Whole Earth Catalog

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
by Fred Turner
Published 31 Aug 2006

Others included Buckminster Fuller’s World Game at Southern Illinois University (see Norman and Shugart, Whole Earth Catalog $1) and Brand’s own experimental production of the Catalog from a city of temporary pillow domes constructed around hot springs in the California desert (see Brand, Whole Earth Catalog One Dollar). Each of these events, like Alloy, featured an attempt to fuse systems theory, new technology, and countercultural practice. One especially important gathering also attempted to fuse the technological and countercultural communities. 55. Brand et al., Whole Earth Catalog $1, 17. 56. Brand, Last Whole Earth Catalog, 221. 57. Brand, Kahn, and Kahn, Whole Earth Catalog, 74. 58.

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By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. Brand, Stewart. “Buckminster Fuller.” In Whole Earth Catalog, edited by Stewart Brand, 3. Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, 1968. ———. “Civilization and Its Contents.” In Rheingold, Millennium Whole Earth Catalog, 5. ———. The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility. New York: Basic Books, 1999. ———. The Electronic Whole Earth Catalog. San Rafael, CA: Broderbund Software, 1989. ———. The Essential Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools and Ideas. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1986. ———. “History.” In Whole Earth Epilog, edited by Stewart Brand, 752 –53.

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“Money.” In Brand, Last Whole Earth Catalog, 438. ———. The Next Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools. Sausalito, CA: Point Foundation, 1980. ———. “The Sky Starts at Your Feet.” In Brand, Space Colonies, 5 –7. ———, ed. Space Colonies. Sausalito, CA: Whole Earth Catalog, 1977. ———. “Space Colonies: Summary.” CoEvolution Quarterly 9 (Spring 1976): 4. ———. “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death among the Computer Bums.” Rolling Stone, December 7, 1972. ———. “Sticking Your Head in Cyberspace.” Whole Earth Review 63 (Summer 1989): 84 – 85. ———, ed. The Updated Last Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools. San Francisco: Point Foundation, 1974. ———.

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand
by John Markoff
Published 22 Mar 2022

Brand’s celebrity would peak with the publication of The Last Whole Earth Catalog. The following month, in February of 1971, he appeared, complete with buckskin suit topped this time with a hard hat, before a national television audience on the Dick Cavett Show. Cavett was effusive about the Catalog and immediately probed Brand about why he was stopping something that was such a success. “It’s an incredible publication and its very personally done by the guy who is the sort of genius behind it,” he told the TV audience. “And people are very sorry, the fans of the Whole Earth Catalog, that this is the last Whole Earth Catalog, because it’s such a hit, and he owes us an explanation as to why it’s the last Whole Earth Catalog.

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Later Brand would officiate at English’s wedding in the backyard of a home on Homer Lane in Menlo Park. Trained as a mathematician, Lois Jennings was the driving force behind the Whole Earth Catalog. She kept the books, managed the employees, and even worked at the cash register in the store. Here she is with author Gurney Norman. In 1971, his novel Divine Right’s Trip was serialized in the pages of the Last Whole Earth Catalog. Production for the Whole Earth Catalog took place in a garage in the Santa Cruz Mountains, west of Stanford University. A small crew would typeset and paste up camera-ready copy. Beginning in 1968, they produced two catalogs and four supplements each year until Brand closed the venture down in 1971.

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Indeed, John McCarthy, the computer scientist and mathematician, had come up with the term artificial intelligence because, he wrote, he was trying to avoid contact and quarrels with Wiener and his devotees.[12]) Brand saw the Catalog not as a stand-alone document but as part of a dynamic system, and throughout its existence he added regular supplements to offer a channel for feedback in what he believed would be a self-sustaining organism.[13] Brand’s insistence on this feedback loop added more currency and complexity to what thus became a sort of “living” document—The Last Whole Earth Catalog, published in 1971, would offer a vast menu of items sprawling over almost 500 pages. The Whole Earth Catalog supplements offered a window into the communal back-to-the-land movement that had captured the spirit of the counterculture. The January 1969 issue featured this stark Prankster-friendly statement in large block letters on its cover: “BRAIN DAMAGE IS WHAT WE HAD IN MIND ALL ALONG.

The new village green: living light, living local, living large
by Stephen Morris
Published 1 Sep 2007

William Morrow & Co., 1997. The NEW VILLAGE GREEN 151 7 WHOLE EARTH CATALOG “ Civilization’s shortening attention span is mismatched with the pace of environmental problems. . . Environmental health requires peace, prosperity, and continuity.” — Stewart Brand 152 T he original Whole Earth Catalog was not “given” to me; it was “laid on” me by someone who had moved on to a newer edition. It was dog-eared then. It’s more dog-eared now. It has survived more than forty years of moves and life changes. The publication of the Whole Earth Catalog was fueled by new technology. The IBM Selectric typewriter now had changeable type fonts, bringing the world of typesetting, hitherto the exclusive province of printers and publishers, into the home.

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By 1972 Random House had come calling and had taken over the national distribution and the Catalog had been named winner of the National Book Award. The ripples from the original Whole Earth Catalog continue to be felt. The Catalog was published sporadically until 1998. Its alumni have been a vocal and visible lot. Kevin Kelly still publishes a weekly eZine called Cool Tools (find it at kk.org). Illegitimate step-child The Solar Living Sourcebook is in its thirteenth edition and has been continuously in print for the last twenty years. The founders of the Whole Earth Catalog cast a long collective shadow, but it was their ability to look forward that earned their niche in publishing history.

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Brand asks at his own website.“I find things and I found things.Things I find include tools, ideas, books, and people, which I blend and purvey.Things I’ve founded and co-founded include the Trips Festival (1966), Whole Earth Catalog (1968), Hackers Conference (1984),The WELL (1984), Global Business Network (1988), and The Long Now Foundation (1996).” 154 chapter 7 : Whole Earth Catalog Stewart Brand: “ “ Environmental health requires peace, prosperity, and continuity.” Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine — too cheap to meter.

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry
by John Markoff
Published 1 Jan 2005

Tesler’s was the first general-purpose programming language that would do typesetting for any type of device. While PUB was finding a devoted band of users, Tesler decided he had had enough of AI research. The Whole Earth Catalog was having a growing influence on the nascent counterculture, and thousands of people in their twenties were leaving the cities and striking out to create a back-to-the-land communal existence. Tesler found a small group of like-minded friends, one of whom, Francine Slate, had been an employee of the Whole Earth Catalog, and together they decided to buy farmland. Slate and several other members of the group had been in a rather unusual upscale commune in Atherton, a town just north of Stanford that was generally known as an elite bedroom community.

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In July of 1968, the Whole Earth Catalog began to take shape, initially as a six-page mimeographed list of books on topics such as tantric art, cybernetics, Indian teepees, and recreational equipment as well as product samples. Brand, who was tall and gangly and who came equipped with an omnipresent and ambitious Swiss Army knife clipped to his belt, drove around the commune circuit, selling goods and accepting orders.3 Later that year in Menlo Park, with a small staff and the help of his wife, Lois Jennings, he put together the first expanded version of the Whole Earth Catalog, which was published in January 1969.

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Instead, he decided to get rid of things: first his marriage, and then the Catalog. With its staff, he arranged to throw a Whole Earth Catalog “Demise Party.” Brand had gotten to know Frank Oppenheimer, the founder of the Exploratorium science museum at the Palace of Fine Arts in the San Francisco Marina district, when he had helped Oppenheimer think through some of the museum’s plans as it was being developed. So he decided to throw a party with a special twist. The Whole Earth Catalog rented the museum’s building for an evening, and as a surprise Brand brought along twenty thousand dollars in cash in an inch-thick stack of hundred-dollar bills with the idea that, because he had started the Catalog with that amount, it would be fitting to put the money back out into the world and have other things start that might be equally interesting, in a what-goes-around-comes-around way.

Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History
by Thomas Rid
Published 27 Jun 2016

Maybe, just maybe, the picture he sought would change some minds and make people realize how small and precious and fragile Earth was.31 Finally, in November 1967, NASA beamed the picture down to Earth from an ATS-3 satellite. Brand was elated and slapped it on the cover of his new publication: the Whole Earth Catalog. The first issue came out in the fall of 1968. It had an all-black cover. In the middle was a round and clear image of the whole Earth. Above the pristine globe, the cover said simply, “Whole Earth Catalog: access to tools.” Tools, for Brand, had an almost mythical meaning. Anything could be a tool: a hacksaw, a monocular, a pair of Levi’s 501 jeans, or the ideas in a book. “Here are the tools to make your life go better.

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Anthropologist and social theorist Gregory Bateson was part of the original cybernetic Macy conferences and later applied cybernetics on a higher level, articulating his theory in the 1972 cult book Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Barry Schwartz Photography. The first issue of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog was published in 1968. It was meant to be a printed feedback loop for back-to-the-land communards, and it reviewed six books on cybernetics. Stewart Brand (left) and company play with the Earth Ball at the New Games, an event that Brand organized in California, October 1, 1973.© Ted Streshinsky/CORBIS. Stewart Brand holds a copy of the Whole Earth Catalog on July 6, 1984.That same year, he launched the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, or WELL, the first real computerized social network. © Roger Ressmeyer/CORBIS.

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See the back cover of the 2001 Penguin edition. 19.Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1960), viii. 20.Ibid., 18. 21.Ibid., 13. 22.Ibid., 28–29. 23.Quoted in Joseph Durso, “The Secret Weapon,” New York Times, July 15, 1968, L37. 24.Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics (1960), x. 25.Kelly, Out of Control, 379. 26.For a detailed version of this remarkable rise, see Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 27.Richard Brautigan, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” in The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster (San Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation, 1967), reproduced here with permission of Sarah Lazin Books. 28.Brand, quoted and interviewed by Fred Turner in From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 69. 29.Ibid. 30.Ibid. 31.Brand recounts the story in detail in Stewart Brand, “Photography Changes Our Relationship to Our Planet,” Smithsonian Photography Initiative, http://web.archive.org/web/20080530221651/http://click.si.edu/Story.aspx?story=31, cached on May 30, 2008. 32.Quoted in Katherine Fulton, “How Stewart Brand Learns,” Los Angeles Times Magazine, November 30, 1994, 40. 33.Quoted in Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 79. 34.Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1968, 34. 35.Ibid., 35. 36.The Last Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools (Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, 1971), 316. 37.See the preface of every Whole Earth publication, all catalogs and supplements. 38.Michael Rossman, On Learning and Social Change (New York: Random House, 1972), 109. 39.Ibid., 203. 40.Ibid., 113. 41.Ibid., 260–61. 42.Ibid., 262. 43.Stewart Brand, “Both Sides of the Necessary Paradox,” Harper’s 247, no. 1482 (November 1973): 20. 44.For more details, see Bateson’s short biography in Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature (New York: Dutton, 1978), xiii. 45.Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1972), xi. 46.Ibid., 481.

Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia
by Becky Hogge , Damien Morris and Christopher Scally
Published 26 Jul 2011

In a talk he gave in 2005, Apple CEO Steve Jobs called the Whole Earth Catalog “one of the bibles of my generation”, describing it as a Google in paperback form, idealistic and overflowing with incredible tools. Wired founder Kevin Kelly compared it to the modern-day blogosphere, calling it “a great example of user-generated content” thanks to Brand’s habit of encouraging readers to submit their own reviews and earn themselves a fee of $10. It won a National Book Award – the first, and probably only time, a catalogue ever won such a plaudit. The Whole Earth Catalog came out about a dozen times in full editions and updates between 1968 and 1972.

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Although the Whole Earth franchise persists today, the “end” of the Whole Earth Catalog happened in June 1971 when Stewart Brand threw a “demise” party at the Exploratorium Museum in San Francsico. Here’s Brand in 1974, writing about the party: The Exploratorium staff had their museum weirding around us at full steam… And then at midnight Scott Beach announced from the stage that these here two hundred $100 dollar bills… were now the property of the party-goers. Just as soon as they could decide what to do with them. The money was the proceeds of the Whole Earth Catalog. And the guests, unsurprisingly, had a hard time deciding how to invest it: The debate lasted till 9 a.m. the next morning, when a dozen remaining hardcore turned the remaining $15,000 ($5,000 had been distributed to the crowd at one wild point) over to Fred Moore, dishwasher.

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To have that, back to the land and high tech kind of in one place.” I’m about to segue into a question about Stewart Brand when Cory beats me to it, reaching up to the shelf behind him. “So I wanted to show you this before we go further. This is my collection of Whole Earth Catalogs. I stole them from the library at Grindstone. I rate these as some of the most important books ever published.” It’s the first time I’ve seen original copies of the Whole Earth Catalog, and as the cuckoo clock tick-tocks in the background I take my time carefully turning the yellowing, oversize pages. Something hits me, something that hadn’t occurred to me before. The Catalog and Cory’s blog, BoingBoing.net, have a lot in common.

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech
by Franklin Foer
Published 31 Aug 2017

commune population swelled to 750,000: Judson Jerome, Families of Eden (Seabury Press, 1974), 18. “a way to be of use to communes”: “From Counterculture to Cyberculture: The Legacy of the Whole Earth Catalog,” Stanford University symposium, November 9, 2006. “one of the bibles of my generation”: Steve Jobs, Stanford University commencement address, June 12, 2005. “We are as gods”: Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1968. “We can’t put it together. It is together”: The Last Whole Earth Catalog, June 1971. “[The catalog] helped create the conditions”: Turner, 73. “he was the guy who was giving us the early warning system”: Katherine Fulton, “How Stewart Brand Learns,” Los Angeles Times, October 30, 1994.

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“This was a way to be of use to communes without actually having to live on one,” he would later joke. His truck never quite took off, but the core concept morphed into something much bigger and more resonant. He created the Whole Earth Catalog, which was really more like an entirely new literary genre—or what Steve Jobs called “one of the bibles of my generation.” During its four years of existence, the Whole Earth Catalog sold 2.5 million copies and won a National Book Award. The subtitle of the catalog was “access to tools.” There were plenty described in its pages, though it didn’t actually sell any, except from a storefront that Brand operated in the heart of what would become Silicon Valley.

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In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG. Brand’s manifesto distilled the thinking of the commune movement and then advanced it in crucial ways. Technology, he argued, had created the ills of the world. Only technology could solve them. Tools, liberated from the hands of the monopolists and militarists, could empower individuals to become more self-sufficient and more self-expressive.

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto
by Stewart Brand
Published 15 Mar 2009

Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming (2007), Paul Hawken. This is the closest we have to a Whole Earth Catalog of environmental and social justice organizations. I would love to see its online expression, WiserEarth.org, become truly comprehensive. Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (2007), Andrew Kirk. Some of the origins of the book you’re holding can be traced in Kirk’s study of the Green influence of the original Whole Earth Catalog. Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth (2008), Robert Poole. Don’t take my word that the first Earth photographs were a boon for environmentalists.

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The current autocatalytic technologies that goose themselves into exponential growth are infotech (including computers, communications, and artificial intelligence), biotech, and nanotech (which is blurring into biotech). What’s more, they stimulate each other in a mutual catalysis that at times results in hyperexponential growth of power. Forty years ago, I started the Whole Earth Catalog with the words, “We are as gods, and might as well get good at it.” Those were innocent times. New situation, new motto: “We are as gods and have to get good at it.” The Whole Earth Catalog encouraged individual power; Whole Earth Discipline is more about aggregate power. The scale of the climate challenge is so vast that it cannot be met solely by grassroots groups and corporations, no matter how Green.

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Table of Contents PENGUIN BOOKS Title Page Copyright Page Dedication • 1 • - Scale, Scope, Stakes, Speed • 2 • - City Planet • 3 • - Urban Promise • 4 • - New Nukes • 5 • - Green Genes • 6 • - Gene Dreams • 7 • - Romantics, Scientists, Engineers • 8 • - It’s All Gardening • 9 • - Planet Craft AFTERWORD RECOMMENDED READING Acknowledgements INDEX Praise for Whole Earth Discipline by Stewart Brand “If Mr. Brand is right, maybe some greens will rediscover the enthusiasm for technology expressed in his famous line at the start of The Whole Earth Catalog: ‘We are as gods and might as well get good at it.’ ” —John Tierney, The New York Times “Brand’s scary analysis is the setup for a hopeful, though controversial message: All may still be well if we get really good at using tools many greens love to hate. . . . Brand’s case for parting ways with environmentalism’s old guard rests largely on surprising developments that, he freely acknowledges, have shown some of his former views were wrong. . . .

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller
by Alec Nevala-Lee
Published 1 Aug 2022

“the work of small time ingrates”: Steve Baer, Dome Cookbook, 5th printing (Corrales, NM: Lama Foundation, 1970), 8. “long dying and funeral”: Brand, Last Whole Earth Catalog, 439. Barbara Ward: Ward credited the book’s title to RBF: “I borrow the comparison from Professor Buckminster Fuller” (Spaceship Earth [New York: Columbia University Press, 1966], 15). “Amid the fever I was in”: Brand, Last Whole Earth Catalog, 439. “Techniques and tools”: Ibid. “I dunno, Whole Earth Catalog”: Ibid. “with manufacturers”: Stewart Brand to RBF, April 10, 1968, quoted in Wong, 454. “We are as gods”: Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1968, 3. “access to tools”: John Markoff, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (New York: Penguin, 2022), 138.

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“access to tools”: John Markoff, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (New York: Penguin, 2022), 138. “People who beef about Fuller”: Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1968, 3. “one of the most original”: Ibid. “baling wire hippies”: J. D. Smith, quoted in Andrew G. Kirk, Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 76. On December 9, 1968, Brand assisted: Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 110. center for futures studies: Jenny Andersson, The Future of the World: Futurology, Futurists, and the Struggle for the Post–Cold War Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 202.

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Lloyd Kahn: Biographical information derived from Lloyd Kahn, interviewed by author, March 21, 2019, and Kahn, Domebook 2, 16. “I’ve found this to be true”: J. Baldwin, ed., The Essential Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools and Ideas (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1986), 21. he was “very straight”: Lloyd Kahn, author interview. “There’s someone you should meet”: Ibid. “Persons in their late twenties”: Brand, Last Whole Earth Catalog, 112. Abandoning the “second-rate”: Jay Baldwin, interviewed in Gowan, Shared Vision, 73. Pacific High School: Kahn, Domebook 2, 32–34, and Alastair Gordon, Spaced Out: Radical Environments of the Psychedelic Sixties (New York: Rizzoli, 2008), 204–11.

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
by Walter Isaacson
Published 6 Oct 2014

Donald Davies coins the term packet switching. 1967 ARPANET design discussions in Ann Arbor and Gatlinburg. 1968 Larry Roberts sends out request for bids to build the ARPANET’s IMPs. Noyce and Moore form Intel, hire Andy Grove. Brand publishes first Whole Earth Catalog. Engelbart stages the Mother of All Demos with Brand’s help. 1969 First nodes of ARPANET installed. 1971 Don Hoefler begins column for Electronic News called “Silicon Valley USA.” Demise party for Whole Earth Catalog. Intel 4004 microprocessor unveiled. Ray Tomlinson invents email. 1972 Nolan Bushnell creates Pong at Atari with Al Alcorn. 1973 1973 Alan Kay helps to create the Alto at Xerox PARC.

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But he did pull together, better than anyone, many of the cultural strands of that period, from acid-dropping hippies to engineers to communal idealists who sought to resist the centralized control of technology. “Brand did the marketing work for the concept of the personal computer through the Whole Earth Catalog,” said his friend Lee Felsenstein.21 DOUGLAS ENGELBART Shortly after the first edition of the Whole Earth Catalog came out, Brand helped to produce a happening that was an odd echo of his techno-choreography of the January 1966 Trips Festival. Dubbed “the Mother of All Demos,” the December 1968 extravaganza became the seminal event of the personal computer culture, just as the Trips Festival had been for the hippie culture.

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Shockley Nobel toast: Courtesy of Bo Lojek and the Computer History Museum Noyce: © Wayne Miller/Magnum Photos Moore: Intel Corporation Fairchild Semiconductor: © Wayne Miller/Magnum Photos Kilby: Fritz Goro/ The LIFE Picture Collection/ Getty Images Kilby’s microchip: Image courtesy of Texas Instruments Rock: Louis Fabian Bachrach Grove, Noyce, Moore: Intel Corporation Spacewar: Courtesy of the Computer History Museum Bushnell: © Ed Kashi/VII/Corbis Licklider: Karen Tweedy-Holmes Taylor: Courtesy of Bob Taylor Larry Roberts: Courtesy of Larry Roberts Davies: National Physical Laboratory © Crown Copyright / Science Source Images Baran: Courtesy of RAND Corp. Kleinrock: Courtesy of Len Kleinrock Cerf and Kahn: © Louie Psihoyos/Corbis Kesey: © Joe Rosenthal/San Francisco Chronicle/Corbis Brand: © Bill Young/San Francisco Chronicle/Corbis Whole Earth Catalog cover: Whole Earth Catalog Engelbart: SRI International First mouse: SRI International Brand: SRI International Kay: Courtesy of the Computer History Museum Dynabook: Courtesy of Alan Kay Felsenstein: Cindy Charles People’s Computer Company cover: DigiBarn Computer Museum Ed Roberts: Courtesy of the Computer History Museum Popular Electronics cover: DigiBarn Computer Museum Allen and Gates: Bruce Burgess, courtesy of Lakeside School, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Fredrica Rice Gates: Wikimedia Commons/Albuquerque, NM police department Microsoft team: Courtesy of the Microsoft Archives Jobs and Wozniak: © DB Apple/dpa/Corbis Jobs screenshot: YouTube Stallman: Sam Ogden Torvalds: © Jim Sugar/Corbis Brand and Brilliant: © Winni Wintermeyer Von Meister: The Washington Post/Getty Images Case: Courtesy of Steve Case Berners-Lee: CERN Andreessen: © Louie Psihoyos/Corbis Hall and Rheingold: Courtesy of Justin Hall Bricklin and Williams: Don Bulens Wales: Terry Foote via Wikimedia Commons Brin and Page: Associated Press Lovelace: Hulton Archive/Getty Images Vitruvian Man: © The Gallery Collection/Corbis TIMELINE CREDITS (IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER) Lovelace: Hulton Archive/Getty Images Hollerith: Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons Bush (first image): © Bettmann/Corbis Vacuum tube: Ted Kinsman/Science Source Turing: Wikimedia Commons/Original at the Archives Centre, King’s College, Cambridge Shannon: Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images Aiken: Harvard University Archives, UAV 362.7295.8p, B 1, F 11, S 109 Atanasoff: Special Collections Department/Iowa State University Bletchley Park: Draco2008 via Wikimedia Commons Zuse: Courtesy of Horst Zuse Mauchly: Apic/Hulton Archive/Getty Images Atanasoff-Berry Computer: Special Collections Department/Iowa State University Colossus: Bletchley Park Trust/SSPL via Getty Images Harvard Mark I: Harvard University Von Neumann: © Bettmann/Corbis ENIAC: U.S.

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex
by Yasha Levine
Published 6 Feb 2018

“It was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions.”18 The mail-order L.L. Bean catalogue was what inspired Brand to create the Whole Earth Catalog. But it was not just about commerce. Like other New Communalists, Brand was enamored with cybernetics ideas—the notion that all life on earth was one big, harmonious interlocking information machine appealed to his sensibilities. He saw his fellow New Communalists as the start of a new society that fit into a larger global ecosystem. He wanted the Whole Earth Catalog to be the connective tissue that held all these isolated communes together, a kind of print magazine–based information network that everyone read and contributed to and that bound them into one collective organism.19 The Whole Earth Catalog was a huge success, and not just with the hippies.

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“When I was young, there was an amazing publication called the Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was 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 60s, before personal computers and desktop publishing so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic, 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.

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“So much for record stores,” Stewart Brand predicted. The way he described it, you’d think that working for ARPA was the most subversive thing a person could do. Cults and Cybernetics Brand was thirty-four and already a counterculture celebrity when he visited Stanford’s AI Lab. He had been the publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog, a wildly popular lifestyle magazine for the commune movement. He ran with Ken Kesey and his LSD-dropping Merry Pranksters, and he had played a central role in setting up and promoting the psychedelic concert where the Grateful Dead debuted and rang in San Francisco’s Summer of Love.10 Brand was deeply embedded in California’s counterculture and appeared as a major character in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

From Satori to Silicon Valley: San Francisco and the American Counterculture
by Theodore Roszak
Published 31 Aug 1986

it, along a number of routes, one can trace the origins of several ingenious projects in the Bay Area whose aim was to scale- down, democratize, and humanize our hypertrophic technological society. These included the Briarpatch Network, the Farallones Institute, Urban House, the Simple Living tional scene, the most the Project. Integral On the na- visible of these efforts was the Whole Earth Catalog of 1968, a landmark publication of the period. compendium of The Catalog was an exuberant resourceful possiblities for laid- back, but self-reliant living: wood-burning stoves, home tools. remedies, I mail order moccasins, can recall a meeting I attended Francisco peninsula where the 8 first down durable the San rather ratty- looking edition of the Catalog (the print order was about 1000) was handed around the circle hot off the press.

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front cover of Time 1964) but he became one of the pro- phetical voices of the starting with a American counterculture - prolonged campus residency Jose State College that brought in early 1966. for- Thanks to that 18 him to the at San Bay Area appearance and subse- him quently to the prominence Stewart Brand gave in the Whole Earth Catalog, was launched on and most spectacular phase of the final On Fuller his career. the first page of the Catalog, the full corpus of Fuller's works was generously presented under the inscription: "the insights of itiated this catalog." became From Buckminster Fuller in- that point forward, Fuller the necessary presence at New Age confer- ences, symposia, and workshops: a sort of peripatetic global wizard audience down who might tie his awe-inspired for four or five hours at a stretch while he recited the history of the universe.

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And was not the whole history of the world going to be trans- formed by the dome? There was a QED. cult of the geodesic 27 dome during the sixties. It began with the popular domebooks of San Francisco architect Lloyd Kahn, who was converted to came domesmanship by to the Fuller when the inventor San Francisco Bay Area. Thanks to Kahn's books and the Whole Earth Catalog, the hope sprang up communities of domes might that blossom overnight barbarian encampments embodying dustrial culture. outside major cities the new - like postin- (As far as I'm aware, the closest approach to that goal was Drop City near Trinidad Colorado, a "weed patch commune" whose several funky structures were rigged up out of salvaged junk from the nearest city dump.)

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)
by Adam Fisher
Published 9 Jul 2018

Larry Brilliant: Then I said, “Stewart, I took this company public, I have some money, how about we do a joint venture?” This is how The Well got started. Stewart Brand: Larry wanted a Whole Earth Catalog teleconference of some sort, basically an online version of the Whole Earth Catalog. He was a lover of the Whole Earth Catalog, I guess. Fabrice Florin: The counterculture movement idolized the Whole Earth Catalog, which symbolized this kind of holistic view of the world. Stewart Brand: I said, “I’d be interested in working on that. What do we get?” Larry Brilliant: I said, “I’ll give you some technology and a couple hundred grand, and you provide the customer base, the family, the community, you run it, and we split it fifty-fifty?”

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There was really nothing else to do then, because we were building things. PARC’s first outside visitor of note was Stewart Brand, fresh from editing and publishing The Last Whole Earth Catalog, and newly famous as a result of its countercultural success. He came to PARC for the tour in 1972. Stewart Brand: I went to Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone and said, “I want to do this story about what’s going on with computers,” and he said, “Fine, go ahead and do it.” He was doing it based, totally, on his good feelings about the Whole Earth Catalog. Alan Kay: Stewart and I knew each other a bit. He contacted me and said he was going to do a piece basically on Spacewar.

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John Battelle: It was the people who kind of first gathered around the Atari and the Apple II, and later around the Mac, and then later around the CD-ROM revolution and the multimedia revolution of the late eighties and early nineties. And they were the same people. Jamis MacNiven: We had the Whole Earth Catalog as bible, then it went electronic, The Well, and it became one of the backbone models for the internet. These guys around here invented the new world. John Battelle: They also gathered around science fiction, right? Steve Wozniak: Science fiction leads to real products, but first you’ve got to deal with the laws of physics, and ask, “What’s it going to cost?”

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World
by Meredith Broussard
Published 19 Apr 2018

Doug Engelbart, the NASA- and ARPA-funded researcher who performed the 1968 “mother of all demos” that showed for the first time all the hardware and software elements of modern computing, dropped acid at the International Foundation for Advanced Study, the legal home for academic inquiry into LSD that lasted until 1967. Operating the camera for Engelbart’s demo was Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Catalog founder who helped organize LSD guru Ken Kesey’s infamous acid tests, massive drug-fueled cross-country bacchanals that were chronicled in Tom Wolfe’s book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Brand was the most important connector between Minsky’s world of scientists and the counterculture. “We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” Brand wrote as the first line of the Whole Earth Catalog in 1968.16 That publication was a major source of inspiration for almost all the early Internet pioneers, from Steve Jobs to tech-publishing titan Tim O’Reilly.

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When developers created early Internet message boards, they were trying to recreate the freewheeling commentary and recommendation culture that flourished in the back pages of the Whole Earth Catalog, where readers wrote in to share requests, tools, and tips on communal living. As Fred Turner writes in From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, Brand was everywhere in the background of early Internet development. Space colonies? Brand was speculating about them in the 1970s in his magazine CQ, the next iteration of the Whole Earth Catalog and the precursor to Wired, the influential technology-culture magazine that Brand also founded.

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We saw that our parents had gone straight, and communes clearly weren’t the answer—but there was this entire new, uncharted world of “cyberspace” that was ours for the making. The connection wasn’t just metaphorical. The emerging Internet culture of the time was heavily influenced by the New Communalism movement of the 1960s, as Fred Turner writes in From Counterculture to Cyberculture, a history of digital utopianism.1 Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, laid out the connections between the counterculture and the personal computer revolution in an essay called “We Owe It All to the Hippies,” in a 1995 special issue of Time magazine called “Welcome to Cyberspace.”2 The early Internet was deeply groovy. By my junior year, I could make a web page or spin up a web server or write code in six different programming languages.

Cool Tools in the Kitchen
by Kevin Kelly and Steven Leckart
Published 1 Dec 2011

However Cool Tools started even earlier, in 2000, as an email list run by Kevin Kelly, a founding editor of Wired Magazine and, prior to that, publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog and its quarterly journal. The Whole Earth Catalog was a reader-written publication, with no ads, long before the web. Much of Cool Tools’ DNA stems from the passionate amateur’s spirit of the Catalog. As Catalog founder Stewart Brand wrote in in the first Whole Earth Catalog in 1969: An item is listed in the CATALOG if it is deemed: Useful as a tool, Relevant to independent education, High quality or low cost, Easily available by mail.

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It is that lineage which attracted me to Cool Tools in 2007, when I became its editor. Web culture is obsessed with the latest and, supposedly, greatest. But bloggers and writers may only briefly test an item before submitting a review. They don’t know what came before. Therefore, they are primarily concerned with what is new, rather than what is best. In contrast, the Whole Earth Catalog and, therefore, Cool Tools only draws attention to what works and stands the test of time. That means that if you buy an item or try a tip included in this ebook, you should count on it. If, for whatever reason, our recommendation doesn’t quite satisfy, please let us know. If you use an item that’s superior to anything we’ve featured in this ebook, please let us know.

Howard Rheingold
by The Virtual Community Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier-Perseus Books (1993)
Published 26 Apr 2012

Even the idea that you could publish books on the West Coast was a revolution when it happened; in 1992, when Publishers Weekly ran an article on the history of West Coast publishing, it started with the Whole Earth Catalog. The first Whole Earth Catalog was the first idealistic enterprise from the counterculture, besides music, that earned the cultural legitimation of financial success. The Whole Earth Catalog crew, riding on the catalog's success, launched a new magazine, The Whole Earth Software Review, and, after the WELL was started, received a record-breaking $1.4 million advance for the Whole Earth Software Catalog.

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The shock of recognition that came with that statement seemed to resolve the matter between us. The WELL is rooted in the San Francisco Bay area and in two separate cultural revolutions that took place there in past decades. The Whole Earth Catalog originally emerged from the Haight-Ashbury counterculture as Stewart Brand's way of providing access to tools and ideas to all the communards who were exploring alternate ways of life in the forests of Mendocino or the high deserts outside Santa Fe. The Whole Earth Catalogs and the magazines they spawned--Co-Evolution Quarterly and its successor, Whole Earth Review--seem to have outlived the counterculture itself, since the magazine and catalogs still exist after twenty-five years.

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HLR http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/2.html Introduction Chapter One: The Heart of the WELL Chapter Two: Daily Life in Cyberspace: How the Computerized Counterculture Built a New Kind of Place Chapter Three: Visionaries and Convergences: The Accidental History of the Net Chapter Four: Grassroots Groupminds Chapter Five: Multi-user Dungeons and Alternate Identities Chapter Six: Real-time Tribes Chapter Seven: Japan and the Net Chapter Eight: Telematique and Messageries Rose: A Tale of Two Virtual Communities Chapter Nine: Electronic Frontiers and Online Activists Chapter Ten: Disinformocracy Bibliography Chapter Two: Daily Life in Cyberspace: How the Computerized Counterculture Built a New Kind of Place I was still toting around my 1969 edition of the Whole Earth Catalog when I read an article about a new computer service that Whole Earth publisher Stewart Brand and his gang were starting in the spring of 1985. For only $3 an hour, people with computers and modems could have access to the kind of online groups that cost five or ten times that much on other public telecommunication systems.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy
by Jonathan Taplin
Published 17 Apr 2017

The beginnings of the technical and social revolution that Martin Luther King referenced in his 1968 sermon at the National Cathedral were under way even as he was speaking. The revolution began in the moral precepts of the counterculture: decentralize control and harmonize people. The earliest networks—like the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (WELL), organized by Stewart Brand, the founder of The Whole Earth Catalog—grew directly out of 1960s counterculture. Brand had helped novelist Ken Kesey organize the Acid Tests—epic be-ins where thousands of hippies ingested LSD and danced to the music of a new band, the Grateful Dead. Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computer, Inc., dropped acid as well. “Jobs explained,” wrote John Markoff in his book What the Dormouse Said, “that he still believed that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life, and he said he felt that because people he knew well had not tried psychedelics, there were things about him they couldn’t understand.”

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It is not an exaggeration to say that the work of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg stands on the shoulders of Doug Engelbart. Yet Engelbart’s vision of the computing future was different from today’s reality. In the run-up to the demonstration, Bill English had enlisted the help of Whole Earth Catalog publisher Stewart Brand, who had produced the Acid Tests with Ken Kesey two years earlier. Engelbart felt that Brand might help make his show into a multimedia event. Kesey and Brand’s LSD festival had forever cemented San Francisco’s link to what Fred Turner in his book From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism describes as the New Communalists.

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Engelbart himself had taken acid twice under the supervision of a Stanford psychology PhD, Jim Fadiman, at the International Foundation for Advanced Study, the Bay Area research hub for academic LSD studies, which were legal until 1967. Geeks on acid, dreaming of the future. But financed by the military-industrial complex. Complicated. The Whole Earth Catalog, subtitled Access to Tools, begins: “We are as gods, and we might as well get used to it.” Pretty bold mission statement. Was this a church? No, but the sense was that the New Communalist needed tools to create an individual identity free from the hidebound institutions of contemporary society, which was not an easy task.

Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer
by Novella Carpenter
Published 25 May 2010

the librarian, a pretty blond lady, asked when I handed her the slip of paper with the call number for the Whole Earth Catalog. “Yeah, my mom always talks about it,” I said. The periodical had been one of her main resources for country living on the farm in Idaho. My parents weren’t the only ones in their day to move to rural areas and try to live off the land. By some estimates more than one million young people in the 1970s moved out of cities and tried their hand at farming. The Whole Earth Catalog had been like the Internet for this generation of wannabe farmers. After a few minutes in a back room, the librarian emerged and hefted a massive tome into my hands.

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But it can also be work, good, productive work of the kind that contributes to health and vigor by getting good home-grown food on the table.” That had been one of my parents’ main goals: to be self-sufficient, to raise their own meat and milk, to build their own house. This desire was a cultural virus, part of the first ecological movement in the United States. I flipped through the Whole Earth Catalog with growing interest. One female rabbit, I read, could have up to thirty offspring in a year. They enjoy shady, cool conditions. Don’t feed them cabbage. Building rabbit housing is fun and easy. The History Room, full of coughing scholars turning dusty pages, suddenly became a vibrating, living place.

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“Or break their necks?” Benji asked in French. The woman looked mortified. Who was this barbarian? “No.” Benji has these big brown eyes, and they were cast downward in shame. “Sorry, Benji,” I said. I was sorry to embarrass Benji, but I had to figure it out for my own project at home. The Whole Earth Catalog had been silent about how to actually kill a rabbit. The French rabbit lady nodded her head when we pointed at a plump bunny in the case. She took out an enormous pair of scissors—I mean enormous: the blade was almost two feet long—and cut our rabbit up into pieces like a chicken. At my sister’s insistence, we brought the rabbit’s head home.

Clock of the Long Now
by Stewart Brand
Published 1 Jan 1999

The founding board is Daniel Hillis (co-chair), Stewart Brand (co-chair), Kevin Kelly, Douglas Carlston, Peter Schwartz, Brian Eno, Paul Saffo, Mitchell Kapor, and Esther Dyson. Hillis created Thinking Machines Inc. and its supercomputer, the Connection Machine, and is now a Fellow at Disney. Brand began the Whole Earth Catalog and co-founded Global Business Network. Kelly is executive editor of Wired magazine and author of Out of Control. Carlston co-founded Broderbund Software. Schwartz is chairman of Global Business Network and author of The Art of the Long View. Eno is a musician, music producer, and artist. Saffo is spokesman for Institute for the Future.

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See Library of Alexandria Ambient music America-Europe dialogue American Association of Retired People (AARP) Amorphous Technologies International Anderson, Laurie Arcadia Art Art of the Long View, The Asimov, Isaac Aurelian Axelrod, Robert Babbage, Charles Ball, Patrick Barnett, Steve Barry, Charles Bateson, Gregory Bellcore Benjamin, Walter Benson, Richard Beowulf Berlin, Isiah Bernal, Desmond Berners-Lee, Tim Besser, Howard Big Ben Big Here Billington, James Biological and Environmental Specimen Time Capsule 2001 Biotechnology Black hole Book burning Boorstin, Daniel Bosnian Manuscript Ingathering Project Boulding, Elise Brand, Stewart and ancient Egyptian woman and century-watch and Global Business Network and Long Now Foundation and tour of Big Ben and Whole Earth Catalog Bright Red Brin, David Brøderbund Software Brown, Jim Brown, Patricia Fortini Burning of books Caesar, Julius Cage, John Cajete, Gregory Canons, as instrument of civilization Carbon dioxide levels Carlston, Douglas and digital information preservation and endangered information and messages to the future Carse, James P.

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Thurow, Lester Time as asymmetrical frames of reference of kairos and chronos long and wide dimensions of value of Time capsules Time mail Tinju porcelain Tragic optimism Travels of Marco Polo, The Tree Triumphs of Big Ben, The Two-path strategy of digital information preservation 2000, year Universal translation system Universities and the long view and preservation of learning Utopian agendas Value and the future Velocity Venice and Antiquity Vinge, Vernor Virtual reality Visingsö Warshall, Peter Whole Earth Catalog Wide time Wildlands Project, The Winning Wired (magazine) Wolf, Dan Wooing of Earth, The World Economic Forum World Family Tree World Wide Web and the future and site for Long Now size of storage of See also Internet Year 2000 Yunju monastery stone tablets Zen Buddhism Zeno’s Paradox Zip disks and storage of information 1 C.E., meaning “of the common era,” is rightly considered preferable to A.D.

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era
by Gary Gerstle
Published 14 Oct 2022

Bernstein, ed., Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History (New York: Pantheon, 1968), 263–288; Martin Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916: The Market, the Law, and Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 67.On Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, see Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968; New York: Bantam Books, 1969). 68.Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog, 1st ed. (Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, 1968). 69.Anna Wiener, “The Complicated Legacy of Stewart Brand’s ‘Whole Earth Catalog,’ ” New Yorker, November 16, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/the-complicated-legacy-of-stewart-brands-whole-earth-catalog, accessed April 10, 2021; Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Catalogue, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 61–62; Margaret O’Mara, The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America (New York: Penguin Press, 2019).

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Stewart Brand, the man who invented the phrase “personal computer” and who is credited with helping generations of nerds and hackers to imagine the full potential—and freedom—of cyberspace, spent time in the 1960s alternating between two enthusiasms: first hanging out with Ken Kesey’s group of crazed “merry pranksters” and participating in the psychedelic parties Kesey was hosting at his home near the Stanford University campus; and second, publishing the Whole Earth Catalog, a paperback book of giant dimensions, each page packed with products and how-to information needed by individuals who were fleeing Moloch for communes where they could lead autarchic and self-sufficient lives.67 The Whole Earth Catalog eliminated the advertising, brand promotion, and mindless captions that filled the pages of just about every other catalogue and magazine in the United States at the time. It abandoned the “Madison Avenue sell” and reification of commodities that such hard selling entailed.

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On the first page of the first Whole Earth Catalog, Brand had written these words: “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.”68 Brand was then a man of the left; but Reagan, Goldwater, Hayek, and Friedman would have been hard-pressed to improve on Brand’s articulation of this dimension of the neoliberal creed. Steve Jobs would later salute Brand—the libertarian, one-time hippie—as a crucial influence on him and would celebrate the Whole Earth Catalog as “Google in paperback form, thirty-five years before Google came along.”69 The personal computer revolution was still incubating in the 1960s and would not begin breaking on American society with force until the late 1970s and early 1980s.

We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production
by Charles Leadbeater
Published 9 Dec 2010

Brand stood at the crossroads between bohemianism and new technology, the original digital communard. Brand’s most significant contribution was the creation in 1968 of the Whole Earth Catalog, a mixture of news, tools, reading suggestions and mail-order offers of everything from tantric art to cybernetics. The first rough-and-ready version of the Catalog sold 1,000 copies. By the time it closed three years later it had sold 1.5 million, and Brand won a National Book Award for his efforts. The last copy had 448 pages, listing 1,072 interesting items. The Whole Earth Catalog contained elements now recognisable in trendy Web 2.0-style businesses like eBay and Craigslist. Much of the content was submitted by readers, and those who were first to recommend something interesting got their names listed in the magazine.

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Brand went on to help create the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, an early Internet bulletin board, which in turn spawned the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which campaigns for freedom of speech online, and Wired magazine, the bible of the New Economy. More than any other magazine, Wired lionised technology entrepreneurs as the carriers of revolution. By 1971, however, the workload on the Whole Earth Catalog was taking its toll on Brand and he decided to close the magazine down with a Demise Party, held on 21 June at the Palace of Fine Arts in the centre of San Francisco. The entertainment included clowns, belly dancers, trampolinists and a band called Golden Toad who played Irish jigs and Tibetan temple music.

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Sharing ideas quickly became normal. As the community grew, researchers communicated their progress through the relentlessly practical Worm Breeder’s Gazette. (The Gazette was like a cross between Lean’s Engine Reporter, which organised innovation in the Cornish tin mines and Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, which listed useful technologies.) Brenner’s openness set off a virtuous cycle of knowledge-sharing, which was the only way to get the work done. He had identified a task so complex that no single laboratory could complete it. Knowledge about what a particular gene did was worthless unless it could be combined with information about other genes.

What Technology Wants
by Kevin Kelly
Published 14 Jul 2010

Even the chain saw, which can cleanly slice through knotty burls too tough for a hand ax, had instilled in me a reverence for the beauty and strength of wood no other agent in the world could. I became fascinated by the challenge of picking the few tools that might elevate my spirit. In 1980 I freelanced for a publication (the Whole Earth Catalog) that used its own readers to select and recommend appropriate tools picked out of the ocean of self-serving manufactured stuff. In the 1970s and ’80s, the Whole Earth Catalog was, in essence, a user-generated website before the web, before computers, employing only cheap newsprint. The audience were the authors. I was thrilled by the changes that simple, well-selected tools could provoke in people’s lives.

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At the age of 28, I started selling mail-order budget travel guides that published low-cost information on how to enter the technologically simple realms most of the planet lived in. My only two significant possessions at the time were a bike and sleeping bag, so I borrowed a friend’s computer (an early Apple II) to automate my fledgling moonlight business, and I got a cheap telephone modem to transmit my text to the printer. A fellow editor at the Whole Earth Catalog with an interest in computers slipped me a guest account that allowed me to remotely join an experimental teleconferencing system being run by a college professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. I soon found myself immersed in something altogether bigger and wilder: the frontier of an online community.

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Once I noticed how online computers stirred the muses and multiplied possibilities, I realized that other technologies, such as automobiles, chain saws, biochemistry, and yes, even television, did the same in slightly different ways. For me, this gave a very different face to technology. I was very active on early teleconference systems, and in 1984, based on my virtual online presence, I was hired by the Whole Earth Catalog to help edit the first consumer publication that reviewed personal computer software. (I believe I might have been the first person in the world hired online.) A few years later, I got involved in launching the first public gateway to the emerging internet, an online portal called the Well.

Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right
by Jennifer Burns
Published 18 Oct 2009

This distinction is made by Andrew Kirk, Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007). Whether this set of ideas transcends or represents yet another iteration of what Donald Worster called the dialectic of “arcadian” and “imperialist” ecology is an important question to explore. Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977/1994). 47. Stewart Brand, diary entries dated July 9, 1968 and August 16, 1968, Stewart Brand Papers, Stanford University Special Collections. 48. The Last Whole Earth Catalog (Menlo Park, CA: Portola Institute, 1971), 185.

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She focused relentlessly on what historians call conservation environmentalism, which emphasized the dangers of technology and was resolutely anti-growth. But another strain of environmental thought had discovered Rand’s celebration of human creativity and the power of markets. Pragmatic or countercultural environmentalism focused on invention and innovation, rather than regulation, as solutions to the environmental crisis. The survivalist Whole Earth Catalog, a hippy-techno-geek bible, was an important node of this movement. “We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” the catalogue announced, striking a vaguely libertarian note with its intention to support “a realm of intimate, personal power” and “the power of the individual.” Not surprisingly the catalogue’s founder, Stewart Brand, thought Rand was an exciting thinker.46 In 1968 Brand noted in his diary, “I’m reading Atlas Shrugged these days, again, on quite a different level—keeping some watch on myself, but mostly letting the notions run on.”

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For more than a month his journal made occasional references to Rand and showed unmistakable traces of her thought. He wrote after a discussion of Arthur Koestler’s views on abstract and emotional thought, “Don’t sever ‘em, connect ‘em up better. Then your abstract advances will be accompanied by emotional joy, and so forth. Which sounds Ayn Randish.”47 In the Last Whole Earth Catalog, a countercultural classic that sold more than a million copies and won a National Book Award, Brand offered a cryptic one-line review of Atlas Shrugged, “This preposterous novel has some unusual gold in it,” followed by a short excerpt. Brand’s ability to freely mingle Rand’s ideas with futuristic themes like moon colonization foreshadowed the emerging culture of cyberspace, which was strikingly libertarian from the beginning.48 Looking at another new movement of the 1970s, feminism, Rand was similarly critical.

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition
by Steven Levy
Published 18 May 2010

In reorganizing the Information Age around the individual, via personal computers, the hackers may well have saved the American economy . . . The quietest of all the ’60s sub-subcultures has emerged as the most innovative and powerful. --Stewart Brand Founder, Whole Earth Catalog In November 1984, on the damp, windswept headlands north of San Francisco, one hundred fifty canonical programmers and techno-ninjas gathered for the first Hacker Conference. Originally conceived by Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand, this event transformed an abandoned Army camp into temporary world headquarters for the Hacker Ethic. Not at all coincidentally, the event dovetailed with the publication of this book, and a good number of the characters in its pages turned up, in many cases to meet for the first time.

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He was involved with the influential Midpeninsula Free University, an embodiment of the area’s do-your-own-thing attitude, which drew people like Baba Ram Dass, Timothy Leary, and the former AI sage of MIT, Uncle John McCarthy. Albrecht was involved in starting the loosely run “computer education division” of the nonprofit foundation called the Portola Institute, which later spawned the Whole Earth Catalog. He met a teacher from Woodside High School on the peninsula, named LeRoy Finkel, who shared his enthusiasm about teaching kids computers; with Finkel he began a computer-book publishing company named Dymax, in honor of Buckminster Fuller’s trademarked word “dymaxion,” combining dynamism and maximum.

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On the cover of the first issue, dated October 1972, was a wavy drawing of a square-rigged boat sailing into the sunset—somehow symbolizing the golden age into which people were entering—and the following handwritten legend: COMPUTERS ARE MOSTLY USED AGAINST PEOPLE INSTEAD OF FOR PEOPLE USED TO CONTROL PEOPLE INSTEAD OF TO FREE THEM TIME TO CHANGE ALL THAT— WE NEED A . . . PEOPLE’S COMPUTER COMPANY The paper was laid out in similar style to the Whole Earth Catalog, only more impromptu, and sloppier. There could be four or five different type fonts on a page, and often messages were scribbled directly onto the boards, too urgent to wait for the typesetter. It was a perfect expression of Albrecht’s all-embracing, hurried style. Readers got the impression that there was hardly any time to waste in the mission of spreading computing to the people—and certainly no time to waste doing random tasks like straightening margins, or laying out stories neatly, or planning too far ahead.

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter
by David Sax
Published 8 Nov 2016

The most interesting project Kelly has produced in recent years is a giant book, measuring nearly 3 feet square, called Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities, which he gave me as a parting gift. One of the first jobs Kelly had was editing a publication called the Whole Earth Catalog, which featured reader reviews of products and essays that were geared to the first generation of proto-hippie-hackers, back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Think geodesic domes, experimental solar panels, and screeds against corporate America. Later, the Whole Earth Catalog expanded to include computers and software, but the rise of review-based e-commerce sites, such as Amazon, rendered the Whole Earth Catalog somewhat pointless, and it ceased publication. Kelly kept it alive with a blog called Cool Tools, which published a single review of a different tool every day, in the spirit of the Whole Earth Catalog.

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Kelly kept it alive with a blog called Cool Tools, which published a single review of a different tool every day, in the spirit of the Whole Earth Catalog. Kelly continued updating Cool Tools online, but kept feeling there was this gap, the final 5 percent of the experience, that online simply couldn’t achieve. “Twenty years later, I’d find myself late at night looking through some of those old catalogs, and be amazed that even with much of that info out of date, it was incredibly transfixing,” Kelly said. “Something was going on in this out-of-date, moribund information that could mesmerize me and tell me something for hours on end.

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See Internet/web webcams, 83 websites, 33, 60, 88, 109, 111, 112, 113, 132, 188, 199 Welch, Gillian, 24 Welcome to 1979, 24–25 West, Kanye, 26 What Technology Wants (Kelly), 226 WhatsApp, 171, 217 Wheaton, Wil, 91 White, Jack, 5, 21–22, 22–23, 24, 172 White Stripes, 15, 21 whiteboards, 190–191, 213, 222 Whole Earth Catalog (magazine/catalog), 228 Whole Foods, xv, 127, 171 WHSmith, 127 Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping (Underhill), 131 Wilco, 15 Williams, Evan, 208 Windows 95, 65 Wired (magazine), 19, 37, 89, 208, 226 Wolf, Karen, 175, 176 Wolff, Michael, 110 Wolfson, Jane, 108 Wonder Forge Games, 84 Woodward, Ian, 10 WORD, 140, 148 Words With Friends (game), 77 work, nature of, 164 See also digital work; jobs; manual work World Is Flat, The (Friedman), 154 World of Warcraft (game), 80, 82 Wrap (magazine), 106 Wu-Tang Clan, 3 Xerox printer, 223 X-Files (game), 91 Yahoo!

Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond
by Tamara Kneese
Published 14 Aug 2023

The late 1960s and 1970s saw the establishment of “trendcasting” as a field and “futurist” as a job category.43 Although IFTF is officially a nonprofit organization, it partners with major corporations and wealthy clients to make predictions about the future of technology to help guide investments.44 IFTF shares some infrastructural and spiritual affinities with the Long Now Foundation. Based in San Francisco and founded by Stewart Brand and the computer scientist Danny Hillis in 1996, the foundation emerged from Brand’s 1960s hippie technologist Whole Earth Catalog. The experimental musician Brian Eno coined the phrase “the long now” as a way of unsettling startup culture’s accelerationism, expanding and slowing down the pace of technological production. Similar to the Whole Earth Catalog, the Long Now unites back-to-the-land communalism and libertarian-tinged techno-utopianism. Members intend to foster long-term thinking and responsibility, providing an alternative to the short attention spans of social media feeds.

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The Stanford Research Institute became SRI International after its 1970 split from Stanford University, and it is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. 2. Co-founded by Larry Brilliant and Stewart Brand in 1985, the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link is one of the oldest virtual communities. The name is based on Brand’s countercultural magazine, the Whole Earth Catalog. The WELL is still alive and well today; such prominent technologists as Ellen Ullman still use their WELL email addresses. 3. Hastreiter, @heaven, x. 4. Hastreiter, @heaven. 5. McNeil, Lurking. Journalist Joanne McNeil describes lurking as a positive activity tied to the early web, which was more open to fluid identities than are the corporate platforms of today. 6.

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Department of Labor, (i) USA Today (newspaper), (i) “The Veldt” (Bradbury), (i)n38 venture capitalists (VCs), (i), (ii), (iii) Virginia Tech shootings (2007), (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) virtual badges, (i) virtual cemeteries, (i) The Virtual Community (Rheingold), (i) Vivint Smart Home (Provo, Utah), (i) Wall Street Journal (newspaper), (i) Washington Post (newspaper), (i) Wayback Machine (Internet Archive), (i), (ii), (iii) Weapons of Math Destruction (O’Neil), (i) Weatherby, Leif, (i)n58 WebCease, (i) websites. See memorial websites Web 2.0, (i), (ii) Weizenbaum, Joseph, (i) The Well (Hafner), (i) WELL (Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, virtual community), (i), (ii) Wernimont, Jacqueline, (i)n13, (ii)n49 West, Jessamyn, (i) West, Kanye, (i) West, Tom, (i), (ii) Whole Earth Catalog (magazine), (i), (ii)n2. See also WELL (Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, virtual community) Wiener, Anna, (i) Wired (magazine), (i), (ii), (iii) women: care work and, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv); digital death care practices and, (i), (ii); digital estate planning and, (i), (ii); Mormon transhumanism and, (i); smart technologies and, (i), (ii), (iii) Women and Performance (journal), (i) Woods, Juno, (i), (ii) xkcd (webcomic), (i) Yip, Megan, (i), (ii), (iii) Yip-Williams, Julie, (i) Your Digital Afterlife (Carroll and Romano), (i) Your Digital Estate (Yip and Idlewild), (i) Your Life Uploaded (Bell and Gemmell), (i) Zachary, Gregg, (i) Zelizer, Viviana, (i), (ii) Zimmerman, Eilene, (i) Zuckerberg, Mark, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv)

Intertwingled: The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson (History of Computing)
by Douglas R. Dechow
Published 2 Jul 2015

All of this was happening at that time: Seymour Papert with his Logo programming language and Turtle graphics; Simula; and some of our own stuff as well, such as the Arpanet, the Flex Machine and its first object-oriented operating system, the idea of Dynabook, and much, much more. It was an exciting time. The Whole Earth Catalog and its folks were nearby in Menlo Park thinking big thoughts about universal access to tools. Not just physical, but especially mental. This was the first book in the PARC library, and it had a big influence on how we thought things should be. We loved the idea of lots of different tools being available with explanations and comments, and we could see that it would be just wonderful if such media could be brought to life as one found and made it.

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PS: Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib/Dream Machines had two front covers, no back cover. One front cover was for Computer Lib, which dealt with computer politics and tech. Flip the book over, start reading from the other cover and you have Dream Machines, dealing with the visionary use of computers. Stylistically Computer Lib/Dream Machines was modeled on Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, interspersed with hip illustrations, weaving odd stories and quotations into the text. The book was not meant to be read in a linear fashion. For 1974, it was completely revolutionary. LS: The forms Ted’s early books took showed the essence of the problem. We simply don’t think in sequential streams.

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Ted Nelson: A Critical (and Critically Incomplete) Bibliography Henry Lowood1 (1)Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, CA, USA Henry Lowood Email: lowood@stanford.edu 16.1 Introduction Devoting time to serious bibliographical matters as a tribute to Ted Nelson may seem like a quaintly out-of-tune and bookish, if not totally misguided project. It is easy to pigeon-hole Ted’s work as belonging to a generation of adventurous and creative writers and editors active during the 1960s who began to find that traditional print media constrained the expression of their ideas. Marshall McLuhan and the Whole Earth Catalog come to mind. Indeed, Literary Machines opens with the declaration that it is “a hypertext, or nonsequential piece of writing.” Each reader of this book has confronted the difficulties imposed by non-linear writing on the linear medium of print. And yet, there is no way around the fact that most of Ted’s work has been published on paper.

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next
by Andrew McAfee
Published 30 Sep 2019

Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox. To my mother, Nancy, who showed her children the world and taught them to love it We are as gods and might as well get good at it. —Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog, 1968 INTRODUCTION README Listen! I will be honest with you, I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes —Walt Whitman, “Song of the Open Road,” 1856 We have finally learned how to tread more lightly on our planet. It’s about time. For just about all of human history our prosperity has been tightly coupled to our ability to take resources from the earth.

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In 1968 he christened a Dodge truck the Whole Earth Truck Store and took it on a “commune road trip” to educate back-to-the-landers about the best tools and techniques for sowing a field, drilling a well, and other important tasks. He also began producing a catalog, an early issue of which had Earthrise on its cover. The Whole Earth Catalog quickly became a huge hit. Some issues were more than an inch thick, and in 1971 it won a National Book Award in the Contemporary Affairs category. The Foxfire books were a similar sensation. They began as a project in a Georgia high school in which students interviewed their older neighbors and relatives about rural Appalachian traditions and crafts.

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On energy Mike Shellenberger and Ramez Naam helped me be much less incorrect than I would have been otherwise; Allan Adams provided the same service around global warming. Alexander Rose and Andrew Warner listened to the bets I wanted to make about humanity’s future planetary footprint, and agreed to host them on the Long Bets site, which is part of the Long Now Foundation. Long Now was cofounded by Stewart Brand, whose Whole Earth Catalog I devoured when it was reproduced as a coffee-table book sometime around 1980. Some of it clearly stuck with me. Like so many others, I’m grateful to Stewart for helping us think different. My agent, consigliere, and friend, Rafe Sagalyn, not only helped me think through the book at every stage but also arranged for Scribner to publish it.

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism
by John Elkington
Published 6 Apr 2020

And since Gaia depends on organic life, we can hope to be partners in the planet management project. Having worked on a book called The Gaia Atlas of Planet Management back in the 1980s, I have long been interested in this theme. It probably tracks back to the various editions of The Whole Earth Catalog, which I read assiduously between 1968 and 1972.44 Imagine my joy, then, to find myself sitting next to Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand at the Lovelock centennial event, and across the table from his wife Ryan Phelan, who runs an organization called Revive & Restore.45 I learned that her team had been using the triple bottom line to evaluate their work on saving the horseshoe crab from exploitation by the pharmaceutical industry.

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See also: https://www.greenbiz.com/article/can-sustainable-companies-get-lower-cost-capital. 37.https://www.wbcsd.org/Overview/About-us/Vision2050 38.Julian Hill-Landolt, personal communication, June 17, 2019. 39.I had first read his writing in New Scientist in 1975 when I was also writing for the magazine. 40.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_capture_detector 41.Based on the sort of timings laid out in The Human Planet. 42.James Lovelock, Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence. London: Penguin Random House, 2019. See also: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/313/313880/novacene/9780241399361.html. 43.Tom Knowles, “AI solves Rubik’s Cube Quicker Than You Can Click Your Fingers,” The Times, July 18, 2019. 44.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Catalog 45.https://reviverestore.org 46.https://reviverestore.org/horseshoe-crab/ 47.Ryan Phelan, personal communication, July 31, 2019. 48.https://www.hakaimagazine.com/news/synthetic-crab-blood-is-good-for-the-birds/ 49.https://reviverestore.org/projects/woolly-mammoth/ 50.John Thornhill, “The Return of the Luddites,” Financial Times, July 13-14, 2019. 51.John Elkington, “Saving the Planet from Ecological Disaster Is a $12 Trillion Opportunity,” Harvard Business Review, May 4, 2017.

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See also Black Swans; Gray Swans; Green Swans defined, 3, 11 disruptive technologies, 175–182 Gartner Hype Cycle, 173–175 Green versus Black Swans, 182–186, 188 Midgley syndrome, 171–173 overview, 166–167 unintended consequences, 167–171 Umicore, 215 UN Environment Inquiry into a Sustainable Finance System, 243–244 UN Global Compact, 34–36 UN Sustainable Development Goals, 19, 56–57, 148, 232–233 Unburnable Carbon (Campanale), 243 Underwood, Barbara, 67 Unearthed, 146 United States exponential leaders in, 237–240 and “gradually, then suddenly” transitions, 79 Green New Deal, 204 space junk contributed by, 114 Superfund legislation, 136 unmanned aircraft, 178–179 The Unnamable Present (Calasso), 192–193 “Unthinking Modernity” (Klee), 109 Upheaval (Diamond), 195 urban greening, 255 urban mobility, 178 urbanization, 210 US Forest Service, 254–255 US Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), 182–184, 185 V Vale, 69–70 valuation, market, 206 value, 47, 58–61, 149, 149f Venezuela, 7–8 Vestager, Margrethe, 236 Victor private jet company, 245–246 Vision 2050 project, WBCSD, 229–230 Volans, 25–27, 34–36, 147, 223, 234 Volkswagen (VW), 129–130, 214 W Waksman, Selman, 103 Walker, Robert J., 22 Wartzman, Rick, 14 waste exports/imports, 134 wasting assets, 72 water, bottled, microplastics in, 96 Waygood, Steve, 205–207, 210 WCKD ticker symbol, 91 Webber, Melvin M., 81 Weeden, Brian, 111 West, Geoffrey, 239 Western diet, 98–102 White Swans, 22 The Whole Earth Catalog (magazine), 231 wicked problems Anthropocene epoch, 86–89 antibiotics, 102–108 calories, 98–102 carbon economy, 108–111 characteristics of, 81–84 defined, 80–81, 91 “gradually, then suddenly” transitions, 78–80 overview, 76–78 plastics, 92–97 space junk, 111–116 super wicked problems, 84–86 tracking in financial markets, 90–91 Wikipedia, 6 Wilde, Oscar, 58 Winners Take All (Giridharadas), 13 Wired (magazine), 114–115, 169, 180–181 wireless industry, 125–126 Wolf, Martin, 49–50 woolly mammoth, restoration of, 232 World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), 229–230 World Economic Forum (WEF), 175–176, 177, 178, 179, 181, 182 World Health Organization (WHO), 100, 105, 106 world of abundance, and technology, 37, 170 World Trade Organization, 119 World War II, 204 World Wildlife Fund (WWF), 200–201, 224 worldviews, differing, 190–193 X X facility, Google, 35–36, 83, 240 XPRIZE Foundation, 35–36, 83 XR (Extinction Rebellion), 189, 225–226 Y YITU Technology, 168 Yu, Kongjian, 136 Z Zeitz, Jochen, 54 Zhexembayeva, Nadya, 198–199, 247 ZIF-8 molecule, 244 Zuckerberg, Mark, 53, 130

Piracy : The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates
by Adrian Johns
Published 5 Jan 2010

It occurred at a range of extramural and sometimes transient social settings, including various homes, Kepler’s bookstore (a place reminiscent of the bookshops and coffeehouses of Restoration London), and a Free University that offered courses on “How to End the IBM Monopoly.” In print, there was of course Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, a guide to “tools” useful for readers impatient with the conformities of American consumerism. Launched in 1969, the catalogue touched on an extraordinary range of topics, from cybernetics and communication theories to agriculture and medicine, with an eclectic individualism purportedly inspired by Buckminster Fuller.

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Its influence was demonstrated by the People’s Computer Company, a project overseen by Brand and Robert Albrecht (whom Ted Nelson hailed as the “caliph of counterculture computerdom”). The PCC was both a publication and an institution. As a publication, it was produced on the same printing equipment as the Whole Earth Catalog, using similar pagecraft to proselytize for a cognate message. It even reprinted Catalog material verbatim. As an institution, it developed from an older project, “Community Memory,” that had deployed public terminals linked to a mainframe, the hope being that they would become both communications devices – pathways by which citizens could establish links with each other – and portals to information.

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Dobb’s Journal of Tiny BASIC Calisthenics and Orthodontia, launched as a vehicle for “the design, development, and distribution of free and lowcost software for the home computer.” Like the PCC itself, it was the manifestation in public of a community defined by its sharing of information and code. Meanwhile, Brand had begun to find the demands of running the Whole Earth Catalog wearisome. He decided to end it, and to do so with a bang. He threw a “demise party” for 1,500 guests at the Exploratorium. The event became one of the most storied moments in countercultural and computer history alike. At the height of the party, Brand, cloaked in a black cassock, announced that $20,000 remained in the kitty and invited the attendees to come up with a way to spend the money.

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us
by Will Storr
Published 14 Jun 2017

Much of the spirit of Engelbart’s wider vision would be carried into the future by the man who was not only an invited speaker, along with Vasco, at Esalen’s bad-tempered ‘Spiritual Tyranny’ conference, but who acted as consultant and cameraman for the 1968 demo. To Engelbart’s technology, Stewart Brand would add the humanist-neoliberal ideology that still drives our computer culture today. The month following the demo saw the first proper publication of Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, whose headquarters was blocks from Engelbart’s lab. Open the cover of this esoteric bazaar of products and philosophies and you’d see its mission statement. Declaring ‘we are as gods and might as well get good at it’, it hailed a future in which ‘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.’

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Declaring ‘we are as gods and might as well get good at it’, it hailed a future in which ‘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.’ Brand’s biographer, Stanford University’s Professor Fred Turner, would archly note that the Catalog presented a way of changing the world through buying things, an ‘idea which has stuck around’. In 2005 Steve Jobs called the Whole Earth Catalog ‘one of the bibles of my generation . . . sort of like Google in paperback form’. The instruction on the final page of its final issue, ‘Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish’, would be a mantra that guided his life and career. Brand and his cohorts are often depicted as kind of techno-hippies. But what’s not often noted is that their utopian vision of a world without hierarchy, in which the old, centralized, authoritarian orders would be washed away, leaving all the individuals free to manage their lives as they wished, was strikingly similar to Friedrich Hayek’s own vision of neoliberalism, in which the old centralized, coercive state would be crushed to its minimum, leaving all the individuals free to manage their lives as they wished.

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He lionized the entrepreneur, the individualist self-starter, and had an authentic neoliberal’s distaste for altruistic government, later writing, ‘That whole victim mindset – saying to the government you’re supposed to fix my problem – is a total anathema to Whole Earth.’ But as much as Brand himself, it was the network of like-minded influencers he drew around him that would have a defining effect on the digital culture of today. From the Whole Earth Catalog sprouted a range of other magazine titles and a new form of community that gathered ‘online’, connected by computers and modems, that he called Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link. In 1987, Brand co-founded the Global Business Network, a consultancy made up of ‘remarkable people’ including Doug Engelbart and Esalen co-founder Michael Murphy.

Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Writing Science)
by Thierry Bardini
Published 1 Dec 2000

(Engelbart 1996) Back in our lab, we dismantled a number of the display units in our display sys- tem, so that we could use the cameras in San Francisco and SRI. We borrowed a few tripods and got some extra people to be camera people. One of our friends, Stewart Brand, who was at that time workIng on his first Whole Earth Catalog, helped as well. So it was really a group project; there were about 17 of us. SRI and the oN-LIne System 141 On my console on the stage, there was a camera mounted that caught my face. Another camera, mounted overhead, looked down on the workstatIon controls. In the back of the room, Bill English controlled use of these two video signals as well as the two video sIgnals coming up from SRI that could brIng eIther camera or computer video.

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(Kay I993) Tesler also was involved in the publishing business at two levels. The first of these was his involvement, prior to going to PARC, with Jim Warren and the Free University Newsletter. As Warren recalls: This was in the late I960'S, maybe the early 1970'S. People's Computer Center was in one store front, around the corner was Whole Earth Catalog Order and Truck Farm. . . run by Stewart and Lois Brand. Another half block over was the Mid-Peninsula Free University Store. I was the general secretary of the Mid- Peninsula Free University. A guy named Larry Tesler. . . was the treasurer of the Free University. . . . We worked with each other in the Free U., on these newslet- ters, very frustrating, because it was a proportional-spacing typewriter, It wasn't programmable, you had very limited control.

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The personal computer is in part the product of what in Europe was called "the generation of '68," and of its culture as it developed in the San Francisco Bay Area, from the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and antiwar ag- itation on through the San Francisco Summer of Love and the rise of the Hu- man Potential movement. There was a whole 1960's thing. . . the Free University was in Palo Alto (laughs). There was a lot of stuff going on . . . psychodrama, est was going on, Esalen, down in Big Sur, the Whole Earth Catalog was right across the street at that time to SRI. . . . You know, I am from the East Coast and I found It too confining. Cali- fornia was wide open, particularly during this time: anything went. Of course a lot of people floundered. . . . I think that it helped a lot that there was sort of the perfect clImate to put an engineering cast into, because they were just naturally looser. . . .

Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
by Jane McGonigal
Published 20 Jan 2011

The Values in Action (VIA) Institute, October 23, 2008. http://www.viacharacter.org/Classification/tabid/56/Default.aspx. 11 Tapscott, Don, and Anthony D. Williams. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (New York: Portfolio, 2008), 33. 12 Ibid., x. CHAPTER 14 1 Brand, Stewart. Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto (New York: Viking, 2009), 275, 298. 2 Brand, Stewart. “The Purpose of the Whole Earth Catalog.” Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1968. Electronic version available at http://wholeearth.com/issue/1010/article/195/we.are.as.gods. 3 Brand, Whole Earth Discipline, 276. 4 Ibid., 298. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 276. 7 “Jill Tarter and Will Wright in Conversation.” Seed, September 2, 2008. http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/seed_salon_jill_tarter_will_wright/. 8 “Spore.”

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And now we must learn better ways of remaking it, this time with intention, discipline, and purpose. As Steward Brand, author of Whole Earth Discipline, puts it, “Humanity is now stuck with a planet stewardship role.... We are as gods and have to get good at it.”1 Brand is perhaps best known as the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, a countercultural catalog of “tools and ideas to shape the environment” published from 1968 to 1972. (When he launched that catalog, he wrote, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”)2 In 1996 he cofounded the Long Now Foundation, a San Francisco-based foundation dedicated to long-term thinking and responsibility—for the earth, and for the survival of the human species—over the next ten thousand years and beyond.

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But alongside the more than five hundred other superstructures that players created, they effectively prove a new reality: that problem solving at extreme scales can involve ordinary people; that all scales of human organization can combine and recombine in startling ways; that continuous reinvention is not only possible, it’s an evolutionary imperative for the next decade. WE RAN SUPERSTRUCT as a live forecasting experiment for six weeks. So what were the final results? After the game, our players inventoried and organized their efforts into a catalog of solutions called the Whole Superstructure Catalog (a play on Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog), which you can view online, at Superstruct. wikia.com. In addition to their catalog of 550 superstructures, our players created more than a thousand vivid first-person accounts of the superthreats, told in videos and photos, blogs and Twitter updates, Facebook messages and podcasts. This world lives online as a resource for other forecasters, policy makers, educators, and interested individuals to explore and analyze.

The Techno-Human Condition
by Braden R. Allenby and Daniel R. Sarewitz
Published 15 Feb 2011

The background to much discussion of transhumanism is a world in which human activity increasingly affects global systems, including the climate and the hydrological, carbon, and nitrogen cycles of the anthropogenic Earth. l l And yet we know it not. We are strangers in our own strange land, homeless because we have been turfed out by our very successes. As Stewart Brand put it in his first Whole Earth Catalog (1968), "We are as gods and might as well get good at it." So far, we fail that test, and we do so for reasons that the philosopher Martin Heidegger stated succinctly: So long as we do not, through thinking, experience what is, we can never belong to what will be .... The flight into tradition, out of a combination of humility and presumption, can bring about nothing in itself other than self deception and blindness in relation to the historical moment. 12 We are as gods.

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False Economy: A Surprising Economic History of the World. Riverhead Books. Berkes, F., and C. Folke, eds. 1998. Linking Social and Ecological Systems: Management Practices and Social Mechanisms for Building Resilience. Cambridge University Press. Boot, M. 2006. War Made New. Gotham Books. Brand, S. 1968. Whole Earth Catalog. Portola Institute. Brown, P. 1987. Microparasites and macroparasites. Cultural Anthropology 2 (1): 155-171. Callaway, E. 2009. Brain scanners can tell you what you're thinking about. New Scientist 2732. Available at www.newscientist.com. Clark, A. 2003. Natural-Born Cyborgs. Oxford University Press. 212 Bibliography Clark, R.

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-P., 189 Science, as belief system, 110, 206 Schizophrenia, 16 Schlieffen Plan, 76 Second Coming, 78 Second Life, 81 Shakespeare, W., 16 "Shock and awe," 76,127,135 Shop-floor activities, 51, 63, 65 Silicon Valley, 135 Simon, H., 120 Singer, P., 141 Smallpox, 16,31,47,70 Smith, A., 97 Soviet Union, 114 Space-time compression, 74 Spice Islands, 129 Stalinism, 31 Stem cells, 3 Steppe warriors, 129 Stirrups, 84 Stock, G., 19 Struldbruggs, 83 Swedish Ministry of Sustainable Development, 122 Synthetic biology, 68ff Synthetic reality, 82 222 Index Taylorism, 79 Techno-dystopianism, 160 Technological Society, The, 44 Technological sublime, 198 Technology as cultural competitive advantage,84 as earth-system state, 84 and geopolitical dominance, 27 Technology clusters, 79££ Techno-optimism, 7 Techno-utopianism, 160 Telegraph technology, 72 Telepathic control, of avatars, 82 Terraforming,10 Terrorism, 125 "Think globally, act locally," 105,110 Time, measured differently, 72 Tour de France, 3, 4 Toxic chemicals, in manufacturing, 51 Transhumanism, defined, 5, 6 Treaties of Westphalia, 13 7 Trojan horse, 127 Twitter, 81, 144, 148 Umesao, T., 168 Uncertainty about future, 88££ United Kingdom, 144 United Nations, 112, 164 United States, 139, 183 and brands, 134 and climate change, 113 and geopolitical dominance, 27 and higher education, 134 and venture capital, 134 Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), 139, 141, 151 Vaccines, 40ff, 46, 49ff, 60, 63, 98,107,174 Values, conflict of, 88££ Van der Leeuw, S., 9 Venter, C., 68 Vietnam, 131 Vietnam war, 136, 139 Vishnu, 10,78,119 Visvanathan, S., 66 War, laws of, 152 War Made New, 130 "War on drugs," 125 "War porn," 155 Watches, 34 Webber, M., 109 Webster, D., 74 Whitman, W, 74, 77 Whole Earth Catalog, 10 Wilson, E. 0., 122 Winner, L., 44, 45 Wired for War, 141 Wolfpack sensor system, 143 Woodhouse, N., 56 World Charter for Nature, 181 World Economic Forum, 49 World Health Organization, 48 World Trade Organization, 135 World Transhumanist Association, 5 World War I, 76,127,151 World War II, 127, 131 Xe,141 

The Hacker Crackdown
by Bruce Sterling
Published 15 Mar 1992

Point Foundation's cultural efforts, like those of their fellow Bay Area Californians the Grateful Dead, were multifaceted and multitudinous. Rigid ideological consistency had never been a strong suit of the Whole Earth Catalog. This Point publication had enjoyed a strong vogue during the late 60s and early 70s, when it offered hundreds of practical (and not so practical) tips on communitarian living, environmentalism, and getting back-to-the-land. The Whole Earth Catalog, and its sequels, sold two and half million copies and won a National Book Award. With the slow collapse of American radical dissent, the Whole Earth Catalog had slipped to a more modest corner of the cultural radar; but in its magazine incarnation, CoEvolution Quarterly, the Point Foundation continued to offer a magpie potpourri of "access to tools and ideas."

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As it happened, Kapor had already met Barlow, who had interviewed Kapor for a California computer journal. Like most people who met Barlow, Kapor had been very taken with him. Now Kapor took it upon himself to drop in on Barlow for a heart-to-heart talk about the situation. Kapor was a regular on the Well. Kapor had been a devotee of the Whole Earth Catalog since the beginning, and treasured a complete run of the magazine. And Kapor not only had a modem, but a private jet. In pursuit of the scattered high-tech investments of Kapor Enterprises Inc., his personal, multi-million dollar holding company, Kapor commonly crossed state lines with about as much thought as one might give to faxing a letter.

One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility
by Zack Furness and Zachary Mooradian Furness
Published 28 Mar 2010

Urban planners were also idealistic and looking to create humane environments; Barry Benepe and Brian Ketcham were two of them, and two of our founders influenced by Jane Jacobs (David Gurin was also influenced by Jane). Health, being more at one with nature, and using our own resources were three ideals of the time, influenced by the Whole Earth Catalog. it was a time of be-ins, love-ins, smoke-ins . . . so it was natural to plan a huge Bike-in—one that would bring all groups together around a common dream.103 What is interesting about these early years of bike activism is that despite its cultural emphasis, there was also a firmly entrenched commitment to transforming bicycling and automobility through formal political channels, whether it be lobbying, hosting community events, meeting with politicians and urban planners, circulating petitions, and/or getting involved with local (and regional) governmental affairs.

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Health, being more at one with nature, and using our own resources were three ideals of the time, influenced by the Whole Earth Catalog. it was a time of be-ins, love-ins, smoke-ins . . . so it was natural to plan a huge Bike-in—one that would bring all groups together around a common dream.103 What is interesting about these early years of bike activism is that despite its cultural emphasis, there was also a firmly entrenched commitment to transforming bicycling and automobility through formal political channels, whether it be lobbying, hosting community events, meeting with politicians and urban planners, circulating petitions, and/or getting involved with local (and regional) governmental affairs. One of the prominent critiques of both the counterculture and appropriate technologists—who especially mingled in the pages of the Whole Earth Catalog as well as the back-to-the-land movement—is that they either advocated an individualist, escapist paradigm (“tune in, turn on, drop out”) or tried to naïvely solve complex social/political problems by simply “living differently” or by using different tools.104 Bike advocacy in the 1970s reveals the limitations and inaccuracy of this critique because cyclists were directly engaged with urban problems that are fundamentally social and political in their scope. rather than arguing for cyclists to just do their own thing, groups like Transportation alternatives, le Monde à Bicyclette, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition (founded in 1970), the East Bay Bicycle Coalition, the Bicycle Coalition of Greater philadelphia, and the Washington area Bicyclist association (all founded in 1972), specifically worked to transform the urban milieu by addressing both the pragmatic needs of cyclists (and potential cyclists) as well as the overarching problems posed by poor urban planning and environmental pollution. like Jane Jacobs, many saw unregulated automobility as a problem requiring a positive orientation and a realistic set of goals: attrition [of automobiles], too, must operate in positive terms, as a means of supplying positive, easily understood and desired improvements, appealing to various specific and tangible city interests.

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Critiques of the aT movement and other proponents of “alternative technology” are most explicit in Jennifer Daryl Slack, Communication Technologies and Society (norwood, nJ: ablex publishing Corporation, 1984), 30–39, and langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1986), 61–84. For contrasting perspectives on aT, see andrew Kirk, “appropriating Technology: The Whole Earth Catalog and Counterculture Environmental politics,” Environmental History 7, no. 4 (2001): 374–394; Kleiman, “The appropriate Technology Movement in american political Culture,” esp. 296–400 (on the political economy of aT). Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 370. Emphasis is my own.

Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare
by Thomas Rid

The Fifth Estate was a volunteer organization, with new headquarters established at 2000 P Street NW, just off Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. The Fifth Estate grew out of late-1960s counterculture, and was especially inspired and modeled on the Whole Earth Catalog, then a cult publication. Produced in the San Francisco Bay Area by Stewart Brand, an iconic, technology-embracing hippie maven, the Whole Earth Catalog was an early techno-utopian vision of back-to-the-land living that embraced cybernetic feedback loops, community, wholeness, flattened hierarchies, and the motto “access to tools.” Brand’s catalog would become a prototypical social media platform (and later became the first actual social media platform when it was taken online, in 1984, as the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, or WELL).

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They aimed to build their new movement around “campus and community based action/research groups.”18 Counterspy’s first issue, for example, included a questionnaire for readers to fill out, asking potential contributors to list the intelligence agencies they worked for. The CIA assumed this was an attempt to secure sources.19 The Fifth Estate, like the Whole Earth Catalog, advocated for greater citizen access to advanced technology. Technology, they argued, must enlighten humanity, not hasten a descent into what they dubbed technofascism. Their lofty goal, guided by science fiction, was to “restrain further development of technofascism—the societal form described by George Orwell in his prophetic novel 1984.”

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The first editorial, published in the summer of 1978, expressed confidence that there was enough subscriber demand “to make this publication a permanent weapon in the fight against the CIA, the FBI, military intelligence, and all the other instruments of U.S. imperialist oppression throughout the world.”1 The editors encouraged readers to submit leads, tips, suggestions, and guest articles. It was another attempt at a Whole Earth Catalog of counterintelligence activism, predating the internet yet already beginning to act like a community engagement platform and outlet for user-generated content and anonymous leaks. In its opening editorial, the new magazine vouched to go after the CIA especially: “we will never stop exposing CIA personnel and operations whenever and wherever we find them.”

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You
by Eli Pariser
Published 11 May 2011

Type in a few lines, or a few thousand, strike a key, and something seems to come to life on your screen—a new space unfolds, a new engine roars. If you’re clever enough, you can make and manipulate anything you can imagine. “We are as Gods,” wrote futurist Stewart Brand on the cover of his Whole Earth Catalog in 1968, “and we might as well get good at it.” Brand’s catalog, which sprang out of the back-to-the-land movement, was a favorite among California’s emerging class of programmers and computer enthusiasts. In Brand’s view, tools and technologies turned people, normally at the mercy of their environments, into gods in control of them.

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Harris, “Facebook’s Advertising Fluke,” TechRepublican, Dec. 21, 2010, accessed Feb. 9, 2011, http://techrepublican.com/free-tagging/vincent-harris. 155 have the ads pulled off the air: Monica Scott, “Three TV Stations Pull ‘Demonstrably False’ Ad Attacking Pete Hoekstra,” Grand Rapids Press, May 28, 2010, accessed Dec. 17, 2010, www.mlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2010/05/three_tv_stations_pull_demonst.html. 157 “improve the likelihood that a registered Republican”: Bill Bishop, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), 195. 157 “likely to be most salient in the politics”: Ronald Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 10. 159 Pabst began to sponsor hipster events: Neal Stewart, “Marketing with a Whisper,” Fast Company, Jan. 11, 2003, accessed Jan. 30, 2011, www.fastcompany.com/fast50_04/winners/stewart.html. 159 “$44 in US currency”: Max Read, “Pabst Blue Ribbon Will Run You $44 a Bottle in China,” Gawker, July 21, 2010, accessed Feb. 9, 2011, http://m.gawker.com/5592399/pabst-blue-ribbon-will-run-you-44-a-bottle-in-china. 160 “I serve as a blank screen”: Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York: Crown, 2006), 11. 161 “We lose all perspective”: Ted Nordhaus, phone interview with author, Aug. 31, 2010. 162 “the source is basically in thought”: David Bohm, Thought as a System (New York: Routledge, 1994) 2. 163 “participants in a pool of common meaning”: David Bohm, On Dialogue (New York: Routledge, 1996), x–xi. 164 “define and express its interests”: John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Athens, OH: Swallow Press, 1927), 146. Chapter Six: Hello, World! 165 “no intelligence or skill in navigation”: Plato, First Alcibiades, in The Dialogues of Plato, vol. 4, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1871), 559. 166 “We are as Gods”: Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog (self-published, 1968), accessed Dec. 16, 2010, http://wholeearth.com/issue/1010/article/195/we.are.as.gods. 167 “make any man (or woman) a god”: Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2001), 451. 167 “having some troubles with my family”: “How Eliza Works,” accessed Dec. 16, 2010, http://chayden.net/eliza/instructions.txt. 168 “way of acting without consequence”: Siva Vaidyanathan, phone interview with author, Aug. 9, 2010. 168 “not a very good program”: Douglas Rushkoff, interview with author, New York, NY, Aug. 25, 2010. 168 “politics tends to be seen by programmers”: Gabriella Coleman, “The Political Agnosticism of Free and Open Source Software and the Inadvertent Politics of Contrast,” Anthropological Quarterly, 77, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 507–19, Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost. 170 “addictive control as well”: Levy, Hackers, 73. 172 “Howdy” is a better opener than “Hi”: Christian Rudder, “Exactly What to Say in a First Message,” Sept. 14, 2009, accessed Dec. 16, 2010, http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/online-dating-advice-exactly-what-to-say-in-a-first-message. 173 “hackers don’t tend to know any of that”: Steven Levy, “The Unabomber and David Gelernter,” New York Times, May 21, 1995, accessed Dec. 16, 2010, www.unabombers.com/News/95-11-21-NYT.htm. 174 “engineering relationships among people”: Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”

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Walker social capital social graph Social Graph Symposium Social Network, The Solove, Daniel solution horizon Startup School Steitz, Mark stereotyping Stewart, Neal Stryker, Charlie Sullivan, Danny Sunstein, Cass systematization Taleb, Nassim Nicholas Tapestry TargusInfo Taylor, Bret technodeterminism technology television advertising on mean world syndrome and Tetlock, Philip Thiel, Peter This American Life Thompson, Clive Time Tocqueville, Alexis de Torvalds, Linus town hall meetings traffic transparency Trotsky, Leon Turner, Fred Twitter Facebook compared with Últimas Noticias Unabomber uncanny valley Upshot Vaidhyanathan, Siva video games Wales, Jimmy Wall Street Journal Walmart Washington Post Web site morphing Westen, Drew Where Good Ideas Come From (Johnson) Whole Earth Catalog WikiLeaks Wikipedia Winer, Dave Winner, Langdon Winograd, Terry Wired Wiseman, Richard Woolworth, Andy Wright, David Wu, Tim Yahoo News Upshot Y Combinator Yeager, Sam Yelp You Tube LeanBack Zittrain, Jonathan Zuckerberg, Mark Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Introduction Chapter 1 - The Race for Relevance Chapter 2 - The User Is the Content Chapter 3 - The Adderall Society Chapter 4 - The You Loop Chapter 5 - The Public Is Irrelevant Chapter 6 - Hello, World!

Makers
by Chris Anderson
Published 1 Oct 2012

In his biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson describes Brand’s role in the origins of what is today the Maker Movement: Brand ran the Whole Earth Truck Store, which began as a roving truck that sold useful tools and educational materials, and in 1968 he decided to extend its reach with The Whole Earth Catalog. On its first cover was the famous picture of Earth taken from space; its subtitle was “Access to Tools.” The underlying philosophy was that technology could be our friend. Brand wrote on the first page of the first edition, “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.” Buckminster Fuller followed with a poem that began, “I see God in the instruments and mechanisms that work reliably.”13 The Homebrew Computer Club, where Jobs and Wozniak brain-stormed the first Apple computer, was founded on these principles.

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Or could it become more like the real Web, where the majority of content is created by amateurs, without any intention of creating a business or making money at all? This second option is a future where the Maker Movement is more about self-sufficiency—making stuff for our own use—than it is about building businesses. It is one that hews even closer to the original ideals of the Homebrew Computer Club and The Whole Earth Catalog. The idea, then, was not to create big companies, but rather to free ourselves from big companies. Every time I download some design from the Web and print something on my MakerBot without going to a store or otherwise engaging in any commercial transaction at all, I wonder how long it will take before more of the world of atoms becomes free, like most of the world of bits already has.

The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting
by Anne Trubek
Published 5 Sep 2016

To this day, most trained calligraphers are members of these informal yet long-lasting guilds. In the late 1960s and 1970s, calligraphy experienced a second revival for predictably similar reasons: hippies and other back-to-earthers, like those of the Arts and Crafts era, valued making things by hand in reaction to mass culture. The Whole Earth Catalog, that iconic book of the seventies, has a chapter dedicated to calligraphy, and a brisk business developed in calligraphy pens and instruction manuals and offering italics workshops. During this resurgence both the senior letterers at American Greetings, Mike Gold and Martha Ericson, learned calligraphy.

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See also keyboarding acceptance of, here, here advertisements for, here authors as early adopters of, here, here continued use of, here in correspondence, here cost of, here, here effect on spelling and punctuation, here improvements in typewriters, here invention of, here physicality of, here placement of keys on, here prototypes of, here racing typewriters, here touch-typing method for, here Twain’s use of, here typing contests, here women as type-writers, here, here, here uncial script, here, here, here, here, here, here Underwood Speed Training Group, here Underwood typewriters, here United States calligraphy movement in, here, here development of scripts in, here, here, here, here and handwriting as evidence in court of law, here, here literacy rates in, here, here public schools in, here round hand used in, here, here universities, manuscript production in, here University College London, here University of Pennsylvania, here uppercase letters, here, here verso, here Vindolanda tablets, here Virgil, here Visigothic script, here voice recognition software, here, here Wallace, David Foster, here, here, here wax tablets, here website designs, here Whole Earth Catalog, here Willins, Stella, here Wolf, Maryanne, here, here, here Wolfe, Heather, here women as clerks, here Italian hand used by, here restrictions on literacy of, here, here as type-writers, here, here, here writing taught to, here WordPress, here word use, patterns of, here, here Worthington, Martin, here writing.

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation
by Paris Marx
Published 4 Jul 2022

Their response to the social and political challenges of the sixties was to abandon politics altogether and seek out individualized solutions, even going so far as to retreat from society and build their own communities modeled on how they believed their ideal world should work. But their communes displayed the fundamental problems with their approach, and those issues would be echoed in the institutions that were inspired by them. In 1967, former Stanford biology student and US Army soldier Stewart Brand set up the Whole Earth Catalog with his wife, Lois Jennings. The Catalog brought together Brand’s countercultural, scientific, and academic interests in the pursuit of enhancing individual freedom and went on to create an influential nexus of ideas and personalities that inspired the worldview of Silicon Valley. The inside cover of every issue contained a statement that set out the Promethean ideology behind the worldview Brand was creating in bringing together his various interests.

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In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG. There is a clear line between Brand’s thinking in the Catalog and how Jobs was promoting the personal computer thirteen years later. Brand positioned individuals as being akin to gods and promised the Catalog would equip them with the tools they needed to wield their power toward whatever end they saw fit, and some of those tools were small-scale technologies designed to serve individuals instead of major corporations.

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See bicycles Seattle, WA, ride-hailing services in, 99 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 138 Sedran, Thomas, 129–30 self-checkout, 194–5 self-driving cars accidents with, 132–5 Autonomous Land Vehicle project, 119 Brin on, 114–5 challenges of, 126, 129–30 environmental dilemmas and, 131–2 Google, 6 Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (1991), 119 Kalanick on, 116 Navlab autonomous vehicles, 119–20 Ng on, 126 pedestrians and, 127 pricing of, 127–8 pulp science fiction and, 118 Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and, 118 software for, 122–3 speed and, 123–4 Tesla’s Autopilot system, 137–8 Tsukuba Mechanical, 119 VaMoRs, 119 Sepulveda Pass, 141 Shanghai Gigafactory (Tesla), 83 Sheffield, UK, docked bikeshare system in, 170–1 Sheller, Mimi, 158, 207 Shell Oil City of Tomorrow, 2 Shill, Gregory, 30 shipping industry, 49 shut-in economy, 196–7 Sidewalk Labs, 228–30 Silicon Valley, 37–8, 44–5 skates (platforms), 146–7 Skyports, 154–5 Small Business Investment Company, 55 smart homes, 60–1 smartphone apps, 55, 181, 194–5 Smiley, Lauren, 196 Social Bicycles (SoBi), 167–8 Socialist Left Party, 209 social media, 61–2 SolarCity, 55, 143, 188 solar panels, Musk on, 188–9 Southern State Parkway, 26 Soviet Union, 39 space program, 48 SpaceX, 55, 144, 148, 150–1 speed limiter referendum, 19–20 speed limits, 18–20 Sputnik I satellite, 39, 45 standardized containers, increasing use of, 49 Standard Oil of California, 21 Stanford Industrial Park, 40 Stanford Research Institute, 54–5 Stanford University, 39–40, 55, 120 Stark, Tony, 70 Starley, John Kemp, 160, 162 Starship Technologies, 172, 173–5, 176–7 Stop de Kindermoord, 205 streetcars, 12–3, 15, 21, 92, 160 “subscriber city,” 197 suburbanization, 23 suburbs, 12–3 superhighway plan (Detroit), 22 supply chains, 50 Surface Transportation Policy Project, 141 surge pricing, for ride-hailing services, 100 Swisher, Kara, 116–7 Taft-Hartley (1947), 112 taxi medallions, 104–5 taxi services about, 95–6, 101–2, 104–5 industry regulation and, 107, 110–1, 185 Taylor, Isaac, 122 TCP/IP protocol, 50 TechGirls Canada, 228–9 tech industry development of, 9–10 growth of, 4, 180–5 speed of technological innovation, 48 technological solutionism, 59 Tesla, 5–6, 55, 63–4, 70, 72, 73, 82–4, 85–6, 116, 137–8, 143, 147, 158–9, 188, 189, 190 Tesla, Nikola, 70 Texas, Interstate Highway System in, 140 Thacker Pass, NV, 79, 226 Thiel, Peter, 46–7 Thrun, Sebastian, 121 Toronto, Canada, 228–30 Toyota, 116, 121, 122 train system in France, 220 in North America, 218–9 transportation bus system, 21, 215, 219 computerized planning systems for, 130 flying cars, 151–2, 159 history of, 7 jitneys, 89–91, 92, 108–9 Navlab autonomous vehicles, 119–20 present-day dominance of, 34–5 taxi services, 95–6, 101–2, 104–5, 107, 110–1, 185 three-dimensional vs. two-dimensional, 145 train system, 218–9, 220 tunnels for, 144–51, 154–5, 158–9, 189 vertical takeoff and landing vehicle (VTOL/eVTOL), 152–5, 157, 158 walking as primary means of, 12 Trudeau, Justin, 79–80, 228 Trump, Donald, 78 Tsukuba Mechanical, 119 tunnels, for transportation, 144–51, 154–5, 158–9, 189 Turner, Fred, 41, 43, 52 Turner, Matthew, 141–2 Uber about, 115 acquisition of Jump, 166–8 Advanced Technologies Group (ATG), 133, 134–5 benefits of, 94 campaigns for, 103 changed from Ford Fusion to Volvo XC90 SUVs, 134–5 compared with taxi services, 95–6 core business of, 93 costs for, 107–8 Covid-19 and, 108 customer base for, 100–1 divisions of, 153–4, 184 driver pay for, 103–4, 107 effect on traffic of, 100 employee classification for, 111–2 founding of, 181 Greyball and, 110 growth of, 97, 105–6 industry regulation and, 101–2, 107, 110–1, 112–3, 156, 174, 185 loss of money by, 106–7, 184–5 marketing by, 158–9 media representation of, 94–5 micromobility services of, 166–9 model of, 102–3 in New York City, 98–9 origins of, 92–3, 109 pricing for, 184 promises made by, 186 pulls out of China, 152 refocus on ride-hailing and food delivery services, 184–5 safety record of, 134, 135–6 in San Francisco, 97–8 walking vs., 191 Uber Air, 153–4, 155, 157, 159 Uber Copter, 155–6 Uber Eats, 184–5 Uber Elevate, 152, 154, 159 unemployment rate, 95–6 unions, for taxi drivers, 101–2 United Kingdom (UK) docked bikeshare system in, 170–1 ecommerce in, 193 University of Technology Sydney, 75 University Paris-East, 169–70 Unsafe at Any Speed (Nader), 27–8 Untokening collective, 218 Urban Challenge, 120 urban renewal strategy, 26 Urry, John, 32–3, 143 US Air Force, 50 US Department of Defense, 50 US-Japan Semiconductor Trade Agreement (1986), 45 US National Labor Relations Act, 102 VaMoRs, 119 Vansintjan, Aaron, 222 Vasquez, Rafaela, 132, 135 Vélib’ bikeshare system, 210 venture capitalists, 186–7, 199 vertical takeoff and landing vehicle (VTOL/eVTOL), 152–5, 157, 158 Very Far Away from Anywhere Else (Le Guin), 202 Vietnam War, 39, 40, 43, 49 VoiceOver, 175 Volkswagen, 77, 78, 129–30 Volocopter, 152 Volvo XC90 SUVs, 134–5 Walker, Jarrett, 59, 142–3, 181–2 walking, as means of transportation, 12, 191 Washington, DC, ride-hailing services in, 99 Waterfront Toronto, 228–9, 230, 231 Waymo, 133, 138, 186 web 2.0, 57 WeWork, 181, 182–3 white people, mortgages and, 29 Who Killed the Electric Car? (documentary), 69 Whole Earth Catalog, 42–3, 52 Whole Earth community, 53–4 Whole Earth Review, 53 Wilt, James, Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars?, 217 Wired (magazine), 53, 54 Wolfe, Tom, 40–1 women, bicycles and, 13 World’s Fair, 1–2, 5, 118 world War II, 38–9 Wylie, Bianca, 230 Yahoo!, 55 Yee, Norman, 178 Yelp, 172 Yom Kippur War, 203 zoning policies, 29 Zukin, Sharon, 27, 200 Zysman, John, 182

The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity
by Peter Schwartz , Peter Leyden and Joel Hyatt
Published 18 Oct 2000

It turned out NASA was not withholding the image from the public. No one had bothered to take the picture in the first place. For whatever reason, NASA just hadn't thought of it—that is, until Brand came along. So in relatively short order, NASA did take the picture and made it public, and it ended up on the cover of the premier issue of Brand's Whole Earth Catalog in the fall of 1968. The now-familiar image was stunning at the time. There we saw our living planet against the stark black backdrop of space. We saw the greens and browns of the landmasses contrasted with the blues of the oceans, and all that enveloped in the soft white swirls of the clouds.

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And our increasing understanding of genetics will also allow us to react to impending environmental crises, such as a new disease epidemic. We're not like a helpless dinosaur. We're much more in control of our destiny. "We are as gods and might as well get good at it." That was the opening line of the inaugural 1968 Whole Earth Catalog, the one that greeted the world with that picture of the earth floating in space. Stewart Brand came up with that line to set the tone for a catalog that wanted to get news of great new technologies and tools to as many people as possible. He actually built Ms line on a similar one from the 1968 book A Runaway World?

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It's Up to Phred," New York Times (March 23, 1999), D2, Karin Jegalian, "The Gene Factory," Technology Review, vol. 102, no. 2 (March-April 1999), 64-71. control that gene, too?: See the novel Mendel's Dwarf, by Simon Mawer (New York: Harmony Books, 1998), which explores this very question. Sarah Lyall, "A Country Unveils Its Gene Pool and Debate Flares," New For* Times (February 16,1999), Dl. fears be resolved?...: The original Whole Earth Catalog was reproduced in full in the Winter 1998 Whole Earth, which marked the thirtieth anniversary of that inaugural issue. Brand wrote a preface to the new version. most people think: Gina Kolata, "Pushing Limits of the Human Life Span," New York Times (March 9,1999), Dl. life span to age 120: Steve Farrar, "Today's Babies Can Expect to Live to 130," London Times (February'14,1999), 1. as SO years ago: Mary Catherine Bateson, who is a member of the GBN network, gave a talk related to this topic at the company's Emeryville office on January 6, 1999.

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality
by Jaron Lanier
Published 21 Nov 2017

I became convinced our home should be made of spherical structures resembling those found in plants. Ellery said he thought I might enjoy another book, in that case. This turned out to be a roughly designed publication in the form of an extra-thick magazine called Domebook. It was an offshoot of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog.5 Buckminster Fuller had been promoting geodesic domes as ideal structures, and they embodied the techie utopian spirit of the times. Initially I was skeptical of going geodesic. “I don’t want our house to be like any other house, and other people are building geodesic domes,” I complained.

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Fridge hosed, swiveling it a step at a time back to the hut: “Maybe it’s a sign that the world really needs VR now!” “Oh, you don’t know. We’re calling it Shallow Alto.” “It changed that much?” “It just seems like everything interesting isn’t here anymore. The Suicide Club is in the city, the Whole Earth Catalog moved to Marin—sigh—and Survival Research Lab doesn’t even come around anymore. No one interesting can afford the rents anymore.” You might not know about these early Silicon Valley institutions. The Suicide Club was a punk urban adventure club that would do things like climb the Golden Gate Bridge illegally.

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I’ll highlight two figures who were particularly influential as well as dear to me: Kevin Kelly and John Perry Barlow. Kevin is a fine example of a trusted friend with whom I disagree completely. When I met him, he was editing and writing in publications connected to Stewart Brand’s world, post–Whole Earth Catalog; he later became the first editor in chief of Wired. Kevin thinks that objects we perceive to exist in software really exist. I do not. He believes in AI, and that a noosphere not only exists, but might have gained a kind of self-determination now that computers are networked. I do not. Kevin thinks technology is a superbeing that wants things.

Distrust That Particular Flavor
by William Gibson
Published 3 Jan 2012

These are not observations that one could arrive at using any previous literary model of metropolitan history, but the result of a genuinely postmodern agenda, an entirely new and utterly compelling way to write about cities. If you wish to possess the world’s greatest city, read this book. If you would learn to expose the soul of a place, in the deepest and most thoroughly contemporary way, read it again. I loved The Whole Earth Catalog, in the Seventies, though it made me feel guilt. I loved it for the sense it gave that my generation might find new ways of sorting out the world’s difficulties (which now seems terribly ironic). The guilt I felt was equally straightforward, and perhaps as fantastic: that I was not repairing an electricity-generating windmill with a Leatherman tool.

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“An Invitation” copyright © 2007 by William Gibson. First published in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings by Jorge Luis Borges. New York: New Directions Press, 2007. “Metrophagy: The Art and Science of Digesting Great Cities” copyright © 2001 by William Gibson. First published by Whole Earth Catalog, Summer 2001. Published by arrangement with Bruce Sterling, editor. “Modern Boys and Mobile Girls” copyright © 2001 by William Gibson. First published by The Observer, March 31, 2001. “My Obsession” copyright © 1999 by William Gibson. First published by Wired magazine, January 1999. “My Own Private Tokyo” copyright © 2001 by William Gibson.

Drugs 2.0: The Web Revolution That's Changing How the World Gets High
by Mike Power
Published 1 May 2013

The Shulgins wrote the preface to Stolaroff’s book Thanatos to Eros (1994) detailing his experiences with LSD, MDMA, mescaline and a number of Shulgin’s creations.2 Author Stewart Brand, who coined the phrase ‘Information wants to be free’ in 1984, was responsible for filming the Mother of All Demos, and that same year he launched the Whole Earth Catalog, the ad-free samizdat techno-hippy bible. Its esoteric and wide-ranging content, from poetry to construction plans for geodesic domes by physicist Buckminster Fuller, from car repair tips to trout-fishing guides and the fundamentals of yoga and the I-ching, was hacked together using Polaroid cameras, Letraset and the highest of low-tech.

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It now reads much like a printed blog; it was a paper website, in the words of blogger and author Kevin Kelly, that was sprinting before the web even took its first shaky steps.3 Its statement of intent in its launch issue reads like a manifesto that has been realized by today’s web users: ‘A realm of intimate personal power is developing – the 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.’ Brand, whose collaborations with Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters would evolve into the Acid Tests, the 1960s proto-raves fuelled by LSD and documented by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, felt that information technology was the next stage in humans’ evolutionary progress. Info-anarchists and cyber-utopians not only laid the foundations for the internet, but would act as outriders for the free software movement.

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, 1 Skype, 1 Slocombe, Mike, 1 smartphones, 1 smartshops, 1, 2 Smith, Nicholas, 1 Smith, Sullivan, 1 Snowballs, 1, 2 Somalia, 1 SOS, 1, 2 Spath, Ernst, 1 speed, see amphetamines Spice, 1, 2, 3 spinal fluid, 1 Spirit Cave, 1 SSRIs, 1 Stanley, Owsley, 1 Starck, Phillipe, 1 Stewart, Maryon, 1 Steiner, Peter, 1 Stolaroff, Mylon, 1 Stonham, Lord, 1 street drugs, testing of, 1 SubCoca, 1, 2, 3 Sullivan, Brian, 1 Sweden, 1, 2, 3 drug laws, 1 Switzerland, 1 Symes, Trevor, 1 Synthetic Drug Control Act, 1 Syverson, Paul, 1 Taiwan, 1, 2, 3 Talk to Frank helpline, 1 Tandy, Karen P., 1 Tapsell, Paul, 1 Taylor, Polly, 1 Temple of the True Inner Light, 1 Temporary Class Drug Orders (TCDOs), 1, 2 Tettey, Justice, 1 Texas group, 1 TFM (The Farmer’s Market), 1 THC, 1, 2 TICTAC Communications, 1 tiletamine, 1 Time magazine, 1, 2 Timms, Dave, 1 tobacco, 1, 2 Tor network, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Transform, 1 truth serums, 1 tryptamines, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 Twitter, 1, 2 UK Border Agency, 1. 2 UK Drug Policy Commission, 1 UK laws Dangerous Drugs Act (1920), 1 Defence of the Realm Act (DORA), 1 Medicines Act (1968), 1, 2 Misuse of Drugs Act (1971), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Pharmacy Act (1868), 1 Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act (2011), 1 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), 1 Serious Crime Act (2007), 1 UKLegals, 1 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 1 United Nations treaties, 1, 2 United States of America drug testing, 1 illegal drug use, 1 incarceration rate, 1 internet speeds, 1 Prohibition era, 1 research chemicals manufacture, 1 US Department of Defense, 1 US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 US drug legislation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 flaws in analogue laws, 1 and marijuana replacements, 1 see also American Analog Act US National Drug Control Strategy, 1 US Navy, 1, 2 Urban1, 2 urea, 1 Usenet, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 V Festival, 1 Valium, 1, 2, 3 Van den Berg, Paul, 1 van Dijk, Peter, 1 VICE, 1 Vietnam War, 1 Voice of America, 1 Voodoo Fest, 1 Wain, David John, 1 Wainwright, Louis, 1 Wainwright, Rob, 1 Wasson, R. Gordon, 1 Watson, James D., 1 Weekes, Elsworth, 1 Well, The, 1 Wells-Pestell, Lord, 1 Wen Jiabao, 1 Wenn, Hugo, 1 Western Union, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Whole Earth Catalog, 1 Wikipedia, 1, 2, 3 Willem, Marc, 1 Williams, Judge Adele, 1 Williams, Edward Huntingdon, 1 Willmer, Kate, 1 Winstock, Adam, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Wöhler, Friedrich, 1 Wolfe, Tom, 1 woof woof, see MDAI Xanax, 1 Yage vine, 1 Yemen, 1 YMMV disclaimer, 1 YouTube, 1, 2, 3, 4 Zectran, 1 Zeff, Leo, 1 Zimmermann, Phil, 1 Zirilli, Saverio, 1 About the Author Born in 1971, MIKE POWER has worked as a freelance journalist for British newspapers and organizations including the Guardian, Lonely Planet, the Mail on Sunday, the Sunday Herald, DrugScope and the Big Issue for the last sixteen years, producing and writing news, features and investigations.

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet
by Claire L. Evans
Published 6 Mar 2018

Fill a machine with nonsense, and it will cook it up for you with no judgment, executing commands precisely as dictated. Feed it truth, and it does the same. It doesn’t care about the signal’s nature. Meaning is our business; the computer is a mirror that reflects us back to ourselves, and whoever controls it molds the world in their image. This might be why the counterculture’s magazine of record, the Whole Earth Catalog, always printed the same coda on the cover of every issue: Access to tools. The year Resource One installed its computer, the Whole Earth Catalogue’s Stewart Brand pronounced that “half or more of computer science is heads.” Brand was inspired by the Bay Area’s constellation of forward-thinking research labs, the hacker groups gathering to play games after hours in university basements, and the scene developing at Resource One, and he wrote about computer science as the realm of mystics, sages, weirdos, or as he put it, “magnificent men with their flying machines, scouting a leading edge of technology.”

…

Out in Sausalito, the same Bay Area techno-idealism that had galvanized Community Memory and Resource One a decade previous gave birth to The WELL, a BBS for West Coast intellectuals. It was a joint venture between Larry Brilliant, an epidemiologist with a computer-conferencing company, and Stewart Brand, editor of the Whole Earth Review. Brand was known as a connector—the counterculture had been browsing the Whole Earth Catalog for solar ovens, composting toilets, and radical books for nearly a generation—and a scribe of disruptive technologies. “All software does is manage symbols,” he wrote in 1984. BBS had a reputation as a realm of nerdy fiefdoms, but The WELL was different. Fans of the Whole Earth publications signed up to chat with the writers, editors, and subjects of their favorite magazine, expecting a level of discourse that Brand and his cohort were happy to indulge.

…

J., 150 Smithsonian Institution, 62 Snyder, Elizabeth “Betty,” see Holberton, Elizabeth “Betty” social media, 97, 137, 139–41, 148, 149, 151, 152, 201, 207, 210, 241, 242 Facebook, 139, 141, 148, 149, 151, 210 Reddit, 149 Twitter, 149, 150, 151 Social Services Referral Directory, 105–7, 215 Sodoeka, Yoshi, 193 software, 56, 74, 88, 94, 132, 163 crisis in, 76–78 distinction between hardware and, 33 women and, 51–52 see also programming software engineering, use of term, 77–78, 93 Somerville, Mary, 16, 21 Space Task Force, 24 spanning-tree protocol, 126–28 Speiser, Jane, 99–100 Stahl, Mary, 114, 118, 120, 122 Stanford University, 110, 153, 154 Augmentation Research Center at, 111–12, 116 Starrs, Josephine, 237 Stevenson, Adlai, 60 stock market crash, 198–200, 201 Stone, Allucquére Rosanne, 143 subroutines, 37 Suck.com, 194, 201–2 Sun Link Service, 162 Sun Microsystems, 161, 162, 210 Sutton, Jo, 239 Switchboards, 97–98, 100, 101, 105 Symbolics, 161, 162 Symbolics Document Examiner, 162 system administrators (sysops), 130, 131 Talmud, 154 Tandy, 225 Tannenbaum, Rob, 137 telephone companies, 24 Telepresence Research, 227 Teletype machines, 101, 105, 106 Telluride InfoZone, 131 telnet, 151–52 Terminal, 151–52 textile looms, 11–13, 20 Tierney, Gertrude, 73 Time, 233 Tomb Raider, 236 TransAmerica Leasing Corporation, 98, 99 trans experience, 143–44 Embraceable Ewe and, 142, 144 Turkle, Sherry, 223, 229 Twitter, 149, 150, 151 United States Naval Observatory, 9–10 United Way, 106 UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer), 57–63, 65, 66, 67, 73 C-10 code for, 58–59 University of California, Berkeley, 97, 110 University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), 110 University of Michigan, 157 University of Pennsylvania, 69–70 Moore School of Electrical Engineering, 37–42, 47, 48, 50, 54–56 University of Southampton, 157–59, 160 Web Science Institute, 171, 173 Unix, 135–36, 152 URLs, 215 Utopian Entrepreneur (Laurel), 235 Van Meter, Jonathan, 188, 189 Viacom, 186, 192 VIBE, 188 video games, see computer games VIKI, 166, 170 Village Voice, 136, 183, 184 Virtual Community, The: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Rheingold), 148–49 virtual reality, 227–28 VNS Matrix, 237–40, 242 Volkart, Yvonne, 240 von Neumann, John, 36 Walcott, James, 137 Walker, Janet, 162 Wall Street Journal, 220, 221 Watson, Patty Jo, 91–92 Watson, Richard, 88 Watson, Thomas, Jr., 60 Web: use of word, 153 see also World Wide Web Web sites and pages, 131, 135, 153, 154, 184, 186 life spans of, 170 for women, see women’s Web see also World Wide Web WELL, The, 132–35, 140, 149, 153, 179–80, 205–6, 209 Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of, 16 Wescoff, Marlyn, 39, 43, 48, 49 Westheimer, Ellen, 114 WHOIS, 119–20 Whole Earth Catalog, 100, 132 Whole Earth Review, 132, 183 Wilcox, Patricia (Pat Crowther), 84–94, 110 William the Conqueror, 155 Wired, 138, 194, 206 women, 4–5 computers as viewed by, 229 men posing as, 143–44, 179 and software vs. hardware, 51–52 women, working, 23–24 black, 24 wage discrimination and, 23, 77, 78 women.com, 205, 214–21 Women in Telecommunications (WIT), 141–42, 144, 205 Women’s Internet History Project, 143 Women’space, 239 women’s Web, 131, 216, 221, 223, 233 advertising and, 214–16, 218, 219, 221 iVillage, 214, 216–21 women.com, 205, 214–21 Women’s WIRE, 205–15 Women’s WIRE, 205–15 Woods, Don, 90 Word, 188–95, 201–3, 205, 214, 215 Works Progress Administration, 25 World War I, 24 World War II, 24, 25, 28–29, 31, 32, 34–37, 40, 45, 47, 50, 51, 53–55 atomic bomb in, 36 Pearl Harbor attack, 27–29, 32 World Wide Web, 102, 131, 152, 154, 159, 165, 168–72, 177, 203, 204, 222 browsers for, see browsers commercialization of, 204–5, 217, 241; see also advertising conferences on, 170, 173 early true believers and, 187–88, 196, 197, 202 hypertext and, 168–70, 201 links on, 168–70, 201 Microcosm viewer for, 172–73 number of women on, 214 search engines for, 115, 154 Semantic Web and, 174 see also Internet; Web sites and pages Xerox, 161 Xerox PARC, 162–66, 210 Y2K, 71, 194 Yankelovich, Nicole, 162 Zapata Corporation, 194, 201 Zeroes + Ones (Plant), 238 About the Author CLAIRE L.

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis
by Scott Patterson
Published 5 Jun 2023

Brockman had earlier sent Taleb a list of topics included in the so-called Master Class, a dizzying witches’ brew of techno-wizardry: what is life, origins of life, in-vitro synthetic life, mirror life, metabolic engineering for hydrocarbons and pharmaceuticals, computational tools, electronic-biological interfaces, nanotech-molecular manufacturing, biosensors, accelerated lab evolution, engineered personal stem cells, multivirus-resistant cells, humanized mice, bringing back extinct species. At the SpaceX facility, Church gave a talk called “Dreams and Nightmares.” Attendees included venture capitalist Sean Parker, an original Facebook backer; Google’s Larry Page; behavioral economist Richard Thaler; Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog; someone from the White House; and a bunch of egghead scientists. Elon Musk ducked in from time to time to listen. Taleb introduced himself as a professor of risk engineering, which he said “doesn’t explain what I do.” Church, a tall, wizardly man with a heavy white beard, explained that, contrary to popular belief, geneticists still hadn’t mapped the entire human genome.

…

The science behind GMOs was about three decades old. These concoctions might provide a short-term benefit and feed more people, but over the long run—across generations—the impact could be disastrous on a global level, a risk that should never be taken, Taleb warned. Taleb sent his letter to Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog and president of the Long Now Foundation, whose goal was to improve long-term thinking. Taleb, who’d briefly met Brand at the Brockman conference at SpaceX in 2009, was shocked by his reply. “The science of genetic engineering is far more precise than blind selective breeding, and for that reason it is even safer,” Brand wrote.

…

Brand’s 2010 book Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, Radical Science, and Geoengineering Are Necessary is a paean to outside-the-box techno-solutions to the world’s ills, including GMOs. The book “gushes about technology in a way that might raise a blush even in a spokesman for Monsanto,” a Financial Times review observed. It was an old stance for Brand. “We are as gods,” he wrote in the Whole Earth Catalog, first published in 1968, “and might as well get good at it.” This was not a view Taleb—or Rupert Read—looked fondly upon. * * * In May 2013, Taleb and Read traveled to Hay-on-Wye, a sleepy market town in Wales, to attend a popular philosophy and music festival called HowTheLightGetsIn after lyrics in a celebrated Leonard Cohen song.

Computer: A History of the Information Machine
by Martin Campbell-Kelly and Nathan Ensmenger
Published 29 Jul 2013

Stewart Brand, Stanford University biology graduate turned publishing entrepreneur, became a leading voice for the New Communalists through creating The Whole Earth Catalog. Deeply influenced by cybernetics visionary Norbert Wiener, electronics media theorist Marshall McLuhan, and architect and designer Buckminster Fuller, Brand pressed NASA to publicly release a satellite photo of the Earth in 1966. Two years later the photo adorned the cover of the first edition of The Whole Earth Catalog. Publishing regularly between 1968 and 1971, Brand’s catalog identified and promoted key products or tools for communal living and, in doing so, sought to help “transform the individual into a capable, creative person.”

…

The only “catalog” to ever win a National Book Award, the publication was inspirational to many personal-computer pioneers including Apple Computer co-founder Steve Jobs, who later reminisced: “The Whole Earth Catalog . . . was one the bibles of my generation. . . . It was a sort of Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.” While Brand and The Whole Earth Catalog offered inspiration, the most articulate spokesperson for the computer-liberation idea was Ted Nelson, the financially independent son of Hollywood actress Celeste Holm. Among Nelson’s radical visions of computing was an idea called hypertext, which he first described in the mid-1960s.

Dealers of Lightning
by Michael A. Hiltzik
Published 27 Apr 2000

Ingalls, LRG member, developer of “BitBlt” graphic program and principal developer of Smalltalk Adele Goldberg, LRG member, learning specialist and co-developer of Smalltalk Ted Kaehler, LRG member, co-developer of Smalltalk and “Twang” music program Diana Merry, LRG member and co-developer of Smalltalk Larry Tesler, LRG member, co-designer of Gypsy user-friendly word processing program and first PARC principal scientist to be hired by Apple John Shoch, LRG member, inventor of the Worm Tim Mott, co-designer of Gypsy Chris Jeffers, childhood friend of Kay’s and “chief of staff” of LRG Gary Starkweather, inventor of the laser printer Lynn Conway, co-developer (with Carver Mead) of VLSI tools and technology allowing the design of highly complex integrated circuits on silicon chips Douglas Fairbairn, hardware implementer of POLOS and co-designer (with Tesler) of the Notetaker portable computer Bill English, head of POLOS (PARC On-Line Office System) group, early but unsuccessful multimedia office network Bill Duvall, chief designer of POLOS David Liddle, head of System Development Division after 1978, supervisor of the development of the Xerox Star, first fully realized commercial version of a PARC computer GENERAL SCIENCE LABORATORY Gerald Lucovsky, associate manager (reporting to Pake) David Thornburg, scientist David Biegelsen, scientist OPTICAL SCIENCE LABORATORY (AFTER 1973): John C. Urbach, manager OTHERS: Max Palevsky, founder of Scientific Data Systems (SDS), sold to Xerox in 1969 Rigdon Currie, chief of sales at SDS Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and author of “Spacewar,” 1972 article in Rolling Stone that introduced PARC to the general public Carver Mead, California Institute of Technology professor and co-developer of VLSI tools and technology at PARC James Clark, principal inventor of the “Geometry Engine” graphics chip at PARC, founder of Silicon Graphics Inc. and Netscape Communications Corp.

…

Before they had read to the end of “Spacewar” they knew they had a major crisis on their hands. With Bob Taylor’s apparent permission, but to the complete ignorance of anyone else in PARC management, the writer Stewart Brand had apparently been ranging freely through the Computer Science Lab for weeks. Brand was a technology fancier whose recent sale of the Whole Earth Catalog, his popular offbeat guidebook, had left him with the money and time to conduct a personal grand tour of the Bay Area’s leading computer research facilities. (A few years later he would resurface as a founder of The Well, a pioneering on-line computer service.) At the outset, he said later, some old friends at Doug Engelbart’s lab put him in touch with Bill English at PARC.

…

See ARPA Advanced Systems Division (ASD), 282–84, 357commercialization of Alto and, 278, 283–86 Alarm clock worm, 298 ALOHAnet, xiv, 186–87, 189 Alpha, 198 Altair 8800, xvi, 323, 333, 334 Alto, xv, xix–xxiv, xxvii, 141, 163, 167–77, 212, 224–25, 233, 261, 274, 303, 321, 324, 326, 330, 333, 357, 389, 395 Apple and, 335–36, 338–43asynchronous architecture and, 252–53 Bilbo and, 326 Bravo and, 194–95, 198–200, 208–9, 210, 283, 310 BravoX and, 283commercialization of, xvi, xxvii, 278, 282–88, 357, 392–93 Cookie Monster and, xv, xxii–xxiii, 81, 198, 231, 233cost of, 176diagnostic program for, 294display of, 171, 172–75, 176, 239 Draw and, 212 Elkind and, 168, 175, 278, 282–84 Ellenby and, 261–65, 268, 278, 283, 284–88 Ethernet and, 141, 176, 184–93, 212, 250, 251, 343 Futures Day and, 266, 271–72, 278, 280, 393 Goldman and, 278, 282–83 Gypsy and, 194–95, 207–10, 283interactivity and, xxi, 169, 170–71, 172–73 Kay and, xv, xxi, 167–68, 169, 170, 175, 220–28, 239, 283, 316 Kearns and, 286, 287, 288 Lampson and, xv, 141, 167–68, 171, 173–74, 175–76, 194, 195, 198, 206, see also Bravomanufacturing process and, 261–62 Markup and, 212 MAXC and, 175, 176 McCreight and, 141, 169, 176–77musical synthesizer and, 221 OfficeTalk and, 285 Penguin and, 285 POLOS and, 205–7, 210, 307at public school, 222–24, 314–15reset switch and, 289 SIL and, 212, 319 Simonyi and, 283, 284, 357 Smalltalk and, 220–21, 222–23software course for executives using, 274–75success of, 211–12 Taylor and, 3, 170–71, 205–6, 211text editor for, 194, 195, 198, see also Bravo Thacker and, xv, xix–xxiv, 4, 141, 163, 167–77, 174, 175, 212, 250–51, 289 Twang and, 221–22 Worm crashing, 289–90, 294–98 Xerox and, 285–88, 392, 393, 395 Xerox Model 850 versus, 264, 265, 274 Alto II, 262–63 Alto III, 263–65, 268, 350 850 word processor versus, 264, 265, 283 Ames Research Center, 197 Apple Computer, 329, 369–70 Apple II and, 332, 357, 358eMate and, 321 Goldberg and, 330, 335–36, 337, 338–40 Hall and, 334–35, 337, 338, 339, 340 Jobs and, xvi, xvii, xxiii, 329–45, 369–70, 389, 391 Lisa and, xvii, xviii, 337–38, 341–42, 343, 344 Macintosh and, xvi, xvii, xviii, xxiv, 329, 340, 341–42, 343, 344, 370, 389, 391, 395–96 Microsoft versus, xxv, 395–96size of, 392 Smalltalk and, 335–36, 338–43 Tesler and, 330, 333–34, 335, 336, 337, 338, 339, 340–41, 342, 344–45 VisiCalc and, 332 Wozniak and, xvi, 332 Architecture of information, 394 Archival memory, 123 Argus 700, 262 ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), 11–12, 13, 14, 42–43, 118 ARPANET and, 43–46, 48, 78 Augmentation Research Center and, 64, 65 Berkeley 500 and, 78grants of, 61graphics and, 43, 231 Illiac IV and, 197 Licklider and, 11, 12–14, 18, 44 LINC and, 42 Mansfield Amendment and, 47–48 PDP—10 and, 98 Pup shared with, 291–93research conferences and, 16–17 Taylor and, 14–20, 42–43, 90, 146 University of Utah and, 90 Vietnam War and, 45–47 See also IPTO ARPANET, xiii, 48, 78, 171, 180, 184, 266 IMPs and, 118, 320as “internet,” 291–93 MAXC and, 115, 183–84 PDP—10 and, 98 POLOS Novas and, 189 Pup and, 291–93 Taylor and, 8, 43–45, 48 VLSI and, 310 Artificial intelligence, 91, 98 Bobrow and, 121, 237, 261 ASCII, 135, 139 “As We May Think” (Bush), 63 Asynchronous architecture, 252–53 Atkinson, Bill, 340, 342–43 Atlantic Richfield Company, 284 AT&T, 30, 53, 57, 391 Augmentation Research Center, 63–67 Aurora Systems, 241 Ballmer, Steve, 358–59 Bardeen, John, 57, 160 Barker, Ben, 180 Bates, Roger, 173 Bauer, Bob, 59 Beat the Dealer (Thorp), 146 Beaudelaire, Patrick, 212, 231 Becker, Joe, 369 Bell, Alexander Graham, xxiii Belleville, Bob, 250–52, 253, 369–70 Bendix LGP30 computer, 70 Berkeley Computer Corporation, xiv, 68–69, 73–79, 106, 107–8, 197, 230 500 computer and, 76, 78, 109 Genie and, 69, 70, 72–73 1 computer and, 74–76 Biegelsen, David, 52–53, 58, 152 “Biggerism,” Thacker and, xx, 75 Bilbo, 326 Billboard worm, 298 BitBlt, Ingalls and, xv, 226–28, 342 Bitmapped screen Alto and, 173–74, 272 Star and, 362, 364 Blue books, 291 Bobrow, Daniel G., 261, 376, 399artificial intelligence and, 121, 237, 261 Bolt, Beranek & Newman and, 121, 280, 301 Elkind and, 280, 281, 282 Boeing Corporation, 284 Boggs, David R., 178–79, 399 Alto and, 294 Ethernet and, 141, 176, 187–92 Futures Day and, 267, 272 Novas and, 188 Worm and, 290–91 Bolt, Beranek & Newman, 76, 118, 119, 120, 121, 180, 265–66, 280, 301, 320 Boolean logic, 109, 304 “Bose Conspiracy,” 152–53 Box Named Joe, A, 222 Brand, Stewart Rolling Stone and, xv, 155–62, 204, 223 Whole Earth Catalog and, 157 Bravo, 208–9, 210, 227, 283, 310, 373 Lampson and, 194, 195, 198, 199, 201 Simonyi and, xv, 194–95, 198–201 BravoX, 283–84, 285, 364 Simonyi and, 283, 357, 360 Brittain, William, 57 Brooks, Frederick, 74, 76 Brown, John Seely, 302, 386, 399 Brunner, John, 295–96, 297, 298–99 Brushes, Alto and, 174 Building 34, 140 Burroughs, 24, 89, 101 Bush, Vannevar, 63–64, 67, 122 Buvall, Bill, 64 C++, xiv Campbell, Sandy, 381–82 “Capability Investment Proposal” (Ellenby), 285, 286–87, 288 Card, Stuart, 302 Carlson, Chester, 22, 35, 130, 350, 393 Carnegie-Mellon, 43 Carter, Jimmy, 283–84 Carter, Shelby H., 285–86, 287, 363 CD-ROM, 55, 123 Cedar, 325 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 336 Character generator.

The Misfit Economy: Lessons in Creativity From Pirates, Hackers, Gangsters and Other Informal Entrepreneurs
by Alexa Clay and Kyra Maya Phillips
Published 23 Jun 2015

“Our education system was used to make industrial workers out of agricultural workers. It is no longer adequate,” Howard Rheingold told us. Rheingold, sixty-seven, is the former editor of Whole Earth Review. Founded in 1985, Whole Earth Review was a countercultural publication evolving out of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog and rooted in “that old American tradition of self-reliance,” Rheingold shared, “building on that misfit streak started by Emerson.” In Rheingold’s perspective, Whole Earth Review was all about sharing tools and ideas to get people to take more control over their lives. “There was this hope that you didn’t have to depend on distant institutions—government, business, religious organizations—to shape your life.”

…

Louis Federal Reserve, 92 salmon production, 198 Samwer, Alexander, 83 Samwer, Marc, 83, 84 Samwer, Oliver, 83 Samwer brothers, 84 San Francisco, Calif., 184, 185, 220–21 San Francisco General Hospital, 128, 207 SAP, 36 Saudi Arabia, 7, 10 Schneider, Nathan, 214 Schumpeter, Joseph, 39 Secret Garden Party, 156 Seeker, 146–47 Seidman, Dov, 215 Semco, 215–16, 217 sex, 21, 143 Sex and Society (Wright), 21 sex education, 21 Shakespeare and Company, 212, 213 shanzhai, 77–80, 81, 82, 102 see also copying Shapiro, Howard-Yana, 100–101, 102 Sharpton, Al, 176 Shell, 90, 204–5 Shenkar, Oded, 83–84 Shipibo tribe, 180, 181 Silver, Jay, 102 SimCopter, 154 Six Degrees, 103–4 Skillshare, 23 Slutkin, Gary, 128–36, 207, 210 Smith, Adam, 24 solitude, 184–85, 207, 210 Somalia, 26–27, 128–29, 131 collapse of government in, 13–14, 27–28 fishing in, 13–14, 27–29 Somaliland, 26 Somali Marines (pirates), 14 Somali piracy, 13–14, 26–27 cost of trade and, 17 evolution of, 14–15, 16–17, 29 as organized and professional, 14–17 origin of, 13–14, 27–29 payment and financing for, 16 Sonfield, Matthew C., 63 Song, Stephen, 99 South America, 127 Southwest Airlines, 84–85 space, 144–50 space flight, 148–49 space tourism, 31 Spain, recession in, 64–65 Spotify, 96, 97, 124 Sprigman, Christopher, 85 Stark, Kio, 22–23, 142 Steam, 215 steam engine technology, 88 steel industry, 88–89 Stein, Gertrude, 213 Stephens, Dale, 22–23, 139–42, 143 Stonyfield, 201 Stop Online Piracy Act, 113 streaming technology, 96 Structural Genomics Consortium, 101 Stuckert, Taylor, 67–70 Student (magazine), 31 Sullivan, Tim, 184 Swartz, Aaron, 113–14, 115 Sweden, 145, 156 Teach, Edward (“Blackbeard”), 121 TED, 201 telecom industry, 78 ten-thousand-year clock, 150–51 terrorists, 124 Texas, 58–59, 150 Texas Department of Criminal Justice, 59 Thai Flood Hacks, 34–35 Thailand, 34 Thessaloniki, Greece, 162 Thoreau, Henry, 185 3-D printing robots, 149 Tornabell, Robert, 65 Torvalds, Linus, 37 Toyota, 78, 85 trade: cost of, piracy and, 17 of counterfeit goods, 81 pirates’ disruption of, 121 Trade Secrets (Ben-Atar), 79 Trevithick, Richard, 89–90 Troyer, Marlin, 6, 8 Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin, 148 tuberculosis, 128 Tumblr, 34, 186 Twain, Mark, 80 Tweakers, 98 Twitter, 83 UAW Local, 40, 600 Ulysses (Joyce), 213 UnCollege, 22, 140 United Auto Worker, 40 United Kingdom, 66, 107, 163 United Nations, 17 United States: adoption industry in, 21 automobile consumption in, 41–42 camel farmers in, 3, 4, 6, 9, 74 camel milk industry in, 5–7, 8, 72, 74–75 community building in, 67–72 history of camels in, 72–73 hustling in, 67 industrial period copying of, 79 raw milk in, 6, 7 “Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall, The” (Poe), 147 unschooling movement, 139–42 Urban eXperiment (The UX), 19, 125–27, 214 Valve, 215, 217 Venturing Out, 62, 64 Verdin, Zach, 185–86 Vergne, Jean-Phillippe, 94 Vermeulen, Angelo, 144–47, 149, 216–17 Verne, Jules, 143, 148, 149 Vietnam, 165 Village Telco, 99 Villains of All Nations (Rediker), 121 violence, 129–36 as health issue, 130, 131, 133–34, 136 punishment as solution for, 129, 130 understanding and perception of, 130–31, 133–34 violence interruptors, 131–32, 135 Virgin (record store), 31 Virgin Records, 31, 64 Visa, 85 Walden Pond, 185 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 87 Wall Street Journal, 36 Wang Chuanfu, 79 Water Margin (Shuihu Zhuan), 77 Watson, James, 86 Watt, James, 89 Weiler, Lance, 32–34 Weinreich, Andrew, 103–5 Wells, H. G., 148 We-Think (Leadbeater), 89 What’s Mine Is Yours (Botsman and Rogers), 65 Where Good Ideas Come From (Johnson), 98 Whitby, England, 107 “white hat” hacking, 108–9 Whole Earth Catalog, 141 Whole Earth Review, 141–42 Whole Foods, 9 Wilkins, Maurice, 86 Wilmington, Ohio, 67–70 Wimdu, 83 Wired, 83, 84 Wisdom Hackers, 220 Woodroof, Ron, 8 Woolf, Arthur, 89–90 World Bank, 17 World Economic Forum, 163 World Health Organization (WHO), 129, 136 World Trade Organization (WTO), 95, 154–55 World War II, 145 WPP, 158 Wright, Helena, 21, 143 Yes Lab, 155 Yes Men, 153–55, 214 York, University of, 108 YouGov, 66 Youthstream Media Networks, 104 YouTube, 83, 152 ZICO, 184 Zimbabwe, 188 Zipcar, 65, 124 Zuckerberg, Mark, 104, 122–23 Simon & Schuster 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 www.SimonandSchuster.com Copyright © 2015 by Alexa Clay and Kyra Maya Phillips All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
by Brad Stone
Published 14 Oct 2013

Kaphan had grown up in the San Francisco Bay Area and as a teenage computer enthusiast explored the ARPANET, the U.S. Defense Department–developed predecessor to the Internet. In high school, Kaphan met Stewart Brand, the writer and counterculture organizer, and the summer after he graduated, Kaphan took a job at the Whole Earth Catalog, Brand’s seminal guide to the tools and books of the enlightened new information age. Sporting long hippie-ish hair and a bushy beard, Kaphan worked at Brand’s Whole Earth Truck Store in Menlo Park, a mobile lending library and roving education service. He tended the cash register, filled subscriptions, and packed books and catalogs for shipment to customers.

…

“I was once part of a little consultancy called the Symmetry Group, and people always thought we were the Cemetery Group,” says Kaphan. “When I heard about Cadaver Inc., I thought, Oh God, not this again.” But Kaphan (by now shorn of his long locks and beard, balding, and in his early forties) was inspired by what he saw as Amazon’s potential to use the Web to fulfill the vision of the Whole Earth Catalog and make information and tools available around the world. At first, Kaphan figured he’d write some code and return to Santa Cruz to work remotely, so he left half his belongings at home and stayed with Bezos and MacKenzie in Bellevue for a few days while looking for a place to rent. They set up shop in the converted garage of Bezos’s house, an enclosed space without insulation and with a large, black potbellied stove at its center.

…

Bezos flew in colleagues and Kaphan’s family and friends and put everyone up for three days in private cabins on a Maui beach. Every attendee received an ornamental tile coaster emblazoned with a picture of Kaphan wearing a goofy Cat in the Hat hat. That weekend spawned a fortuitous relationship for Bezos. One of Kaphan’s friends who came on the trip was Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog. Brand and his wife, Ryan, bonded with Bezos and MacKenzie, forging a connection that led to Bezos’s involvement in the Clock of the Long Now, an aspirational project aimed at building a massive mechanical clock designed to measure time for ten thousand years, a way to promote long-term thinking.

Steve Jobs
by Walter Isaacson
Published 23 Oct 2011

Brand ran the Whole Earth Truck Store, which began as a roving truck that sold useful tools and educational materials, and in 1968 he decided to extend its reach with the Whole Earth Catalog. On its first cover was the famous picture of Earth taken from space; its subtitle was “Access to Tools.” The underlying philosophy was that technology could be our friend. Brand wrote on the first page of the first edition, “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.” Buckminster Fuller followed with a poem that began: “I see God in the instruments and mechanisms that work reliably.”

…

This fusion of flower power and processor power, enlightenment and technology, was embodied by Steve Jobs as he meditated in the mornings, audited physics classes at Stanford, worked nights at Atari, and dreamed of starting his own business. “There was just something going on here,” he said, looking back at the time and place. “The best music came from here—the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Joan Baez, Janis Joplin—and so did the integrated circuit, and things like the Whole Earth Catalog.” Initially the technologists and the hippies did not interface well. Many in the counterculture saw computers as ominous and Orwellian, the province of the Pentagon and the power structure. In The Myth of the Machine, the historian Lewis Mumford warned that computers were sucking away our freedom and destroying “life-enhancing values.”

…

With his final slide, Jobs emphasized one of the themes of his life, which was embodied by the iPad: a sign showing the corner of Technology Street and Liberal Arts Street. “The reason Apple can create products like the iPad is that we’ve always tried to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts,” he concluded. The iPad was the digital reincarnation of the Whole Earth Catalog, the place where creativity met tools for living. For once, the initial reaction was not a Hallelujah Chorus. The iPad was not yet available (it would go on sale in April), and some who watched Jobs’s demo were not quite sure what it was. An iPhone on steroids? “I haven’t been this let down since Snooki hooked up with The Situation,” wrote Newsweek’s Daniel Lyons (who moonlighted as “The Fake Steve Jobs” in an online parody).

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots
by John Markoff
Published 24 Aug 2015

Once Toyota had extraordinary craftsmen that were known as Kami-sama, or “gods” who had the ability to make anything, according to Toyota president Akio Toyoda.49 The craftsmen also had the human ability to act creatively and thus improve the manufacturing process. Now, to add flexibility and creativity back into their factories, Toyota chose to restore a hundred “manual-intensive” workspaces. The restoration of the Toyota gods is evocative of Stewart Brand’s opening line to the 1968 Whole Earth Catalog: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” Brand later acknowledged that he had borrowed the concept from British anthropologist Edmund Leach, who wrote, also in 1968: “Men have become like gods. Isn’t it about time that we understood our divinity? Science offers us total mastery over our environment and over our destiny, yet instead of rejoicing we feel deeply afraid.

…

The machine was controlled by an oddly shaped rolling appendage with three buttons wired to the computer known as a mouse. For those who saw the Alto while it was still a research secret, it drove home the meaning of Engelbart’s augmentation ideas. Indeed, one of those researchers was Stewart Brand, a counterculture impresario—photographer, writer, and editor—who had masterminded the Whole Earth Catalog. In an article for Rolling Stone, Brand referred to PARC as “Shy Research Center,” and he coined the term “personal computing.” Now, more than four decades later, the desktop personal computers of PARC are handheld and they are in the hands of much of the world’s population. Today Google’s robot laboratory sits just several hundred feet from the building where the Xerox pioneers conceived of personal computing.

…

Economic Growth.” 49.Craig Trudell, Yukiko Hagiwara, and Jie Ma, “Humans Replacing Robots Herald Toyota’s Vision of Future,” BloombergBusiness, April 7, 2014, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-06/humans-replacing-robots-herald-toyota-s-vision-of-future.html. 50.Stewart Brand, “We Are As Gods,” Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1968, http://www.wholeearth.com/issue/1010/article/195/we.are.as.gods. 51.Amir Efrati, “Google Beat Facebook for DeepMind, Creates Ethics Board,” Information, January 27, 2014, https://www.theinformation.com/google-beat-facebook-for-deepmind-creates-ethics-board. 52.“Foxconn Chairman Likens His Workforce to Animals,” WantChina Times, January 19, 2012, http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subclass-cnt.aspx?

Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web
by Cole Stryker
Published 14 Jun 2011

These baby boomers had grown up a bit, and where their ’60s brethren had failed, they believed they’d succeed, with the power of network technology. It was all very back-to-the-earth, but with a focus on the power of computing. Words like cybernetic and transhumanism were thrown around. Many of the community’s first users were subscribers to Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, a magazine devoted to topics like alternative shelter, nomadics, and telecommunications. These subscribers were already on the forefront of technology, and very smart. This early user base would come to have a tremendous influence on the quality of discourse. In 1995, a decade into the WELL’s history, Wired magazine called the WELL the world’s most influential online community.

…

And he quickly dispels any image of the pre-AOL Internet as an anarchic proto-4chan. I only had to ban one person in ten years at the Well. It was too expensive and difficult to dial in; the people who were there had a good reason to be there. We were very friendly, but very hands off. I asked Stewart Brand, cofounder of the WELL and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, about the nature of anonymity in an effort to draw parallels between 4chan and the infancy of the Internet. Unlike other Internet communities of the day, the WELL forced identity on its users. Stewart attributes the success of the community to “continuity of community and absence of anonymity”—what he calls “the main preventatives of destructive flaming.”

I Hate the Internet: A Novel
by Jarett Kobek
Published 3 Nov 2016

The defining aspect of Steve Jobs was the marriage of his innate dickishness with gauzy Bay Area entitlement. This blessed union birthed a blanket of darkness which settled over the Western world. Steve Jobs grew up reading The Whole Earth Catalog, a publication dedicated to the proposition that by spending your money in the right way, you could become the right kind of person. This was the mantra of the post-WWII economy, an unspoken ideology that cut across the social classes. But because The Whole Earth Catalog emerged from the Bay Area after the death of several utopian ideals, the stench of its message was masked by patchouli, incense and paperback editions of gruel-thin Eastern spirituality.

The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider
by Michiko Kakutani
Published 20 Feb 2024

Silicon Valley emerged in the San Francisco Bay Area, ground zero for antiestablishment culture in the 1960s and 1970s, and its founding generation was indelibly shaped by that era’s zeitgeist of rebellion and utopian hopes. In a 1995 essay titled “We Owe It All to the Hippies,” the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand, wrote that “the counterculture’s scorn for centralized authority provided the philosophical foundations of not only the leaderless Internet but also the entire personal-computer revolution.” While huge mainframes of the day were associated with the government and corporate America (i.e., IBM), hackers and early programmers saw the personal computer as a revolutionary tool that could help people realize both libertarian and communitarian goals—connect like-minded people, boost creativity, democratize information, empower outsiders.

…

Although Reich hailed blue jeans as a symbol of Consciousness III’s anti-materialist philosophy (“Basically they are machine-made, and there is no attempt to hide that fact, no shame attached to mass-produced goods, no social points lost for wearing something that sells at $4.99 from coast to coast”), wealthy consumers were soon paying thousands of dollars for special-edition, recycled designer iterations and for rare, early vintage Levi’s (one pair from the 1880s recently went for nearly $100,000). Designers have similarly discovered meditation, yoga, and Whole Earth Catalog holism. Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle website Goop offers merchandise like a two-piece meditation pillow set (covered in “plush high-pile chenille”) for $290 and a pyramid-shaped mahogany cabinet that “creates a spatial vortex in whatever room it’s placed in, energetically lifting the vibrations there” (cost: $35,000, no returns).

The Unicorn's Secret
by Steven Levy
Published 6 Oct 2016

Names appearing on the cover letters of recipients of a given piece might include economist Hazel Henderson; Lehmann Brothers managing director Shel Gordon; Seagram heir Charles Bronfman; futurist Alvin Toffler; science adviser to the British Commonwealth Christian de Lait; corporate presidents John Haas and George Bartol; Whole Earth Catalog publisher Stewart Brand; physicists Freeman Dyson, David Bohm, Frijtof Capra, and Heinz Pagels; Esalen cofounder Mike Murphy; journalists Alex Cockburn and Jack Anderson; authors Colin Wilson, Robert Theobold, and Thomas Kuhn. “Adam Smith” (himself a recipient of certain network mailings under his real name Gerry Goodman) wrote a column about it in New York magazine, calling it the “Far-Out Physics Underground”; Smith described an afternoon discussing various mailings with fellow network recipient Arthur Koestler.

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Among other Londoners, Ira connected with Peter Gabriel, the lead singer of the rock group Genesis. Einhorn also hung out with a group of London survivors of the sixties, many associated with Oz, the controversial underground magazine. Some of them were working on an English version of the Whole Earth Catalog, and Ira would often be among the visitors who crowded into that small office. He developed a particular friendship with Heathcote Williams, a controversial playwright whose works include AC/DC. Richard Adams, an editor in that crowd, recalls that Ira endeared himself by his networking talents, generously pulling out names and numbers from his address book to put people in contact with others who often proved to be valuable contacts.

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Einhorn claimed he was among the world vanguard in circulating information regarding Tesla technology—used in various ways from Soviet jamming techniques known as the “Russian Woodpecker,” to ELF transmissions clouding minds in Timmons, Ontario, even in Russian efforts to control the weather! Ira had not only distributed dispatches on his network about this but had written an article in Co-Evolution Quarterly (a magazine founded by Stewart Brand of the Whole Earth Catalog) about the Tesla stuff, warning of a “psychic Pearl Harbor.” Then there was his recent trip to Yugoslavia, paid for, Ira said, by the Yugoslavian government, which provided him high-level access to their Tesla files. All of this technology was, Ira insisted to the dumbfounded Greg Walter, potentially as dangerous as nuclear weapons.

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America
by Margaret O'Mara
Published 8 Jul 2019

There was Pam Hardt, a Berkeley computer science dropout and co-founder of a San Francisco commune called Resource One; she secured a “long-term loan” of an aging SDS minicomputer, settled it in the commune’s living room, and made it the mothership of a time-shared bulletin-board system called Community Memory. There was Bob Albrecht, an engineer who quit his corporate gig at supercomputer maker Control Data Corporation to join an educational nonprofit called the Portola Institute, a far-ranging collective operated on a shoestring. Portola spawned the bible of the techno-counterculture, the Whole Earth Catalog, created by artist, utopian, and “happening” impresario Stewart Brand. High-tech met hippiedom on the Catalog’s pages, which featured fringed buckskin jackets and camp stoves alongside scientific calculators. Its motto: “Access to Tools.”13 Albrecht’s project was the People’s Computer Company, started in 1972 as a walk-in storefront for computer training, accompanied by a loose and loopy newsletter “about having fun with computers.”

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Dean Brown’s lab used Engelbart’s mouse to test how computers augmented student learning. The event also brought new converts to the movement, notably Stewart Brand, who had joined the demo team as a journeyman videocam operator, and left having been turned on to the power of networked computing. Brand and Albrecht’s collaboration, the Portola Institute, and the Whole Earth Catalog followed. The demo “quite literally branched the course of computing off the course it had been going for the previous ten years,” remembered Saffo, “and things have never quite been the same again.”4 THE IDEA FACTORY Not too long after, three thousand miles away from the robot-trolled halls of SRI, a group of corporate executives were sitting in a wood-paneled office, trying to figure out where the next generation of their company’s products would come from.

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The Steves donned collared shirts, ran combs through their hair, and pinned nametags to their chests. Their first stop was Jim Warren’s first annual West Coast Computer Faire, a landmark in tech history all on its own. Apple landed a coveted booth near the entrance.13 Despite the proliferation of new entrepreneurs, the first Faire had a program and a vibe that was more Whole Earth Catalog than Wall Street Journal. Panels focused on the change-the-world potential of computing, with titles like “If ‘Small is Beautiful,’ is Micro Marvelous? A Look at Micro-Computing as if People Mattered” and “Computer Power to the People: The Myth, the Reality, and the Challenge.” There were sessions on computers for the physically disabled, and four panels on using personal computers in education (Liza Loop appeared on one of them).

Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room
by David Weinberger
Published 14 Jul 2011

Founded in 1975 by the generational icon Stewart Brand, with Larry Brilliant, The WELL has been one of the longest-running conversations on the Net. Its origins are in the hippie culture of which Brand is an avatar—the name stands for The Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, a reference to Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog—but the 4,000 current members seem to reflect more of an earnest coffee-shop culture than the shirtless non-linearity of Haight-Ashbury. Jon Lebkowsky, who has been on The WELL since 1987, says that the site’s success was not accidental. “They were successful in building the community by seeding it originally with people who were great conversationalists,” waiving the fees for the people they wanted involved.

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See also Books and book publishing Paper-based tools Parenting experts Patent Office, US PatientsLikeMe.com Pavement performance Peer-review journals Perception, facts and Permission-free knowledge Philosophy defining and quantifying knowledge information overload reality unresolved knowledge Pinker, Steven Planetary Skin initiative Plato PLoS One online journal Pogue, David Polio vaccine Politics Politifact.com Popper, Karl Population growth, Malthusian theory of Pornography Postmodernism Pragmatism PressThink.org Primary Insight Principles of Geology (Lyell) Prize4Life Protein folding ProteomeCommons.org Pseudo-science Public Library of Science (PLoS) Punchcard data Pyramid, knowledge Pyramid of organizational efficiency Quora Racial/ethnic identity Ramanujan, Srinivasa RAND Corporation Random Hacks of Kindness Rauscher, Francis Raymond, Eric Reagan, Ronald Reality Reason as the path to truth and knowledge critical debate on unresolved knowledge Reliability Repositories, open access Republic of Letters Republican Party Republic.com (Sunstein) Revolution in the Middle East Rheingold, Howard Richards, Ellen Swallow Riesman, David Robustness “The Rock” (Eliot) Rogers, William Rorty, Richard Rosen, Jay Roskam, Peter Rushkoff, Douglas Russia: Dogger Bank Incident Salk, Jonas Sanger, Larry Schmidt, Michael School shootings Science amateurs in crowdsourcing expertise failures in goals of hyperlinked inflation of scientific studies interdisciplinary approaches media relations Net-based inquiry open filtering journal articles open-notebook overgeneration of scientific facts philosophical and professional differences among scientists public and private realms scientific journals transformation of scientific knowledge Science at Creative Commons Science journal Scientific journals Scientific management Scientific method Self-interest: fact-based knowledge Semantic Web Seneca Sensory overload Sexual behavior The Shallows (Carr) Shapiro, Jesse Shared experiences Shilts, Randy Shirky, Clay Shoemaker, Carolyn Simplicity in scientific thought Simulation of physical interactions Slashdot.com Sloan Digital Sky Survey Smart mobs “Smarter planet” initiative Smith, Arfon Smith, Richard Soccer Social conformity Social networks crowdsourcing expertise Middle East revolutions pooling expertise scaling social filtering Social policy: social role of facts Social reform Dickens’s antipathy to fact-based knowledge global statistical support for Bentham’s ideas Social tools: information overload Society of Professional Journalists Socrates Software defaults Software development, contests for Sotomayor, Sonia Source transparency Space Shuttle disaster Spiro, Mary Sports Sprinkle, Annie Standpoint transparency Statistics emergence of Hunch.com Stopping points for knowledge The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn) Stupidity, Net increasing Sub-networks Suel, Gurol Sunlight Foundation Sunstein, Cass Surowiecki, James Systems biology Tag cloud Tagging Tatalias, Jean Taylor, Frederick Wilson TechCamps Technodeterminism Technology easing information overload Technorati.com Television, homophily and Temptation of hyperlinks Think tanks Thoreau, Henry David The Tipping Point (Gladwell) Todd, Mac Toffler, Alvin TopCopder Topic-based expertise Torvalds, Linus Traditional knowledge Tranche Transparency hyperlinks contributing to objectivity and of the Net Open Government Initiative Transparency and Open Government project Triangular knowledge Trillin, Calvin Trust: reliability of information Trust-through-authority system Truth elements of knowledge reason as the path to value of networked knowledge Twitter Tyme, Mae Unnailing facts Updike, John USAID UsefulChem notebook Vaccinations Verizon Vietnam Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Wales, Jimmy Wallace, Alfred Russel Walter, Skip Washington Post Watson, James Welch, Jack Welfare The WELL (The Whole Earth’Lectronic Link) Whole Earth Catalog Wikipedia editorial policy LA Times wikitorial experiment policymaking Virginia Tech shootings Wikswo, John Wilbanks, John Wired magazine The Wisdom of Crowds (Surowiecki) Wise crowds Wittgenstein, Ludwig Wolfram, Stephen WolframAlpha.com World Bank World Cup World War I Wurman, Richard Saul Wycliffe, John York, Jillian YourEncore Zappa, Frank Zeleny, Milan Zettabyte Zittrain, Jonathan Zuckerman, Ethan a I’m leaving this as an unsupported idea because it’s not the point of this book.

Bike Boom: The Unexpected Resurgence of Cycling
by Carlton Reid
Published 14 Jun 2017

Environmental broadcaster Nancy Pearlman, coordinator of the Earth Day events in Southern California, went on to found Concerned Bicycle Riders for the Environment and lobbied to get bikeways for Los Angeles by riding with a World War II-era gas mask. “Bicycles are small, inexpensive, require little maintenance, pleasurable to use, and smogless,” stated the Whole Earth Catalog for 1970, adding: “If America traded in all their [cars] for bikes, a lot of problems would be solved.” By 1974, the right-on publication included four bike-related pages: “Not only is bicycle travel human-scaled, healthful, and non-polluting, but it turns out to be more efficient than jetplanes, salmon, or seagulls.”

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Cycling and Society. Ashgate, 2007. Hudson, Mike. Bicycle Planning. Architectural Press, 1982. Hurst, Robert. The Cyclist’s Manifesto: The Case for Riding on Two Wheels Instead of Four. Falcon, 2009. Jordan, Peter. In the City of Bikes. HarperCollins, 2013. Kirk, Andrew G. Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism. University Press of Kansas, 2007. Lightwood, James T. The Cyclists’ Touring Club: Being the Romance of Fifty Years’ Cycling. Cyclists’ Touring Club, 1928. Longhurst, James. Bike Battles: A History of Sharing the American Road. University of Washington Press, 2015.

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World
by Joseph Menn
Published 3 Jun 2019

Even before the Dead had their name, they were a part of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, the eclectic and idealistic group that drove through America to have fun messing with people and to spread the good news about LSD. Another Prankster, visionary writer and marketer Stewart Brand, would also help spread the good news about the coming age of computing. Brand’s outlets included the ecology-oriented magazine Whole Earth Catalog and the WELL, the pioneering West Coast online community. Among Mann’s friends was Dead lyricist and future WELL regular John Perry Barlow. As a Wesleyan college student, Barlow had begun visiting acid guru Timothy Leary, and he introduced the Dead to Leary in 1967. Later, he wrote songs for the Dead, including “Cassidy,” a tribute to a child that weaves in the history of Beat icon Neal Cassady, still another Prankster.

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See Wysopal, Chris WELL, the (online community), 22, 26, 30 Wentworth Institute of Technology, 49 WhatsApp, 152 Wheeler, Kevin, 9–20, 78, 82, 95, 156–157 on changes in cDc, 60, 71, 194–195 at Def Con, 66, 80, 96 early life in Lubbock, Texas, 8–13 founding of cDc, 12–17, 30 at HoHoCon, 32–33, 41 involvement in music scene, 17–18, 187–188 learning from other hackers, 18–20 recruiting for cDc, 41, 44, 48–49, 57–59, 87–88, 140–142 whistle-blowing. See leaks White, Thomas (@CthulhuSec), 170 “white hat” hacking, 3, 82, 123, 148, 196 White Knight. See MacMillan, Dan white nationalism, in tech world, 6, 144, 193–196 Whole Earth Catalog (magazine), 22 WikiLeaks, 3, 142–151, 155–156, 158–159, 163, 166, 169–170, 192 Windows, 56, 63, 95, 111, 163, 167 Windows 7, 124 Windows 95, 38, 50, 61, 64, 82 Windows 98, 77, 82 Windows NT, 68–69, 77–78, 82 Windows XP Service Pack 2, 111 See also Back Orifice; Microsoft Wired (magazine), 30, 44, 46, 66, 73–74, 93–94, 99, 178 Wired News (online magazine), 94–95 Wiretapper’s Ball, 163 wiretapping, 143, 145, 163, 198 women, in tech world, 16, 46, 49–50, 141, 149, 154–155, 158 Wong, Blondie, 93–100 Works, the (bulletin board), 38, 41, 45–48, 59 World Economic Forum, 89 World Trade Center.

After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back
by Juliet Schor , William Attwood-Charles and Mehmet Cansoy
Published 15 Mar 2020

The New Left retained a political focus—opposing the military, the corporations that supported it, and the U.S. government. They viewed technology through the lens of war, as a destructive, dehumanizing force.6 New Communalists rejected politics as part of the problem and saw technology as a solution. Their bible was Stuart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, which was known for its innovative gadgets and technical offerings. When personal computing and the internet developed in the 1990s, New Communalists hailed them as the route to the ecotopias they had failed to create in their back-to-the-land phase. The New Communalists’ views morphed into what became known as the Californian Ideology.7 It combined libertarian politics, countercultural aesthetics, and techno-utopian visions.8 Its core belief was that technology would yield personal liberation and egalitarian community.

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See also digital technology: algorithms, 31, 66–70, 169; and counterculture, 22–23; faith in, 21; and idealist discourse, 162; and social change, 23–24, 162, 174; and social connection, 112; and values, 174–75 tech sector, 150–51 Telecommunications Act of 1996, 23 Telles, Rudy, Jr., 192 Thelen, Kathleen, 153 ThredUp, 112 Tim, 168–69 time banks, 125–27, 134–36, 144–46 TimeBanksUSA, 127 TimeRepublik, 8 tips, 65 traffic accidents, 118 tragedy of the commons, 163 trust, 24, 32 Turner, Fred, 21 Turo, 20, 45–46, 107; car owner incomes, 104; environment benefits, 54; income, 73; racial bias, 88–89; renter experience, 53–54 two-sided markets, 31 Tyler, 8, 45, 50, 112 Uber, 2, 9–11, 38, 151; business model, 35–37; decreased earnings, 75–76; education levels, 97; employee classification, 47, 161; European regulation, 152–53; gender discrimination, 87; labor competitor, 59; lobbying, 156–57; network effect, 32; origin story, 25; quiet mode, 114; as sharing economy platform, 193; taking (advantage), 159; traffic congestion, 117; transaction fees, 86; UberPool, 108, 118; worker experience, 58, 62, 76 Uberland, 13 Uber of x, 26, 125 UberPop, 153 Uberworked and Underpaid, 12 unemployment, 3 Union Square Ventures, 171 Up and Go, 170 Upwork, 41 urban sharing, 172 UrbanSitter, 27 used book market, 120 Val, 139 Valeria, 98 value proposition, 124, 143–47 values, 174–75 vehicle miles traveled (VMT), 116 Vinni, 31 Wang, Charley, 38 wealth inequality, 95 Wealth of Networks, The, 163 Wells, Katie, 76 Wengronowitz, Robert, 14, 181–82 Werbach, Adam, 27 Wettlaufer, Brianna, 148–49 What’s Mine Is Yours, 12 What’s Yours Is Mine, 13 “When Your Boss Is an Algorithm,” 66 Whole Earth Catalog, 22 Wikipedia, 164 Will, 53–54 women: discrimination, 87; platform participation, 190; ratings, 92 Wonolo, 110 Wood, Alex, 77 work: and capitalism, 3–4; and corporate culture, 3, 6, 12–13; and digital technology, 1, 6–7; employment classification, 47, 71; and for-profit platforms, 2, 6–11, 13; and labor control, 80; and person-to-person economy, 2; precarious, 70–71 workforce, sharing, 43–45, 77, 190 Woz, 139 xenophobia, 89 Yerdle, 27, 34 Zaarly, 35, 99 Zack, 98 Zelizer, Viviana, 193 Zimmer, John, 25 Zimride, 25 Zipcar, 26, 192 Zysman, John, 194 Founded in 1893, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS publishes bold, progressive books and journals on topics in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences—with a focus on social justice issues—that inspire thought and action among readers worldwide.

Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader
by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli
Published 24 Mar 2015

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called the Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was 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, thirty-five 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.

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It headed that way because of intuition, but an intuition that was deeper and richer than the selfish preferences of the young man who had founded Apple. WHEN I FIRST read the speech online, I remembered an interview I’d conducted with Steve in 1998. We had been talking about the trajectory of his career when, in a rambling aside not unlike the road on the back cover of the last issue of the Whole Earth Catalog, Steve told me about the impact that the Catalog had had upon him. “I think back to it when I am trying to remind myself of what to do, of what’s the right thing to do.” A few weeks after that interview had been published in Fortune, I received an envelope in the mail. It was from Stewart Brand, and it contained a rare copy of that final issue.

Machinery of Freedom: A Guide to Radical Capitalism
by David Friedman
Published 2 Jan 1978

Also, for sporadic criticism and general forbearance, to Diana. INTRODUCTION From Ayn Rand to bushy anarchists there is an occasional agreement on means called libertarianism, which is a faith in laissez-faire politics/economics.... How to hate your government on principle. SB, THE LAST WHOLE EARTH CATALOG The central idea of libertarianism is that people should be permitted to run their own lives as they wish. We totally reject the idea that people must be forcibly protected from themselves. A libertarian society would have no laws against drugs, gambling, pornography — and no compulsory seat belts in cars.

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Consider, as a more current example, the back to the land movement, as represented by The Mother Earth News. Ideologically, it is hostile to what it views as a wasteful, unnatural, mass consumption society. Yet the private property institutions of that society serve it just as they serve anyone else. The Mother Earth News and The Whole Earth Catalog are printed on paper bought on the private market and sold in private bookstores, alongside other books and magazines dedicated to teaching you how to make a million dollars in real estate or live the good life on a hundred thousand a year. A NECESSARY DIGRESSION A few pages back I asserted that an individual who works hard under institutions of private property gets most of the benefit.

The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World
by John Michael Greer
Published 30 Sep 2009

For that matter, it is improbable that I am the only Master Conserver from those days who still has all the class handouts from the program in a battered three-ring binder or who keeps part of a bookshelf weighed down with classic conservation books — ​The Integral Urban House, The Book of the New Alchemists, Rainbook, and the like. I don’t quite remember anybody in the last days of the program saying,“Keep your Whole Earth Catalogs, boys, the price of oil will rise again!” Still, the sentiment was there. More generally, of course, the experiences of any of the 20th century’s more difficult periods can be put to work constructively as we move deeper into the 21st century’s first major crisis. The victory gardens and ingenious substitutions that kept the home front going during two world wars are well worth revisiting.

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Beckford, James A., New Religious Movements and Rapid Social Change, SAGE Publications, 1986. Bell, Daniel, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting, Basic Books, 1973. Bell, Graham, The Permaculture Garden, Thorsons, 1994. Brand, Stewart, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built, Viking, 1994. ——— ed., The Next Whole Earth Catalog, Rand McNally, 1980. Brierley, Corale L., et al., Coal: Research and Development to Support National Energies Policy, National Academies Press, 2007. Brown, Lester, Plan B: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in ­Trouble, Norton, 2003. Burns, Timothy, After History? Francis Fukuyama and his Critics, Rowman and Littlefield, 1994.

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy
by Nathan Schneider
Published 10 Sep 2018

They had their own publication, the People’s Computer Company Newsletter, and a mostly theoretical network (with only one actual node, in a Berkeley record store) called Community Memory. Their propaganda described the computer as a “radical social artifact” that would usher in a “direct democracy of information”—“actively free (‘open’) information,” of course.5 This was the culture out of which arose such icons as Steve Wozniak, inventor of the Apple computer, and the Whole Earth Catalog, which hyped the digital revolution with all that newsprint and mail-order could muster. Like the unMonastery, these guerrilla hackers blended the old with the new, the ancient with the postindustrial. Although their projects often relied on state or corporate subsidies, they envisioned their efforts as apolitical, wrapped in the “safe neutrality” of information, as Roszak put it.

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worker productivity in, 76–77 universal basic income, 221, 223–224 universal destination of goods, 24, 60, 217 universal health care, 184–185 University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Center for Cooperatives, 69 unMonastery, 24–32, 27 (photo), 30 (photo) Up & Go, 154 Uptima Business Bootcamp, 157 urban-rural divides, 125–126 user data, 143–144 venture capital (VC), 144–145, 145 (fig.), 156–157 Vial, Joshua, 94–95 Vickers, Ben, 27, 31 Vincent, Margaret, 149 (photo) voter turnout, for co-ops, 181 Wage Labor and Guilds in Medieval Europe (Epstein), 34 wages, 76–77 Waldman, Steve Randy, 112–113 Wales, Jimmy, 26 Wallace, George, 200 Wallace, Henry A., 177 Warbasse, James Peter, 41–43, 42 (fig.), 57, 183 Watkins, Hollis, 194 Wayne State University, 73–75 We Can! (newspaper), 120 We Own It, 180–181 Weeks, Kathi, 75, 224 Weev (hacker-troll), 110 Wells, Benita, 177 Wenger, Albert, 165 Western Sugar Cooperative, 3 Weth, Felix, 150 Wettlaufer, Brianna, 148, 149 (photo) Whitfield, Ed, 224 Whole Earth Catalog, 138 Whole Foods, 8 Widerquist, Karl, 222 Wiener, Jason, 88 Wilson, Fred, 168 Wind, Dominik, 89–90 Winstanley, Gerrard, 39 wire services, 163 Witchger, Felipe, 226 women’s suffrage, 6 Women’s Trade Union League, 7 WORCs. See Worker-Owned Rockaway Cooperatives Word Jammers, 155 Worker-Owned Rockaway Cooperatives (WORCs), 82 workers businesses owned by, 83–86, 158 cooperation and organizing of, 44 co-ops, 82–83, 226–227 ownership and dispossessed, 60 piecework tasks of, 144 strikes by, 43 See also employee ownership Working World, the, 84 The World a Department Store (Peck), 56 World Wide Web Consortium, 147, 153 Wozniak, Steve, 138 Wynn, Curtis, 178–179 Yarber, Tony, 202 Zamagni, Stefano, 228–229, 231 Zamagni, Vera, 228–229, 228 (photo) Zebra startups, 159 Žižek, Slavoj, 123 Zuckerberg, Mark, 107, 218–219

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI
by John Brockman
Published 19 Feb 2019

Wiping it off, I saw “the” computer. I fell in love. Later, in the fall of 1967, I went to Menlo Park to spend time with Stewart Brand, whom I had met in New York in 1965 when he was a satellite member of the USCO group of artists. Now, with his wife, Lois, a mathematician, he was preparing the first edition of the Whole Earth Catalog for publication. While Lois and the team did the heavy lifting on the final mechanicals for WEC, Stewart and I sat together in a corner for two days, reading, underlining, and annotating the same paperback copy of Cybernetics that Cage had handed to me the year before, and debating Wiener’s ideas.

…

See singularity Tegmark, Max, 76–87 AI safety research, 81 Asilomar AI Principles, 2017, 81, 84 background and overview of work of, 76–77 competence of superintelligent AGI, 85 consciousness as cosmic awakening, 78–79 general expectation AGI achievable within next century, 79 goal alignment for AGI, 85–86 goals for a future society that includes AGI, 84–86 outlook, 86–87 rush to make humans obsolescent, reasons behind, 82–84 safety engineering, 86 societal impact of AI, debate over, 79–82 Terminator, The (film), 242 three laws of artificial intelligence, 39–40 Three Laws of Robotics, Asimov’s, 250 threshold theorem, 164 too-soon-to-worry argument against AI risk, 26–27, 81 Toulmin, Stephen, 18–19 transhumans, rights of, 252–53 Treister, Suzanne, 214–15 Trolley Problem, 244 trust networks, building, 200–201 Tsai, Wen Ying, 258, 260–61 Turing, Alan, 5, 25, 35, 43, 60, 103, 168, 180 AI-risk message, 93 Turing Machine, 57, 271 Turing Test, 5, 46–47, 276–77 Tversky, Amos, 130–31, 250 2001: A Space Odyssey (film), 183 Tyka, Mike, 212 Understanding Media (McLuhan), 208 understanding of computer results, loss of, 189 universal basic income, 188 Universal Turing Machine, 57 unsupervised learning, 225 value alignment (putting right purpose into machines) Dragan on, 137–38, 141–42 Griffiths on, 128–33 Pinker on, 110–11 Tegmark on, 85–86 Wiener on, 23–24 Versu, 217 Veruggio, Gianmarco, 243 visualization programs, 211–13 von Foerster, Heinz, xxi, 209–10, 215 Vonnegut, Kurt, 250 von Neumann, John, xx, 8, 35, 60, 103, 168, 271 digital computer architecture of, 58 second law of AI and, 39 self-replicating cellular automaton, development of, 57–58 use of symbols for computing, 164–65 Watson, 49, 246 Watson, James, 58 Watson, John, 225 Watt, James, 3, 257 Watts, Alan, xxi Weaver, Warren, xviii, 102–3, 155 Weizenbaum, Joe, 45, 48–50, 105, 248 Wexler, Rebecca, 238 Whitehead, Alfred North, 275 Whole Earth Catalog, xvii “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us” (Joy), 92 Wiener, Norbert, xvi, xviii–xx, xxv, xxvi, 35, 90, 96, 103, 112, 127, 163, 168, 256 on automation, in manufacturing, 4, 154 on broader applications of cybernetics, 4 Brooks on, 56–57, 59–60 control via feedback, 3 deep-learning and, 9 Dennett on, 43–45 failure to predict computer revolution, 4–5 on feedback loops, 5–6, 103, 153–54 Hillis on, 178–80 on information, 5–6, 153–59, 179 Kaiser on Wiener’s definition of information, 153–59 Lloyd on, 3–7, 9, 11–12 Pinker on, 103–5, 112 on power of ideas, 112 predictions/warnings of, xviii–xix, xxvi, 4–5, 11–12, 22–23, 35, 44–45, 93, 104, 172 Russell on, 22–23 on social risk, 97 society, cybernetics impact on, 103–4 what Wiener got wrong, 6–7 Wilczek, Frank, 64–75 astonishing corollary (natural intelligence as special case of AI), 67–70 astonishing hypothesis of Crick, 66–67 background and overview of work of, 64–65 consciousness, creativity and evil as possible features of AI, 66–68 emergence, 68–69 human brain’s advantage over AI, 72–74 information-processing technology capacities that exceed human capabilities, 70–72 intelligence, future of, 70–75 Wilkins, John, 275 wireheading problem, 29–30 With a Rhythmic Instinction to Be Able to Travel Beyond Existing Forces of Life (Parreno), 263–64 Wolfram, Stephen, 266–84 on AI takeover scenario, 277–78 background and overview of work of, 266–67 computational knowledge system, creating, 271–77 computational thinking, teaching, 278–79 early approaches to AI, 270–71 on future where coding ability is ubiquitous, 279–81 goals and purposes, of humans, 268–70 image identification system, 273–74 on knowledge-based programming, 278–81 purposefulness, identifying, 281–84 Young, J.

The omnivore's dilemma: a natural history of four meals
by Michael Pollan
Published 15 Dec 2006

Rodale, a health-food fanatic from New York City's Lower East Side, the magazine devoted its pages to the agricultural methods and health benefits of growing food without synthetic chemicals—"organically." Joel Salatin's grandfather was a charter subscriber. Organic Gardening and Farming struggled along in obscurity until 1969, when an ecstatic review in the Whole Earth Catalog brought it to the attention of hippies trying to figure out how to grow vegetables without patronizing the military-industrial complex. "If I were a dictator determined to control the national press," the Whole Earth correspondent wrote, Organic Gardening would be the first publication I'd squash, because it's the most subversive.

…

PERHAPS MORE THAN any other single writer, Sir Albert Howard (1873— 1947), an English agronomist knighted after his thirty years of research in India, provided the philosophical foundations for organic agricultural. Even those who never read his 1940 Testament nevertheless absorbed his thinking through the pages of Rodale's Organic Gardening and Farming, where he was lionized, and in the essays of Wendell Berry, who wrote an influential piece about Howard in the The Last Whole Earth Catalog in 1971. Berry seized particularly on Howard's arresting—and prescient—idea that we needed to treat "the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal and man as one great subject." For a book that devotes so many of its pages to the proper making of compost, An Agricultural Testament turns out to be an important work of philosophy as well as of agricultural science.

…

I., 142, 144, 145, 181,204 Rorabaugh.WJ., 100 Rosie (chicken), 135, 140, 159, 169-74, 176, 177, 178 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 3, 297 Rozin, Paul, 3, 287-88, 292, 296, 298, 300,357 Rumensin, 74, 78-79 Russell, Jim, 82 Sahagun, Friar, 58 Salatin.Art, 240, 250-52, 253 Salatin, Daniel, 123, 202, 203, 216, 227, 228,231-33,251 Salatin, Frederick, 204, 206 Salatin, Joel: in alternative food chain, 125, 126-27, 128, 130, 169, 198, 213, 240-42, 249, 253-55, 257-58, 260-61, 270, 271,304,321,331 books written by, 209-10, 230 family background of, 204-7 on government interventions, 229—30, 243, 246 as grass farmer, 123-27, 186-87, 189, 190-91, 197-98, 201 on industrial organic, 131—33, 213, 222,230,243-46,248,260 and local markets, 240-42, 244-45, 248-50, 253-55, 257-58, 332 natural systems of, 214—17, 221 and rotational grazing, 192-98, 216-17,220 self-sufficiency of, 203—4 and sustainability, 131, 230, 240 see also Polyface Farm Salatin, Rachel, 203 Salatin, William, 204-7, 2 2 3 salt flats, 279, 393-94 Salvador, Ricardo, 58 Sand County Almanac, A (Leopold), 281 Santa Cruz Island, 3 2 4 - 2 5 science, reductionist, 146-48, 150, 180, 181 Scully, Matthew, 309, 321 seeds, patented, 255 Shainsky, Allen, 170 Sheridan, Philip, 2 4 Shiva, Vandana, 41 Sinclair, Upton, 250, 3 1 2 Singer, Peter, 304-9, 3 1 1 , 3 1 2 - 1 3 , 3 2 1 , 326,327-28,332 Slow Food movement, 255, 259-60 Small Planet Foods, 154, 159, 161 Smil,Vaclav, 4 2 , 4 3 , 4 7 soft drinks, 18, 104-5, 107, 115, 117 Soil and Health,The (Howard), 145 Soil Conservation Service, 49 sorbital, 86 soufflé, chocolate, 272-73 Soviet Union, food chain in, 256 soybeans: planting, 35, 40, 42 prices of, 103 processed foods from, 91—92, 108 research on, 87 Squanto, 24—25, 26 Stamets, Paul, 378 steer number 534: author's purchase of, 66, 72 death of, 250, 304, 329-30 early days of, 69, 7 1 , 83 and fast food, 114 in the feedlot, 7 2 - 7 3 , 79-84, 195-96 Gar Precision 1680 as father of, 69, 77 4 5 0 * INDEX steer number 534 (cont.) as link in food chain, 81,83 number 9534 as mother of, 69, 71 weaned, 71—72 weight gain of, 80, 81 Stockman Grass Farmer, 187, 249 stomata, 21 Stony field Farm, 173, 182 sucrose, 89, 107 sugar, 104, 107 sugarcane, 104 sun: converted to food, 4 5 , 46, 70-71, 195 energy from, 2 1 - 2 2 , 44, 45, 70, 73, 83, 188-89, 199 and photosynthesis, 2 0 - 2 1 , 188, 195, 196, 197, 199,375 supplanted in food chain, 7, 4 4 superbugs, antibiotic-resistant, 78—79, 82 supermarket, 15-19, 258 bar codes in, 244—45 biodiversity in, 16—17 food prices in, 51—52, 243 organic food sold in, 134—40, 145, 2 5 7 , 258, 260 SKU (stock-keeping units) in, 20 Supermarket Pastoral, 137-39, 158, 170-72 supersizing, 1 0 5 - 6 , 1 1 0 , 1 1 7 sweeteners, 88-89, 93, 95, 103-5 Swift & Company, 69 Tanimura & An tie, 164 Tassinello, Anthony, 378-81, 383, 387, 390,392,406,407 TBHQ (tertiary butylhydroquinone), 113-14 teosinte, 27-28, 104 Thoreau, Henry David, 55, 281-82 thrifty gene, 106 Tolstoy, Leo, 305 transfats, 88 transgenes, 36 TreeTop apple pieces, 97 turkeys, on Poly face Farm, 126, 216 Tylosin, 74, 78-79 Tyson, Don, 252, 261 Tyson foods, 69, 95-96, 114, 170 usufruct, 398, 409 vegetarianism, 118, 305, 3 1 3 - 1 5 , 319, 325-27,362 Voisin, André, 188, 189,206 Walden (Thoreau), 281-82 Wallace, Henry, 104 Wallerstein, David, 105-6, 111 Warman, Arturo, 26 wasabi, 296 Washington, George, 101 Wasson, Gordon, 378 Waters, Alice, 253 water table, pollution of, 46 Weil, Andrew, 372, 377, 378 Weston A. Price Foundation, 248 wheat, in new world, 25 wheat people, Europeans as, 2 2 - 2 3 whiskey, 25, 100-101, 105 Whole Earth Catalog, 142, 145 Whole Foods supermarkets, 258-59 author's shopping in, 173—76, 178, 183 and industrial organic, 138-39, 161, 178, 1 8 3 , 2 4 8 - 4 9 , 2 6 0 and organic movement, 139, 141 prices in, 176, 262 Supermarkets Pastoral style, 134—39 Williams, Joy, 309 Wilson, E.O., 128 Wisconsin glacier, 3 3 Wise, Steven M., 309 World War I, poison gas in, 43 xanthan gum, 19, 86, 96, 156 yeast, wild, 397, 399-400 YieldGard gene, 36 Zea mays, see corn Zyklon B, 43 ABOUT THE AUTHOR Michael Pollan is the author of three previous books: Second Nature, A Place of My Own, and The Botany of Desire, a New York Times bestseller that was named a best book of the year by Borders, Amazon, and the American Booksellers Association.

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities
by Howard P. Segal
Published 20 May 2012

As the head of General Electric, Jeffrey Immelt, has argued, “it’s hard to believe simultaneously in energy security and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions without believing in nuclear power.”43 Increasing numbers of environmentalists are conceding this point, among them the famous Stewart Brand, creator of The Whole Earth Catalog. Brand confessed to his traditional opponents: “I’m sorry. I was wrong, you were right. I’m sorry.” Brand has nevertheless maintained his utopian propensities despite this Utopia Reconsidered 153 change of heart and has embraced a decentralized corporate vision of information technologies and computer networks that nicely complements those of capitalist leaders such as Immelt.

…

G. 9, 35, 240, 251 Wen Jiabao, Prime Minister 38 Western ethnocentrism and industrialisation 169–170 Westinghouse, George 157 What Will Be (Dertouzos) 164 Wheeler, William Bruce 111 Whewell, Rev. William 51, 52 “Which Guide to the Promised Land? Fuller or Mumford?” (Temko) 245 “white man’s burden” 170 Whitney, Eli 157 Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (Dahl) 106 Whole Earth Catalog, The (Brand) 153–154 Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences (Tenner) 167 Whyte, Jr., William H. 114–115, 122 Wikipedia 193, 194 Williams, Rosalind 8 Wilson, President Woodrow 252 wind power 150–152, 154, 157, utopian aspects 150 Winfrey, Oprah 168 Winter, Jay 251–253 Wiscasset, Maine, US 143, 145, 146–147 Woman on the Edge of Time (Piercy) 92 women 114–115 and education 22 equality 26, 92–93 and Frankenstein 130–131 marginalizing of 67, 170, 188 and utopianism 25, 63, 90–92, 173 women’s rights 18, 253 Women’s Commonwealth, Texas 25 Index 289 wood, energy from 157 Woodstock 242 Wooldridge, Adrian 11 workers: exploitation of 81 and industrial revolution 75, 83, 212 and speed 165 and utopia 61, 62 Workers’ Control in America (Montgomery) 212 “Works and Days” (Hesiod) 47 World a Workshop, The: Or the Physical Relationship of Man to the Earth (Ewbank) 80 World Future Society 166 World of Tomorrow exhibit, 1939– 1940 New York World’s Fair 14, 34–35, 37, 164 World War I 170 World War II 21, 35, 240 World Wide Web 186 World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago 36–37 290 Index World’s Fairs 33–39 decline of 38 and impact of communications 35–36 impact 37 listed 34, 36, 37–38, 39 New York 242 perceptions of 33 as temporary utopias 34 Wozniak, Stephen 158, 202 Young Mill-Wright and Miller’s Guide, The (Evans and Ellicott) 77 Young West (Schindler) 10 YouTube 193, 205 Yuaikai (Friendly Society), Japan 20 Zamyatin, Eugene 123, 166 zealots, high-tech 188, 189 Zimbabwe 170 Zionists 8 Zuckerberg, Mark 193 

Artificial Whiteness
by Yarden Katz

While Zeleny states this is not meant to be “an argument against planning,” his work fits rather squarely in the neoliberal epistemic frame that sees markets as powerful, decentralized information-processors.   42.   Milan Zeleny, “Crisis and Transformation: On the Corso and Ricorso of Human Systems,” Human Systems Management 31, no. 1 (2012): 49–63.   43.   Fred Turner describes how individuals such as Stewart Brand (of Whole Earth Catalog fame) brought together people from the corporate world, academia, the military, and the media around themes of self-organization, cybernetic control, networks, and distributed learning: “The notion of distributed learning, in which individuals learn together as elements in a system, was simultaneously congenial to Shell executives (‘because that’s pretty much how they do their administration’), to cyberneticians such as Francisco Varela (because it seemed to describe his notion of ‘awakening systems’), to computer engineers like Danny Hillis (because it was a conceptual element of massively parallel computing), and to Brand’s own ‘access to tools’ approach to life.”

…

Sanitary Commission (USSC), 278n19 Van Riper, Paul, 211–12, 215–16, 297n63, 298n69 Varela, Francisco J., 194–96, 199–203, 205, 289n25, 292n38, 293n43, 294n46 Vietnam War, 62, 84, 211–12, 215 “view from nowhere” and “view from somewhere” 6–7, 94–95, 100, 117, 123, 166, 193, 204, 221 Virginia, 161, 279nn24–25 virtual humans, 219, 299n79 Vitale, Alex, 136–37 Wallis, Brian, 110 Wall Street Journal, The, 67, 76, 130, 249n89 War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, 297n61 Washington Post, The, 60, 70, 83, 125, 215 Weinbaum, Alys Eve, 293n44 Weizenbaum, Joseph, 44–46, 123–25, 238n11, 247n70, 269n49, 270n53, 270n55 Wells, Ida B., 176, 179, 285n69 West Bank, 151, 180, 267n35, 276n45 What Computers Can’t Do, 33 white fragility, 11, 171, 182 white gaze, 175, 180 White House, 50, 80, 135, 141, 261n41 whiteness: as analogous in form to AI, 164–67, 181–82, 185, 226, 228, 239n24; of the AI expert industry, 77, 156, 172; disinvesting from, 14, 16, 172, 228–29, 232–34, 240n28; in global politics, 82; investment in, 9–11, 162–64; logic of, 93, 153–55, 157, 276n9, 280n27; nebulous and incoherent character of, 7–12, 16, 20, 159–64, 233; and the politics of representation, 172–73; as property, 162–64, 281nn30–32 white supremacy, 14, 152; logic of, 6–9, 127, 160, 163, 278n20, 281n31, 286n70; in discourse of AI experts, 128, 155, 158; opposition to, 16, 229, 240n28; as reinforced by AI, 164, 172, 175, 181–82, 185. See also whiteness white voice, 167–71 Whole Earth Catalog, 293n43 Wiener, Norbert, 22, 258n32 Wilson, Terry P., 279n26 Winfrey, Oprah, 176 Winograd, Terry, 44, 192–94, 196–99, 203, 289n19, 289n22, 290n31 Winston, Patrick, 24, 52, 244n41, 250n90 Wired, 120, 254n3, 257n26, 293n43 World Bank, 275n39 world building, 11, 200, 202–3, 221–22, 227 World War I, 21 World War II, 217 Yale University, 273n33 Yang, K.

The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us
by Diane Ackerman
Published 9 Sep 2014

It’s as if Gurdon and Yamanaka had found a way to reset the body’s clock to early development, enabling it to mint wild-card cells that haven’t chosen their career yet—without using the fetal stem cells that cause so much controversy. Space may be only one of the final frontiers. The other is surely the universe of human imagination and creative prowess in genetics. “We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” Stewart Brand began his 1968 classic, The Whole Earth Catalog, which helped to inspire the back-to-the-land movement. His 2009 book, Whole Earth Discipline, begins more worriedly: “We are as gods and have to get good at it.” Among the rarest of the rare, only several northern white rhinoceroses still exist in all the world. But, thanks to Gurdon and Yamanaka, geneticists can take DNA from the skin of a recently dead animal—say, a northern white rhino from forty years ago—turn it into “induced pluripotent stem cells” (IPS), add a dose of certain human genes, and conjure up white rhino sperm.

…

Hardiness Zone Map, 38 Vancouver, Canada, 78 Vawter, Zac, 254–55 vegetable gardens, urban, 74 Venice, Italy, 50 veronicas, 125 vertical farming, 74 in sea, see mariculture vervet monkeys, 131 Viking, 220 Vikings, 42 violence, 286 Viridity Energy, 102 Virtual Dissection, 197 Virtual Interactive Presence in Augmented Reality, 261 viruses, 172, 289–90 vitamin D, 192 volcanic archipelagos, 157–58 voles, 115 Voronoff, Serge, 264 Voyager, 220 Wade, Chris, 157–67 Wageningen UR, 104 Wake Forest, 185 Wakodahatchee Wetlands, 75–76 walking, 259–60 walls, 92 walruses, 134 war, 141–48, 285 War Horse, 141–42 Warner, Sabrina, 47–48 Washington State University, 238 water lettuce, 132 water moccasins, 117–18 water purification, 74–75 water-purifying tea bags, 181 Watson, James, 274 waxbills, 79 Wells, H. G., 267–68 West, American, 165 West Africa, 151 West Nile virus, 134, 302 Weston, Edward, 25 West Virginia, 46 whale fins, 91 wheat, 71 white rhinoceros, 164 white storks, 13 white-tailed deer, 119–21, 126, 129 white-tailed eagles, 124 Whitman, Walt, 184 Whole Earth Catalog, The (Brand), 150 Whole Earth Discipline, The (Brand), 150 wild boars, 124, 131 wildfires, 40–41, 46 wild fishing, 60 wildlife corridors, 83 Wild Ones (Mooallem), 139–40 Wilfrid Laurier University, 40 William the Conqueror, 190 Willis Tower, 254 Wilson, E. O., 10 windows, 196–97 wind power, 83, 92, 100, 102, 103–5 Windstalk, 103–4 “Wind Tunnel,” 102 wind turbines, 104–5 Win-Win Ecology (Rosenzweig), 74 Wizard of Oz, The (film), 146 Wolbachia, 302 wolves, 132 wombats, 164 women, invention and, 191 women’s rights, 191 wood, 106 woodpeckers, 125–26 woolly mammoths, 151 proposed repopulation of, 161–63 Wordsworth, William, 259 World War I, 142–44, 153 World War II, 60–61, 153, 273 writing, 11, 171, 191, 255 Wuppertal, Germany, 78 Xi, Zhiyong, 302 Yamanaka, Shinya, 150, 160 yellow fever, 302 Yellowstone National Park, 126, 132 Youth Climate Leaders Network, 65 Yup’ik Eskimos, 47–48 Zanjani, Esmail, 267 zebra mussels, 131 Zilber-Rosenberg, Ilana, 293 Zimmerman, Richard, 6 ALSO BY DIANE ACKERMAN One Hundred Names for Love Dawn Light The Zookeeper’s Wife An Alchemy of Mind Origami Bridges Cultivating Delight Deep Play I Praise My Destroyer A Slender Thread The Rarest of the Rare The Moon by Whale Light A Natural History of Love A Natural History of the Senses Jaguar of Sweet Laughter Reverse Thunder On Extended Wings Lady Faustus Twilight of the Tenderfoot Wife of Light The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral For Children Animal Sense Bats: Shadows in the Night Monk Seal Hideaway Anthology The Book of Love (with Jeanne Mackin) Copyright © 2014 by Diane Ackerman All rights reserved First Edition For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W.

The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet
by Justin Peters
Published 11 Feb 2013

In his 1987 book, The Media Lab, the entrepreneur and futurist Stewart Brand memorably asserted that “information wants to be free”: that it is effectively impossible to restrict the flow of (and artificially maintain high prices for) data in a world rife with photocopiers, tape decks, instant cameras, digital networks, and other such disseminative tools.32 Brand was the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, which, in the 1960s and 1970s, brought long-haired shoppers a message of conscientious consumption. In the 1980s, Brand became interested in digital networks. He thought that, like the tools he had featured in the Catalog, these networks had the potential to bridge cultural chasms and empower their users to transform society.

…

J., 59 Victory Kit, 258–59 Vixie, Paul, 185 voting rights, 57, 58 Voyage to America (film), 79 Walker, Scott, 233 Wallace, David Foster, 6, 159, 244 Walton, Sam, 7, 249 WarGames (movie), 218 Washburn, Jennifer, University, Inc., 212 Washington, George, 29–30 watchdog.net, 173, 188, 191, 193, 257 web.resource.org, 187–88 Webster, Abraham, 36 Webster, Daniel, 36 Webster, Noah, 20–25, 268 ambition of, 24, 27–28 American Dictionary of the English Language, 34, 35–37 as author, 23, 24–25 autobiography of, 29–30 “blue-backed speller” by, 23, 25, 27, 30, 33, 34, 36 and copyright, 23–24 and copyright law, 27–31, 36–40 death of, 40 early years of, 21 as Federalist, 32–33 financial problems of, 33, 36 lobbying by, 27–30, 37 public image of, 38 as public speaker, 28 as teacher, 22 Webster, William, 37 Weinberg, Martin, 254, 256 Weinberger, David, 158 Wells, H. G., 99 Westlaw database, 173 White Friars, 174 Whole Earth Catalog, 12 Wikimedia Foundation, 150 Wikipedia, 124, 173, 241 Wikler, Ben, 10, 233, 248–49, 260 and Avaaz, 203, 241, 248 and Flaming Sword of Justice, 241, 243 and Swartz’s death, 262 Swartz’s friendship with, 203, 214, 262 and Swartz’s legal woes, 202, 217 Wilcox-O’Hearn, Zooko, 125, 129, 145 Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 71 Williams, Julie Kay Hedgepeth, 27 Wilson, Christopher P., The Labor of Words, 64–65, 70 Wilson, Holmes, 152, 155, 240, 241, 243, 263 Windows operating system, 106 Winer, Dave, 8, 131 Winn, Joss, 207 Wolcott, Oliver Jr., 25, 32, 33 Woodhull, Nathan, 10, 259 WordPress, 241 work as identity, 146 WorldCat, 179 World War I, 77 World War II, 78, 82, 208 World Wide Web: anniversary of, 237–38 archiving all of, 135–36, 173 commercial potential of, 112 as infinite library, 127–28 and Internet, 98, 108–10 introduction of, 98, 108 linking capacity of, 108, 238 malignant forces vs., 238 open, collaborative, 178, 237 popularization of, 112 World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), 127–29 Wyden, Ron, 226, 231 Xerox photocopy machine, 87–88 Xerox Sigma V mainframe, 95–97, 113 Yahoo, 185 Y Combinator, 147 Young America, 50–53 Zanger, Jules, 44 SCRIBNER An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 www.SimonandSchuster.com Copyright © 2016 by Justin Peters All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us
by Joel Kotkin
Published 11 Apr 2016

More than 80 percent of employment growth from 2007 to 2013 was in the newer suburbs and exurban areas.23 CITIES, SUBURBS, AND ENVIRONMENT In addition to economic arguments, claims of environmental superiority also drive the push for densification. Some environmentalists also celebrate the demographic impact of densification, seeing in denser cities a natural contraceptive against population growth, which is seen as a major contributor to environmental destruction. Stewart Brand, founder of the green handbook Whole Earth Catalog, embraces denser urbanization, particularly in developing countries, as a way of “stopping the population explosion cold.”24 Concerns over climate change have been added to justify greater density. “What is causing global warming is the lifestyle of the American middle class,” insists New Urbanist architect Andrés Duany, a major developer of dense housing himself and arguably the movement’s most important voice.25 To advocates such as Duany, a return to old urban forms encourages transit riding over cars, which is one way to reduce carbon emissions.

…

K., 40 Washington, DC childlessness in, 112, 117 children in, 16 as luxury-oriented city, 40 as political power center, 25 Water quality, 68–69 Wealth, in shaping glamour zones, 96–97 Wealthiest cities, 51–52 Webber, Melvin, 163 Weber, Max, 24, 25 Wells, H. G., 2, 28, 144, 191 Welwyn, 29 Westchester County, New York, 184 Western Europe, 15 “What Is a City For?” (speech), 2 Whitman, Walt, 87–88 Whole Earth Catalog, 9 Whyte, William, 146 Wildlife protection, 192 Williams, Austin, 44, 197 Williams, Richard, 163 Wilson, A. N., 37 Winograd, Morley, 175 Wolfe, Alan, 150 Woodlands, Texas, 177 Workforce job decentralization and commuting patterns, 186–187 maintaining, 169 seniors in, 181 women in, 135–136 Working classes, 27 World cities, 81.

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 14 Jun 2017

Clarke: For a kid growing up without TV in the boring enclaves of suburbia in the ’50s and early ’60s, science fiction opened up my universe. I devoured any and all science fiction our public library contained. Arthur C. Clarke’s stories in particular birthed a lifelong interest in science and a deep respect for the power of imagination. This story of a singularity always stuck with me as something to prepare for. The Whole Earth Catalog by Stewart Brand: When I was 17, this big catalog of choices gave me permission to have my own ideas, make my own tools, and unabashedly follow my two loves of art and science. I used it to invent my own life. Decades later, I worked at the Catalog in my first real job. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand: I got sucked into reading this over-the-top manifesto of self-reliance during finals of my first year of college.

…

Stewart Brand TW: @stewartbrand reviverestore.org STEWART BRAND is the president of the Long Now Foundation, established to creatively foster long-term thinking and responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years. He leads a project there called Revive and Restore, which seeks to bring back extinct animal species such as the passenger pigeon and woolly mammoth. Stewart is well known for founding, editing, and publishing The Whole Earth Catalog (1968–85), which received a National Book Award for its 1972 issue. He is the co-founder of The WELL and Global Business Network, and the author of books including Whole Earth Discipline, The Clock of the Long Now, How Buildings Learn, and The Media Lab. He was trained in biology at Stanford and served as an infantry officer in the U.S.

…

By the time I was 24, I could have earned my living as a logger, writer, field biologist, commercial photographer, Army officer, museum exhibit researcher, or multimedia artist. I also learned to live happily on almost nothing. I stayed with none of those things, but the skills served me in everything I eventually did, such as publish The Whole Earth ­Catalog. I was fortunate to base my college education on a science (biology), but I do wish I had taken some anthropology and trained in theater skills (introverts need them). For me, far better than graduate school was two years active duty as a military officer. Any kind of national service (Peace Corps, etc.) is a boon, both for you and for society.

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties
by Christopher Caldwell
Published 21 Jan 2020

It meant natural ingredients (author and dietician Euell Gibbons), home cooking (chef Alice Waters), family values as defined in some past era (not just Happy Days and other 1950s nostalgia but also The Waltons, a colossally successful 1970s television series about the Depression in Appalachia, almost never re-aired in the decades that followed), folk and country music, all kinds of crafts (macramé, latch-hook rugs, Quaker furniture), the grumpy novels of Edward Abbey, backpacking, and The Whole Earth Catalog. When the Baby Boom rock critic Greil Marcus described The Band’s eponymous second album (1969) as “a passport back to America,” he meant it as a compliment. Turning back the clock was a shared societal yearning. Something linked, say, the New York University psychology graduate who joined a commune in Oregon, thinking America had been better before superhighways, with the rural Georgia native who moved to Arizona and joined a megachurch, thinking that America had been better when women stayed home.

…

Windsor (2013), 222, 228, 230 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 26 universities, 42, 44, 53, 75, 86, 109–110, 157–160, 163–166, 200, 202, 203, 269–273 University of California, Berkeley, 165 University of California, Davis, 144–145 University of Connecticut, 158–160 University of Maryland, 158 University of Mississippi, 4 University of Phoenix, 110 University of Toronto, 30 Updike, John, 48 UPS, 224 Upshaw, Gene, 155 Vanity Fair, 256 Vassar, 44 Vatican II (Second Vatican Council), 79, 270 Velvet Underground, 161 Verhoeven, Paul, 135 veterans, 37, 40, 42, 102 Vidal, Gore, 48 video games, 136 Viereck, Peter, 96 Vietnam War, 3–5, 27, 42, 44, 65–79, 82–85, 89, 161–162, 178, 210, 241 Ia Drang (battle), 74 Khe Sanh (siege), 74 Mekong River Redevelopment Commission, 68 My Lai and Songmy (massacres), 71 Operation Rolling Thunder, 70 Paris Peace accords, 73 Tet Offensive, 72, 74, 75 Viet Cong, 67, 68, 70, 72 Vietnamization, 72–73 Virginia Slims, 43, 49 Volcker, Paul, 103 Voting Rights Act of 1965, 9, 12, 31, 32, 33 Walmart, 191, 232 Walters, Barbara, 65 Walton family, 209 Waltons, The (television show), 81 Wanniski, Jude The Way the World Works, 104–106 War on Drugs, 9, 243 War on Poverty, 9, 207 Warhol, Andy, 141 Washington, Booker T., 122 Washington, George, 13, 149–150 Washington Post, 37, 65, 71, 248 waterbeds, 50 Watergate (scandal), 95, 123 Waterman, Guy, 82 Waters, Alice, 81 Waters, Maxine, 154 Wattenberg, Ben, 239 Watts, Alan, 79 Watts riots, 28, 31 Webb, James, 78 Webb, Roy H., 111 Weber, Max, 164 Wechsler, Herbert, 13–14, 23, 222 Weil, Cynthia, 46 Welch, Jack, 127 welfare state, 5, 81, 104, 109, 177 Wenner, Jenn, 230 Western Electric, 134 WhatsApp, 199 Whirlpool, 224 White, Bill, 155 Whole Earth Catalog, The, 81 Wicker, Tom, 69 Wilde, Oscar, 183 Wilentz, Sean The Age of Reagan, 95 Williams-Sonoma, 224 Williamson, Kevin, 244 Wilmot Proviso of 1846, 238 Wilson, Darren, 262–263 Wilson, James Q., 33, 47 Windsor, Edith, 223–225 Winfrey, Oprah, 208 Wolfe, Tom, 48 women’s rights, 3–5, 42–45, 47, 49–51, 65, 89, 163, 164, 166, 229 women’s suffrage, 206 (see also feminism) Womyn of Antioch, 157 Woods, Granville, 157 Woodstock (music festival), 82, 99, 183 Woodward, C.

A People’s History of Computing in the United States
by Joy Lisi Rankin

A subset of the Bay Area population at the intersection of technology and counterculture cared deeply about computing and the environment. Albrecht helped launch the loose computing education division of the Portola Institute, which employed Stewart Brand, the f­ather of the quin­tes­sen­ tial countercultural publication the Whole Earth Cata­log.107 The Whole Earth Cata­log was favored by ­t hose interested in (among other ­things) ecol­ogy, the environment, and back-­to-­the-­earth communes. Albrecht mirrored ­t hese issues in My Computer Likes Me when he noted about population that “if the pres­ent growth rate persists,” ­t here would be “too many” ­people.108 The first edition of My Computer Likes Me was snapped up during 1972, the same year that Albrecht expanded his paired BASIC-­and-­ people-­computing mission with the publication of the ­People’s Computer Com­pany.

Hacking Capitalism
by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

The leading thought was to develop small-is-beautiful, bottom-up, and decentralised technology. The personal computer fits into this picture. A central figure in advocating such an approach, with a foothold both in the environment movement and the embryonic hacker movement, was Stewart Brand, publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog. Another key name in the philosophy of ‘appropriate technology’ was the industrial designer Victor Papanek. They denounced mass production in the same breath as they provided blueprints for Do-It-Yourself technologies. The leading thought was that a ‘better mousetrap’ would win out against faulty industrial products on the merits of its technical qualities.

…

Index Aestethic innovation 64, 68, 177 Adorno, Theodor 65, 70, 168, 191–192 Advanced Research Projects Agency, see ARPA Affluent society 99–101 Aglietta, Michel 59 Alienation 10, 156–159, 173, 182, 188, 190 Allopoietic 134–135 Altair 17 Althusser, Louis 77 Analytical Engine 3 Anti-production 120, 213 n.12 AOL Time Warner 89, 91, 125 Apache 24, 28, 38, 44 Apple 17 ARPA (advanced research projects agency) 13–15 AT&T (american telephone and telegraph) 13–15, 19, 23–24, 91, 116 Audience power 66, 68, 198 n.47, 204 n.40 Authorship 74, 78, 80–82, 112, 114, 125, 128–129, 138, 154, 160, 174, 206 n.9 Autonomous Marxism 6–7, 52, 55, 176, 194 n.18, 201 n.9 Autopoietic 134–135, 155 Axelos, Kostas 158–159 Babbage, Charles 3–4 Back Orifice 80 Barbrook, Richard 150, 216 n.27 Bataille, George 147, 149, 154, 216 n.20 Baudrillard, Jean 64, 103, 105, 109, 127, 202 n.19, 211 n.9, n.12 BBS (bulletin board systems) 96 Beauty of the Baud 3, 184 Bell, Daniel 51, 54, 100, 170–171, 173 Bell, Graham 11 Bell laboratory 14 Benjamin, Walter 65, 207 n.18, 210 n.49 Benkler, Yochai 139–140, Berkeley internet name domain, see BIND Berkeley software distribution, see BSD Berne convention 85, 208 n.25 Bertelsmann 124 Biegel, Stuart 91 Bijker, Wiebe 54–55, 203 n.24 Binary code 19, 21–22, 97, 195 n.16 BIND (Berkeley internet name domain) 25 Biometric technology 92–93 Black, Edwin 194 n.15 Boomerang externalities 146 Bowles, Samuel 173 Boyle, James 117, 208 n.24 Brand, Stewart 16, 69 Braverman, Harry 130–133 British cultural studies 9, 65–66 Brooks, Fred 184 BSD (Berkeley software distribution) 15, 23–24, 38 Bulletin board systems, see BBS Burghardt, Gordon 166–167 Bush, Vannevar 12 Caffentzis, George 61–63 Caillois, Roger 166–167, 182 Castells, Manuel 51, 145, 200 n.3, 202 n.19, 216 n.15 CC (Creative commons) 4, 41, 78 Censorship 4, 79–80, 82, 91, 97, 178, 189 CERN (Conseil européen pour la recherche nucléaire) 25 Certeau, Michel de 66, 112, 182 Chaos computer club 180 Charismatic code 153, 217 n.33 Chiapello, Eve 163 Circulating capital 120, 145 Class consciousness 18, 178, 180–181 for-itself 188 struggle 4, 7, 44, 47–48, 54, 56, 67, 72, 76, 103–104, 159, 175–178, 188, 203 n.20, 204 n.27, 212 n.12 Clickwrap license, see shrinkwrap license Coase, Ronald 140 Cohen, Gerald 54 Collective invention, 213 n.6 Collins, Hugh 76–77 Commodification of information 8, 31, 199 n.60, Commodity exchange theory 75–76, 90 Commons 119, 122, 129, 135, 137, 145–148, 150–151, 171–172, 184, 191, 199 n.57, 216 n.18 Community for-itself 183 FOSS developers 21, 23 Compiling 195 n.16 Computer literacy 131–132 Constant capital 127 Copyleft 20–22, 34, 196 n.19, n.21, 198 n.44 Copyright law 8, 18–22, 78–79, 82–85, 94, 98, 112, 113, 143, 154, 181, 195 n.14, 196 n.19, 207 n.15, 208 n.22 Crackers 69, 98, 113, 151, 153, 155, 183, 188, 217 n.35 Creative class 51, 61, 173–174 Creative commons, see CC Cross, Gary 101 Cultural workers 82, 163–164, 192 Culture industry 57, 70, 73, 75, 85, 106, 112, 168, 173, 205 n.46 Cyber attacks 199 n.61 feminism 30, 214 n.32 libertarianism 4, 90, 216 n.27 marx 52 politics 4, 30, 48, 69 space 11, 88, 150 Cycles of struggle 176–177 Cygnus 32–34 Darknet 97 Davies, Donald 195 n.5 Debian 123 Debian-women 30 Debord, Guy 103, 211 n.9 Decompiling 195 n.16 DeCSS see DVD-Jon Deleuze, Gilles 135, 213 n.12, 215 n.34 Denial-of-service attacks 1, 193 n.3 Derrida, Jacques 57, 149, 153, 216 n.24 Desire 18, 27, 48, 105, 109, 136, 155–156, 161, 174, 185–186 Deskilling 5, 9, 45, 97, 111, 130–131, 209 n.44, 210 n.56 Desktop factory 186 Developing countries and FOSS 30, 87, 96, 210 n.54 Difference Engine 3 Digital rigths management, see DRM DRM (digital rights management) 22, 42, 91, 183, 209 n.45 DVD-Jon 87–88, 91 Edelman, Bernard 77–78, 80, 207 n.16 Edwards, Richard 89 Electro-hippies 178 Electronic Frontier Foundation 58, 208 n.21 Ellickson, Robert 217 n.30 Empire 6 Enclosure movement 71, 129, 171 Engels, Friedrich 53, 115 Enzensberger, Hans 194 n.16, 210 n.49 Excess of expenditure 49, 100, 136, 147–148, 153–155, 171, 174 Exchange value 45, 56, 103–105, 109, 144, 211 n.12 Fan media production 112–113, 127, 164, 183, 191, 212 n.20, 194 n.16 Fanning, Shawn 124–125 Felsenstein, Lee 17 Filesharing networks 4, 8, 10, 31, 73, 93–94, 113, 127, 137, 150–153, 189 Firefox 37, Fisher, William 74–75 Fixed capital 15, 27, 39, 68 Flextronics 96 Florida, Richard 51, 173–174 Fordism 59, 67, 101, 203 n.26 Formal subsumption 56, 118 FOSS (free and open source) community 5, 8, 28–29, 38, 49, 111, 125, 133, 172, 177 development model 6, 9, 24, 41, 49, 115, 121, 137, 139–140, 190 license 8, 20, 28, 40, 78, 122, 125, 190 movement 26–27, 31–32, 38, 43, 50, 116, 133, 150, 184, 195 n.17 Foucault, Michel 48, 57, 76, 80, 128, 181 Frankel, Justin 124–125 Frankfurt School 57, 160 Free and open source software, see FOSS Freenet 80, 214 n.18, Free software foundation 19, 22–23, 37, 73, 126, 179–180, 196 n.20, n.23 movement 151, 195 n.17 Free speach not free beer 32, 73, 123 French regulation school 59, 204 n.27 French revolution 1–2, 79, 159, 161, 165, 187 Friedman, Andrew 133 Frow, John 151 Gaines, Jane 207 n.20 Garnham, Nicholas 102 Gates, Bill 4 Gay, Paul du 106–107 General economy 147 intellect 60, 63, 184 public license, see GPL Giddens, Anthony 200 n.6 Gift economy 10, 54, 100, 137, 148–152 Gintis, Herbert 173 Gnome 35, GNU (GNU is not Unix) book 210 n.55 Emacs 20, 32 /Linux 4, 15, 22–24, 26, 28, 31–35, 38–39, 43–44, 47, 87, 123, 163, 183, 196 n.23, n.28 Gnutella 124–125, 153, 214 n.18 Google 41 Gopher 25 Gosling, James 20 Gouldner, Alvin 201 n.12 GPL (General public license) 19–24, 27, 31–32, 34–35, 37, 96, 129, 185, 196 n.19, n.20, n.21, 197 n.44 Gracenote 41, 199 n.57 Guattari, Felix 135, 213 n.12, 215 n.34 Habermas, Jurgen 202 n.16 Hacker manifesto 28, 30, 172 spirit 44, 108, 174, 199 n.66 Hacktivists 16, 55, 84, 178, 180, 182 Haeksen 30, 197 n.41 Halloween Documents 26 Haraway, Donna 197 n.42 Hardin, Garrett 145–146, 148 Hardt, Michael 6, 47–48, 52, 60, 194 n.18, 204 n.30 Hardware hackers 7, 17–18, 96 Harrison, Bennett 140–141 Harvey, David 95 Haug, Wolfgang 104–105 Hayes, Dennis 44 Hayles, Katherine 71–72, 203 n.22 Hearn, Francis 168, 182 Heeles, Paul 108 Hegel, G.W.F. 52–53, 56, 74, 157 Heidegger, Martin 160 Heller, Michael 148 High-tech cottage industry 139 gift economy 10, 100, 137, 150 Himanen, Pekka 100, 108, 174, 199 n.66 Hippel, Eric von 205 n.44 Hirsch, Fred 102, 171 Hobsbawm, Eric 76, 189, 193 n.6 Holloway, John 7 Homebrew computer club 17, 185 Homo ludens 165 Horkheimer, Max 65, 70, 168 Howard, Michael 114–115 Huizinga, Johan 165–167, 182 Human genome project 39, 93 Hyde, Lewis 152, IBM 5, 7, 17–19, 24, 38, 43–44, 47, 73, 92, 108, 128, 142, 194 n.15 Identification 90–93, 189 Identity 98, 110, 123, 174–177, 181 Illich, Ivan 128, Immaterial labour 52, 60–61, 71 Independent media centre (IMC) 126 Information age 8, 19, 31, 50–54, 57, 60, 108, 180, 182, 199 n.66, 202 n.19, 203 n.26 exeptionalism 69–70, 73, 132, society 50 Instrumentality 10, 49, 56, 116, 160, Intel 17, 38–39, 43, 92, 198 n.52 Intellectual property enforcement 5, 43, 83, 85, 85, 88, 94, 98, 133 regime 19, 35, 42, 65, 72–75, 80, 82–85, 111, 113–114, 119, 123, 154, 174 Internet explorer 36–37 Jacquard Joseph-Marie 1, 3 Jacquard loom, 1, 193 n.1, n.2, n.4 Jameson, Fredric 56, 64, 201 n.8, 202 n.17 Jefferson, Thomas 69, 205 n.50 Jenkins, Henry 212 n.20 Jessop, Bob 143, 216 n.14 Johansen, Jon, see DVD-Jon Johnson-Forrest Tendency 143 Kant, Immanuel 74, 161 Kautsky, Karl 53–54 KDE (K desktop environment) 35 Kenney, Martin 39, 67 Keynesianism 143, 170 King, John 114–115 Kirchheimer Otto 77 Kloppenburg, Jack 90 Kopytoff, Igor 150 Kropotkin, Peter 129 Labour contract of the outlaw 123 Laclau, Ernesto 175 Lamer 58, 153, 155 Landsat system 119 Late capitalism 56, 101, 104, 120, 168, 188, 201 n.8, 202 n.17, n.18 Lazzarato, Maurizio 60–62 Lenin, Vladimir 4, 115 Lessig, Lawrence 70, 88 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 152, 217 n.34 Levy, Steven 17 Libertarianism 18, 34, 50, 90, 182, 196 n.28, 216 n.27 Library economy 136, 151–153, 155 Liebowitz, Stan 122–123, 144, Linux, see also GNU/Linux chix 30 kernel 21, 23, 49, 193 n.7, 196 n.23 Liu, Alan 48 Locke, John 74, 78, 147, 154 Luddites 1–2, 189 Lukács, Georg 162, 178–181, 184 Lury, Celia 81 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 201 n.10 Machlup, Fritz 69, 206 n.58 Magic circle 165, 167, 190 Make-believe markets 145–146, 148, 155 Mallet, Serge 60, 204 n.29 Malinowski, Bonislaw 148 Mandel, Ernest 56, 59–60, 62–63, 184, 202 n.17, n.18, n.19 Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company 116 Marcuse, Herbert 3, 10, 116, 159–164, 182, 184 Marx, Karl 2, 4, 7, 48, 50, 53–54, 56–57, 60–61, 64, 81, 88, 101, 104, 109–111, 114–115, 118–119, 133, 139, 141, 144–145, 156–162, 173–175, 197 n.32, 201 n.12, 211 n.5, 212 n.19, 215 n.4 Maslow, Abraham 99–101, 211 n.2 Mass worker 7, 176 Maturana, Humberto 134, 136s Mauss, Marcel 148–149 McBride, Darl 31, 87 McLuhan, Marshall 58 McRobbie, Angela 108 Means of production 9, 48, 57, 81, 116, 129–130, 135, 186, 192 Mentor, the 172 Micro-capital 141 Microsoft 4, 19, 24, 26, 34, 36–39, 42–43, 63, 87, 92, 96, 144 Mill, John Stuart 69 Minitel 14 Minix 23–24 Moglen, Eben 4, 126 Mokyr, Joel 55 Moody, Glen 35, 37, 130 Moore, Fred 17 Morris-Suzuki, Tessa 63–64 Mosaic 36, 198 n.50 Mosco, Vincent, 204 n.40 Motion pictures association of america, see MPAA Mouffe, Chantal 175 Mozilla 36–37, 198 n.50 Mozilla crypto group 126 MPAA (motion pictures association of america) 42, 87–88, 199 n.58, 209 n.36 Multitude 6–7, 60, 181 Mumford, Lewis 134, 147 Naples, Nancy 200 n.77 Napster 124–125, 213 n.17 Naughton, John 12, 15 N/C technology 45–46, 131 Negri, Antonio 6–7, 47–48, 52, 56–57, 60–61, 176–177, 194 n.18, 201 n.9, n.15, 202 n.16, 204 n.31, n.33 Neo-Luddism 134 Netscape 36–38, 126 Network externalities 38, 144 firm 137, 141–142, 144 industry 27, 137 science 141, 215 n.2 society 51, 137, 142 Neuman, Franz 77 Neumann, John von 61, 63 New economy 124, 132, 144 New left 16–17, 150–151, 157, 212 n.12 Noble, David 45, 131, 206 n.59 Norton, Bruce 202 n.17 Nullsoft 125 Nupedia 128 Oekonux 5 Offe, Claus 214 n.30 Office despotism 18 Opencores project 96 Open marxism 7 Open source car 185 development labs 43 initiative 36, 38–41, 78, 180 Organised labour 27, 41, 69, 72, 95–96, 131–132, 141–142, 188, 190 Pashukanis, Evgeny 75–77, 206 n.2 Patent costs 116–118 expansion 22, 39, 83–84, 208 n.24 pools 119 Peer-to-peer filesharing networks 31, 91, 123– 125, 151 labour relations 123, 129 Perelman, Michael 86, 171 Perpetual innovation economy 64, 120 Petty commodity trader 61, 81, 159 PGP (pretty good privacy) 80 Phone phreaks 16, 96–97 Pirate sharing 69, 122–123, 183, 209 n.33, n.45 Play drive 10, 18, 49, 154, 161–162 struggle 3, 10, 156, 174, 182, 190–192 Political subject 156, 174 Poster, Mark 128 Post- fordism 8, 59–61, 67, 81, 107, 116, 133, 135, 139–140, 163, 168, 176, 183, 203 n.26, 204 n.27 industrialism 5, 51–52, 54, 56, 60–61, 71, 100, 103, 130, 137, 139 marxism 175, 177 modern capitalism, 52, 56, 61, 64, 73, 101, 104, 120, 145, 168, 175–176, 188, 216 n.20 Poulantzas, Nicos 218 n.18 Pretty good privacy, see PGP Professional worker 176 Proprietary software 9, 16, 19, 21, 24, 26–27, 33–34, 38, 41, 115, 129–130, 139, 144, 198 n.46, n.52, 200 n.71 Prosumer 106–108 Put to work 8, 48, 73, 82, 177, 184 Qt 35 Radio amateur 17, 96, 185, 191 Radio frequency identifiers, see RFID RAND (research and development) 13 Rand, Ayn 206 n.61 Raymond, Eric 25–27, 196 n.28, 197 n.29 Real subsumption 56, 118, 135 Record industry association of america, see RIAA Recuperation 49, 164, 182 Red Hat 26, 32–35, 43, 47, 68, 196 n.27, 197 n.33, n.44, 198 n.45 Refusal of work 44, 108 Rehn, Alf 217 n.35 Representation politics 66, 110, 191 Research and development, see RAND Restrictive economy, see general economy RFID (radio frequency identifiers) 92 RIAA (record industry association of america) 42, 124–125, 153, 199 n.58 Robins, Kevin 194 n.17, 209 n.44 Romanticism 2, 81–82, 159, 162–163 Ross, Andrew 46, 199 n.66 Sabotage 1, 10, 46, 111, 188, 193 n.6 Sahlins, Marshall 70 Sanger, Larry 128 Sarnoff law 66 Scarcity 70–71, 99–101, 109, 112–113, 130, 147, 155, 160, 169, 190 Schiller, Dan 71, Schiller, Friedrich 23, 10, 154, 160–163, 184 Schumpeterian competition state 143 Schumpeter, Joseph 30 SCO/Caldera 43–44, 87 Self-administrated poverty 172 Sennett, Richard 45 SETI@home 127 Sham property 141 Shiva, Vandana 209 n.45 Shrinkwrap license 21 Shy, Oz 122, 143–144 Silicon Valley 44, 180 Simputer 210 n.54 Sitecom Germany GmbH 22 Situationists 150 Smythe, Dallas 66–67 Social bandit 76, 93–94, 98, 189 division of labour 4, 77, 99, 123, 149, 158–159, 164, 174, 187–188, 192, 205 n.44, 210 n.49 factory 47–48, 56, 64, 68, 89, 177 labour 38, 56, 71 planning theory 74–75 taylorism 90, 97–98, 209 n.44 worker 7, 60, 176–177 Sony 42 Stallman, Richard 19–20, 32, 37, 73, 179, 195 n.17, 196 n.23, 200 n.71 Strahilevitz, Jacob 152–153, 217 n.33 Stefik, Mark 92 Sterling, Bruce 11, 15 Strahilevitz, Jacob 152–153, 217 n.33 Surplus labour 8, 47–48, 61, 63, 67, 211 n.5 profit business model 34, 68 value 33–34, 47, 50, 61–64, 66–68, 101, 105, 110–111, 118, 120–121, 134, 156, 202 n.16, 204 n.40, 213 n.12, Surveillance 4–5, 85, 90–91, 97, 143, 145, 189, 214 n.18, Tanenbaum, Andrew 23 Taylorism 8, 45–46, 48, 90, 115, 132 Techies 16, 18, 30, 178, 182 Technical division of labour 27, 48, 115, 123, 132, 142, 155, 199 n.68 Technicist 54, 201 n.6 Technological american party 16, 18 Technological determinism 57–58, 182 Terranova, Tiziana 68 Toffler, Alvin 51, 106 Torvalds, Linus 21–23, 26–27, 49, 193 n.7, 197 n.32 Travis, Hannibal 207 n.15 TRIPS 86, 208 n.29 Troll Tech 35 Tronti, Mario 47 Trusted computing 92, 96 Unix 14–15, 19–20, 23–24, 43, 87, 195 n.7 User centred development 9, 27, 41, 65–68, 129, 131, 133, 192, 205 n.44 community 50, 68, 111, 123 friendliness 17, 45, 90, 98 Use value 68, 71, 101–105, 109, 113, 120, 122, 129, 144, 147, 153, 155, 211 n.9, n.12 Vaneigem Raoul 212 n.21 Varela, Francisco 134, 136 Variable capital 127 Veblen, Torsten 211 n.7 Villanueva, Edgar 144 Virno, Paulo 57, 73, 172, 177 Virtual community 152–153, 217 n.30 space 90, 92–93, 95, 184, 203 n.22, 217 n.33 Volosinov, Valentin 202 n.20 Voluntarism 5, 29, 179 Voluntary labour 2, 8, 107, 129, 166 Wales, Jimmy 128 Warez 153, 183, 217 n.35 Wark, McKenzie 177 W.a.s.t.e. 125 Watt, Duncan 141–142 Watt, James 166 Watt, Richard 213 n.14 Wayner, Peter 151–152 Webster, Frank 194 n.17, 200 n.3, 201 n.7, 209 n.44 Wetware 133–135 White collar working class 48, 97, 130, 200 n.72 hat hacking 180 Whole Earth Catalog 16 Wiener, Norbert 12 Wikipedia 128–129 Williams, Raymond 58 Windows 25, 41, 43, 86–87, 123, 126, 163, 183 Winner, Langdon 16, 203 n.25 WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organisation) 18, 83, 91 Wired Magazine 18, 58, 180 Witheford, Nick-Dyer 51, 204 n.31 Wolfgang, Haug 104–105 Wolf, Naomi 105 Wood, Stephen 131 Workfare state 135, 171 World Intellectual Property Organisation, see WIPO World Trade Organisation, see WTO Worshipful Company of Stationers London 79 Wright, Steve 201 n.9 WTO (World Trade Organisation) 86, 126, 178 Yahoo 41 Young, Robert 26–27, 33, 126, 196 n.27, 198 n.46, n.52 Youth international party line 16 Zero work 49 Zizek, Slavoj 4, 175

Don't Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
by Steve Krug
Published 2 Jan 2000

Even though the subject is the brick-and-mortar shopping experience, the problem is the same as Web design: creating complex, engaging environments where people look for things—and find them. > SOURCES OF POWER: HOW PEOPLE MAKE DECISIONS Gary Klein, MIT Press, 1999 Klein’s study of naturalistic decision making is another wonderful example of how field observation can reveal the difference between the way we think we do things and the way we actually do them. If the Whole Earth Catalog still existed, this book and Why We Buy would both be in it. > THE PRACTICE OF CREATIVITY: A MANUAL FOR DYNAMIC GROUP PROBLEM SOLVING George M. Prince, Macmillan, 1972. I took a course in the Synectics method thirty-five years ago, and there hasn’t been a week since then that I haven’t used something I learned from it.

The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives
by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen
Published 22 Apr 2013

There is an underside to SEO, however—“black-hat SEO”—where efforts to manipulate rankings include less legal or fair practices like sabotaging other content (by linking it to red-flag sites like child pornography), adding hidden text or cloaking (tricking the spiders so that they see one version of the site while the end user sees another). 2 This dictum is commonly attributed to Stewart Brand, the founder and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, recorded at the first Hackers’ Conference, in 1984. 3 While in the technical community the term “hacker” means a person who develops something quickly and with an air of spontaneity, we use it here in its colloquial meaning to imply unauthorized entry into systems. 4 Among the tweets the Pakistani IT consultant Sohaib Athar sent the night of the bin Laden raid: “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).” 5 “Predictive analytics” is a young field of study at the intersection of statistics, data-mining and computer modeling.

…

Sarkozy, Nicolas satellite positioning Saud, Alwaleed bin Talal al- Saudi Arabia, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 4.1, 6.1 “Saudi People Demand Hamza Kashgari’s Execution, The” (Facebook group) Save the Children scale effects Schengen Agreement Scott-Railton, John search-engine optimization (SEO), n secession movements secure sockets layer (SSL) security, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4 in autocracies censorship and company policy on, 2.1, 2.2 privacy vs., itr.1, 5.1, 5.2 in schools selective memory self-control self-driving cars, itr.1, 1.1, 1.2 September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks of, 3.1, 5.1 Serbia, 4.1, 6.1 servers Shafik, Ahmed shanzhai network, 1.1 sharia Shia Islam Shia uprising Shiites Shock Doctrine, The (Klein), 7.1n short-message-service (SMS) platform, 4.1, 7.1 Shukla, Prakash Sichuan Hongda SIM cards, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 6.1, 6.2, nts.1 Singapore, 2.1, 4.1 Singer, Peter, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.5, 6.6, 6.7, 6.8 singularity SkyGrabber Skype, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 3.1, 5.1 sleeping rhythms Slim Helú, Carlos smart phones, itr.1, 1.1, 1.2, 5.1, 5.2, 7.1 in failed states peer-to-peer capability on Snapchat Snoad, Nigel social networking, 2.1, 4.1, 5.1 social-networking profiles social prosthetics social robots “socioeconomically at risk” people Solidarity Somalia, 2.1, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 6.1n, 210, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 Sony South Africa, 4.1, 7.1 South Central Los Angeles Southern African Development Community (SADC) South Korea, 3.1, 3.2 South Sudan Soviet Union, 4.1, 6.1 Spain Speak2Tweet Special Weapons Observation Reconnaissance Detection System (SWORDS), 6.1, 6.2 speech-recognition technology spoofing Spotify Sputnik spyware, 3.1, 6.1 Stanford University statecraft State Department, U.S., 5.1, 7.1 states: ambition of future of Storyful, n Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) Stuxnet worm, 3.1, 3.2 suborbital space travel Sudan suggestion engines Summit Against Violent Extremism Sunni Web supersonic tube commutes supplements supply chains Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) surveillance cameras Sweden switches Switzerland synthetic skin grafts Syria, 2.1, 3.1, 4.1, 4.2 uprising in Syrian Telecommunications Establishment tablets, 1.1, 1.2, 7.1 holographic Tacocopter Tahrir Square, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 Taiwan Taliban, 2.1, 5.1, 7.1 TALON Tanzania technology companies, 2.1, 3.1 Tehran Telecom Egypt telecommunications, reconstruction of telecommunications companies Télécoms Sans Frontières television terrorism, terrorists, 4.1, 5.1, con.1 chat rooms of connectivity and cyber, 3.1n, 153–5, 5.1 hacking by Thailand Thomson Reuters Foundation thought-controlled robotic motion 3-D printing, 1.1, 2.1, 2.2, 5.1 thumbprints Tiananmen Square protest, 3.1, 4.1 Tibet time zones tissue engineers to-do lists Tor service, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 3.1, 5.1n Total Information Awareness (TIA) trade transmission towers transparency, 2.1, 4.1 “trespass to chattels” tort, n Trojan horse viruses, 2.1, 3.1 tsunami Tuareg fighters Tumblr Tunisia, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5 Turkey, 3.1, 3.2, 4.1, 5.1, 6.1 Tutsis Twa Twitter, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.6, 2.7, 3.1, 3.2, 4.1, 4.2, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 7.1, 7.2, nts.1 Uganda Uighurs, 3.1, 6.1 Ukraine unemployment UNESCO World Heritage Centre unique identification (UID) program United Arab Emirates, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 United Kingdom, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 3.1 United Nations, 4.1, 5.1, 6.1, 7.1 United Nations Security Council, 3.1n, 214, 7.1 United Russia party United States, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 4.1, 5.1, 7.1 engineering sector in United States Agency for International Development (USAID) United States Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.5 Ürümqi riots user-generated content Ushahidi vacuuming, 1.1, 1.2 Valspar Corporation Venezuela, 2.1, 2.2, 6.1 verification video cameras video chats video games videos Vietcong Vietnam vigilantism violence virtual espionage virtual governance virtual identities, itr.1, 2.1, 2.2 virtual juvenile records virtual kidnapping virtual private networks (VPNs), 2.1, 3.1 virtual reality virtual statehood viruses vitamins Vodafone, 4.1, 7.1 Vodafone/Raya voice-over-Internet-protocol (VoIP) calls, 2.1, 5.1 voice-recognition software, 1.1, 2.1, 5.1 Voilà VPAA statute, n Walesa, Lech walled garden Wall Street Journal, 97 war, itr.1, itr.2, 6.1 decline in Wardak, Abdul Rahim warfare: automated remote warlords, 2.1, 2.2 Watergate Watergate break-in Waters, Carol weapons of mass destruction wearable technology weibos, 62 Wen Jiabao Wenzhou, China West Africa whistle-blowers whistle-blowing websites Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World (Goldsmith and Wu), 3.1n Whole Earth Catalog (Brand), 2.1n Wi-Fi networks WikiLeaks, itr.1, 2.1, 5.1, 5.2 Wikipedia, 1.1, 6.1 wikis Windows operating system Wingo, Harry Wired, 203 Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century (Singer), 6.1, 6.2 wisdom of the crowds, 2.1, 6.1 women Women2Drive Campaign women’s rights World Food Program (WFP) World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), 3.1, 3.2 World Trade Organization (WTO), 3.1, 3.2 World War I World War II World Wide Web, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 worms, 3.1, 6.1 Wu, Tim, n Xbox 360 video-game console Xi Jinping Yahoo!

Fire in the Valley: The Birth and Death of the Personal Computer
by Michael Swaine and Paul Freiberger
Published 19 Oct 2014

Rebelling Against the Priesthood Bob Albrecht had left Control Data Corporation in the 1960s because of its reluctance to consider the idea of a personal computer, and had, with friends, started a nonprofit alternative-education organization called the Portola Institute. From Portola sprang The Whole Earth Catalog, under the orchestration of Stewart Brand, with its emphasis on access to tools. This, in turn, inspired actress Celeste Holm’s son Ted Nelson to write a book similar in spirit but about access to computers. Nelson’s Computer Lib proclaimed, well before the Altair was announced, “You can and must understand computers NOW!”

…

After that he jumped back in and started another firm, the significantly smaller On Technology, a company focusing on software for workgroups. And in 1989 he began to log on to an online service called The Well. The Well, which stood for Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, was the brainchild of Stewart Brand, who had also been behind The Whole Earth Catalog. The Well was an online community of bright, techno-savvy people. “I fell in love with it,” Kapor said later, because “I met a bunch of people online with similar interests who were smart that I wanted to talk to.” He plunged headlong into this virtual community. One day in the summer of 1990, he even found himself on a cattle ranch in Wyoming talking computers with John Perry Barlow, a former lyricist of the Grateful Dead.

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power
by Max Chafkin
Published 14 Sep 2021

Jobs had presented his decision to leave college as financially motivated—he was wasting his parents’ savings on an education that seemed of questionable value. Thiel, on the other hand, dropped out of a high-paying job as a form of rebellion against the establishment. “Familiar tracks and traditions are like clichés,” he said, referring to his early life of careerist conformity. Jobs had quoted the slogan of the lefty Whole Earth Catalog: “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” Thiel cited the great modernist poet (and fascist) Ezra Pound: “Make it new.” Then, without naming Jobs, Thiel proceeded to attack the two maxims that the Apple founder’s speech had turned on. Jobs had told graduates to follow their hearts. Thiel said the opposite.

…

D., 288, 332–33 VanDevender, Aaron, 168 VantagePoint Venture Partners, 121 VDARE, 101, 203 Vekselberg, Viktor, 200 venture capitalists (VCs), 55–57, 80, 125, 163, 211, 217 Verge, 264 Verisign, 65 Verjee, Aman, 99 Viguerie, Richard, 60–61 visas, 262 H-1B, 260–62 Wacknov, Kevin, 9 Wallace, Chris, 179 Wallace, David, 53 Wallace, George, 61, 304 Wall Street, 33 Wall Street Journal, 42, 47, 64, 80, 129, 314 Warren, Elizabeth, xvi, 300–301, 303, 304 Washington Mutual, 132 Washington Post, 26, 184, 189, 242, 252, 259, 260, 300 Washington Times, 42 Weekly Standard, 42, 99 Weill, Sandy, 85 Weinberg, Zach, 253, 316 Weinberger, Sharon, 153 Weinstein, Eric, 278, 319 Weisberg, Jacob, 160–61 Welch, Christopher Evan, 188 welfare beneficiaries, 140, 141, 145 Weltwoche, 328 WeSearchr, 202, 203, 243, 278–79 Western Oil Sands, 103 West Germany, 3 WhatsApp, 300–301 What the Dormouse Said (Markoff), 145 White, Dana, 237 White, T. H., 25 white supremacists, white nationalists, xiv, 14, 139, 203, 231 Unite the Right rally of, 272 Whitman, Meg, 84–85, 88–91, 147, 236 Whole Earth Catalog, 335 Wikileaks, 150 Willey, Kathleen, 243 Wingfield, Nick, 295–96 Wired, 84, 95–96, 137, 189, 263 Wolfe, Tom, 144, 162 Wolfe Schiff, Alexandra, 162, 312 women voters, 140, 141, 192, 202 Woodstock, 145 Woolway, Mark, xvi working-class white voters, 225 World War I, 327 World War II, 144, 266, 327 Wright, N.

The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-To-5
by Taylor Pearson
Published 27 Jun 2015

Instead of a large, up-front investment in hiring and training someone who may or may not be good enough for the role, you’re able to make a small investment, over time, in someone that has been vetted by other people in your industry. Self-Education: Information Wants to Be Free In 1984, at the first Hackers Conference, Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand was overheard telling Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak the now iconic phrase: “Information wants to be free.” The internet has done more to facilitate information transparency than any technology since the printing press. Knowledge that used to be opaque and hard to source is often now just a Google search away.

One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com
by Richard L. Brandt
Published 27 Oct 2011

“At that time both Jeff and I believed Amazon could succeed as a relatively small business, compared to what it eventually became. I liked that too.” Plus, it reminded Kaphan of an enjoyable, although brief, time he had spent in 1970 working for Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Truck Store, precursor of the Whole Earth Catalog. “I saw Amazon’s mission as a continuation of certain aspects of that same mission: to supply hard to find tools (mainly information-based tools) to a far-flung clientele who might not have easy access to those tools in their local communities,” he says. Bezos offered to hire both Kaphan and Herb.

Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age
by Cory Doctorow , Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman
Published 18 Nov 2014

It’s up to creators everywhere to engage with their colleagues about the ways that expanded liability for intermediaries drive us all into the old-media companies’ corrals, where they get to make the rules, pick the winners, and run the show. 3. DOCTOROW’S THIRD LAW Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, People Do BACK IN 1984, Stewart Brand—founder of the Whole Earth Catalog—had a public conversation with Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak at the first Hackers Conference. There, Brand uttered a few dozen famous words: “On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time.

Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension
by Samuel Arbesman
Published 18 Jul 2016

In the case of computers, technological systems often rely on machinery that is no longer manufactured and code written in programming languages that have long since been retired. Many pieces of scientific software exist as legacy tools, often written in Fortran, a powerful but archaic programming language. Given the speed with which technology moves, reading Fortran is almost the computational equivalent of being well-versed in Middle English. To quote the Whole Earth Catalog creator Stewart Brand in The Clock of the Long Now: “Typically, outdated legacy systems make themselves so essential over the years that no one can contemplate the prolonged trauma of replacing them, and they cannot be fixed completely because the problems are too complexly embedded and there is no one left who understands the whole system.”

To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise
by Bethany Moreton
Published 15 May 2009

Despite its gleam of pure sciÂ�enÂ�tific rationality, developing and deploying high technology has been in part a 132 MAKING CHRISTIAN BUSIN E S S M EN spiritual exercise from the beginning, no matter the political context. The countercultural devotees of Buckminster Fuller, Ken Kesey, and the Whole Earth Catalog brought their dreams of antiauthoritarian, transcendent elitism into the cyber revolution in California. Blending their privileged vision as “comprehensive designers” with the decentralized technologies they developed, this loose fraternity marked an entire wing of the postindustrial economy with their conviction that their new tools made them “as gods.”

…

Fortune, January 30, 1989, 55; Soderquist, The Wal-Mart Way: The Inside Story of the Success of the World’s Largest Company. 33. http://larryholder.blogspot.com/2008/02/my-early-days-with-wal-mart-data. html; accessed July 15, 2008. 34. Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture; the quoted phrase, reports Turner, appeared in Stewart Brand’s opening statement to evÂ�ery edition of the Whole Earth Catalog (1969–1971); Ibid., 82. 35. Between 1959 and 1997, acÂ�tual skilled high-tech jobs like systems analysts and code-writers grew only from 3.4 percent of all U.S. jobs to 6.6 percent; even at a paradigmatic high-tech corporation like Intel, three-quarters of the jobs are for routine clerical, sales, production, or maintenance work.

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 31 Mar 2014

They made up the Free Software Movement, whose aim was to create a global Collaborative Commons (that movement will be considered in greater detail in part III). Their slogan was “information wants to be free,” coined by Stewart Brand, one of the few who bridged the Appropriate Technology Movement and hacker culture. (The Whole Earth Catalog, which Brand edited, helped elevate the Appropriate Technology Movement from a niche subculture to a broader cultural phenomenon.) What’s often lost in Brand’s remarks on the software revolution is the rest of the utterance, which he delivered at the first hackers conference in 1984: On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable.

…

K., 50 Walljasper, Jay, 189 watermill, 33–34, 40–41 Watson, 130 Watt, James, 41 The Wealth of Nations (Smith), 3, 306 The Wealth of Networks (Benkler), 193 Weber, Max, 43–44, 59, 61 Weiner, Gary, 127 Werbach, Adam, 237–238 Werbach, Kevin, 151, 194 Whitacre, Ed, 198 White, Lynn, 34–35 The Whole Earth Catalog (Brand), 100 Wikipedia, 170, 177, 180, 199–200, 243, 309 Williams, Stuart, 246–247 windmill, 34, 40 wired carriers/communications, 149 Wired (magazine), 5 work/worker(s). see last worker standing World Trade Organization (WTO), 187–188 World Watch Institute, 275 Wu, Tim, 202 Yerdle, 237–238 Youth Employment Partnership (YEP), 257 YouTube, 76, 170, 180, 198, 234, 248, 250, 292 Yumkella, Dr.

If Then: How Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future
by Jill Lepore
Published 14 Sep 2020

“If man is to continue as a successful pattern-complex function in universal evolution,” Fuller wrote in 1960, “it will be because the next decades will have witnessed the artist-scientist’s spontaneous seizure of the prime design responsibility and his successful conversion of the total capability of tool-augmented man from killingry to advanced livingry.” For Stewart Brand, an LSD advocate and one of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, the commune answered the atomization of Cold War America. But communal living required tools, a taking back of the machine. In 1968, from his base in Menlo Park, California, Brand launched the Whole Earth Catalog, with the motto “access to tools.” (“The insights of Buckminster Fuller are what initiated this catalog,” Brand wrote in its inaugural issue.)40 In 1972, when ARPANET made its debut, Brand celebrated the liberation of the computer from big business. “That’s good news, maybe the best since psychedelics,” he wrote in Rolling Stone.

…

Popkin, 309 UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer), 24–26, 69, 89, 122, 150 Van Vleck, Tom, 170–72 Velikovsky, Immanuel, 236, 237 Venezuela, 209, 210 venture capitalists, 325, 326 Vidal, Gore, 11, 63–64, 112 Vietnam, partition of, 60, 239, 248 Vietnam War    — advisers sent by Kennedy, 163–64    — antiwar movement in 1967, 233–36    — Ball’s warnings about escalation, 163–64, 194, 213    — bombing of North Vietnam, 194, 198, 214, 219, 253    — causes for United States fighting, 199    — deaths, 60, 225, 294    — escalation of, 198–99, 200, 213, 225, 227, 234, 294    — first war waged by computer, 208    — Hamlet Evaluation System, 227–28, 241, 247–48, 250, 264, 267    — Johnson’s publicity campaign, 253–54, 266    — Johnson’s reluctance to commit to war, 181–82, 193    — military draft and, 225    — National Day celebration in 1966, 229    — Pentagon computer peace calculation story, 231–32    — Project Camelot, 209–12, 216, 285, 293, 298    — Regional and Popular Forces, or RF/PF (Ruff Puffs), 222    — Simulmatics interviews and opinion surveys, 216–18, 220–25, 226, 227, 234, 244–47    — as social-science laboratory, 205, 215, 216, 231, 239, 250, 254    — teach-ins, 199–200, 225, 234, 251, 292, 294    — Tet Offensive, 267, 303    — Tonkin Gulf Resolution, 194    — war correspondent reports, 225–27, 241, 374n Vonnegut, Kurt, 203 Voting (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, McPhee), 34, 81–82, 340n Voting Rights Act (1965), 101, 258, 279 Wallace, Chris, 297 Wallace, George, 268 Wallace, Mike, 297 War on Poverty, 181, 258 Warren, Earl, 134 Washburn, Ruth, 81 Watch Me (McPhee), 83 Watergate    — break-in and arrests at, 308, 309    — Committee for the Re-election of the President, 308, 309    — legacies of, 313    — Nixon resignation, 313    — Woodward and Bernstein story, 309, 310 Wattenberg, Ben J., 274 Wayman, Dorothy, 249, 253 Welles, Orson, 54 Westmoreland, William, 213, 215, 266 Wheeler, Harvey, 148, 157, 158–59, 163, 174–75, 361n, 364n Whitaker, Clem, 16, 17, 273 White Noise (DeLillo), 301 White, Theodore H., 106, 111, 113–14, 131, 140–41 Whole Earth Catalog (Brand), 312 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Albee), 85, 146 Wicker, Tom, 167, 268, 309 Wiener, Norbert, 69 Wiesner, Jerome, 284, 315, 317 Wiggins, Lee, 229 Willkie, Wendell, 53 Wilson, Clark, 359n Winston, Ann Penner, 224, 255, 256, 259, 272, 303 Winston, Marcellus (Gus), 255, 259, 272, 303, 377n Wofford, Harris, 14, 112, 120 Women’s Strike for Equality, 302 Woodward, Bob, 309, 310 Worchel, Philip, 222, 229, 248 World on a Wire (TV show), 4 Wright, Richard, 13 Young, Whitney, 78 Young & Rubicam, 153, 321 Youth International Party (Yippies), 251–52, 286 Zinn, Howard, 295 Zuckerberg, Mark, 6, 282 About the Author Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker.

Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality From Camp Meeting to Wall Street
by Jackson Lears

The counterculture’s improvised rituals were hopeful signs as well—the rituals celebrating “something postulated as sacred … the magnificence of the season, the joy of being the human animal so vividly alive to the world.” The rhetoric of vitalism flourished amid countercultural ferment. Soon enough the ferment would subside and what was left of countercultural protest would be absorbed into the newer, hipper technocracy pioneered in Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog and brought to fulfillment in Silicon Valley. Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine (1980) signaled a new sort of technophilic mysticism, well suited to the mass distribution of personal computers. Hip capitalist advertisers helped to channel countercultural impulses toward the creation of “alternative lifestyles” through the assemblage of consumer goods—including expensive gear that could make the purchaser feel and look like an outdoorsman even if he spent sixteen hours a day staring at a screen.

…

Watts, Alan Waugh, Frank Wayland, Francis Wealth of Nations, The (Smith) Weber, Max Weismann, August Weizenbaum, Jerome Weld, Habijah Welles, Orson Wells Fargo Bank Wesley, John White, Richard White, Theodore White, Walter White, William Allen Whitefield, George “White Negro, The” (Mailer) white supremacy; anxiety about maintaining; in international relations; lynching under; as primitivism; slavery and; sports and Whitman, Jason Whitman, Walt Whitney, Richard Whole Earth Catalog (Brand) Wigfall, Louis T. Wilcox, Ella Wheeler wild, as term; girls Willcox, Louise Collier William III (King of England) Willis, Thomas Wilmans, Helen Wilson, Edmund Wilson, Woodrow; postwar vision of Winesburg, Ohio (Anderson) Winkelman, Bernie Wittgenstein, Ludwig Wohlstetter, Albert Wolf, R.

Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion: Rhetoric in the Peer-To-Peer Debates
by John Logie
Published 29 Dec 2006

Segaller writes: Pa r l orPr e s s wwwww. p a r l or p r e s s . c om Hackers, Crackers, and the Criminalization of Peer-to-Peer Technologies 29 By 1984, as the Macintosh was launched, the hippie origins of networking were once again beginning to show themselves. Part of the impetus came from an electronic version of the Whole Earth Catalog (whose Epilog had come and gone a decade earlier). Inevitably, it was Stewart Brand who originated and branded what he called the “Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link,” or WELL. Now more users were able to tune in and turn on to the highs of networking, attracted by the chance to connect with like-minded people— even “Dead” people.

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future
by Elizabeth Kolbert
Published 15 Mar 2021

This is the situation of the Devils Hole pupfish, the Shoshone pupfish, and the Pahrump poolfish, of the northern quoll, the Campbell Island teal, and the Tristan albatross. Stick to a strict interpretation of the natural and these—along with thousands of other species—are goners. The issue, at this point, is not whether we’re going to alter nature, but to what end? “We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” Stewart Brand, editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, famously wrote in its first issue, published in 1968. Recently, in response to the whole-earth transformation that’s under way, Brand has sharpened his statement: “We are as gods and have to get good at it.” Brand has co-founded a group, Revive & Restore, whose stated mission is to “enhance biodiversity through new techniques of genetic rescue.”

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 7 Sep 2022

Psychedelic heroes of the 1960s, including LSD guru Timothy Leary, former Merry Prankster Stewart Brand, and Grateful Dead lyricist John Barlow, reassured the California counterculture that the computer revolution would be characterized less by the postwar military bureaucracy or even high-tech corporations than by the “new communalists ” of Haight-Ashbury, the Whole Earth Catalog, and the hot tubs of Esalen. By the early 1990s, psychedelic and computer culture had grown indistinguishable. Software developers who wrote code for Apple during the day came home to scrape peyote buds off cactuses and trip all night. My friends at SUN Microsystems used their high-powered computers to generate fractal imagery that was projected at Dead shows.

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History
by Kurt Andersen
Published 4 Sep 2017

And in the 1970s the courts and state legislatures started deciding okay, whatever, do your own thing, Christian, hippie, it’s all good, school’s optional. Retreating to self-sufficient rural isolation, living off the grid, became a hippie thing in the 1960s before it took off as a right-wing conceit in the 1970s. The back-to-the-land movement, with the Whole Earth Catalog as its official almanac and souvenir program, floated along on dreams of agrarian utopia. (For a year or two around 1970, I was a teenage Walter Mitty with my own Whole Earth dream.) Survivalism was the same but different. Both shared a vision of themselves as clued-in self-reliant ordinary heroes escaping the urban corporate-government hive because it was decadent, corrupt, and corrupting.

…

In 2015, in the reality-based zone inhabited by Brian Williams, it turned out that explicit public fabulism was still prohibited and punishable. *4 The authors’ surname, I swear, is Malarkey. *5 2012 National Household Education Surveys Program. 36 Anything Goes—Unless It Picks My Pocket or Breaks My Leg AFTER EMERGING IN THE 1970S as the haunted, well-armed cousins of Whole Earth Catalog readers, survivalists steadily multiplied. They’re betting on a complete breakdown of the U.S. economy and government that they can and will survive by living as they imagine Americans lived centuries ago, in rural isolation and off the grid. Theirs is a dystopia-ready lifestyle, a fantasy given vivid form and encouraged by the three Mad Max movies that came out between 1979 and 1985.

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies
by Geoffrey West
Published 15 May 2017

At the time perhaps no one appreciated this more than the writer and futurist thinker Stewart Brand, who passionately felt that the image of the whole Earth from space would be a powerful symbol, evoking a sense of shared destiny among all people living on the planet. He relentlessly lobbied NASA to release the first images in 1967, which he then used on the cover of his highly influential Whole Earth Catalog, one of the great icons of the 1960s and ’70s. Equally revelatory are the more recent pictures of Mother Earth taken at night when she is not bathed in sunlight (here, bottom right). Had it been technically possible to take such a photograph a couple of hundred years ago, it would have appeared black and revealed nothing.

…

See also finite-time singularity; technological singularity Singularity Is Near, The (Kurzweil), 422 Sisyphus, 418, 423, 424 “six degrees of separation,” 296–97, 301, 304–5 sleep, 6, 12 “slum clearance,” 260, 261, 263 “small world problem,” 296–97, 302–4, 305 smart cities, 270, 294, 338, 346 Smith, Adam, 380 social brain hypothesis, 308–9, 315–16 social capital, 278, 286, 372, 392 Social Darwinism, 287 social incubators, cities as, 295–304 social media, 332, 340 social metabolic rate, 13 social metabolism, 13, 373–74, 415 social networks, 344–45 cities and, 281–88, 295–304, 326–27 Dunbar and numbers, 304–9 impedance matching, 123 integrating physical infrastructure with, 315–24 social physics, 56–57 socioeconomic diversity and business activity, 363–71, 367 “socioeconomic space,” 285 socioeconomic time, 326–32 solar energy, 236, 240–42 solar system, 37, 108–9 Sornette, Didier, 415, 418, 425 Soros, George, 364 South African coast, 140, 144 space filling, 27, 112–13, 129, 201, 284 Spinoza, Baruch, 172 sports rankings, 352–53 square-cube law, 39–42, 43, 58, 59, 158–59 standardized measures, 76 Standard Model of particle physics, 338–39 standard of living, 184, 185–86, 229, 234–35 Standard & Poor’s, 385, 404 Stanford University, 265, 301, 303, 329–30, 361, 435–36 steam engines, 69 Stevenage, 263–65, 267 Stewart, Potter, 20 stock markets, 142, 144, 389–90 Stokes, George, 71 stone arch bridges, 61 strength of materials, 42–45 string theory, 85, 130, 225, 429 Strogatz, Steven, 297–98, 300–301 structuralism, 87 Strumsky, Debbie, 356, 364 Strutt, Edward, 78 Strutt & Parker, 78 sublinear scaling, 19, 28, 173, 374, 412–13 cities, 272, 273, 274–75, 288, 295, 321, 372, 374–75, 388 companies, 391–92, 408 patents, 2, 2n, 4, 29, 276, 357, 386 Sumatra earthquake of 2010, 46 supercentenarians, 188–89, 191 Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), 82–83 superexponential growth, 413–14, 414, 417 superlinear scaling, 18, 19, 29, 374 cities, 275–76, 280, 304, 318, 319, 321, 326–27, 342, 355–56, 370, 374, 391–92 companies, 408, 413–14, 414 Superman, 43–45, 44, 161 survival analysis, 402–3, 405–6 “survival of the fittest,” 87, 89, 403 survivorship curves companies, 397, 398–400, 400–402 human, 189–94, 191, 192 Swift, Jonathan, 128 Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, 271 Sydney Opera House, 259 Szell, Michael, 352 Takamatsu Corporation, 406 Taleb, Nassim, 383 Tange, Kenzo, 248, 258 Taylor Walker (London), 224–26 technological singularity, 28–32, 420, 422, 424 telescopes, 37 temperature, 20–21, 109 exponential scaling of, 173–78 extending life span and, 203–4 temperature dependence of life span, 175, 176, 177, 203–4 temperature rise, 237 terminal units, 113–14, 151, 201–2, 284 terrorist attacks, 134 Tesla, Inc., 124, 403–4 Tesla, Nikola, 123–24 Texas, flow of transport, 292–94, 293 Thames Tunnel, 64 Theory of Everything (ToE), 429–30, 444 theory of relativity, 107–8, 115, 339, 422, 428, 429 thermodynamics, 14, 69, 71, 233, 236, 237 Thiel, Peter, 184 Thomas, Warren, 52–53 Thomas Edison Company, 123–24 Thompson, D’Arcy Wentworth, 86–88, 97, 111, 181 ¾ power scaling law, 25–27, 93, 155, 458n time dilation, 332 tipping points, 16, 24, 157–58, 382, 463n total market capitalization, 379, 389–90, 390 Tottenham Hotspur, 187 “Toward a Metabolic Theory of Ecology” (Brown, Savage, Allen, Gillooly), 174 “toy model,” 109 traffic flows, 292–94 traffic gridlock, 332–33 transaction costs, 380, 381 transportation time, 332–35 travel time, 329–30, 332–35, 346–47 treadmills, 328, 412, 418 Treatise on Man (Quetelet), 56 trees, 116–17, 121, 121–22, 172, 459–60n scaling exponents, 147, 150, 150–51 trial and error, 69–71, 74–75 Triumph of the City, The (Glaeser), 213 tumors, 6, 15, 27, 172 growth curves, 170, 171 turbulence, 72 Tusko (elephant), 53 Twitter, 296, 332, 340, 447 Two New Sciences (Galileo), 38–42 Tycho Brahe, 439 Tyrannosaurus rex, 159 UCLA School of Medicine, 205 Ultimate Resource, The (Simon), 232–33 United Nations Millennium Development Goals, 230–31 unit of length, 135–37 universality concept of, 76–77 magic number four and, 93–99 “universal laws of life,” 81, 87 universal time, 423–24 University of Modena, 249 University of New Mexico (UNM), 105, 106 urbanization, 6–7, 8–10, 214–15, 223–26 global sustainability and, 28–32, 213–15 life span and, 184–85, 191, 192–93 Urbanocene, 212, 214–15, 236, 262 urban overload, 303–4 urban planning and design, 253–58, 261–67, 290, 294–95 urban psychology, 302–4 urban renewal, 260, 261, 263 urban sociology, 266 Utzon, Jørn, 259 van der Leeuw, Sander, 249–50 van Gogh, Vincent, 189 variational principle, 115–16 Vasa (ship), 70, 459n Vinge, Vernor, 422 von Neumann, John, 424 wages in cities, 30, 275, 276, 278, 281, 285–86 Walford, Roy, 205–6, 207 walking pace, 334, 335–36, 336 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 89, 228 Walmart, 32, 388–89, 394 wars, mathematical analysis of, 132–35 washing machine, 152–53 Washington, D.C., 266–67 Washington Square (New York City), 260, 261 water supply, 360–63 Watson, James, 84, 437 watts (W), 457n Watts, Duncan, 297–98, 300–301 wave theory of light, 126 wealth creation and ranking of cities, 355–59 “wear and tear,” 15, 88, 199–200 decline of body functions with age, 195, 197, 201, 202 weight lifting, 48–51, 50, 352–53 Welwyn Garden City, 255 West, Jacqueline, 187, 317 West, Louis, 52–53 whales, 3, 5, 16, 27, 80, 90–91, 92, 155, 159–60. See also blue whales What Is Life? (Schrödinger), 84 wheat and chessboard problem, 218–20, 219 Whitfield, John, 431–32 Whole Earth Catalog, 212 wide-gauge railway, 64–65 Wilson, Colin, 179 Wired (magazine), 434, 442 world energy consumption, 234, 235 World War II, 133–34, 290, 292, 301 X-ray crystallography, 437 Yale University, 132, 301, 382 Youn, Hyejin, 364 Young, Thomas, 125–26 Yule, Udny, 369–70 Yule-Simon process, 368–71 Yun, Anthony “Joon,” 184 Zahavi, Yacov, 332–34, 335 “zeroth order,” 109–10, 117 Zhang Jiang, 389–90 Zimbardo, Philip, 301–2, 303–4 Zipf, George Kingsley, 310–14 Zipf’s law, 310–14, 311–12, 389 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Here: Public.Resource.Org/CC BY 2.0 Here: (mitochondrion): Blausen.com staff, “Blausen gallery 2014” from Wikiversity Journal of Medicine; (ant): Katja Schulz/CC BY 2.0; (ants’ nest): Natural History Museum: Hymenoptera Section/CC BY 2.0; (Dubai): Henrik Bach Nielsen/CC BY 2.0 Here: (circulatory system of the brain): OpenStax College/CC BY 4.0; (cell network): NICHD/CC BY 2.0; (tree): Ales Kladnik/CC BY 2.0 Here: (Romanesco cauliflower): Jon Sullivan/PDPhoto.org; (dried-up riverbed): Courtesy of Bernhard Edmaier/Science Source; (Grand Canyon): Michael Rehfeldt/CC BY 2.0 Here: (ant): Larry Jacobsen/CC BY 2.0; (shrew): Marie Hale/CC BY 2.0; (elephant): Brian Snelson/CC BY 2.0; (blue whale): Amila Tennakoon/CC BY 2.0; (Paraceratherium): Dmitry Bogdanov/Wikimedia Commons Here: Courtesy of YAY Media As/Alamy Here: (tumor network): Courtesy of JACOPIN/BSIP/Alamy Here: (aging woman): Courtesy of Image Source/Alamy; (marathon runner): Courtesy of Sportpoint/Alamy Here: (long-term real growth in U.S.

Fantasyland
by Kurt Andersen
Published 5 Sep 2017

And in the 1970s the courts and state legislatures started deciding okay, whatever, do your own thing, Christian, hippie, it’s all good, school’s optional. Retreating to self-sufficient rural isolation, living off the grid, became a hippie thing in the 1960s before it took off as a right-wing conceit in the 1970s. The back-to-the-land movement, with the Whole Earth Catalog as its official almanac and souvenir program, floated along on dreams of agrarian utopia. (For a year or two around 1970, I was a teenage Walter Mitty with my own Whole Earth dream.) Survivalism was the same but different. Both shared a vision of themselves as clued-in self-reliant ordinary heroes escaping the urban corporate-government hive because it was decadent, corrupt, and corrupting.

…

In 2015, in the reality-based zone inhabited by Brian Williams, it turned out that explicit public fabulism was still prohibited and punishable. *4 The authors’ surname, I swear, is Malarkey. *5 2012 National Household Education Surveys Program. 36 Anything Goes—Unless It Picks My Pocket or Breaks My Leg AFTER EMERGING IN THE 1970S as the haunted, well-armed cousins of Whole Earth Catalog readers, survivalists steadily multiplied. They’re betting on a complete breakdown of the U.S. economy and government that they can and will survive by living as they imagine Americans lived centuries ago, in rural isolation and off the grid. Theirs is a dystopia-ready lifestyle, a fantasy given vivid form and encouraged by the three Mad Max movies that came out between 1979 and 1985.

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet
by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider
Published 14 Aug 2017

It’s no coincidence that this historical moment gave rise, on the one hand, to the early visions of a networked economy, and on the other, to the first significant wave of cooperative development in the post-WWII period. In both, the individual, reduced to a consumer, stands in for the collective subject of political action, and alternatives become spaces of withdrawal, not engagement. Consider the expansive vision of the Whole Earth Catalog, inviting the people at the intersection of the thriving counterculture and a nascent cyberculture to take up the “tools” they will need to rebuild Spaceship Earth. The project of liberation, in the Catalog, is quite literally a shopping exercise: one picks out the ideas and technologies that construct and confirm a new identity in (nominal) opposition to the mainstream—hence the mélange of yurts and primitive computers, cybernetics, and new age theology that floats across its pages.

You Are Not a Gadget
by Jaron Lanier
Published 12 Jan 2010

If a design like Facebook or Twitter depersonalizes people a little bit, then another service like Friendfeed—which may not even exist by the time this book is published—might soon come along to aggregate the previous layers of aggregation, making individual people even more abstract, and the illusion of high-level metaness more celebrated. Information Doesn’t Deserve to Be Free “Information wants to be free.” So goes the saying. Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, seems to have said it first. I say that information doesn’t deserve to be free. Cybernetic totalists love to think of the stuff as if it were alive and had its own ideas and ambitions. But what if information is inanimate? What if it’s even less than inanimate, a mere artifact of human thought?

The Longing for Less: Living With Minimalism
by Kyle Chayka
Published 21 Jan 2020

Over the years, he observed a trend of Americans “returning to the simple life,”10 which the media had turned into a new archetype. Moving to the country, baking your own bread, and establishing cooperative businesses constituted a new social philosophy that mingled with the techno-utopianism of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog circa 1968. Elgin rebranded Gregg’s voluntary simplicity with the acronym VS, which sounds more like a technological device than an idea with centuries of history—once again showing how minimalism erases its own past. Elgin’s version of VS was driven by a sense of disconnection: Economic and political structures had grown beyond human scale, so people wanted to separate themselves from them.

The Fran Lebowitz Reader
by Fran Lebowitz
Published 8 Nov 1994

The first step, of course, in any successful battle plan is to identify the enemy, and thus I have defined the following terms: PEOPLE WHO THINK OF THEMSELVES AS INHABITANTS OF THE PLANET, OR EARTHMAN Plainly given to gross generalization, Earthman is immediately recognizable by a relationship to green, leafy vegetables that can best be described as camaraderie. He eats and thinks low on the food chain and often believes in reincarnation—a theory that at least explains where he gets his money. His favorite book is something called The Whole Earth Catalog, from which he apparently orders his clothes, and he is so frequently to be seen gazing at the stars that one can only hope that he is thinking of moving. PEOPLE WHO THINK OF THEMSELVES AS CITIZENS OF THE WORLD, OR INTERNATIONALMAN Best typified by the big-time Italian fashion designer, Internationalman is at home wherever he goes.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism
by Aaron Bastani
Published 10 Jun 2019

‘The People Are Not a Brutal and Ignorant Mass’. Verso Books Blog, 30 January 2013. Srincek, Nick and Alex Williams. Inventing the Future. Verso Books, 2016. The Red and the Green ‘Balcombe “Fracking” Village in First Solar Panel Scheme’. BBC News, 28 January 2015. Brand, Stewart. ‘WE ARE AS GODS’. Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1968. Against Globalism, towards Internationalism Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Penguin Books, 2015. Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Progress Publishers, 1977. 10. Fundamental Principles Carillion’s Collapse and the East Coast Line Bastani, Aaron.

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World
by Scott Galloway
Published 2 Oct 2017

To date, consumers and advertisers have voted with their actions and expressed that creepy is a price worth paying for the relevance. Information’s Price Tag The hacker credo “Information wants to be free” set the stage for the second golden age of the internet. The origin of the phrase is worth reviewing. First proposed by Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, at the 1984 Hackers Conference, his formulation was: On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time.

Tomorrowland: Our Journey From Science Fiction to Science Fact
by Steven Kotler
Published 11 May 2015

And it’s this list that’s put the nuclear option back on the table, a process well summarized by Peter Schwartz and Spencer Reiss in a recent Wired article: “Burning hydrocarbons is a luxury that a planet with six billion energy-hungry souls can’t afford. There is only one sane, practical alternative: nuclear power.” Many feel the same. Both the previous Bush administration and the current Obama administration back the nuclear option, as do an increasing number of serious environmentalists like Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand, Gaia theorist James Lovelock, and eco-author Bill McKibben. Congress as well. In 2007, they gave the nuclear industry $18.5 billion in loan guarantees for up to 80 percent of the cost of new units. Since then, US power companies have submitted applications for 30 new plants.

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath
by Nicco Mele
Published 14 Apr 2013

Ted Nelson’s pivotal 1974 book Computer Lib: You Can and Must Understand Computers Now confronted nerds everywhere with a rousing call to action, demanding that they claim computing for individuals so as to free them from the oppression of, you guessed it, large institutions. Computer Lib had a radical style similar to Stewart Brand’s countercultural publication The Whole Earth Catalog, yet Computer Lib devoted itself to computers, offering both a primer on the basics of programming and a breathtaking vision of computing’s future. The book’s cover art—a raised fist, à la the Black Panthers—left little doubt about its intended radicalism. Computer science was burgeoning as a discipline at major universities.

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age
by Astra Taylor
Published 4 Mar 2014

Attend any technology conference or read any book about social media or Web 2.0, whether by academics or business gurus, and the same conflation of communal spirit and capitalist spunk will be impressed upon you. The historian Fred Turner traces this phenomenon back to 1968, when a small band of California outsiders founded the Whole Earth Catalog and then, in 1985, the online community the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, the WELL, the prototype of online communities, and then Wired. This group performed the remarkable feat of transforming computers from enablers of stodgy government administration to countercultural cutting edge, from implements of technocratic experts to machines that empower everyday people.

The Internet Is Not the Answer
by Andrew Keen
Published 5 Jan 2015

By 2012 there were more than 3 billion email accounts around the world sending 294 billion emails, of which around 78% were spam.37 Another popular feature was the Bulletin Board System (BBS), which enabled users with similar interests to connect and collectively share information and opinions. Among the best known of these was the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (the WELL), begun in 1985 by the Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand. The WELL captured much of the countercultural utopianism of early online users who believed that the distributed structure of the technology created by Internet architects like Paul Baran, with its absence of a central dot, represented the end of traditional government power and authority.

Lurking: How a Person Became a User
by Joanne McNeil
Published 25 Feb 2020

The industry-standard social media origin story is that a young white man wanted to look at women online and had a eureka moment about how to make money off the prototype. Many are loath to admit it now, but the “Hot or Not” web page for ranking attractiveness is at least as much of an influence in Silicon Valley as The Whole Earth Catalog or the Homebrew Computer Club. Mark Zuckerberg’s creation started as “Facemash,” in which he compiled all the photos of students in Harvard dorms and built a website for users to rank which of two people presented at random was “hotter.” Max Levchin, of Yelp and PayPal, created something similar in 2005 that he called a “babe ticker,” before rebranding the product as the general photo-sharing widget Slide.

The Twittering Machine
by Richard Seymour
Published 20 Aug 2019

If anyone knew what utopia looked like, it would have ceased to be utopia: we would be living in it. Utopia is, literally, a non-place, meaning that utopias at their best are not prescriptions but imaginative placeholders for human desires. At its worst, cyber-utopianism has been a neo-liberal sublimation of 1960s communalism, reflecting the journey from the hippy Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog to Wired magazine. The whole earth, according to this dispensation, is a ‘global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us’, as executive editor of Wired, Kevin Kelly, put it.26 This conception, which he calls ‘the technium’, saw Kelly, Brand and their confederates serenaded by venture capital and lauded at Davos.

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us
by Dan Lyons
Published 22 Oct 2018

Wozniak and his Apple co-founder Steve Jobs were long-haired hippie-hackers who built their first personal computers as members of the Homebrew Computer Club, a pack of amateur kit-computer hobbyists. Wozniak was steeped in the people-first “HP Way.” Jobs was an LSD-taking, commune-dwelling hippie who often went barefoot and who was influenced by Stewart Brand, a proponent of psychedelic drugs who hung out with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. Brand created the Whole Earth Catalog and co-founded the WELL, one of the first online communities. Its members included John Perry Barlow, who wrote lyrics for the Grateful Dead and co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet civil liberties advocacy organization. Counterculture values—freedom, personal liberation, civil rights, respect for the individual—shaped the culture of Silicon Valley.

About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks
by David Rooney
Published 16 Aug 2021

Time capsules such as the one buried in Osaka can be considered as clocks, but clocks unlike all the others we have examined so far in this story. Where they have been concerned with the now, or nowadays, time capsules work over longer time horizons. They work over the long now. And that might just save civilization. IN 1998, STEWART BRAND, writer, inventor and founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, wrote these words: Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multitasking.

Please Report Your Bug Here: A Novel
by Josh Riedel
Published 17 Jan 2023

Alongside how-to guides on driftwood structures and subsistence farming was Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. Books of poetry were interspersed among the guides, Gregg and Snyder and Hass—or perhaps they, too, were guides. Stacks of Whole Earth Catalogs served as bookends. “If you need a coffee,” a man at the table said, “go ahead and make one.” The man seemed annoyed at me. I didn’t ask questions. I walked behind the bar and pulled myself a shot of espresso. The steps were muscle memory—grind, tamp, pull—and the shot came out perfect. A confidence boost, to make something of my own.

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World
by Steven Johnson
Published 15 Nov 2016

You might teach a computer to play chess in order to determine how intelligent the machine had become, but programming a computer to play games just for the sake of playing games would have seemed like a colossal waste of resources, like hiring a symphony orchestra to play “Chopsticks.” But the Spacewar! developers saw a different future, one where computers had a more personal touch. Or, put another way, developing Spacewar! helped them see that future more clearly. In 1972, during a hiatus between publishing issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand visited the Artificial Intelligence Lab at Stanford to witness “the First Intergalactic Spacewar! Olympics.” He wrote up his experiences for Rolling Stone in an article called “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums.” As one of the first essays to document the hacker ethos and its connection to the counterculture, it is now considered one of the seminal documents of technology writing.

The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism
by Matt Mason

By distributing their core software for free, Linux now powers forty-three million personal computers worldwide. By selling customized software that runs on top of the free open-source software, it's predicted the market for Linux products will be worth $35 billion by 2008. To paraphrase Stewart Brand, author and founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, information wants to be free, but customized information wants to be really expensive. Linux is a great example of a company that follows this dictum. The value of openness is something most of us are only just getting to grips with. Harvard Business School published a report in 2006 that surveyed a range of businesses and concluded that introducing problems to outsiders was the best way to find effective solutions.

The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy
by Matthew Hindman
Published 24 Sep 2018

The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.” Governments could not hope to govern cyberspace, because the internet was not just a technology but “an act of nature.” Barlow was hardly the first to invoke “natural” laws or biological metaphors in talking about the internet. Southern California’s tech culture had been shaped by both Whole Earth Catalog-tinged counterculture2 and Joseph Schumpeter-inspired “evolutionary” capitalism. But Barlow’s treatise gave such views a wider audience. The essay was quickly mirrored on forty thousand other sites, making it arguably the most impressive example of viral content up to that point. Today the Declaration is often cited as the zenith of 1990s techno-utopian silliness.

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
by Naomi Klein
Published 15 Sep 2014

Their minds hovering out in orbit, there are those who begin to imagine leaving the planet for good—saying, “Goodbye Earth!” to quote Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill, who, in the mid-1970s, started calling for the creation of space colonies to overcome the earth’s resource limits. Interestingly, one of O’Neill’s most devoted disciples was Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, who spent a good chunk of the 1970s arguing that the U.S. government should build space colonies; today he is one of the most vocal proponents of Big Tech fixes to climate change, whether nuclear power or geoengineering.59 And he’s not the only prominent geoengineering booster nurturing the ultimate escape fantasy.

…

Martin’s, 1999), 324. 58. Kurt Vonnegut Jr., “Excelsior! We’re Going to the Moon! Excelsior!” New York Times Magazine, July 13, 1969, SM10. 59. Poole, Earthrise, 144–145, 162; Peder Anker, “The Ecological Colonization of Space,” Environmental History 10 (2005): 249–254; Andrew G. Kirk, Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 170–172; Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary (New York: Penguin, 2009). 60. Leonard David, “People to Become Martians This Century?”

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 21 Mar 2013

While chronobiologists looked at the various natural cycles influencing the processes of life, proponents of temporal diversity are encouraging us to understand and distinguish between the different rates at which things on different levels of existence change. Former Merry Prankster and Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand applied temporal diversity to different levels of society. In his book The Clock of the Long Now, he argues that we live in a world with multiple timescales, all moving simultaneously but at different speeds. Brand calls it the order of civilization. Nature, or geological time, moves the slowest—like the skater in the middle of the pinwheel.

Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions
by Paul Mason
Published 30 Sep 2013

In her brilliant cyber-memoir, technology writer Becky Hogge describes how survivors of the LSD fraternity in California ‘quit drugs for software’, seeding a techno-revolution that would create the mouse, the pixel, the Apple Mac, the Internet, hacking and free software.15 Their goals were made explicit in two famous statements by Stewart Brand, the visionary founder of the Whole Earth Catalog: ‘Like it or not, computers are coming to the masses’; and ‘Information wants to be free’. This would open up a forty-year battle, still ongoing, between those trying to monopolize, censor and commercialize information technology and those who want it to be open, uncensored and free. And it’s a battle over fundamentals.

Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It
by Brian Dumaine
Published 11 May 2020

The clock project, which the foundation says has no public completion date, is the brainchild of Bezos’s friend Danny Hillis, a pioneer in parallel supercomputers and the creative force at Disney’s Imagineering division—he once designed a full-sized dinosaur to saunter around Disney’s theme parks. In 1996, he and Stewart Brand, a biologist, cultural pioneer, and the editor of the 1960s bible Whole Earth Catalog, launched a nonprofit to build the clock. The rock musician Brian Eno helped name the organization the Long Now Foundation, to indicate, as the foundation’s website puts it, “the expanded sense of time the clock provokes—not the short now of next quarter, next week, or the next five minutes, but the ‘long now’ of centuries.”

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
by David Wallace-Wells
Published 19 Feb 2019

From that perspective, the only threat to technology must come from technology, which is perhaps why so many in Silicon Valley seem less concerned with runaway climate change than they are with runaway artificial intelligence: the only fearsome power they are likely to take seriously is the one they themselves have unleashed. It is a strange evolutionary stage for a worldview midwifed into being, in the permanent counterculture of the Bay Area, by Stewart Brand’s nature-hacking bible, Whole Earth Catalog. And it may help explain why social media executives were so slow to process the threat that real-world politics posed to their platforms; and perhaps also why, as the science fiction writer Ted Chiang has suggested, Silicon Valley’s fear of future artificial-intelligence overlords sounds suspiciously like an unknowingly lacerating self-portrait, panic about a way of doing business embodied by the tech titans themselves: Consider: Who pursues their goals with monomaniacal focus, oblivious to the possibility of negative consequences?

The Moon: A History for the Future
by Oliver Morton
Published 1 May 2019

This vision, published under the title “The High Frontier” (1976), proved to have a wide and eclectic appeal. Tech-heads liked it; hippies liked it, too; so did the ecology minded. Stewart Brand, a magnificent Californian impresario of ideas who had campaigned for NASA to release pictures of the whole Earth from space when they were not available, took up the cause in his publications Whole Earth Catalog and its spin-off CoEvolution Quarterly. The same publications had also, not coincidentally, been the venue for some of the first serious discussions of James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis. Gaia was part of the anti-Copernican shift back to the Earth driven by how lifeless everywhere else looked; it celebrated the specialness of such a living system.

Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age
by Alex Wright
Published 6 Jun 2014

Dressed in the white shirt of a working engineer, the soft-spoken former Navy telegraph operator demonstrated a working model of a system that struck many of the idealistic San Francisco counterculture types in attendance as representing nothing short of a revolution in human consciousness. Equipped with a video monitor, keyboard, and central pro­ cessor, Engelbart’s demo included applications for word processing, sending messages between users, and even building links from one document to another. Stewart Brand (of the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Whole Earth Catalog fame) manned a video camera trained on Engelbart’s on-stage keyboard, while Engelbart proceeded to show a working prototype of a fully functional hypertext system, including a word processor, video and graphics displays, and the ability to link one document to another, all connected to another computer in Menlo Park by a 1,200-baud modem.

Owning the Sun
by Alexander Zaitchik
Published 7 Jan 2022

No longer interested in how patents retarded innovation and plugged up competition, he penned an influential book, The Economics of Regulation, credited with laying the basis for the undoing of his party’s regulatory legacy, beginning with the Aeronautics Board established by Truman. 35.An understanding of this history, together with the influence of psychedelics and the counterculture, contributed to the open science ethos of the young Silicon Valley. 36.This shift was embodied in Silicon Valley hype men like Stewart Brand, publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog, who traded in his back-to-the-land philosophy for a spastic digital utopianism. 37.As of this writing, the NIH website defines the CRADA program as “an exciting opportunity for NIH investigators to join with their colleagues from industry and academia in the joint pursuit of common research goals.

Culture works: the political economy of culture
by Richard Maxwell
Published 15 Jan 2001

See also AOL Time Warner Titanic, 231 TNCs (transnational corporations), 2, 9, 15, 17–19, 38, 63, 108–9, 125, 190, 230–31 Tonkin Gulf Resolution, 31 Traditional Values Coalition, 46 Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), 201 Trans World Airlines (TWA), 66 TrizecHahn, 178 Tugwell Bill, 91–96 Tugwell, Rexford G., 91 Turkey, 44, 175 TV Nation, 232, 245 Twitchell, James B., 83 2Live Crew, 113, 115 Wallis, Brian, 44, 53 Wall Street Journal, 211 Wal-Mart, 174–78, 180, 184–86, 190–91 Walton, Sam, 174 Wanamaker, John, 167, 169 Wanamaker’s Department store, 167 War Advertising Council, 97 War economy, 170; and advertising, 97 Warhol, Andy, 31 Washington D.C., 45 Washington Post, The, 226 Webster, Frank, 220 Weissman, George: Phillip Morris president, 32, 34 Wenner, Lawrence, 155 Western culture, 23, 28, 174 Westfield America, 178 Wheeler-Lea Amendment, 91–96. See also Tugwell Bill Whole Earth Catalog, 238 Wintel monopoly, 204–8 Wired, 239 Wiseman, Frederick, 227 Women’s National Basketball Association, 139 Woodmansee, Martha, 245 World Cup, 70, 112, 128, 137 World Series, 137, 143 World Trade Organization, 16 Venice Biennale, 28, 35, 49 Vertical integration, 62–63, 144, 146, 204 Viacom, 136, 140, 183, 233 Vig (vigorish), 207 Xerox, 42 Yorúbà, 11 Underhill, Paco, 163, 177, 186 UNITE, 190 Z (magazine), 245 259 

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations
by Nicholas Carr
Published 5 Sep 2016

He quotes O’Reilly: “The internet today is so much an echo of what we were talking about at Esalen in the ’70s—except we didn’t know it would be technology-mediated.” Levy then asks, rhetorically, “Could it be that the internet—or what O’Reilly calls Web 2.0—is really the successor to the human potential movement?” Levy’s article appears in the afterglow of Kevin Kelly’s ecstatic “We Are the Web” in Wired’s August issue. A Whole Earth Catalog editor before he helped launch Wired, Kelly serves as a nexus between hippie and hacker, a human fiber-optic cable beaming Northern Californian utopianism between generations. In his new article, a cover story, he surveys the recent history of the internet, from the Netscape IPO ten years ago, and concludes that the net has become a “magic window” that provides a “spookily godlike” perspective on existence.

Free Ride
by Robert Levine
Published 25 Oct 2011

A bohemian intellectual who befriended both Buckminster Fuller and Ken Kesey, Brand appeared as a character in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and campaigned for NASA to release a picture of Earth from space. As living off the land became part of the post-hippie zeitgeist, he created the Whole Earth Catalog, an influential compendium of advice that Steve Jobs once referred to as “sort of like Google in paperback form.”19 He started out peddling an early version from the back of his truck and went on to sell more than a million copies of a later edition. In 1983, a year before Brand said that information wanted to be free, he got a $1.3 million advance to create the Whole Earth Software Catalog.20 From the perspective of the technology world, information wants to be free “because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time.”

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future
by John Brockman
Published 18 Jan 2011

And how I think is an expression of that identity. For me, the Internet has led to that deep sense of collaboration, awareness, and ubiquitous knowledge that means that my thought processes are not bound by the meat machine that is my brain, nor my locality, nor my time. One’s Guild Stewart Brand Founder, Whole Earth Catalog; cofounder, the WELL; cofounder, Global Business Network; author, Whole Earth Discipline I couldn’t function without them, and I suspect the same is true for nearly all effective people. By “them,” I mean my closest intellectual collaborators. They are the major players in my social, extended mind.

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking
by John Brockman
Published 14 Feb 2012

Sasselov estimates that there are approximately a hundred thousand Earths and super-Earths within our own galaxy. The universe is young, so wherever we find microbial life, there will be intelligent life in the future. Expanding our scientific reach farther into the skies will change us forever. Microbes Run the World Stewart Brand Founder, Whole Earth Catalog; cofounder, the WELL; cofounder, Global Business Network; author, Whole Earth Discipline “Microbes run the world.” That opening sentence of the National Research Council’s The New Science of Metagenomics sounds reveille for a new way of understanding biology and maybe of understanding society as well.

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All
by Adrian Hon
Published 14 Sep 2022

The belief that games aren’t just good for their players but good for everyone took hold during the wider techno-optimism prevailing in the late 1990s and early 2000s. While the modern conception of technology broadly, and Silicon Valley specifically, being a positive force in the world dates back to Stewart Brand’s 1968 Whole Earth Catalog, it was only later that most people believed personal computers and the internet would genuinely change the world for the better. The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) initiative, born in 2005, aimed to disrupt education “for all kids—especially those in developing nations” by means of a one-hundred-dollar laptop.24 A few years later, antiregime protests in Iran were dubbed as the “Twitter Revolution” in the press, and academics would credit Facebook for mobilising activists and coordinating protests during the Arab Spring uprisings.25 The internet and social media seemed like unmitigated goods, with any downsides so minor as to be barely worth consideration.

The Ultimate Engineer: The Remarkable Life of NASA's Visionary Leader George M. Low
by Richard Jurek
Published 2 Dec 2019

“George knew that I had spent huge amounts of time underwater in the water immersion facility at MSC on the Skylab program. I was very much into scuba work. George himself loved scuba diving, and he had a natural affinity for Cousteau. He put us together,” he said.15 Low was interested at the time in the work of people like author Stuart Brandt, editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, and physicist and space activist Gerard O’Neill, according to Schweickart. “George was not a narrow person, by any means. We would get into all kinds of conversations—about space colonies, the environment, and all kinds of things. George had this wonderful, broad interest in almost everything that was going on, especially anything that was on the leading edge, and people who were doing far-out things.”16 NASA had LANDSAT (formerly the Earth Resources Technology Satellite) used to photograph and image the world in order to monitor changes to the environment.

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life
by Ozan Varol
Published 13 Apr 2020

When our focus shifts from proving ourselves right to proving ourselves wrong, we seek different inputs, we combat deeply entrenched biases, and we open ourselves up to competing facts and arguments. “I don’t like that man,” Abraham Lincoln is said to have observed. “I must get to know him better.” The same approach should apply to opposing arguments. Regularly ask yourself—as Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog does—How many things am I dead wrong about?42 Poke holes in your most cherished arguments, and look for disconfirming facts (What fact would change my mind?). Follow the “golden rule” of Darwin who, upon finding a fact that contradicted one of his beliefs, would write it down right away.43 When you kill off your bad or outdated ideas, Darwin knew, you leave breathing room for the good ones to surface.

The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket
by Benjamin Lorr
Published 14 Jun 2020

The September 1970 issue of Scientific American was dedicated to the “biosphere,” a word Joe had never heard before. “I converted on the road to Damascus,” he says. “Right there, I looked at the evidence and turned green.” This was not a business decision. Within weeks, he had subscribed to the Whole Earth Catalog and Mother Earth News. He turned his front lawn into an organic garden and retrofitted his car with diesel. And from that Christmas on, the family only had “living trees” that got replanted in the backyard come the New Year. Which is to say, Joe was a true green. But he never made the jump to health food.

Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of Energy Independence
by Robert Bryce
Published 16 Mar 2011

In 2006, Moore wrote an opinion piece for the Washington Post saying that nuclear energy may be the “energy source that can save our planet.” Although Moore now does public relations work for the nuclear power industry, he pointed out that many other ardent environmentalists, including Stewart Brand, one of the founders of the Whole Earth Catalog, and James Lovelock, the British scientist who came up with the Gaia theory about the resilience of the planet Earth, are advocates of nuclear power. In mid-2006, Moore told me that when it comes to producing large increments of new, low-carbon electricity, there “aren’t really any other choices.

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software
by Scott Rosenberg
Published 2 Jan 2006

In the spring of 2002, around the time Mitch Kapor and the early members of the Chandler team were beginning to zero in on their new software’s architecture, Kapor made the tech news headlines for something entirely different: He entered into a Long Bet about the prospects for artificial intelligence. Long Bets were a project of the Long Now Foundation, a nonprofit organization started by Whole Earth Catalog creator Stewart Brand and a group of digital-age notables as a way to spur discussion and creative ideas about long-term issues and problems. As the project’s first big-splash Long Bet, Kapor wagered $20,000 (all winnings earmarked for worthy nonprofit institutions) that by 2029 no computer or “machine intelligence” will have passed the Turing Test.

Power Hungry: The Myths of "Green" Energy and the Real Fuels of the Future
by Robert Bryce
Published 26 Apr 2011

Renewable energy is dandy, but it simply cannot provide the gargantuan quantities of always-available power that we demand at prices we can afford. The production of electricity from the wind and the sun will continue growing rapidly in the years ahead. But those sources are incurably intermittent. As Stewart Brand, the environmental activist and creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, put it during a lecture in mid-2009, “wind and solar can’t help because we don’t have a way to store that energy.”4 Given our inability to store the energy that comes from wind and solar, those sources will remain bit players in our overall energy mix for the foreseeable future. After two decades of studying the energy business, I believe those points about energy and power are self-evident.

The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future
by Gretchen Bakke
Published 25 Jul 2016

A local politician visited the blown transformer with her children to take a look at the culprit; another witness told a reporter, ‘There was no fur left on it. It looked like something from C.S.I.’ She posted a photo of the incinerated animal to her Facebook page.” “causing frequent power outages”: Mooallem (2013). to install solar panels: CoEvolution Quarterly (1974–1985), an offshoot of The Whole Earth Catalog (a counterculture golden-era mainstay) awarded this sun-challenged distinction to Forks in the late 1970s. CHAPTER 8: In Search of the Holy Grail from thirty years to ten: “A Big Bet on Small,” Economist Technology Quarterly, December 6, 2014, 7. so has it always been: Back in 1973, with fusion but thirty years away, there was another grail search under way, though not yet for storage.

Crypto: How the Code Rebels Beat the Government Saving Privacy in the Digital Age
by Steven Levy
Published 15 Jan 2002

The more you looked at them, the weirder they appeared. One recent controversy involved Bruce Schneier’s 1994 book, Applied Cryptography. It was a technical cornucopia of cryptological mathematical theory, explanations of popular cryptosystems, and all the algorithms that a security specialist or cypherpunk would ever need. The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog called it “the Bible of code hackers.” But while anyone could ship the physical book overseas, the crypto restrictions seemed to ban the export of those same contents in digital form. At least that’s what cypherpunk Phil Karn found out when he applied for a “commodities jurisdiction” (or CJ) to export the book, along with an accompanying floppy disk with the same contents on it.

Worn: A People's History of Clothing
by Sofi Thanhauser
Published 25 Jan 2022

Her shuttle looms were far slower than the Swiss-designed shuttle-less looms and other air jet looms used in modern manufacture, but they produced fabric with a selvedge, which allowed her to do work that most factories couldn’t. Goody was like many people who got into handweaving in the 1970s, when weaving kits could be purchased from the Whole Earth Catalog alongside agricultural equipment for back-to-the-land projects. In some ways, she was a hippie. Goody became a Quaker, and got involved in nonviolence and the antiwar movement. During the protests against the Vietnam War, she said, “I marched with the communists because they sang better songs.”

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World
by Max Fisher
Published 5 Sep 2022

It had grown out of a magazine run by a former Ken Kesey associate named Stewart Brand, who’d spent the ’60s driving between California’s hippie communes selling supplies out of his truck. He’d called it the Whole Earth Truck Store. On settling in the Santa Clara Valley, he converted it, in 1968, into the Whole Earth Catalog. The name was a joke: it advised readers on how to make the products on their own, alongside articles promoting hippie communalism. Copies were ubiquitous in early Silicon Valley. Steve Jobs later called it “one of the bibles of my generation.” Brand, having absorbed the Valley’s promises of liberation, used his magazine, and hippie cred, to repeat it back to them as a mandate: only you can finish what the ’60s started.

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?
by David Brin
Published 1 Jan 1998

After all, a flamer isnʼt really different from the motorist who cut you off last week, nearly causing an accident, flipping an obscene gesture and laughing at your frustration, safe behind a mask of anonymity. Driven by rancorous behavior he witnessed in the Netʼs early days, Stewart Brand, cofounder of the Whole Earth Catalog and Whole Earth Review magazine, realized there would be no peace as long as nastiness could find shelter behind false identities. Brand lobbied successfully to have anonymity strictly forbidden on the pioneering Internet service the Well. True, there are disadvantages to this rule, and I do feel there should remain places where anonymous postings are possible, especially for whistle-blowers reporting crimes.

San Francisco
by Lonely Planet

Ads breathlessly gushed that Hewlett-Packard’s ‘light’ (40lb) machine could ‘take on roots of a fifth-degree polynomial, Bessel functions, elliptic integrals and regression analysis’ – all for the low, low price of $4,900 (about $29,000 today). Consumers didn’t know what to do with such a computer, until its potential was explained in simple terms by Stewart Brand, an LSD tester for the CIA with Ken Kesey and organizer of the first Trips Festival in 1966. In his 1969 Whole Earth Catalog, Brand reasoned that the technology governments used to run countries could empower ordinary people. That same year, University of California, Los Angeles, professor Len Kleinrock sent the first rudimentary email from a computer in Los Angeles to another at Stanford. The message he typed was ‘L,’ then ‘O,’ then ‘G’ – at which point the computer crashed.

Future Shock
by Alvin Toffler
Published 1 Jun 1984

Bates in [122], p. 126. 121 Pupil turnover: "The Schoolhouse in the City," a report by the Educational Facilities Laboratories, Inc., 1966, p. 8. Not to be confused with [115]. 121 Whyte quote in [197], p. 383. 122 Moore study mentioned in American Education, April, 1967. Poignant note on transcience from bulletin board of communal farm, U.S.A., Summer, 1969. Quoted in Difficult But Possible Supplement to Whole Earth Catalog, September, 1969, p. 23. "I hope that this week is the Farm's lowest point for the summer, because if it gets any lower I don't have a decent place to live ... I think of this as my (at least) temporary home. And I like my home to be clear of broken glass and papers, my tools and supplies put away, I like to keep track of my guests, take care of my animals ...

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
by Michael Pollan
Published 30 Apr 2018

Brand came down from his roof and launched a campaign that eventually reached the halls of Congress and NASA. Who knows if it was the direct result of Brand’s campaign, but two years later, in 1968, the Apollo astronauts turned their cameras around and gave us the first photograph of Earth from the moon, and Stewart Brand gave us the first edition of the Whole Earth Catalog. Did everything change? The case could be made that it had. Part II: The Crack-Up Timothy Leary came late to psychedelics. By the time he launched the Harvard Psilocybin Project in 1960, there had already been a full decade of psychedelic research in North America, with hundreds of academic papers and several international conferences to show for it.

Track Changes
by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
Published 1 May 2016

A detailed buyer’s guide published in a 1983 issue of Writer’s Digest compares some three dozen different programs across a matrix of over two dozen variables and features, including (besides price and compatibility) the availability of block commands like copy, move, or delete, search and replace, and file backup as well as options for form printing, pagination, superscript and subscript, proportional spacing, underling and emphasis, word counting, and “screen display same as printed copy.”4 Word processing also spawned ancillary software genres, notably spell-checkers and thesauri (not built into many programs) but also typing tutorials as well as programs for creating indices, tables of contents, footnotes, and outlines. While the abundance of choice may seem empowering in retrospect, it was also a significant obstacle to getting started. Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Software Catalog, an offshoot of the legendary counterculture publication Whole Earth Catalog, put its finger on the problem: “For new computer users these days the most daunting task is not learning how to use the machine but shopping.”5 Charles Bukowski (who wouldn’t begin using a computer in earnest until he got a Macintosh for Christmas in 1990) nonetheless captured the moment in a poem written circa 1985 called “16-bit Intel 8088 chip.”6 Laced with references to brand names such as Apple, Commodore, and IBM, it includes this observation: both Kaypro and Osborne computers use the CP/M operating system but can’t read each other’s handwriting for they format (write on) discs in different ways.7 The poem concludes by contrasting the fundamental irreconcilability of all of these artificial systems with the natural world that unchangingly, unknowingly coexists with them.

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History
by Kurt Andersen
Published 14 Sep 2020

Dressed in reproduction nineteenth-century artifacts—blue jeans, fringed leather jackets, boots, bandanas, hats, men mustachioed and bearded—they fancied themselves hoboes and cowboys and joyriders and agrarian anarchists as they got high and listened to “Maggie’s Farm” (Bob Dylan), “Up on Cripple Creek” (the Band), and “Uncle John’s Band” (the Grateful Dead). Overnight they made the uncool old Victorian houses in San Francisco cool. The vision of the future sold starting in 1968 by the Whole Earth Catalog, the counterculture’s obligatory omnibus almanac, was agrarian and handmade as well as—so ahead of the curve—computerized and video-recorded. In 1969, at the Woodstock Festival, the music of the final performer, Jimi Hendrix, was absolute late ’60s, disconcertingly and deliciously freaky and vain.

As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age
by Matthew Cobb
Published 15 Nov 2022

In each of these fields our ability to alter genes is both extraordinarily far-reaching and profoundly threatening, for ourselves and for the rest of the planet. As mythology teaches us, gods are not always benevolent. But there is another side to this view of scientists ‘playing God’. In 1968, in the heart of what would soon be called Silicon Valley, Stanford biology graduate Stewart Brand published the first issue of the Whole Earth Catalog.i Part hippie mail-order listing, part instruction manual for the Age of Aquarius, Brand called the Catalog ‘a guide to resources’. In the Introduction to the 1969 edition, written shortly before genetic engineering became a reality and at a time of growing doubts about science, Brand made a striking declaration that served as a manifesto for his view of the modern world: ‘We are as gods and might as well get good at it.’

San Francisco
by Lonely Planet

Ads breathlessly gushed that Hewlett-Packard’s ‘light’ (40lb) machine could ‘take on roots of a fifth-degree polynomial, Bessel functions, elliptic integrals and regression analysis’ – all for the low, low price of $4,900 (about $29,000 today). Consumers didn’t know what to do with such a computer, until its potential was explained in simple terms by Stewart Brand, an LSD tester for the CIA with Ken Kesey and organizer of the first Trips Festival in 1966. In his 1969 Whole Earth Catalog, Brand reasoned that the technology governments used to run countries could empower ordinary people. That same year, University of California, Los Angeles, professor Len Kleinrock sent the first rudimentary email from a computer in Los Angeles to another at Stanford. The message he typed was ‘L,’ then ‘O,’ then ‘G’ – at which point the computer crashed.

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us
by Tim O'Reilly
Published 9 Oct 2017

THE CLOTHESLINE PARADOX What we measure matters. I first became fascinated with the curious fact that we often ignore and take for granted many types of economic value when, in 1975, I read an essay by environmentalist Steve Baer published in Stewart Brand’s Co-Evolution Quarterly, the successor to The Whole Earth Catalog. The essay was called “The Clothesline Paradox.” “If you take down your clothesline and buy an electric clothes dryer, the electric consumption of the nation rises slightly,” Baer wrote. “If you go in the other direction and remove the electric clothes dryer and install a clothesline, the consumption of electricity drops slightly, but there is no credit given anywhere on the charts and graphs to solar energy, which is now drying the clothes.”

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America
by Bruce Cannon Gibney
Published 7 Mar 2017

The sins of the oil industry are easy enough to appreciate, but they have been abetted by the mistakes of the environmentalist movement, led by the oldest Boomers and their immediate seniors. In the 1960s and 1970s, parts of the movement cried wolf about the world’s ability to feed itself, the dangers of nuclear power, and resource scarcity generally. None of these arguments had much scientific credibility, and essentially all of them have proved wrong. (Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand, once a prominent antinuclear activist, has now reversed his stand; too little, too late.) The enviro–Chicken Littleism of the 1960s has been dredged up by warming deniers as evidence that scientists and environmentalists cannot be trusted. That is, of course, untrue. Real scientists can be trusted; Boomer ideologues of the 1970s and 2010s cannot.

Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media
by Peter Warren Singer and Emerson T. Brooking
Published 15 Mar 2018

utm_term=.viEmNOlN3o#.xtPNkBWkwD. 256 “generative adversarial networks”: Cade Metz, “Google’s Dueling Neural Networks Spar to Get Smarter, No Humans Required,” Wired, April 11, 2017, https://www.wired.com/2017/04/googles-dueling-neural-networks-spar-get-smarter-no-humans-required/. 9. CONCLUSION 258 “We are as gods”: Stewart Brand, “We Are as Gods,” Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1968, http://www.wholeearth.com/issue/1010/article/195/we.are.as.gods. Although the words are now indelibly his, Brand actually lifted the line from the British anthropologist Edmund Leach. 258 Long before the military: Authors’ phone interview with representatives of the Joint Readiness Training Center, November 14, 2014. 260 “built to accomplish”: “Zuckerberg’s Letter to Investors,” Reuters, February 1, 2012, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-letter-idUSTRE8102MT20120201. 261 youth is no defense: Brooke Donald, “Stanford Researchers Find Students Have Trouble Judging the Credibility of Information Online,” Stanford Graduate School of Education News Center, November 22, 2016, https://ed.stanford.edu/news/stanford-researchers-find-students-have-trouble-judging-credibility-information-online. 263 other nations now look: Michael Birnbaum, “Sweden Is Taking On Russian Interference Ahead of Fall Elections.

Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat
by John P. Carlin and Garrett M. Graff
Published 15 Oct 2018

.* It was a movement that was deeply distrustful of governmental power, a reaction of an era that saw the exposure of J. Edgar Hoover’s domestic spying, Watergate, the Church Committee, and the passage of the 1974 Privacy Act to restrict government information gathering. Another key West Coast voice, Stewart Brand, of the Whole Earth Catalog, gave his colleagues a rallying cry: “Information wants to be free.” Those two revolutions blended together online in the 1980s and exploded in the 1990s as the World Wide Web began to transform the way Americans gathered information, shopped, traveled, and led their daily lives. Even well into the 2000s, the United States continued to dominate online: in 2007, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell was shown a chart from the internet company VeriSign that traced how 80 percent of the world’s digital traffic passed through US wires and servers.

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?
by Alan Weisman
Published 23 Sep 2013

More than a hundred fifty migratory and resident bird species are found here, as well as bobcat, red and gray fox, weasels, raccoons, mule deer, and mountain lions. A research center here archives fifty years of student projects; a habitat map of two tarantula species by one of Ehrlich’s undergrads, Stewart Brand, who would later publish The Whole Earth Catalog, is still used. Years before The Population Bomb appeared, Paul Ehrlich had already gained renown among ecologists for the paper he coauthored with Peter Raven, the future director of Missouri Botanical Gardens. It was the first to describe coevolution: how two interacting species, such as butterflies and the plants their larvae eat, each influence the other’s development.

NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity
by Steve Silberman
Published 24 Aug 2015

It was the first computer designed to support McCarthy’s time-sharing scheme directly. It was also the computer Engelbart had used to power the Mother of All Demos. It was a chunk of hardware with unusually good karma. The hacker subculture incubated at MIT was thriving in places like SAIL, Xerox PARC, and the now legendary garages of Cupertino and San José. Soon Whole Earth Catalog impresario Stewart Brand would unleash this subculture on the unsuspecting inhabitants of Greater Mundania with the ultimate endorsement in Rolling Stone: “Computers are coming to the people. That’s good news, maybe the best since psychedelics.” The focus of the article was Spacewar, the seminal computer game developed in 1961 by four of McCarthy’s students high on the fumes of pulp science fiction.

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 6 Dec 2016

I tell you, nothing concentrates your time like knowing how many days you have left. Now, of course, I’m likely to live longer than that. I’m in good health, etc. But nonetheless, I have 6,000-something days. It’s not very many days to do all the things I want to do. “I learned something from my friend Stewart Brand [founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, president of the Long Now Foundation], who organized his remaining days around 5-year increments. He says any great idea that’s significant, that’s worth doing, for him, will last about 5 years, from the time he thinks of it, to the time he stops thinking about it. And if you think of it in terms of 5-year projects, you can count those off on a couple hands, even if you’re young.”

The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture
by Brian Dear
Published 14 Jun 2017

There was one other conferencing system that also inherited this idea from Notes, called PicoSpan, which was a commercialized version of CONFER written by a developer named Marcus Watts, who along with Larry Brilliant created a company called NETI to market and sell PicoSpan. Brilliant was a friend of Stewart Brand’s, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, and around 1984 Brand and Brilliant started working a conferencing bulletin board service running on PicoSpan called the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link—The WELL—a service that launched in 1985. Computer histories, even recent bestselling ones, often cite The WELL as the first online community with a conferencing system.

Full Catastrophe Living (Revised Edition): Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness
by Jon Kabat-Zinn
Published 23 Sep 2013

We believe that it is important for our patients to develop conscious approaches to recognizing and working with these problems as well as their more personal problems if they are to bring mindfulness to the totality of their lives and cope effectively with the full range of forces at work within them. World stress will only become more intense in the future. In the early 1970s, Stewart Brand of Whole Earth Catalog fame predicted narrowcasting and smart televisions, delivering only the information you want to know when you get home at the end of the day. That day is already here, but it is likely that, in terms of what is coming, we have seen nothing yet. Still, we are already in a world in which our access to information never sleeps, and goes with us everywhere through our various portable wireless devices, Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, and automatic downloads.

Coastal California Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

When Hewlett-Packard introduced the first personal computer in 1968, advertisements breathlessly gushed that the ‘light’ (40lb) machine could ‘take on roots of a fifth-degree polynomial, Bessel functions, elliptic integrals and regression analysis’ – all for just $4900 (almost $35,000 today). Consumers didn’t know quite what to do with computers, but in his 1969 Whole Earth Catalog, author (and former LSD tester for the CIA) Stewart Brand explained that the technology governments used to run countries could empower ordinary people. Hoping to bring computer power to the people, 21-year-old Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak introduced the Apple II at the 1977 West Coast Computer Faire.

Northern California Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet

Geeking Out When Silicon Valley introduced the first personal computer in 1968, advertisements breathlessly gushed that Hewlett-Packard’s ‘light’ (40lb) machine could ‘take on roots of a fifth-degree polynomial, Bessel functions, elliptic integrals and regression analysis’ – all for just $4900 (nearly $35,000 today). Consumers didn’t know quite what to do with computers, but in his 1969 Whole Earth Catalog, author (and former LSD tester for the CIA) Stewart Brand explained that the technology governments used to run countries could empower ordinary people. Hoping to bring computer power to the people, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, both in their 20s at the time, introduced the Apple II at the 1977 West Coast Computer Faire, with unfathomable memory (4KB of RAM) and microprocessor speed (1MHz).

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
by Rick Perlstein
Published 1 Jan 2008

Availing himself of $8,000 from the same funds that bought their gear for the Fielding break-in, Colson bought out bookstores’ stock. Cartons of The News Twisters piled up in Howard Hunt’s office—as it appeared on the bestseller lists beside LBJ’s memoirs, B. F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom & Dignity, The Last Whole Earth Catalog, and the sex manual Any Woman Can! Why not? The Kennedys were worse. Joe Kennedy had gotten his kid Jack’s college thesis cleaned up and published as a book and schemed to get his ghostwritten Profiles in Courage a Pulitzer. “They’re using any means,” Nixon told Colson and Haldeman. “We are going to use any means.

California
by Sara Benson
Published 15 Oct 2010

Advertisements breathlessly gushed that Hewlett-Packard’s ‘light’ (40lb) machine could ‘take on roots of a fifth-degree polynomial, Bessel functions, elliptic integrals and regression analysis’ – all for the low, low price of $4900 (about $29,000 today). Consumers didn’t quite know what to do with personal computers, until another CIA LSD tester named Stewart Brand explained their potential in simple terms. In his 1969 Whole Earth Catalog, Brand reasoned that the technology governments used to run countries could empower ordinary people. That same year UCLA professor Len Kleinrock proved Brand right, sending a message from a computer in Los Angeles to another at Stanford. The message he typed was ‘L’ then ‘O’ then ‘G’ – at which point the computer crashed