Whole Earth Catalogue

By 1968, as exemplified with the publication of the Whole Earth Catalogue (WEC) by Stewart Brand and the Portola Institute in San Francisco, manual indexing was not limited to legal citations and academic references. The cover featured an image of the earth taken from the ATS-3 satellite in 1967 that Brand had lobbied to obtain by printing buttons with the text, ‘Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?’ in 1966 (Figure 15). The answer was to organise the world’s information into the WEC, which had ‘access to tools’ as its subtitle.

Reflecting the back-to-the-land movement, its contents were not a traditional mail-order catalogue but a ‘smorgasbord of books, mechanical devices, and outdoor recreational gear’

(Turner 2006:71). This panoply ‘offered a cacophony of artifacts, voices, and visual design’

organised into seven categories: Understanding Whole Systems, Shelter and Land Use, Industry and Craft, Communications, Community, Nomadics and Learning (ibid). Phrased otherwise, the WEC ‘offered their readers the chance to encounter information and perspectives that might change their thinking or behaviour’ (ibid:92). The content also reflected the communes,

communities and scenes in which Brand operated, with the ‘counterculture movement’ playing a key role, combined with academic input from various figures along with seeds of the

blossoming technological revolution.

Fred Turner’s Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006) epitomises Brand’s branding of the WEC as a ‘research organization’ by his declaration that it was ‘designed as a system. I knew about systems. I had studied cybernetics’ (ibid:79). Turner’s book avidly portrays how the

counterculture transformed into cyberculture, along with the role that cybernetics played in the holistic approach to WEC. As Turner puts forth, changes originated from those outside the computer industry (ibid:106). This counterculture movement imbibed ‘information’s transformative potential’ with a confluence of various hobbyists, computer engineers,

programmers, ‘hackers’ and academic labs, including the Homebrew Computer Club (ibid:103).

It embodied an entrepreneurial spirit of DIY (Do-it-Yourself) as a ‘networked forum’––

executing principles of system theory as well as organisational properties within its structure as a ‘whole system’ and a ‘tool’ for readers that could improve the world with its usage (ibid:84).

Gathering together participants in communes (the movement at the time contained around 10,000,000 Americans), the media of the WEC was diverse enough to offer information regarding manifold tools and techniques to trade. In their communes, readers could search the catalogue for what they needed––from eastern philosophy to military gear for survival in rough climate and conditions.

When these groups met in its pages, the Catalog became the single most visible publication in which the technological and intellectual output of industry and high science met the Eastern religion, acid mysticism, and communal social theory of the back-to-the-land movement. It also became the home and emblem of a new,

geographically distributed community (ibid:73).²⁹

Although geographically separated, the searching and reading of such a catalogue could occur anywhere, with readers submitting orders by post or physically attending the gatherings announced in its pages. The textual networked forum would also supplant images of previous events and readers could write in with suggestions and publish their comments and requests

29 It also exemplified a DIY ‘home schooling’ for the counterculture who were simultaneously synthesising Native American and Settler ways of life, being linked to each other through the medium of the WEC.

under the umbrella of a united ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1983) or a ‘town square’

(ibid:89). Turner elucidates this holistic cybernetic system of exporting rhetorical universalism as ideology, which is transcribed into every page of the WEC. Searching for ways to inject ideal models of community into the world at large, along with technologies and information systems, it also attempted ‘to legitimate mainstream forces of consumption, technological production, and research as hip’ (ibid:84).

With the WEC, it was ‘the ideal relationship between information, technology, and community’

that drove collaboration. Particular figures, such as Douglas Engelbart, stand out. The vision of the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), Engelbart’s place of employment, was collaborative, between each of the members but also between human and machine. Echoing Bush’s vision of the Memex search engine, individuals would be able to retrieve texts and to manage and organise information themselves. Within this social

organisation, the more people participated, the greater the comprehension of each user in the system, along with the ‘process of collective feedback facilitated by the computer’ (Turner 2006:108). Engelbart gave birth to not only the infamous mouse of individualised freedom, but the QWERTY keyboard, the CRT terminal and a computing system for office work called the On-Line System, or NLS. ‘The system offered its users the ability to work on a document simultaneously from multiple sites, to connect bits of text via hyperlinks, to jump from one point to another in a text, and to develop indexes of key words that could be searched’

(ibid:108). As Turner is keen to point out,

like the hyperlinked texts of Engelbart’s system, the Whole Earth Catalog presented its readers with a system of connections. In the Catalog, no text stood apart from every other; each was part of an informational or social system, and each offered a doorway through which the reader could enter one of those systems (110).

Another key figure was Alan Kay, who was employed at Xerox Parc research laboratory and envisioned an interactive desktop computer, the ‘Dynabook’––as a ‘language machine where content was the description of things’ (ibid:112). According to Turner, when Kay ‘saw the Catalog, it offered him a vision of how an information system might organize that content’

(ibid). The linkage was that the Catalog was an information tool, or an analogue computer that organised content, yet it was also a hyperlinked system. Kay described the WEC ‘as a print version of what the Internet was going to be’ (ibid). Key to Kay’s understanding of the

conception of the Catalog was that it was serendipitous, offering ideas to the reader (user) when they didn’t know what they were searching for.³⁰ In hindsight, the WEC set out to change how the world’s information was organised by making it accessible and on the other hand, providing tools allowing mass consumers, i.e. users, to ‘intervene’.The hacker’s ability to be in control of interactions with computers, including the tools that could organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible, imbued the user with agency, a ‘tools can change the world’

mindset which I will address in Chapter 8 and 11.³¹

30 Therefore, the reception of every new iteration of the Catalog was marked by excitement and copies of all of the books at the Whole Earth Truck Store became part of the library at Xerox PARC.

31 In 1972 it was Brand again who became the ‘trendcaster’ having picked up on the Californian ‘hacker’ vibe with his Rolling Stone text, ‘Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death among the Computer Bums’ where he pitted the bureaucratic planners or ‘squares’ (those having normative values) against those of the figure of the ‘hacker’

who were ‘cultural revolutionaries’ not just technicians. ‘Like P. T. Barnum, [Brand] had gathered the performers of his day—the commune dwellers, the artists, the researchers, the dome builders—into a single circus. And he himself had become both master and emblem of its many linked rings’ (Turner 2006:101). The etymology of search

It was not only the world at large and the biosphere but the intimate sphere of the self that was intended to interface with the catalogue. ‘The reader could order the “tools” on display and thus help to create a realm of “intimate, personal power” in her or his own life (albeit by entering the commercial sphere first)’ (ibid:83). Particular items required specific skillsets that transformed the readers as subjects through the WEC ideology, a point I will return to in Chapter 8 with the Interpellated Subject. Not only was the reader transformed but the development of the ‘tools’

that the Whole Earth Catalogue offered––from mainframe computers to personal computers, were themselves affected. Historian Paul Ceruzzi describes the transitions between 1959-1969 stating that ‘small computers, microprocessors, keyboard-based interfaces, individual usability, and the sensation of interactivity, were all in place by 1972’ (ibid:105). This development stems from shifts in habits and patterns by users, where following Thierry Bardini (2000), Turner explains that the ‘dynamic of personalization’ has been ongoing since the 1940s.

After all, wasn’t it the Whole Earth Catalog that had set out to liberate technology from its corporate and governmental contexts? And wasn’t it the Catalog that had promoted the notion that the right tools, properly used, could help reform society? Could perhaps even save the “mass” economy by “personalizing” it? (ibid:138)

During the process the emphasis lay on the transformation of the individual ‘user’s’

consciousness into a creative being (ibid:84,93). Yet it was not only about creativity. It ‘opened windows onto the universal order of things, the items in the Catalog promised to be “personal”

technologies as well’ (ibid:92). With these citations Turner verifies that the ‘dynamic of personalization’ was already an inherent part of counterculture and the cyber community and that they complimented each other (ibid:106). Hobbyists, WEC and computer engineers were all interested in personalised tools and products. Eventually search engine start-ups and companies took on key roles in the ‘personalisation’ of information, which I will discuss in Chapter 5.

At the forefront of those who were empowered to change the face of society and improve the lives of individuals by WEC tools and technology were a couple of individual hackers (Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs). ‘Later on, at a Stanford commencement speech (Google’s founders alma matter) Jobs claimed that the WEC was one of the ‘bibles’ of his generation, as a sort of paperback Google, 35 years beforehand’ (ibid:109).³² The image of the ‘blue marble’ mirrored Brand’s attempt to create a holistic approach to life with the WEC where the individual played a central role, looking down upon the earth as a ‘god’, responsible for whatever would come out of the know-how (information) that was contained within the catalogue’s pages.³³

At one level, the Catalog was a “Whole Earth” in its own right. That is, it was a seemingly comprehensive informational system, an encyclopedia, a map. Simply by picking it up and flipping through its seven sections, the reader could become an astronaut looking down from space on a textual representation of a new earth (ibid:

83).³⁴ (Figure 16)

is the same as ‘circus’ and this circus or ‘readership capitalism’ predicted the ‘networked computing’ of the 1990s, which in turn laid the groundwork for the beginnings of the ‘New Economy’ that later took hold.

32 Full speech available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA&t=12m45s

33 Stewart Brand also created one of the first virtual networks, the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, otherwise known as WELL.

34 However, in spite of its holistic approach, Stewart Brand, as the editor in chief, decided virtually everything that went into the catalogue and what was left out. Although drawing on their traditions and customs, there were no Native Americans (except Brand’s wife who was half Ottawa), women were visualised as sex objects or relegated

Figure 16: Earthrise, taken on December 24, 1968, by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders