I'm not sure how it's possible to procrastinate on a blog post, especially one belonging to Blog.phia, my personal expressive outlet and little Web 1.0 corner of the Web 2.5 internet, yet here I am. It's because I've been brainstorming this post for a while now, adding more bullet points to that one Note on my iPhone I can never find. Somehow the pressure is on and the stakes are so low. Who reads this anyways?

The Whole Earth Catalog means a lot to me, as if I couldn't make that any clearer on this website (see the Whole Vibe Catalog and The Secret to Superhuman Strength). As of May 2024, I am actually a proud owner of a Last Whole Earth Catalog very cold off the press from 1971! I bought it off Thriftbooks for $40, the cheapest offer I could find, and though I wouldn't be able to hold it spine-side up without large yellowed pages flying everywhere, it's complete!

I first learned about the WEC as a sophomore in high school in 2020, when I was deep in my Steve Jobs phase (why am I admitting that?). Proof of that phase is my "Jobes" (Jobs... vibes?) playlist on Spotify. See I wasn't kidding, was I?

He talked about it in his 2005 Stanford commencement address, where he famously quoted the final page of The Whole Earth Epilogue (the true "last" Whole Earth Catalog, though not the last of Stewart Brand's publications). "Stay hungry. Stay foolish." he said. He called it "Google in paperback form" before we had search engines.

I immediately Googled (ha) the quote and saved a picture of the classic Whole-Earth-style page: white Windsor font on a space-black background. And did again two years later...

Four years later, as a sophomore at UC Berkeley, I attended a virtual talk hosted by the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation given by designer-technologist Jurg Lehni on November 16th, 2023. Sitting uncomfortably in the noisy Free Speech Movement cafe with my Airpods in, I read the name "Stewart Brand" on Jurg's slides, thinking, "Isn't that the guy who-". After Googling (ha) him to confirm, I was delighted to discover that the entirety of the Whole Earth Catalog and subsequent Portola Institute publications had been put online since I last tried to access one two years ago to no avail.

Half paying attention during his talk (since I was too busy Googling), I realize I hadn't actually looked at the art piece he was telling us about when Stewart Brand's name came up. This cybernetic map was drawn by a chalk-drawing robot and is actually a fantastic visualization of the history covered by historian Fred Turner's book From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (which I also own and am barely halfway through, oops).

I did watch the entirety of Turner's 2013 Keynote in Berlin, which is a great overview of the extremely complex and colorful evolution from the starry-eyed, egalitarian communalism of the '60s to the technocraticism of the '90s up until today.

Long video short: post World War II nuclear existential threat, DARPA military research and cybernetic principles employed in interdiscipline collaboration, all the while anti-Vietnam War protests and the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, Buckminster Fuller's Whole Systems and geodesic domes, the first image of the "Whole Earth", the creation of the Whole Earth Catalog, access to tools for the back-to-the-land movement and self-sufficiency, the failure of the communes (heterarchies aren't effective, unfortunately), the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (the WELL) and the first virtual communities, the Whole Earth Software Review, Wired Magazine, and finally, our interconnected world today. Phew.

The key fact is that the people involved in the first movement were involved in the second. Turner notes the uniting features between the Whole Earth Catalog and the WELL: Technophilic, Reversionary, Communal, Alternative, and Empowering.

Sorry, got a little sidetracked there but following the principles of cybernetics (from the Greek word meaning "steersman"), I'll course correct.

After being reminded of Stewart Brand and the WEC in the fall, one winter break later, I found myself studying in a new corner of Berkeley's Environmental Design Library. Thirty minutes or so of "studying" later, I thought to look around at the books on the shelves nearby (we students tend to forget that libraries hold books and aren't just study spots).

To my completely visceral surprise, the shelf behind my chair was an absolute gold mine of Whole Earth Catalogs in protective covers. I almost didn't believe the real things were inside the covers until I opened one up.

And so re-initiated my journey into the Whole Earth!

I returned to that shelf at least five times that semester, spending hours holding the catalogs up to my face, flipping through the massive pages, just to get close to the history I felt so immersed in. I even brought my parents to see them (I have a picture of me and the "Stay hungry. Stay foolish." page that I made my mom take but it's too embarrassing to upload right now).

And add on top of that my reading of Alison Bechdel's three autobiographical novels that semester, ending with The Secret to Superhuman Strength which discussed the Whole Earth Catalog and Buckminster Fuller extensively. But that's another blog post.

Part of my journey was the discovery of Community Memory, another Berkeley special. Housed in Leopold's Records on Durant Avenue, Community Memory was the first virtual bulletin board accessible via remote computer terminals. It was used by local musicians to promote their performances among other local advertisements and notices. The music-enthusiast community caught on really fast! As we do.

Then, of course, I had to see it for myself. This summer, my friend Vickie and I spent our one day together before she went back to New York at the Computer History Museum... of all places!

To end this blog post, a quote by Ted Nelson, the man who coined the term "hypertext", from his 1974 book Computer Lib/Dream Machines:

EVERYTHING IS DEEPLY INTERTWINGLED. In an important sense there are no "subjects" at all; there is only all knowledge, since the cross-connections among the myriad topics of this world simply cannot be divided up neatly.

This is a blog post I feel like I should sign off on. Thanks for making it to the end.

Sophia Liu
8/22/24

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10/12/24 UPDATE:

I thought this moment was worth documenting. I finally stumbled across my first geodesic dome! And of course, it was in Berkeley of all places... in the backyard of a student co-op...

I'm not sure when it was built but I have my guesses.

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3/28/25 UPDATE:

Right, so I don't see the updates on this post ending anytime soon, and here's another one. I expect more in the (near) future, but for now...

Believe it or not (actually, it's quite easy to believe), there's a class at Berkeley on this exact subject. It's Media Studies 168 with Matthew Berry (cool dude, dome-builder, and Berkeley Media Studies department fixture): "Cybernetics and Cybercultures: The Psychosocial Impact of Digital Media"—a classic upper division for Media Studies majors and one that I truly believe we should all take, especially the CS/EECS majors. I hope you can see why. Come on, nerds! I Phase 1 enrolled in it (before my computer security class) because I did not want to take any chances.

Last week's assignment: Forum Post #7 (Week 9: Cybernetics Takes Over the Whole Earth - Turner and Breen). The topic I've been waiting for! Also, homework asking me to do what I do when I procrastinate? Perfect. Here's my post:

Question 6: How can we understand the form and contents of the Whole Earth Catalog in cybernetic terms? Why does Turner call the publication an "information technology"? What features, aspects, or items that appear in the Whole Earth Catalog can you identify as precursors to later Silicon Valley systems and products?

The Whole Earth Catalog is an exemplification of the various aspects of cybernetics we've covered in class on multiple levels. Starting from the lowest level, the Catalog itself and its contents, then working our way up to its creators and readership, two distinct groups now collapsed into one group: the first virtual community, where consumers are producers and vice versa.

The most obvious cybernetic feature of the Catalog is its contents and layout, which Turner explains well by calling “the Catalog … a “Whole Earth” in its own right. That is, it was a seemingly comprehensive informational system, an encyclopedia, a map. Simply by picking it up and flipping through its seven sections, the reader could become an astronaut looking down from space on a contextual representation of a new earth.” (83) It is the division of human expertise on “tools”, which do not simply include our basic conception of a tool but include intangible wisdom on practices and systems, towards empowering the human to reclaim their control over their destiny. It was a wave of resistance against the mainstream from the freshly graduated white, educated class that turned to self-sufficiency and moving back to the land as a solution to the Soviet threat and increasing hierarchical corporatization that led to this ingenuity of form. The interconnectedness of their knowledge was best organized in a “mishmash”, collage-style publication, with some structure with the Catalog's loose index.

In fact, this jumble of tools, information on their use, and ways to source them was a result of the Catalog's production process. The creators of the Catalog were a community that extended beyond its publishing group, the Portola Institute. Because the communes' and their satellite communities had overlapping social networks and ideologies, this periodical brought these already intertwingling groups together. This blurring of “the boundaries… between their minds and bodies, and between themselves and their friends” (68) was partially influenced by the growing belief in the power of psychoactive substances, a movement led by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. Their “Humanoid Radio” dreamt up when “they were all high as hell… marked a weird attempt… to transcend distance and reach faraway minds with a single, disembodied signal… They were communication technologies through which humans could not only exchange information, but, at least imaginatively, merge with one another in a spiritually harmonious state.” (63)

Influential network theorist Clay Shirky describes this phenomenon on the internet as, “Every time a new consumer joins the media landscape, a new producer joins as well.” The Whole Earth Catalog was one of the first publications and “worlds” where passive consumers adopted new roles as active producers. This interactivity for the “user” is reflected in the structure of the internet today. We are all active participants in our collective consciousness. Turner describes this as “techno-social systems [that] serve as sites of ecstatic communion” (73). After the collapse of the communes, the hippies and New Communalists pivoted to a new frontier and the land of nomadism, pioneering spirit, and mind expansion became virtual. The ideals that brought about and sustained the Catalog took on a new mission, to connect more than just the communalists and their peers: the whole Earth.

I learned about Clay Shirky the same week in CS 160: User Interface Design. The topic was Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Social Computing. We also talked about Douglas Engelbart's first hypertext demo and a bit on network and graph theory (hierarchical vs. non-hierarchical structures).

What a week of lectures.