Whole Earth Catalog (70s zine)

[Taleisin]

My mum told me that this magazine had a big effect on her when she was younger, and an archive of every issue has just been published online.

Whole Earth Index

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.

wholeearth.info

What is it?

The Whole of the 'Whole Earth Catalog' Is Now Online

The seminal DIY catalogs, journals, and magazines printed by the techno-hippie Whole Earth publishing house are finally available online in digital form, all for free.

www.wired.com

Essentially this was a magazine published a few times a year with DIY, political commentary, hippie/libertarian and self sufficiency/environmental themes.

This seems exactly like the stuff Agora likes, lets go through some of these and share anything cool we find in this thread.


Some pages from issue 1:

 

[Taleisin]

Some random bits and pieces from issue 1:

 

[№56]

This is fascinating. I knew about The Whole Earth Catalog and its connection to the early cyberpunk/cyberculture movement (thanks to this book, which I haven't read), but actually flipping through the thing was eye-opening. I've run into a lot of interesting book recommendations, the graphic design is great, and the idea of presenting the magazine as a catalog of tools that the reader can use to take back control of their own life - the emphasis on going out and actually doing something - is really refreshing and something that deserves to be copied.
On the other hand the ideology behind the catalog is totally baffling to me, and kind of disturbing. I don't understand how the authors could genuinely believe that embracing concepts like systems theory and cybernetics would lead to an increase in individual freedom. Seeing Herman Kahn, Norbert Wiener, and books on how to be an effective executive cited side-by side with Foxfire, guides on producing illegal drugs, and new age counter-cultural stuff feels like naivety, a psy-op, or straight-up schizophrenia. Sure, there's a structural similarity between managing self-regulating systems on your off-the-grid hippy commune and doing the same thing as the administrator of some environmental agency or space colony (lots of space stuff here) but the end result changes as the scale increases. The same tools that an individual can use to secure their own freedom can also be used by the powers that be to take that same freedom away. The gardener's ideology suddenly sounds a lot less friendly when you look at it from the perspective of the plant that's about to have its limbs cut off.
Marshall McLuhan (who unsurprisingly gets name-dropped a lot in the catalog) described technology as an extension of the human senses. Using a certain technology creates a certain "sense ratio" in our brains that changes the way we perceive the world on a fundamental level. The classic example is comparing TV to print media, but I think the theory also applies to social technologies - techniques for organization and control, like cybernetics. If this is the case, what happens to you when you try to subvert the powers that be by appropriating social technologies that they invented? In one of the issues Stuart Brand reviews Gravity's Rainbow and totally misses the point of the book by praising its description of a "late-World War II stateless European "zone" with the lineaments of chaos, amid which heavings of control systems all is Plot, vast conspiracy, the kind of paranoid heaven that a Nixon must live in." You're living in it too, Stuart, we all are! I grew up in a world you and your friends helped create, after they grew up and started working for federal agencies, NGOs, and silicon valley (didn't expect that one, did you?), and it still sucks! Just about everyone in my generation (whether they realize it or not) sees your ideological successors the same way your generation saw Nixon! Got a tool to fix that problem?
Ranting aside, I think there's still a lot to be learned from the Whole Earth Catalog, but at the same time it reminds me of a quote that describes the 60s and 70s as one long bad trip that the world never woke up from. Maybe we can wake up by creating a catalog of our own, but it will have to be different.

 

[Taleisin]

This is fascinating. I knew about The Whole Earth Catalog and its connection to the early cyberpunk/cyberculture movement (thanks to this book, which I haven't read), but actually flipping through the thing was eye-opening. I've run into a lot of interesting book recommendations, the graphic design is great, and the idea of presenting the magazine as a catalog of tools that the reader can use to take back control of their own life - the emphasis on going out and actually doing something - is really refreshing and something that deserves to be copied.
On the other hand the ideology behind the catalog is totally baffling to me, and kind of disturbing. I don't understand how the authors could genuinely believe that embracing concepts like systems theory and cybernetics would lead to an increase in individual freedom.

One thing that reframes this argument is the context of the 60s/70s. Cybernetics, systems thinking, constructivism etc. emerged as a response to the categorical thinking, essentialism and hierarchical ideologies of the previous century. The power structures that were actively fighting against the counterculture were firm believers in the philosophical opposites of the ideas mentioned in Whole Earth. The power dynamic changed when the high-development baby boomers "cut their hair" in silicon valley and applied these ideas to capitalist systems, or sold out and joined a 3 letter agency. The rest of the group all became "magicians".

Although current power dynamics have these ideas used as a tool of the elite, they emerged as a tool for countering the establishment. These ideas were co-opted by those who took power (eg "liberal" elite) and subverted for use as philosophical justifications for the constructs of control they implemented from then onwards. The ideas themselves are merely powerful, not evil, and many of the more nuanced and highly developed aspects are counter to their use as control structures. Its the intentional mutation of these ideas and dumbing down for mass audiences that killed their revolutionary spirit.

The counterculture was subverted and killed. The ideas of counterculture were subverted and used. The hippies were killed or co-opted. Some of them now pull the strings, but not for their old purpose.

 

[№56]

Cybernetics, systems thinking, constructivism etc. emerged as a response to the categorical thinking, essentialism and hierarchical ideologies of the previous century. The power structures that were actively fighting against the counterculture were firm believers in the philosophical opposites of the ideas mentioned in Whole Earth.

I have a hard time believing this when the entire concept of cybernetics was invented by an MIT academic while working on ballistics calculations for the government during WWII. Cybernetic ideas had already been used in the US space and nuclear programs for decades before the Whole Earth Catalog was published. Defense secretary Robert McNamara supposedly used systems theory to manage the Vietnam war. I'm not going to be an expert on the history of these ideas, but everything I've heard makes them sound like they appeared from the top down and not from the bottom up.

 

[Taleisin]

I have a hard time believing this when the entire concept of cybernetics was invented by an MIT academic while working on ballistics calculations for the government during WWII. Cybernetic ideas had already been used in the US space and nuclear programs for decades before the Whole Earth Catalog was published. Defense secretary Robert McNamara supposedly used systems theory to manage the Vietnam war. I'm not going to be an expert on the history of these ideas, but everything I've heard makes them sound like they appeared from the top down and not from the bottom up.

I meant second wave (and post) cybernetics, not first wave sorry. Cybernetics is only one aspect also

 

[Some_porcupine]

50s dreamers of about year 2000, are nowadays WEFers, club of Rome, young leaders members/relatives.
They were control freaks. Like eurobyrocrats and technocrats, neufeudals are nowadays
Prove me wrong.

 

[Pseudiom]

Interesting. I've never heard of this. It reads a lot like notorious American political-schizo survivalist Kurt Saxon's The Survivor newsletter/books but more techno-optimist (I suppose...). I guess they reflect the survivalist boom of the era in certain subcultures. I'm curious how much crossover Whole Earth Catalog had with other groups like the C/FO (Cartoon/Fantasy Organization) and the World Science Fiction Society newsletters and associated publications. Older Filk music riffs on those post-Stark Trek popularity utopian themes that I see glimpses of here (Though I'll say I don't particularly care for a lot of the pure Star Trek stuff). Those fans probably also read a lot of H. G. Wells because I've heard stories his books were always available on tables at conventions in the 1970s. I doubt Sci-Fi conventions are that literary focused today, but I don't go to them. I think Wells influence may account for a lot of the technological utopianism that seems naive today. You could use "One World Government" and "Scientific Atheism" as the punchline to every one of Wells's later conclusions. I won't even mention "The war to end war".

One of the main posthumous criticisms of H. G. Wells probably fits here: He started his career as an author but ended it as a polemicist (I'm poorly repeating a Jorge Luis Borges statement I can't find at the moment). His later work (fiction and nonfiction) was less The Time Machine and more The Shape of Things to Come and The Open Conspiracy which prefigured The New World Order. Writers like Olaf Stapledon probably bridge the gap between the Wells dominated era to the post-Asimov/Heinlein Sci-Fi fandom. Stapledon also wrote at least one book (Last and First Men) that has in an idealized one world goverment full of pseudo-anarchic free love as an intermediary step of human evolution where everyone would own an airplane as a personal vehicle. Larry Niven was probably the most famous author of this milieu to be heavily influenced by Stapledon's Last and First Men and Star Maker.

And as if by kismet...

Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1970, page 12.

But of course Wells is not interested in tragic presentiments. He does not believe in the solemnity of either death or murder itself. No one is less disposed toward funerals, no one less likely to believe that the final day is more important than those previous. It is not unjust to say that Wells is interested in everything, except perhaps the story he is telling at that moment.

— Borges, "H. G. Wells' Latest Novel" (Review of Apropos of Dolores)

There's a Borges interview with a more scathing remark on Wells later books, but, as said, I'm having trouble turning it up at the moment.

 

[grap]

The apparent heterodoxy of the Whole Earth catalog's ideology is, imo, evidence that there were germs of bureaucratic thinking in '60s counterculture to begin with. But that's just a personal preoccupation.

More substantially, the notion that there was a "way out" of cultural conservatism was an inadvertent side-effect of adopting cybernetic and and behaviorist ideas. Black-boxing psychological and philosophical interpretations of behavior and the mind, cybernetic theorists made behavior (and its governance) an engineering problem, rather than a humanistic problem. By designing a particular built environment and particular media ecosystem, you can create feedback loops that reinforce the behavior that you want, without fussing over anyone's thoughts and feelings.

But again, this kind of thinking has a paradoxically revolutionary undertone: If you, the radical, had the means to engineer a different (utopic) media/built environment, then everyone would automatically become a socialist (or anarchist, or whatever) without thinking about it twice, due to the force of the feedback mechanism. By prioritizing systemic effects rather than individual thoughts/feelings, Wiener et al. started to sound (against their intentions) like leftists, with the substitution of systems theory for economics. In the '70s, the failures of the preceding decades' most utopic aspirations might have made this an appealing way of continuing by other means.

 

[Some_porcupine]

More substantially, the notion that there was a "way out" of cultural conservatism was an inadvertent side-effect of adopting cybernetic and and behaviorist ideas. Black-boxing psychological and philosophical interpretations of behavior and the mind, cybernetic theorists made behavior (and its governance) an engineering problem, rather than a humanistic problem. By designing a particular built environment and particular media ecosystem, you can create feedback loops that reinforce the behavior that you want, without fussing over anyone's thoughts and feelings.

theory of mind... then, the fall

 

[Fairykang]

I consider the Whole Earth Catalog to be in a similar sphere as the Agora Road.
A criticism about it I think is warranted though is that the people involved were 'privileged'. You would've had to be well off to afford to dial into the WELL chatroom back then.

 

[Fairykang]

IIRC, this is the first publicly released satellite photo of the globe which was a direct result of the efforts of Stewart Brand.