On First Looking into Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog

Are we in the present that the past envisioned… or just the one they invested in?

Front cover of The Last Whole Earth Catalog, 1971

My favorite browsing lately is at a charity bookshop in my neighborhood – it only accepts donations of books, no purchases, and gives all proceeds in turn to a college scholarship fund.

Part of what I enjoy about this bookshop is the glimpse it gives inside the libraries and attics and basements (and probably self-storage units) of my neighbors. The median age of donors is clear from the sorts of titles on the shelves - when I first started frequenting the shop, there were many stolid hardcovers from the 1940s and 50s, alongside an occasional deep dive into the earlier decades of the 20^th century. But the profile of the stock has steadily changed, and at present it is dominated by trade paperbacks from those formally educated in the 60s (philosophy and lit crit bear this out in particular), coming of age in the 70s (politics, religion, sociology), setting up house in the 80s (cooking), keeping up with culture as defined by art, fiction and music through the 90s (there’s a lot of world music among the CDs), and consistently enticed in this century by retrospective looks at the youth culture of their past (any given book about Bob Dylan is likely to be in stock at any given time).

So it made perfect sense when I spotted a copy of the Last Whole Earth Catalog (1971) on the shop’s backroom table, awaiting shelving in part because no one was sure where to put it. I’d never actually seen a proper copy of this oversized, newsprint mail-order catalog, though I knew it by reputation as a publication that had helped define a generation. Naomi sighed when I picked it up – a large, yellowing-to-the-point-of-crumbling addition to my library of curios, many of which might well end up back in this same shop one day.

The Last Whole Earth Catalog turns out to be more than a curio, however. Reading through its nearly 500 pages, taking care not to tear them too much as I gingerly turn each over, is a full immersion in a late 60s/early 70s mindset that I was too young to understand at the time. I think the nearest prior experience I’ve had was a nighttime outdoor hot tub in Big Sur. But what makes it more than a curio about a bygone era is that we are still living with – if not dominated by – much of the ideology implicit in the book.

Stewart Brand, creator and original editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, is often referred to as a Zelig character from his generation, because he seems to have been part of so many landmark events. To be more specific, geographically and historically, he helped organize two powerfully zeitgeisty gatherings in the Bay Area: the Trips Festival in 1966, when an estimated 10,000 people drank acid-laced punch and watched the Grateful Dead perform under psychedelic lights, transforming themselves into hippies; and the Hackers Conference in 1984, when 150 nerdy computer programmers somehow transformed themselves into our future tech overlords.

The Whole Earth Catalog, in its original incarnation, falls between these two events – it launched in 1968 and declared itself over with the edition I purchased, the “Last,” in 1971, which sold well over a million copies and won a National Book Award without even being nominated. (More editions eventually followed, for various reasons and under different auspices – a complete virtual set can be found online at https://wholeearth.info/.) The catalog does seem like a link between the drop-outs and the overlords. Its subtitle is “access to tools,” and its much-quoted statement of “PURPOSE,” printed on the first page, reads:

“We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far remotely done power and glory -- as via government, big business, formal education, church – has succeeded to point where gross defects obscure actual gains. 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.”

This declaration of hostility to inherited societal institutions, alongside a grandiose idea of individual power (“We are as gods”) served as a credo both for back-to-the-land communards, and the corporate titans of Silicon Valley. Steve Wozniak of Apple was among the 150 at that first Hackers Conference, and Steve Jobs cited The Whole Earth Catalog as inspiration for the company they founded together. “Stay hungry. Stay foolish,” he offered as summary words of wisdom to the 2005 graduating class of Stamford, quoting the back cover of the mid-70s edition of the book he first encountered (Whole Earth Epilog).

“It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along,” said Jobs about the catalog in that same address, thus linking it directly not only to the biggest corporation in the world (Apple has a $3.68 trillion market valuation today), but also to the fourth biggest corporation in the world (Google is currently valued by the market at $2.36 trillion). You might as well throw in a bunch of others – I have no doubt that many if not all of today’s tech billionaires would recognize their own cereal-box philosophy in Stewart Brand’s “We are as gods,” whether or not they ever read The Whole Earth Catalog.

The contradiction between access to tools for building an unconventional life, and access to tools for building a disruptive corporation, is something I’ve never been able to reconcile about Stewart Brand’s cohort. Brand himself seemed to touch on this conflict in another famous remark of his, this one from the Hacker’s Conference in 1984. Brand’s key statement there is often reduced to a simple maxim: “Information wants to be free.” But in fact it comes from a train of thought that also includes its opposite: “On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable,” said Brand. “On the other hand, information wants to be free.”

In my book The New Analog (2017), I suggested that this paradox of Brand’s might represent a confusion between analog and digital forms of communication:

“In analog media, the signal of information is inextricably bound to noise, making the process of accessing it expensive in terms of time and materials. But in digital media, the signal of information is filtered from noise and in that sense already free. It’s not that information’s own inclinations are in conflict. The apparent contradiction described by Brand is the result of applying economic terms we accept for analog media to digital signal.”

from Whole Earth Review, May 1985

But there’s further context to Brand’s remark at the Hacker’s Conference, which reading through The Last Whole Earth Catalog helped clarify for me. The catalog’s stated purpose is to provide access to tools, but it’s not Sears Roebuck — the Last Whole Earth Catalog is intended to be read as a book, with essays and even a novel threaded through it; and Brand annotated many of its listings, putting an ideological spin on its contents. Over and over he underscores what the cover image and title set up: the value of seeing the planet as a whole, and in need of collective care. “Understanding Whole Systems” is the first section, which begins with Buckminster Fuller’s works. “The insights of Buckminster Fuller initiated this catalog,” writes Brand in a headnote, above a series of select Fuller quotations that emphasize ecological problems, and the power of engineering to solve them. From Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth:

“To begin our position-fixing aboard our Spaceship Earth we must first acknowledge that the abundance of immediately consumable, obviously desirable or utterly essential resources have been sufficient until now to allow us to carry on despite our ignorance. Being eventually exhaustible and spoilable, they have been adequate only up to this critical moment. This cushion-for-error of humanity's survival and growth up to now was apparently provided just as a bird inside of the egg is provided with liquid nutriment to develop it to a certain point. But then by design the nutriment is exhausted at just the time when the chick is large enough to be able to locomote on its own legs. And so as the chick pecks at the shell seeking more nutriment it inadvertently breaks open the shell… A new, physically uncomprised, metaphysical initiative of unbiased integrity could unify the world. It could and probably will be provided by the utterly impersonal problem solutions of the computers.”

These pages on Fuller serve as a preface to a subsequent tour of the environment Brand arranges from macro to micro. We move from the cosmos to the biosphere of the Earth to the human body to the mind — and that’s just the first twenty-five pages, which culminate in a full spread devoted to an essay by ecological activist and poet Wendell Berry which begins, “First there was Civil Rights, and then there was The War, and now it is The Environment.”

A long section follows that is devoted to ecological problems - pollution, the population explosion, hunger - and “Desperate Ecology Action.” This in turn introduces one of the most in-depth sections of the catalog, instructions and tools for heading back to the land – farming, shelter, crafts, and advice on organizing new communities. By midway through the book, we’re making homebrew from our own crops and drinking it in outdoor communal hot tubs that we’ve built along Finnish or Japanese plans. Have we solved the world’s ecological problems yet?

Not quite. In fact, looking from a half-century later, not at all. Things are worse. Much, much worse. How did all these good ecological intentions linked to tools go so wrong?

Returning to that well-known statement of Brand’s at the 1984 Hacker’s Conference, I see now that it was in fact part of a dialogue initiated by none other than Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple. The verbatim exchange is preserved on videotape.

STEVE WOZNIAK: It turns out that, there are cases though, problems with development of a product in a company — sometimes it gets developed and the company decides it doesn't want it, doesn’t fit a market, it won’t make a product, it won't sell. In a case like that the company should be very free to quickly give it to the engineer, legal release: "It's yours.” Take it out and start your own company, if it’s Apple, or start your own software product company. And sometimes the companies, internally, because they own it, will squash it and say, "You cannot have it, even though we're not going put it out,” and nobody else in the world's going to get it. That's a hiding of information, and that is wrong.

STEWART BRAND: It seems like there's a couple of interesting paradoxes that we're working here… On the one hand you have, a point you’re making Woz, that information sort of 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 almost wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out in many respects is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other.

WOZNIAK: Information should be free but your time should not.

I want to give Wozniak the last word from the exchange this time, because his follow-up – rarely quoted, and just barely audible in the videotape – leads to another explanation for Brand’s contradiction. Information can – Wozniak even says “should” – be free (Wozniak famously clashed with Jobs over open source, which he championed). But your time – or to rephrase that in more strictly economic terms, your labor – should not.

In this snippet of dialogue, Wozniak – who cashed out of Apple a millionaire – seems to be advocating an anti-capital, pro-labor stance toward information. Brand, on the other hand – the one-time Merry Prankster who killed The Whole Earth Catalog at the height of its profitability, who moved to a houseboat in Sausalito for a lifestyle seemingly more beatnik than yuppie – frames the opposition of capital and labor as a “paradox,” rather than the conflict of material interest that it is.

This oddly benign view of capital may well lurk in The Whole Earth Catalog — peeking out for example in the entry for Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (“This preposterous novel has some unusual gold in it. – SB”) — but it’s difficult to see for all the ecological awareness and activism. However, Brand has proven in years since to be more than a little comfortable with the titans of capital. In the 1980s, Brand horrified many ecological activists who had been inspired by The Whole Earth Catalog when he became a consultant to Shell Oil, as well as an advocate for nuclear power (a stance he holds to this day, even in the wake of the Fukushima disaster). He has also loudly championed bio-engineering for both crops and animals. By 1995, an article in Fortune magazine dubbed him, “The Electric Kool-Aid Management Consultant.” And one of his recent endeavors, The Long Now Foundation, is tied to Jeff Bezos — who personally funded its most grandiose project, a “10,000-year clock,” and installed it on land he owns in west Texas.

from an FAQ by the designer of the 10,000-year clock, Danny Hillis

Is it too much to read this coziness with capital into the exchange at the Hackers Conference in 1984? Can we also read it into certain blithely entitled statements in the Last Whole Earth Catalog? Regardless, it is all too easy to find in the actions of the billionaires who came out of the Silicon Valley community that Brand helped establish. As Brand’s current associate Bezos takes a seat on the inauguration platform this month, alongside Zuckerberg and Musk, the politics of their tech-based corporations have become more obvious, and more poisonous, than ever. The legacy of The Whole Earth Catalog has given Silicon Valley philosophical cover, as it were, for decades – associating corporate strategies with the anti-establishment attitudes of 1960s youth culture. But that cover has not only worn thin, it’s in shreds as these “disruptors” claim their place in an anti-democratic oligarchy.

What’s worse, these corporations have only further entrenched the very problems that The Last Whole Earth Catalog identified as most crucial for society to solve fifty years ago. The book is closing on them - and us - fast.

Back cover of The Last Whole Earth Catalog, 1971

Listening to: Sonic Talismans by Liang Yiyuan & Li Daiguo

Cooking: Tofu