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The Whole Earth Catalog was an amazing, large “Access to tools” book in the late 60s, early 70s that influenced EVERYTHING: Internet sharing of technology and media, affordable housing, Craigslist, BitTorrent, green energy, and more. And the visionary who started it, Stewart Brand, ran The Well (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), the first commercial online service company, even before the Web. (If you ever get an e-mail from someone and their e-mail address ends in @well.net, you can be sure they were using the Internet before you were.)

I had The Whole Earth Catalog as a kid, from my sister, Connie. I found her copy in the attic after she went off to college. I loved the WEC, and it influenced me a lot, opened my mind to ideas that I did not hear about in school, or anywhere else, in my little town.

Reading the WEC also made me want to seek out and meet inventor and visionary Buckminster Fuller. (The Whole Earth Catalog people loved Fuller, because he invented the Geodesic dome, which the WEC touted as cheap housing for hippies wanting to “get back to the land.”

(I met Fuller in Chautauqua, New York, when he was in his 80s and I was 12. Changed my life. He was the first famous person I ever met. Back then, my “rock stars” were scientists.)

Wikipedia says, “Apple Inc. founder and entrepreneur Steve Jobs has described the Catalog as the conceptual forerunner of the World Wide Web….”The WEC was sort of like Google in  paperback form, 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.”

Article in Time Magazine by Stewart Brand called “WE OWE IT ALL TO THE HIPPIES.”

(My view of the Internet is much like Stewart Brand’s. That it’s majestic and spiritual. Which is part of why I don’t like social networking, even though social networking came out of those ideas. I just think most people doing social networking are not people I’d want to talk with in real life. There are a lot of weenies and dolts in the world, and before the Internet, I was blissfully unaware of what they were thinking and doing. I really don’t want to see pictures of your cat, I don’t want to hear your dumb jokes, and I really don’t want to take a “Do you like me?” quiz. I thought those were stupid in third grade. I still think they’re stupid.)

Here’s a cool article about the Whole Earth Catalog. Here’s some quotes from it:

Richard Wurman: A West Coast catalog for hippies that won the National Book Award [in 1972, in the Contemporary Affairs category]? It was a paradigm shift in information distribution. In the early ’70s, the public didn’t know what a yurt was, or where to buy one. But if you were interested in moving back to the land and needed sturdy, cheap housing, this was invaluable information. I think you can draw a pretty straight line from the WEC to a lot of today’s culture. It created an aroma that’s so pervasive, most people don’t even know the source of the smell.

Kevin Kelly: For this new countercultural movement, information was a precious commodity. In the ’60s, there was no Internet; no 500 cable channels. Bookstores were usually small and bad; libraries, worse. The WEC not only gave you permission to invent your life, it gave you the reasoning and the tools to do just that. And you believed you could do it, because on every page of the catalog were other people doing it. This was a great example of user-generated content, without advertising, before the Internet. Basically, Brand invented the blogosphere long before there was any such thing as a blog.

John Perry Barlow: Before the WEC came out, business was big and ugly. It was a kingdom of acronyms like IBM and GE. But Stewart saw sustainable small business as a virtue.

Fred Turner: The WEC set the stage for all of today’s social networks. This kind of collaborative communication and the emphasis on small-scale technology really hit home in early Silicon Valley. You have to remember that the first Xerox PARC [the Palo Alto Research Center, a division of Xerox credited with inventing laser printing and the Ethernet, among other things] library consisted of books selected from the WEC by computer guru Alan Kay.

This entry was posted by Michael W. Dean on Saturday, September 20th, 2008 at 8:44 pm and is filed under Gear porn, Other people's cool stuff, The world is a strange and beautiful place. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.