The Whole Earth Catalog (WEC) was an American counterculture magazine and product catalog published by Stewart Brand several times a year between 1968 and 1972, and occasionally thereafter, until 1998. Download Whole Earth Catalog 50th anniversary magazine in pdf format or read online for free using link provided below.
the whole earth catalog pdf
In Douglas Engelbart's ARC group, computers had long seemed to be natural tools with which to expand the intellectual capacity of individuals and their ability to share knowledge. This vision had grown out of the research cultures of World War II and the early cold war. In 1946, for instance, while stationed in the Philippines as a Navy radar technician, Engelbart had read Vannevar Bush's now-legendary Atlantic Monthly article "As We May Think." In it Bush argued that the same scientists who had just helped win World War II would now have to harness the power of the cheap electronics they had invented to develop a new form of information management. Having built the nuclear weapons that might destroy mankind, scientists should now turn to building technologies with which to "encompass the great record" of human activity and so facilitate a growth "in the wisdom of race experience." By way of example, Bush described a hypothetical desktop machine he called the Memex. Designed for individual use, the Memex featured a keyboard, a translucent screen, microfilm inputs, and the ability to call up reams of stored data by means of a few keystrokes. This machine would turn the ordinary office into a site at which the whole of human history might in theory be called up. The executive equipped with this new knowledge base would not only expand his own intellectual capacities but also enhance his ability to control the world around him.
This cybernetic framework aligned the ARC mission with the goals of two seemingly antithetical communities: the defense establishment and the counterculture. Starting in 1963, much of the ARC group's work was funded by the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). ARPA was founded in 1958 with the aim of sparking new research into defense-oriented technologies. In 1962 it established the Information Processing Techniques Office, headed by Joseph C. R. Licklider; this was the office that would ultimately drive the development of the Internet. In many ways, ARPA marked an extension of the defense-oriented military-university collaborations that began in World War II. Likewise, Licklider's vision of computing grew out of the cybernetic ideal of human-machine integration. After World War II, Licklider became a professor of psychology at MIT, where he worked on a variety of projects descended from MIT's wartime commitments. He was steeped in the cybernetic theories of his colleague Norbert Wiener, and it showed. In a highly influential 1960 paper entitled "Man-Computer Symbiosis," Licklider imagined a form of human-machine collaboration that surpassed even Vannevar Bush's vision for the Memex: "The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today." Licklider, like Bush and Engelbart, envisioned the computer becoming a communications device; along with the user and as part of a whole information system, it might, properly deployed, be of use to humanity as a whole. "Man-computer symbiosis," he suggested, should produce "intellectually the most creative and exciting [period] in the history of mankind."
Like any other catalog, the Whole Earth Catalog offered a wide variety of items, accompanied by short descriptions and pictures. Unlike other catalogs, nothing was for sale. Believing that "information wants to be free," Brand wrote the catalog as a way to get lots of good information to as many people as possible. The catalog accepted no advertising and only reviewed those items that the editors thought would be a positive force for change. In the first edition of the catalog, Brand focused on a few key areas of knowledge, including the environment, shelter and land use, communications, community, and learning. The section on shelter and land use, for example, had ideas for better, more energy-efficient housing design, solar and wind power, and other alternative technologies.
Part of Brand's mission with the Whole Earth Catalog was to put power back in the hands of the people, an attitude that was very much a part of the late 1960s youth counterculture. Brand said the catalog's purpose was to empower "the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested." In the late 1960s, because young people were fed up with government, their parents, and the powerful in society, they sought to take their lives and futures into their own hands, on their own terms, and live by their own values, not those given to them by society. The Whole Earth Catalog, and its later updates and additions, helped people find the tools to live by their own values. Brand later won the National Book Award for his work with the Whole Earth Catalog. He published numerous updates and a magazine, Whole Earth.
A buyer could buy catalogs that offer Brookstone Tools or Jensen Tools, plus a Miners Catalog, and a Blasters' Handbook, and Glenn's Auto Repair Manual, published by Chilton. There are listings on self-hypnotism, psycho-cybernetics, a Yaqui Way of Knowledge, etc. Something for everyone.
Brand came to public attention 41 yearsago by publishing the wildly successfulWhole Earth Catalog, a practical guide forback-to-the-land refugees from suburbia.The catalog questioned virtually every attributeof 1960s middle-class suburban Americaand offered a telephone directory-sized,annotated compilation of equipment for ruralself-reliance. Ultimately, the back-to-the-landmovement proved to be vanishinglysmall, over-fond of drugs, and stuck in a historicalcul-de-sac.
In 1966, I promoted the idea of photographing the 'whole Earth' from space, hoping that it would stimulate humanity's interest in its mega-habitat. The concept of the whole-Earth photo expanded profoundly in 1998 when the then US vice-president, Al Gore, envisaged a video camera in space permanently broadcasting a high-resolution real-time image of the sunlit side of our planet. The camera would reside at Lagrange-1, the point between the Sun and Earth where the gravitational pull is neutral. At this point in space, 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, an object orbits the Sun in synchrony with us. Gore's scheme was modified and eventually named the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR). This project won approval from the US National Academy of Sciences and $100 million from the US Congress, and the satellite was built.
When DSCOVR, or better, gets installed, the most important global activity it can monitor will take place at the scale of a bacterial gene. Metagenomics is giving us detailed access to the genes and gene communities of bacteria and archaea, 99% of which can't be cultured in the lab. For instance, analysis is revealing whole new metabolic pathways for oxygen and carbon production by the ocean's microbes.
The release of photographs taken during early space missions coincided with the first issues of the Whole Earth Catalog. Brand pioneered the publication and dissemination of the images, putting them on the covers of the first catalogue, in fall 1968, and all successive issues. Throughout its run, the catalogue consistently advertised the pictures and provided instructions for ordering them from the government.
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