About
    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
Search
Page Contents
Full
Incoming links
from Martin Buber
  • Despite my Jewish background, I think I found I and Thou via the Whole Earth Catalog and Ken Kesey:
from Is Technology Magic?
  • Max Read cites Whole Earth Catalog and Fredrick Turner, SVs particular hippie libertarianism. Brand likes the turmoil of the market, Thiel and others not so much. (His dad was a CQ subscriber, man, I feel old). Engineering, tinkering, autodidact mindset (for better and worse).
from Christopher Alexander
from High Agency
  • OTOH: this is what Stewart Brand and Whole Earth Catalog were doing: access to tools, we are as gods. He did not use terms like "increased agency" but that was pretty much the core philosophy. Also related to the hacker stance, and to some extent Stoicism.
from re-enchantment
  • Aside from the particular word it doesn't seem very new; the same spirit animated the hippies fifty years ago and many others. I remember first seeing the Whole Earth Catalog and becoming excited that here was an approach to technology that wasn't dull and corporate and rationalist, but in some way alive and magical.
from Anne Herbert
  • Anne Herbert was a writer for the Whole Earth Catalog and its descendent magazine Coevolution Quarterly. She seems largely forgotten today; but I remember her wise and compassionate voice from those publications. It seemed to come from a different place than most, one that sounded like it would be welcoming. Her writing was simple, sincere, deep.
from Weird Studies/Request List
from Robert Heinlein
  • This particular quote has achieved a kind of meme status in tech, it defines our version of machismo. There's nothing obviously wrong with it either. That and the Whole Earth Catalog are my models for valorizing general competence and capability. Heinlein's military background is obvious; Stewart Brand was also in the army and acknowledges that experience as important. It's a stance I guess.
from A Sense of Rebellion
  • I like that term "mechy max system". This is very WEC in style.
from How to be less agentic
  • Drop out of society and find your real goals. This was and is the function of the actual counterculture. I guess this is actually being more agentic (that was the whole raison d'etre of Whole Earth Catalog ). But to outsiders it may not look that way.
from designer stance
  • I was exposed to a really compelling version of design stance at an early age, since I somehow discovered Victor Papanek's Design for the Real World at the public library (quite possible heard about it via Whole Earth Catalog). This was an eye-opening and intense book, as Papanek excoriated the profession of industrial design for spending its energies on trivial things while the real problems of the world are begging for creative solutions. At the time I read it I probably had no idea that there was such a thing as industrial design, but now I not only was aware, I had strong opinions about it.
from 2024 Year End Review
  • Bruce Ames (invented the Ames test for mutagenicity, remember him appearing in WEC on occasion)
from Stewart Brand
  • Best known as the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand has been involved in all sorts of interesting projects, from Doug Engelbart's radically innovative computer systems to George Church's efforts to revive extinct species.
from LWMap/Being a Robust Agent
  • One of my heroes, Stewart Brand, famously promoted something akin to this stance with his Whole Earth Catalog mottos: "Access to Tools" and "We are as Gods and Might as well get Good at It". Tools for what? It doesn't matter, whatever you might want to do (in this case, "you" was a subset of hippies and people interested in alternative ways of living).
from Weird Studies/Unabomber
  • Oh nice comparing Whole Earth Catalog with the Hexen deck and the film The Net that they are talking about...all are primarily networks of ideas.
from unus mundus
  • "There is only one universe, by definition" – Buckminster Fuller maybe? Quoted in Whole Earth Catalog
from Laws of Form
  • A cultish math book, introduced to me by the Whole Earth Catalog and Francisco Varela. From a purely math standpoint, it appears to introduce some novel and perhaps useful notation and invent something sort of like imaginary Boolean values. From a deeper metaphysical standpoint, it offers a way to talk about distinctions in general and our representation and participation in them.
from Psychopolitics
  • Instantly my mind turns to Whole Earth Catalog, which was the Bible of Can for a generation, and a huge influence on me in my youth. Weird to think of it negatively like this. Part of me wants to harrumph and throw the book across the room, what do you mean being against achievement and capability, what kind of attitude is that? But I kind of get what he's saying.
from Sloterdijk
  • Huh he sounds like he is re-inventing Whole Earth Catalogism. Which indeed might be the best hope of salvation.
from conflict theory
from A Sense of Rebellion
  • Morozov sets up a conflict between Brodey's lab and the West Coast Whole Earth Catalog nexus. It's funny, in episode 4 he mentions "counterculture publications" but the only two he names are WEC and CoEvolution Quarterly, which are the same thing (he does this twice). To Morozov, Brand and WEC represent the capitalist sellout of the counterculture.
from Kevin Kelly
  • A technology writer who covers some of the same themes I do. Kelly was the editor of Wired and before that associated with Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog and sort of incarnates the more libertarian techno-optimist strain of thinking from that quarter.
from Agency Made Me Do It
  • We are all forced to be practitioners of agency, forced to construct ourselves as agents, and we might as well get better at it. Like the Whole Earth Catalog, I'm just trying to make the tools more accessible.
from Technic and Magic
  • OK you don't want to see a tree as only so many board-feet of lumber, but still, I'm generally for increasing people's instrumental potential! Like the Whole Earth Catalog slogan, "access to tools".
Twin Pages

Whole Earth Catalog

30 Oct 2021 - 01 Jan 2025
Open in Logseq
    • See Stewart Brand. The Catalog was a major early influence on me, particularly in its stance that one could be interested in anything and pursue anything. There was a Whole Earth Bookstore in Evanston, IL where I grew up, which is where I found both the catalog and Ted Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines. When I went off to MIT I managed to fall in with a bunch of Whole Earth-friendly fellow students who were into alternative energy and other alternatives; later I got to actually share an office with SB himself in the early days of the Media Lab.
    • It's hard to remember what the world was like before the Internet, but back then you didn't have access to all the world's information and resources at your fingertips. There were daily papers and network news and that was it. The public library had plenty of stuff but it tended to be somewhat out of date. The Catalogs opened up a whole world of alternatives and underground scenes and innovations.
    • One distinctive voice I remember from the Whole Earth publications was Anne Herbert, an editor and writer who added a warm, female, humanist note with her little side observations. She seemed to have faded out of the scene; I found this web page about her and her work at archive.org
    • Here's the one time that I got a mention in Whole Earth Review for some of my Vivarium Project work, in 1989.
    • Kevin Kelly's Recomendo newsletter and especially the collected book closely replicates the Catalog format and the focus on tools.

    • Critics

      • Frank Zappa (21) The Adventures Of Greggery Peccary - YouTube
        • Greggery: I must plummet boldly forward to my ultra-avant laminated, simulated replica-mahogany desk, with the strategically-placed, imported, very hip water pipe, and the latest edition of the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG, and rack my agile mind for a spectacular new TREND, thereby rejuvenating our limping economy, and providing for bored & miserable people everywhere some great new 'THING' to identify with!