960s psychedelia in which Wolfe accompanies Kesey and the Pranksters across the States on a Day-Glo bus. And although I know about Brand's connection to Kesey, I didn't know he was in it. But of course he is, right there on page two, driving the Pranksters' pick-up truck ("a thin, blond guy", according to Wolfe, with "a blazing disk on his forehead" and "a whole necktie of Indian beads ... but no shirt").

"That is classic Stewart," says Fred Turner, associate professor of communication at Stanford, who has written a book about Brand. "He only hung out with the Pranksters for about 10 minutes."

And he's right there on page two, of the definitive account of them.

"Exactly. He has a sort of genius for being in exactly the right place at exactly the right time."

It is a sort of genius. The same year that Tom Wolfe's book came out - 1968 - Brand just happened to be at what came to be known as the "mother of all demos" when the world first saw what computers could do. Douglas Englebart astonished the 1,000 foremost computer scientists with the first computer mouse, the first teleconferencing, the first word processing, and the first interactive computing. (Being Stewart Brand, of course, he wasn't just there, he was operating the camera and consulting on the presentation.)

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.

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.

But then, it's almost impossible, to flick through the pages of the Catalog and recapture its newness and radicalism and potentialities. Not least because the very idea of a book changing the world is just so old-fashioned. Books don't change anything these days. If you want to start a revolution, you'd do it on Facebook. And so many of the ideas that first reached a mainstream audience in the Catalog - organic farming, solar power, recycling, wind power, desktop publishing, mountain bikes, midwife-assisted birth, female masturbation, computers, electronic synthesizers - are now simply part of our world, that the ones that didn't go mainstream (communes being a prime example) rather stand out.

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.

Ken Kesey believed that drugs would herald a new era of human consciousness. While scientists like Doug Englebart (who had, like Brand, taken part in LSD-assisted creativity sessions) came to believe that computers would be part of that. They were were developing the hardware while Brand was articulating a vision of how they might be a new tool to empower ordinary people: small scale, democratic and free.

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 changed the world, says Turner, in much the same way that Google changed the world: it made people visible to each other. And while the computer industry was building systems to link communities of scientists, the Catalog was a "vernacular technology" that was doing the same thing.

"And Stewart knew this because he's sitting here in the middle of the tech world. But much of the rest of America can't see that yet. But he can see it. And he makes it visible and he makes it cool - and these things are important."

Forty-five years on and he's still cool. Mick Jagger might be the most obvious 60s icon who's kept on rocking. But mostly he's kept on rocking all the old tunes. Stewart Brand, on the other hand, has continued to evolve and change and at the age of 74, he's still out there at the intellectual cutting edge.

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 many ways, he's the elder statesman of radical ideas, an emissary from the Sixties counterculture who continues to inspire each successive generation anew; a living link between the heady days of the pioneering new technology and today.

John Markoff, who wrote What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, says, simply: "Stewart was the first one to get it. He was the first person to understand cyberspace. He was the one who coined the term personal computer. And he influenced an entire generation, including an entire generation of technologists."

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.

And to no one more so than Steve Jobs. No one was more influenced, or inspired by, Stewart Brand, than the founder of Apple. And while many credit Jobs with being one of the most creative agents of change in the late 20th century, Jobs credited Brand.

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.

"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."

Were you surprised when you heard that, I ask Brand. "I was, yes, though I'd known it meant something to him as I'd been told that he wanted a copy of the cover of 'Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish' signed by me. And I signed one and sent it off to him. That was the first inkling I had that it mattered to him. But I wish I'd had a chance to really quiz him on what he got from that.

"I think he used it as a way to deal with the amount of wealth and power that was accumulating around him. That though he took great care to make sure that it did accumulate, it was a way to keep himself two-minded about it. I think it may have been the way of dealing with the innovator's dilemma, where to keep building on the new innovations you have to destroy the wonderful thing you built a couple of years ago.

"And remember this was the 70s. We were: fuck around with it, mess with it, try it sideways. That was what it was all about. I was an early hippy as it turned out, and Steve Jobs was a late hippy, and we were paying attention to the beatniks and the late hippies were paying attention to the early hippies and so it goes on."

Jobs may have given the world the Apple 2 and iTunes and the iPhone but he's the heir to a cultural mash-up that Brand was both an observer of and a participant in: hippies and computers. And for those puzzled by the confluence of Steve Jobs's professed peace'n'love ideals and his life spent making shiny consumer durables, Fred Turner points out that the Catalog was at its heart "deeply consumerist". I hadn't really thought of in that way but as Turner says "it's full of stuff to buy. All those down jackets and kayaks. It's one of the first places you see the earliest mountain bikes." It offers a vision of changing the world, he says, through buying stuff, an "idea which has stuck around".

There was nothing in Brand's background to suggest that he would become this pivotal figure. He was brought up in Rockford, Illinois, where his father worked in advertising and his mother was a Vassar-educated space fanatic, an enthusiasm that rubbed off on her son. He studied biology at Stanford and then had a stint in the army where he became a "weekend hippy and weekday soldier".

It was meeting the Beats that changed everything. He took up photography and started photographing Native American reservations around the country and it is was this link that led him to Ken Kesey, who had featured a Native American as a central character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. "I got his address from a mutual friend and he said come on by. So I went on by and was met at the door by somebody with a joint. Next thing I knew I was part of the scene."

But his encounter with Kesey came at the same time as his encounter with another San Francisco phenomenon. "I was at the Stanford computation centre and this was some time in the early 60s and I saw these young men playing [an early computer game]. They were out of their bodies in this game that they'd created out of nothing. It was the only way to describe it. They were having an out-of-body experience and up until that time the only out-of-body experiences I'd seen were drugs."

It wasn't until 1972 that Brand wrote about it, and he still wrote about it before anyone else, in Rolling Stone magazine, an article that is so prophetic, it's almost hallucinatory. Brand's revelation, that he understood before almost anyone else, was that cyberspace was some sort of fourth dimension and the possibilities were both empowering and limitless.

At that time, computers weren't hip. They weren't cool. They were controlled by faceless corporations and the military. They were Big Business and authority, or, as they said then, "The Man". "What Buckminster Fuller was saying and what Marshall McLuhan was saying and what I was saying, all in our different ways, was that technology is liberating if you make it so. And a fair number of the hippies bought that programme. I guess Steve Jobs is the most conspicuous one. He was a total hippy, his last words were 'Oh wow' - he said it three times, according to his sister."

It was also the starting point for another of Brand's most famously repeated ideas: that information wants to be free (although he always points out the second half of the sentence was that "it also wants to be expensive").

"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."

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."

His hero was Buckminster Fuller, a futurist architect and designer, who he says "bent my twig" with what Brand calls a "psychedelic version of engineering".

"Fuller said if all the politicians died this week it would be a nuisance, but if all the scientists and engineers in the world died it would be catastrophic. So where's the real juice here?

"And he really got me and others focused on that. Lots of people try and change human nature but it's a real waste of time. You can't change human nature, but you can change tools, you can change techniques." And that way "you can change civilisation".

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."

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."

What's perhaps most remarkable about Brand, though, is the way that he himself has stayed hungry, has stayed foolish. Markoff says that his extraordinary capacity to be at the edge of the change "has puzzled me for years. Some people will be at the heart of one event but not over and over a long period of time. It can't be happenstance to keep on doing it."

He made millions from the Catalog but gave most of it away. At the final party he experimented with giving away $20,000 in cash because he thought that the extra stimulation of handing over wads of notes would "be an interesting thing to do. And indeed it was an interesting thing to do. I did not turn out any particularly creative ideas, I have to say. That was part of what made it interesting. My hypothesis was that under duress people would get extra creative. But it turns out they become extra knee-jerk and the opposite of creative. But you know, that's how you find out these things."

Turner calls him the most influential person you've never heard of, and though in Silicon Valley he's a god to many he still lives on a houseboat in Sausalito just outside San Francisco, and in the flesh is modest and unassuming. He looks like the fit and active 74-year-old he is, dressed in clothes that look like they'd take him straight from a conference hall to a hike in the mountains. I'd thought he might be quite forbidding but he's a great storyteller with a healthy sense of humour that he's happy to turn against himself.

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.

"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."

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.

He's always someone who's been able to take the long view, says TED's Chris Anderson. "I see him as someone whose life's work has been making people see the world in a different way."

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".

He's working alongside his wife, Ryan Phelan, a biotech entrepreneur, and George Church, the leading Harvard geneticist, and there's more than a touch of Jurassic Park to the concept. They're trying to retro-engineer lost species by comparing their DNA with that of their closest living relatives - though sadly they're starting with the American passenger pigeon rather than Tyrannosaurus rex.

Once the most populous bird in North America, its extinction was a "tragedy", Brand says in his TED talk, but then adds: "Don't mourn, organise."

This could be another of Brand's maxims. He's always been a doer. Kevin Kelly tells me that he says when he has an idea, he tries to act on it within 10 minutes, which just seems impossibly dynamic. But then, Fred Turner points out, "he's also had a lifetime of organising. And a lifetime teaches you things. I assure you that when he was much younger he did not feel he needed to get things done in 10 minutes. He would do things like take his entire production staff out into the desert, inflate a giant plastic bubble, and try to live around and inside that bubble to see how that affected production."

Adversely, it turned out. But then Brand is first and foremost a scientist. As was the case when he gave away $20,000 in cash, he wants to test things empirically. He's an experimenter who's always prepared to test his theories. ("It may have been the entire function of communes to go big, fail and then go home," says Brand, to take one example. "At the time we thought we were reinventing civilisation but all we discovered is that free love isn't free at all, that [when] one guy puts up all the money for your commune he is going to feel robbed after a period of six to 12 months, that gardening is actually hard, and that if you treat your women as people who are supposed to wash the dishes, they will leave after six months.")

The drugs didn't work. Or at least only for a bit. "We believed there was no hope without dope but we were wrong. I'm always amazed there aren't drugs by now, but there aren't. They didn't get any better, whereas computers never stopped getting better."

He didn't just theorise about cyberspace, he co-founded the Well, the pioneering online community in the 80s, and lived on it, fighting the first flame wars, the first trolls, making the first mistakes (he wishes he'd insisted the people used their real names rather than post anonymously, an innovation that may well have changed the web for the better).

And he's still out there on the leading edge today. It's no surprise that he's into biotech. It really is the next frontier, though he claims at the moment that he's not so much surfing the next wave of innovation as "paddling to keep up".

There used to be a sense, though perhaps less so now, that there would never be as exciting a time as the 60s again. And yet Brand, who had the best of the 60s, who really was there and can even remember it, is so much more excited by the present, by the future.

"It's much much more exciting right now. The tools of connectivity are so much stronger. The tools of empowerment have absolutely lowered the thresholds of entry. There's things like the iGem with tens of thousands of students producing new organisms. And society is not noticing. I find that both strange, wonderful and in some ways a little bit disturbing."

And it's possibly worth noticing what Stewart Brand is noticing. "Think about the Bay Area in the early 60s," Fred Turner tells me. "He could have focused on antiwar protests, on fluorescent parties, on any number of things. He goes to a basement in Stanford and watches people run a computer game."

Brand's career is as extraordinary and eclectic as they come. As they used to say in the 60s, it's been quite a ride. And yet I still hesitated over whether to include this last quote on him. It's rather delightfully of its time but it's also so over the top. Or is it? It's Kevin Kelly (whom Wired's Chris Anderson describes as "the patron saint of the technology movement") who says it to me. "I've had maybe a daily encounter with Stewart on email or whatever for at least 20 years, and every day I'm more impressed with him. He is genuinely... I don't know what the word is... an inspiring, uplifting, helpful force in the world. I've seen him in many situations, I've seen him under stress, I've seen him in private, and I have never been disappointed."

And then, a hippy - like Brand, like Jobs - to the last, Kelly adds: "If it was possible to be an enlightened person, I would say he's an enlightened person."
Topics

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Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog, the book that changed the world

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Stewart Brand didn't just happen to be around when the personal computer came into being; he's the one who put "personal" and "computer" together in the same sentence and introduced the concept to the world. He wasn't just a member of the world's first open online community, the Well; he co-founded it.

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Hippie Modernism from Complementary Modernisms in China and the United States: Art as Life/Art as Idea by Lawrence Rinder (2020)

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Hippie Modernism from Complementary Modernisms in China and the United States: Art as Life/Art as Idea by Lawrence Rinder (2020)

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Hippie Modernism from Complementary Modernisms in China and the United States: Art as Life/Art as Idea on JSTOR

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Lawrence Rinder, Hippie Modernism, Complementary Modernisms in China and the United States, pp. 511-519

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Access to Tools: Publications from the Whole Earth Catalog, 1968-1974, MoMA (2011)

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Access to Tools: Publications from the Whole Earth Catalog, 1968-1974, MoMA (2011)

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Whole Earth Catalog, spring 1969

In 1968, Stewart Brand founded the Whole Earth Catalog. Brand's goals were to make a variety of tools accessible to newly dispersed counterculture communities, back-to-the-land households, and innovators in the fields of technology, design, and architecture, and to create a community meeting-place in print. The catalogue quickly developed into a wide-ranging reference for new living spaces, sustainable design, and experimental media and community practices. After only a few years of publication it exploded in popularity, becoming a formidable cultural phenomenon.

Function, from Whole Earth Catalog

Books, selected and described by the editorial staff and organized in sections titled Understanding Whole Systems, Shelter and Land Use, Communication, and Community, were the primary resources the Whole Earth Catalog offered. This exhibition of printed matter in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art Library surveys these publications and summarizes the history of the catalogue project. The selection does not represent all the subjects the catalogue featured, but it reflects the publication's focus on experimental ideas in design and technology and the dialogue between theorists and practitioners these ideas raised.

Advertisement for Whole Earth Catalog in Whole Earth Catalog

This exhibition is organized by David Senior, Bibliographer, MoMA Library.

Introducing the Whole Earth

Tulane Drama Review, fall 1966

Prior to publishing the Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand was a member of the art collective USCO, known primarily for its experimental light and sound environments and film projections mounted in museums, dance clubs, theaters, and universities. This feature about USCO includes an image of a pinback button by Brand reading, "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?" He distributed the button widely as part of a campaign for public access to images taken during United States space missions. He believed that a picture of the entire planet would be a unifying force in the management of global ecological challenges.

The release of photographs taken during early space missions coincided with the first issues of the Whole Earth Catalog. Brand pioneered the publication and dissemination of the images, putting them on the covers of the first catalogue, in fall 1968, and all successive issues. Throughout its run, the catalogue consistently advertised the pictures and provided instructions for ordering them from the government.

Whole Earth Catalog, spring 1969

UNDERSTANDING WHOLE SYSTEMS

Fuller's philosophical impact is especially clear in the first section of the catalogue, Understanding Whole Systems. The section begins the catalogue and opens with the line, "The insights of Buckminster Fuller initiated this catalog," and a review of the architect's work in print appears on the first page. This section emphasizes the concerns of the Fuller-inspired "comprehensive designer," giving primary importance to the recognition of universal patterns and forms in nature, culture, and technology.

Buckminster Fuller. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (Southern Illinois University Press, 1969).

In the catalogue, Brand declares of D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's publication On Growth and Form that "everyone dealing with growth and form in any manner can use this book. We've seen well-worn copies on the shelves of artists, inventors, engineers, computer system designers, biologists." This list of professions describes the members of Brand's circle and is an indication of the philosophical inclusiveness of the catalogue. Books listed under Understanding Whole Systems document the growing ecology movement and the systems theory of biologists and designers, and, as in Norbert Wiener's The Human Use of Human Beings, express a holistic philosophy toward global issues and a pragmatic focus on thinkers, designers, and scientists who could provide insight into technological change and the ecological challenges of the future.

Norbert Wiener. The Human Use of Human Beings (Doubleday, 1954).

Whole Earth Bibliography

The first manifestation of the Whole Earth "information service" involved Brand and Lois Jennings selling books and goods out of a truck on communes in the Southwest, in 1968. That summer they commenced work on the catalogue with a group of colleagues under the auspices of Richard Raymond and the Portola Institute, Raymond's nonprofit educational foundation. They soon moved to a storefront in Menlo Park, California, which housed their offices and the Truck Store, a shop selling some of the materials in the catalogue.

Advertisement for Whole Earth Truck Store

In each subsequent issue, the editors added newly available publications and new listings generated from recommendations by the readership. The Whole Earth Catalog was published biannually between 1968 and 1970, after which several issues were produced outside the official run.

In September 1969, as the catalogue was gaining wide notoriety, Brand announced that it would cease publication after a final, large issue. The catalogue's readership grew with each issue, but it increased most dramatically with this one, distributed by Random House. Brand promoted the adoption and replication of the catalogue and store format by other groups in other settings; an article titled "How to Do a Whole Earth Catalog" appears in this final issue.

Cease Publication Announcement. The Whole Earth Catalog. September 1969

Brand invited everyone who had participated in the publication to join in a final celebration called The Demise Party. A story in Rolling Stone documented the event, with a large picture of Brand presiding. In the party's final hours, Brand presented revelers with the publication's remaining twenty thousand dollars and asked the crowd to decide how the sum should be spent.

Advertisement from The Last Supplement of the Whole Earth Catalog, 1971

Supplemental Information

The catalogue supplements, later named the $1 Whole Earth Catalog, update information about previously listed items and add new publications and services that arose between printings of the larger catalogues. The catalogue's supplements most clearly reflect the fact that its voice, organization, and process were driven by feedback and contributions from readers. Sections of the supplements are devoted to mail responding to previous issues, advocating for products and services not listed in the catalogue's pages, or announcing events.

Production in the Desert. In Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog, January 1971

The supplements also document projects sponsored by the organization and its staff and discuss its business decisions, critiquing its own practices and creating a forum about self-publishing, all the while illustrating its renegade, experimental publishing procedures.

The supplement of January 1971, for example, was produced inside the Pillow, an inflatable structure created by the Ant Farm art collective; editors humorously describe the practical issues that faced them, stationed in an inflatable pillow in the desert of California's Saline Valley.

Conversations evolved with the input of various contributors, dissenters, and instigators. Guest editors and writers-notably Wendell Berry, Paul Krassner, and Ken Kesey-helped shape the spirit of the supplements. Kesey and Krassner edited the final iteration, which features a cover by R. Crumb.

Working inside the Pillow. Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog, January 1971

SHELTER AND LAND USE

The catalogue's Shelter and Land Use section addressed the current state of architectural practice and materials research for builders and designers. Visionary architect, designer, and author Buckminster Fuller was an obvious influence, but the section also listed the work of numerous authors.

Domes Are Our New Homes

The May 1966 issue of Popular Science features an article about Buckminster Fuller's Sun Dome and an offer for the complete plans and license for five dollars. These plans, as well as Popular Science itself, were regularly featured in the Whole Earth Catalog.

Robert W. Marks. The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller (New York: Reinhold, 1960).

Inspired by the work of Buckminster Fuller, by the 1970s the hand-built geodesic dome had become synonymous with back-to-the-land communities, and publications such as these helped disseminate building instructions. Drop City was a Colorado artists' community that used recycled materials-"the garbage of America"-to construct its domes.

Above: Drop City letter in Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog, July 1969

Right: Peter Rabbit. Drop City (Olympia Press, 1971).

Steve Baer was a Drop City builder, and his Dome Cookbook and Zome Primer (1970) were listed in the catalogue as introductions for the budding builder.

Steve Baer. Dome Cookbook (Lama Foundation, 1967).

Lloyd Kahn's Domebook 2 mainly highlights the structures that he built with students at Pacific High School, an alternative school in the Santa Cruz Mountains south of San Francisco. Jay Baldwin, a former student of Buckminster Fuller and contributor to the Whole Earth Catalog, also participated in these experimental building projects at the school. Kahn was coeditor of several of the Whole Earth Catalogs, and he used equipment from the Whole Earth office to produce the book. Domebook publications were extremely popular, and they directly influenced the dome-building trend that became emblematic of the back-to-land movement.

Lloyd Kahn. Domebook 2 (Pacific Domes, 1970).

MoMA's International Council funded Bernard Rudofsky's research, which resulted in an exhibition at the Museum and this publication, surveying unique forms in human habitats throughout history and across cultures. The editors of the Whole Earth Catalog made an effort to incorporate non-Western forms and organic design into the dialogue about new ideas for living spaces.

Bernard Rudofsky. Architecture without Architects (Museum of Modern Art, 1964).

Designers who came to Expo '67 in Montreal to view Fuller's dome pavilion were equally impressed by Frei Otto's lightweight tent design for the West German pavilion, which introduced his work to a North American audience. The MIT Press subsequently published two volumes of works on Otto's engineering research, which were enthusiastically reviewed in the Whole Earth Catalog's first issue.

Frei Otto. Tensile Structures (MIT Press, 1967).

Little Magazines/Whole Earth

The Shelter and Land Use section in the Whole Earth Catalog recommends publications ranging from pragmatic instruction to radical visions of architecture and design. The 1960s and 1970s were marked by an international flourishing of "little magazines," independent publications in which young architects and designers presented their own content in innovative graphic styles and spread the language of contemporary theorists like Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan. The catalogue documented this trend and the role of architecture in the counterculture movement.

Architectural Design: A.D., October 1971

A.D. of this period was noted for its Cosmorama section, which reported on experimental projects and exhibitions, as well its profiles of innovative international architects. By February 1971 the magazine had incorporated a catalogue section, describing innovative design objects and tools.

Detail: Architectural Design: A.D., February 1971

Beginning in 1960 the London-based collective Archigram, whose name compounds the words architecture and telegram, published periodic eponymous pamphlets, often with inserts or in unconventional packaging. These two issues give a sense of the expressive graphic styles and collage elements the group used to convey its proposals for future urban spaces.

Advertisement for Archigram

Archigram, no. 8 (1968)

San Francisco-based architecture and art collective Ant Farm self-published this colorful manual. The inflatable structure is the decisive form of Ant Farm's early practice and this publication provides instructions for those interested in constructing their own, with illustrated examples of the collective's pneumatic designs and installations.

Detail from Inflatocookbook (Ant Farm, 1971).

COMMUNITY

The catalogue and its supplements regularly featured the organization's dialogue with colleagues who shared and expanded upon its areas of focus. These publications, many borrowing the Whole Earth Catalog format, were often listed in its Community section.

Friends and Relations

This issue of T he Modern Utopian provides a descriptive tour of variouscommunes across the United States.

Communes, USA, special issue, The Modern Utopian 5, no. 1/2/3 (1971)

Written for educators and parents, Big Rock Candy Mountain (BRCM) emphasizes educational tools and strategies. Editors borrowed the structure of the Whole Earth Catalog but presented in-depth articles and extended discussions of learning theory and educational philosophy.

Big Rock Candy Mountain, summer 1970

Mother Earth News and The Journal of the New Alchemists discuss practical agrarian pursuits such as sustainable growing practices, traditional knowledge, and alternative sources of energy.

Mother Earth News, no. 3 (1970)

The Canadian Whole Earth Almanac, an obvious offspring of the Whole Earth Catalog, honed its focus through thematic issues. Three issues treat Food, Industry, and Shelter.

Canadian Whole Earth Almanac, 1970-71

Published in San Francisco, Rags documented fashion trends in alternative communities and urban centers as well as the developing genre of ecofashion. It provided a social forum and marketplace for the fashion-minded dropout.

Rags (June 1970)

This Rolling Stone-like rock magazine issued four pages of content biweekly that editors described as the "British Whole Earth Catalogue." Products listed were sourced from manufacturers and booksellers in the United Kingdom. Readers were instructed to cut these pages from each issue of Friends to compile the whole publication.

Friends, no. 14 (September 18, 1970)

.

COMMUNICATIONS

In its Communications section the Whole Earth Catalog traced the rapid development and adoption of computing processes in industry, the sciences, and design. Many publications described in this section, such as Data Study, Basic Graphics, and Diagrams, addressed the new forms of information design and presentation emerging in science and commerce. At this time the personal computer was still years from commercial release. Stewart Brand and others in the Whole Earth community envisioned the PC as part of an evolving cybernetic tool set and a potentially revolutionary technology, democratizing access to information and communication.

Information: A Scientific American Book (W. H. Freeman, 1966).

Cybernetic Notation

Cybernetics, Wiener explains in the book Cybernetics; or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, is a social science that reflects on the systematic relationships developing between society and electronic modes of communication, commerce, and movement. In a "cybernetic society," information is processed and transferred by computers and communicating networks of machines and their operators. These ideas had a great effect on public discourse about the expanding role of technology. The concepts of networked communication and feedback at the core of the Whole Earth Catalog 's vision were linked directly to Wiener's writings.

Norbert Wiener. Cybernetics; or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (MIT Press, 1961).

Mediated Art

In Understanding Media, McLuhan surveys changes in perception affected by evolving media environments, from early print culture to modern television. For McLuhan, the media environment of the electronic age demanded radically new pedagogy to help young minds navigate these new conditions. Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, influenced by McLuhan's work, promoted experiments in new media as responsive to these shifts in culture, offering new possibilities for teaching and learning for an electronic age.

Marshall McLuhan. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New American Library, 1964).

Advertisement for Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man in the Whole Earth Catalog

Kepes's Vision and Value book series, which includes The Nature and Art of Motion (1965) and Module, Proportion, Symmetry, Rhythm (1965), elaborated on relationships between modern art, architecture, and the visualization of information and energy. The photo at the right is a detail from The Nature and Art of Motion.

Aerial view of the New York approaches to the George Washington Bridge (Photo Courtesy Project Sky Count, The Port of New York Authority), in The Nature and Art of Motion, Gyorgy Kepes (George Braziller, 1965).

This special issue of the magazine Studio International accompanied the exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. Representing artists and computer technicians at the cutting edge in computer art practices in the 1960s, it groups sound works, poetry, robotics, digital graphics, and kinetic sculpture as examples of cybernetic art. Works by artist Nam June Paik and composer John Cage are presented alongside visual design from Bell Laboratories and the Boeing Graphics Computer.

Jasia Reichardt, ed. "Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts," special issue, Studio International, 1968

Expanded Cinema is Youngblood's extended survey of innovations in the experimental film scene. The "cybernetic movie studio," he writes, extends filmmaking conventions through the combination of media techniques such as video production, computer-aided design, and experimental projection and sound environments. In his introduction to the book, Buckminster Fuller writes, " Expanded Cinema is the beginning of the new-era educational system itself."

Gene Youngblood. Expanded Cinema (E. P. Dutton, 1970).

Culture Is Our Business

The pages of Marshall McLuhan's Culture is Our Business resemble a slide show, coupling images borrowed from print and television advertisements with excerpts from McLuhan's writing in an extended meditation and critical discussion of the state of commercial imagery and media. McLuhan was a central thinker on the subject, and his writings were of primary influence for a younger generation of new media practitioners.

Back (left) and front (right) covers of Culture Is Our Business, Marshall McLuhan (McGraw-Hill, 1970).

Stewart Brand described Radical Software as an inspiration, a publication that resembled the kind of networked community of innovators he had envisioned when developing the Whole Earth Catalog. Published in New York by the media collective Raindance Corporation, the periodical proposes various strategies for alternative television and other interventions in mass media. Articles emphasize a mobile tool kit-including a newly available portable battery-powered video recorder-and shared access to media tools. Other organizations describe their activities and announce events in the Feedback section of each issue.

Radical Software, no. 4 (1971)

Advertisement for Radical Software in the Whole Earth Catalog

Written by a member of the Raindance Corporation media collective and designed by Ant Farm, Guerilla Television elaborated on the group's media activism and devoted chapters to the development of support systems and tool-access programs for the production of alternative television.

Photo from Guerilla Television, Michael Shamberg (Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1971).

Interior spread of Guerilla Television, Michael Shamberg (Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1971).

Produced by the upstate-New York collective Videofreex, The Spaghetti City Video Manual provides details about video production as well as maintenance and repair tips for video equipment. Exceptional drawings of a cartoon camera in various predicaments accompany the instructions.

Illustration from The Spaghetti City Video Manual, Videofreex (Praeger, 1973).

Videofreex. The Spaghetti City Video Manual (Praeger, 1973).

WHOLE EARTH BIBLIOGRAPHY

After a two-year hiatus, Stewart Brand reassembled a publishing team in 1973 and updated the contents of The Last Whole Earth Catalog, of 1971. The catalog had received the National Book Award in 1972, and significant demand still existed for Whole Earth material. The updated last issues of the catalog are its most recognized iterations, and over two million copies were sold. The publication's history is best summarized by Brand's essay in the back pages of these issues, in which he gives a full account of the events leading up to the initial publication, the decisions that formed further evolutions of the catalogue format, and the people who worked in producing and distributing the books.

The Last Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog, 1971

Whole Earth Catalog Publications

Whole Earth Catalog. Menlo Park, Calif: Portola Institute, 1968-1970. (MoMA lacks 1st issue.)

Difficult but Possible: Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, July 1969, September 1969.

$1 Whole Earth Catalog. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, January 1970, March 1970, September 1970, January 1971.

The Last Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools. Portola Institute; distributed by Random House, New York, 1971).

Kesey, Ken, and Paul Krassner. The Last Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog. Menlo Park, CA: Whole Earth Catalog, 1971.

The Updated Last Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools. San Francisco: Point, 1974.

Whole Earth Epilog: Access to Tools. San Francisco: Point, 1974.

Listed Publications

Alexander, Christopher. Notes on the Synthesis of Form. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964.

Archigram. London, 1960-.

Architectural Design. London: Standard Catalogue Co, -1969.
Architectural Design: A.d. London: Standard Catalogue Co, 1971-.

Baer, Steve. Dome Cookbook. Corrales, N.M: Lama Foundation, 1967.

Baer, Steve. Zome Primer: Elements of Zonohedra Geometry. Albuquerque: N. M, 1970.

Big Rock Candy Mountain. Menlo Park, Calif: Portola Institute, 1970.

Borrego, John. Space Grid Structures: Skeletal Frameworks and Stressed-Skin Systems. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1968.

Cage, John. A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1967.

Canadian Whole Earth Almanac. Toronto: Canadian Whole Earth Research Foundation, 1970.

Cortright, Edgar M. Exploring Space with a Camera. Washington, D.C: Scientific and Technical Information Division, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1968.

Critchlow, Keith. Order in Space: A Design Source Book. London: Thames & Hudson, 1969.

Earth Photographs from Gemini Iii, Iv and V. Washington, D. C: Scientific and Technical Information Division, NASA, 1967.

Friends. London: TF Much Co, 1969.

Fuller, R B, Jerome Agel, and Quentin Fiore. I Seem to Be a Verb. New York: Bantam Books, 1970.

Fuller, R B. Nine Chains to the Moon. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Pr, 1963.

Fuller, R B. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969. Print.

Fuller, R B. Untitled Epic Poem on the History of Industrialization. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962. Print.

Fuller, R B, and John McHale. World Design Science Decade, 1965-1975: Five Two Year Phases of a World Retooling Design Proposed to the International Union of Architects for Adoption by World Architectural Schools. Carbondale, 1963.

IL : Information of the Institute for Lightweight Structures and Conceptual Design. Stuttgart: Institut für Leichte Flächentragwerke, 1969-.

Inflatocookbook. Sausalito, CA.: Ant Farm, 1971

Isaacs, Ken. Culture Breakers, Alternatives, and Other Numbers. New York: MSS Educational Pub. Co, 1970.

Jolley, John L. Data Study. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968.

The Journal of the New Alchemists. Woods Hole, Mass: New Alchemy Institute, 1973.

Kahn, Lloyd. Domebook 2. Bolinas, Calif: Pacific Domes ; distributed by Random House, 1970.

Kepes, Gyorgy. Structure in Art and in Science. New York: G. Braziller, 1965

Kepes, Gyorgy. The Nature and Art of Motion. New York: G. Braziller, 1965.

Kepes, Gyorgy. Module, Proportion, Symmetry, Rhythm. New York: G. Braziller, 1966.

Luzadder, Warren J. Basic Graphics for Design, Analysis, Communications, and the Computer. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall, 1968.

Marks, Robert W. The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller. New York: Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 1960.

McLuhan, Marshall. Culture Is Our Business. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970.

The Modern Utopian : Communes, USA. v. 5. Issues 1.2.3. (Alternatives Foundation, 1971)

The Modern Utopian : Communes, Japan. (Alternatives Foundation, 1971)

The Mother Earth News. Arden, NC, etc: Sussex Publishers, 1970-.

Otto, Frei. Tensile Structures. Cambridge, Mass: M.I.T. Press, 1967.

Popko, Edward. Geodesics. Detroit: School of Architecture, University of Detroit, 1968.

Propst, Robert. The Office: A Facility Based on Change / by Robert Propst. Ann Arbor, Mich: Herman Miller Research Corp, 1968.

Radical Software. New York, N.Y: Raindance Corp, 1970.

Rags. (Rosy Cheeks Publishers, June 1970-December 1970).

Reichardt, Jasia. Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts. London: Studio International, 1968. Print.

Roland, Conrad. Frei Otto: Tension Structures. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970. Print.

Rudofsky, Bernard. Architecture Without Architects: An Introduction to Nonpedigreed Architecture. New York: Museum of Modern Art; distributed by Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y, 1964.

Safdie, Moshe. Beyond Habitat. Cambridge, Mass: M.I.T. Press, 1970.

Shamberg, Michael. Guerilla Television. N.Y: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971.

Thompson, D'Arcy W. On Growth and Form. Cambridge, 1942.

Videofreex. The Spaghetti City Video Manual: A Guide to Use, Repair, and Maintenance. New York: Praeger, 1973.

Von, Foerster H, and James W. Beauchamp. Music by Computers. New York: J. Wiley, 1969.

We Built Our Own Computers. Cambridge: Cambridge U.P, 1966.

Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics; Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. New York: M.I.T. Press, 1961.

Wiener, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1954.

Wood, Donald G. Space Enclosure Systems: The Variables of Packing Cell Design. Columbus: Engineering Experiment Station, Ohio State University, 1968.
Youngblood, Gene. Expanded Cinema. New York: Dutton, 1970
Further Reading

Bloom, Brett and Bonnie Fortune. Let's Re-make: Formerly Known as the "Library for Radiant Optimism for Let's Re-make the World." (The archive site for Let's Re-make).

Colomina, Beatriz. Clip, Stamp, Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines, 196x to 197x. Barcelona: Actar, 2010.

Gordon, Alastair. Spaced Out: Radical Environments of the Psychedelic Sixties. New York: Rizzoli, 2008

Horvitz, Robert. "Whole Earth Culture." Written for the conference "Wilderness as a Phenomenon of Integral Culture," May 4-5, 2002.

Kirk, Andrew G. Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism. Lawrence, Kan: University Press of Kansas, 2007.

Reinfurt, David. "A Condensed Biography of Stewart Brand as Model Global Citizen including the Whole Earth Catalog, Computer Games and Extended Scenarios." From Dot Dot Dot 8, 2004.

Sadler, Simon. "An Architecture of the Whole." Journal of Architectural Education vol. 61, no. 4 (2008): 108-129.

Scott, Felicity D. E. Architecture or Techno-Utopia: Politics After Modernism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007.

Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

All material in this exhibition is held by The Museum of Modern Art Library. Contact [email protected] for an appointment.

Thanks to Stewart Brand, Rene Smith, Milan Hughston, Jennifer Tobias and the MoMA library staff for their support. Also special thanks to Rebecca Roberts, Stephanie Pau, Sarah Bodinson, Sara Dayton, and Chiara Bernasconi for their assistance.

This project is dedicated to Ezra Morrell.

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Whole Earth Catalog, spring 1969 In 1968, Stewart Brand founded the Whole Earth Catalog. Brand's goals were to make a variety of tools accessible to newly dispersed counterculture communities, back-to-the-land households, and innovators in the fields of technology, design, and architecture, and to create a community meeting-place in print.

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Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, Andrew Blauvelt (2015)

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Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, Andrew Blauvelt (2015)

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WorldCat Discovery helps people navigate their research journeys to find and get resources from Salve Regina University Library and libraries worldwide.

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Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities by Kevin Kelly (2013)

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Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities by Kevin Kelly (2013)

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WorldCat Discovery helps people navigate their research journeys to find and get resources from Salve Regina University Library and libraries worldwide.

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Cool Tools – Cool tools really work. A cool tool can be any book, gadget, software, video, map, hardware, material, or website that is tried and true. All reviews on this site are written by readers who have actually used the tool and others like it. Items can be either old or new as long as they are wonderful. We only post things we like and ignore the rest. Suggestions for tools much better than what is recommended here are always wanted. Tell me what you love.

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What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counter-culture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff (2005)

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What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counter-culture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff (2005)

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WorldCat Discovery helps people navigate their research journeys to find and get resources from Salve Regina University Library and libraries worldwide.

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Utopia or Oblivion by R. Buckminster Fuller (1969)

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Utopia or Oblivion by R. Buckminster Fuller (1969)

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Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth by R. Buckminster Fuller (1969)

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Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth by R. Buckminster Fuller (1969)

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WorldCat Discovery helps people navigate their research journeys to find and get resources from Salve Regina University Library and libraries worldwide.

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The Complicated Legacy of Stewart Brand's "Whole Earth Catalog" by Anna Wiener (2018)

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The Complicated Legacy of Stewart Brand's "Whole Earth Catalog" by Anna Wiener (2018)

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In the fall of 1968, the Portola Institute, an education nonprofit in Menlo Park, California, published the first edition of the "Whole Earth Catalog": a compendium of product listings, how-to diagrams, and educational ephemera intended for communards and other participants in the back-to-the-land movement. The catalogue's founder, Stewart Brand--a photographer, writer, former army lieutenant, impresario, and consummate networker--had spent part of the summer driving a pickup truck to intentional communities in Colorado and New Mexico and selling camping equipment, books, tools, and supplies to the residents. Brand returned to the Portola Institute (a gathering place and incubator of sorts for computer researchers, academics, career engineers, hobbyists, and members of the counterculture), hired a teen-age artist to handle layout, and began production on the catalogue's first edition.

At the height of the civil-rights movement and the war in Vietnam, the "Whole Earth Catalog" offered a vision for a new social order-one that eschewed institutions in favor of individual empowerment, achieved through the acquisition of skills and tools. The latter category included agricultural equipment, weaving kits, mechanical devices, books like " Kibbutz: Venture in Utopia," and digital technologies and related theoretical texts, such as Norbert Wiener's " Cybernetics" and the Hewlett-Packard 9100A, a programmable calculator. "We are as gods and might as well get used to it" read the first catalogue's statement of purpose. "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."

The communes eventually collapsed, for the usual reasons, which included poor resource management, factionalism, and financial limitations. But the "Whole Earth Catalog," which published quarterly through 1971 and sporadically thereafter, garnered a cult following that included founders of Airbnb and Stripe and also early employees of Facebook. Brand went on to work as a journalist, documenting the burgeoning hacker culture, and co-founded a small galaxy of publications and companies. Among them were CoEvolution Quarterly, a journal focussed on environmentalism; the "Whole Earth Software Catalog," a digitally oriented update to the original; the Hackers Conference; the WELL, one of the earliest online communities; and a corporate-consulting outfit, the Global Business Network, that emphasized scenario-planning with a dash of optimistic futurism.

Brand doesn't have much to do with the current startup ecosystem, but younger entrepreneurs regularly reach out to him, perhaps in search of a sense of continuity or simply out of curiosity about the industry's origins. The spirit of the catalogue-its irreverence toward institutions, its emphasis on autodidacticism, and its sunny view of computers as tools for personal liberation--appeals to a younger generation of technologists. Brand himself has become a regional icon, a sort of human Venn diagram, celebrated for bridging the hippie counterculture and the nascent personal-computer industry. In a 2005 commencement address at Stanford, Steve Jobs described the "Whole Earth Catalog" as "Google in paperback form, thirty-five years before Google came along." Brand's centrality to Silicon Valley history was cemented, in 2006, with the publication of Fred Turner's " From Counterculture to Cyberculture." A biography is in the works, as is a documentary film.

Last month, on a brisk and blindingly sunny Saturday, over a hundred alumni of the "Whole Earth Catalog" network-Merry Pranksters, communards, hippies, hackers, entrepreneurs, journalists, and futurists-gathered to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication, and, per the invitation, to come together "one last time." The event was held at the San Francisco Art Institute, a renovated wharf warehouse with vaulted ceilings, views of Alcatraz, and the cool sterility of an empty art gallery. A number of early-Internet architects, including Larry Brilliant, Lee Felsenstein, and Ted Nelson, floated around the room. Several alumni had scribbled their WELL usernames onto their badges. One man was wearing a red "Make Earth Cool Again" hat, swag from a recent climate-change-themed dinner co-hosted by Alice Waters; another wore a baseball cap advertising Tysabri, a prescription medication that treats multiple sclerosis. Hugh Romney, the activist and performance artist known as Wavy Gravy, wore a tie-dyed sweatsuit, a red foam nose, and a button that read "We must be in heaven, man!" He leaned on a thin opera cane; a small plastic pig dangled from the handle.

The day's agenda included a series of lightning talks and roundtable conversations on themes like climate change and the environment, a cocktail hour, and a buffet dinner; that evening, a slate of conversations among scientists, entrepreneurs, and tech luminaries would be held in a theatre attached to the atrium. The alumni, however, mostly seemed excited to catch up with one another and reminisce. Some stood in front of an "In Memoriam" wall and remarked on lost friends; others perused a minimalist exhibit of a hundred and forty-two publications, above which were printed, in serif typeface, various mottos of the "Whole Earth Catalog": "Access to Tools" and "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." In a small, cool gallery, a forty-minute slide show of Whole Earth "flashbacks" played on a loop, set to the gentle plunks of a contemporary jam band. "I'm getting chills," one attendee said to another.

That evening, Brand-tall, trim, and on the cusp of his eightieth birthday-stood onstage in the adjoining theater. He had replaced his event T-shirt, which read "Still Hungry. Still Foolish.," with a white blazer, making him look a bit like a laboratory technician. "There's a kind of reframing, I hope, going on today, in relation to 'Whole Earth,' " he said. "And it's getting over the sense that somehow the 'Whole Earth' is Stewart Brand." This detachment makes sense, as does the turn toward a more collective understanding of the project. Certain elements of the "Whole Earth Catalog" haven't aged particularly well: the pioneer rhetoric, the celebration of individualism, the disdain for government and social institutions, the elision of power structures, the hubris of youth. Recent criticism of Silicon Valley's techno-libertarianism has pointed out that the "Whole Earth Catalog" helped develop that ideology.

A week after the reunion, Brand and I spoke over the phone, and he emphasized that he had little nostalgia for "Whole Earth." " 'The Whole Earth Catalog' is well and truly obsolete and extinct," he said. "There's this sort of abiding interest in it, or what it was involved in, back in the day, and so the reunion was a way for the perpetrators to get together and have a drink and piss on the grave." Brand continued, "There's pieces being written on the East Coast about how I'm to blame for everything," from sexism in the back-to-the-land communes to the monopolies of Google, Amazon, and Apple. "The people who are using my name as a source of good or ill things going on in cyberspace, most of them don't know me at all," he said. "They're just using a shorthand. You know, magical realism: Borges. You mention a few names so you don't have to go down the whole list. It's a cognitive shortcut."

Brand now describes himself as "post-libertarian," a shift he attributes to a brief stint working with Jerry Brown, during his first term as California's governor, in the nineteen-seventies, and to books like Michael Lewis's " The Fifth Risk," which describes the Trump Administration's damage to vital federal agencies. " 'Whole Earth Catalog' was very libertarian, but that's because it was about people in their twenties, and everybody then was reading Robert Heinlein and asserting themselves and all that stuff," Brand said. "We didn't know what government did. The whole government apparatus is quite wonderful, and quite crucial. [It] makes me frantic, that it's being taken away." A few weeks after our conversation, Brand spoke at a conference, in Prague, hosted by the Ethereum Foundation, which supports an eponymous, open-source, blockchain-based computing platform and cryptocurrency. In his address, he apologized for over-valorizing hackers. "Frankly," he said, "most of the real engineering was done by people with narrow ties who worked nine to five, often with federal money."

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The Complicated Legacy of Stewart Brand's "Whole Earth Catalog"

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In the fall of 1968, the Portola Institute, an education nonprofit in Menlo Park, California, published the first edition of the "Whole Earth Catalog": a compendium of product listings, how-to diagrams, and educational ephemera intended for communards and other participants in the back-to-the-land movement.

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We Are as Gods, David Alvarado and Jason Sussberg (2021)

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We Are as Gods, David Alvarado and Jason Sussberg (2021)

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The pioneer of LSD, cyberspace, futurism and modern environmentalism urges us to use our god-like powers to revive lost species and fight extinction.

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Elements of a Durable Civilization, by Stewart Brand (2024)

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Elements of a Durable Civilization, by Stewart Brand (2024)

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Civilizations come and go. Civilization continues.