Fiftieth anniversary of Whole Earth Catalog | Hacker News Reader

Fiftieth anniversary of Whole Earth Catalog

latimes.com

110 pointswalterbell17 comments

The Whole Earth Catalog was like a preview of the World Wide Web, before the WWW existed. It was the best thing going back then, as far as ways to discover interesting things and, along with its companion publication Coevolution Quarterly (and later Whole Earth Review), ideas.

Also as an aside, Kevin Kelly, who is still producing interesting material today (http://kk.org), ran the magazine for a while, during which time he was developing the vision for what became Wired magazine. This was around the time of the software catalogs and in the early days of the Well. There's an edition of the Whole Earth Catalog called "Signal" which was essentially a preview of Wired, before some people with money came in and claimed credit for founding it... I think he is still given credit as a co-founder but he was the visionary and instigator who made it happen.

[Edit: I see in his own bio he says: "In 1992 I joined a small team which launched Wired magazine in January 1993." LOL! That's insanely modest. In around Spring of 1987 I sat with him in an office at Whole Earth Review while he described this magazine he wanted to do, a larger format magazine, breaking some size rules, with bright colors, bold, creative layout, and lots of experimentation with creative or just plain abusive typography, focused on tech and the culture around it... Signal had to rely on the older printing technology so it didn't have the color aspects as I recall but the vision he described in that meeting was 100% Wired magazine.]

Another interesting tidbit about that KK meeting is J Baldwin was in the room, and when Kevin described the idea of it being about tech, culture and the people doing it, J Baldwin grumbled an objection that he would rather see the focus be on the tech, not on the people. I gather J didn’t like the idea of a gossipy, rock-star producing type of magazine that would give you more personal stories and less juicy details about the tech. I got the feeling KK’s view was more on the people side though not full-bore gossipy fortunately. They didn’t flesh out the two sides of this at that moment.

The author of the Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand, also participated in the Mother of All Demos [1], whose 50th anniversary is coming up this December. A busy year for him.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

The cover of the whole earth publication features a photograph of the earth. The first photograph of earth from space, which he campaigned for. A busy year indeed.

A couple in the archive that might be interesting to HN -- the Whole Earth Software Catalogs from the mid-1980s:

https://archive.org/details/Whole_Earth_Software_Catalog_198...

https://archive.org/details/Whole_Earth_Software_Catalog_for...

And of course, the classic Last Whole Earth Catalog:

https://archive.org/details/B-001-013-719

If you want to hear more about the background and Stewart Brand as a person, Tim Ferris interviewed him recently: https://tim.blog/2017/11/21/stewart-brand/

It's worth mentioning that the Whole Earth Catalogue was not just a creation of Brand and his colleagues. It was often based on reviews submitted by readers.

For my generation it was OUR Whole Earth Catalogue. That was hugely important in making a sense of community that supported the book.

If you haven't yet, I highly recommend checking out one of the old catalogs. The writing has an infectious spirit of hope and enthusiasm.

I used to own two. This is a great reference book and has a wide variety of interesting material, lots of interesting stories in addition to being a 'tools' catalog.

Great MoMA exhibit here: https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2011/AccesstoT...

I still read The Well (The Whole Earth 'Lectronic 'Link) at least once a year, as I have an almost religious addiction to "The State of The World" with Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky. For reference, here is State of the World 2018 - https://people.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/503/State-of...

Stewart Brand is now hosting Seminars at the Long Now Foundation http://longnow.org/

RSS feed at http://longnow.org/projects/seminars/SALT.xml

I posted the same a couple of days ago. I thought a story of the Whole Earth Catalog --written by a really good journalist, John Markoff-- would have been a perfect match for HN, but apparently not.

Do many HN readers even know about Stewart Brand?

Stay hungry. Stay foolish. I love browsing through a copy of the last issue.

> "I thought a story [about X] would have been a perfect match for HN, but apparently not."

Take a step back and think about the variables involved in any given submission getting significant uptake. A few off the top of my head:

- does it get noticed? (and there's a bunch of factors that contribute to why it might get noticed)

- does it get upvoted?

- what other posts are submitted at around the same time?

- is it a good fit for HN?

Only one of those is fit. It's not uncommon for pieces to be submitted multiple times before finally getting a lot of upvotes. I wouldn't jump to any conclusions about fitness based on such limited data.

FWIW, Kevin Kelly (Wired, The Well, Cool Tools) was one of the later editors of the publication as well, a name that might be more familiar to some HN members.

That's a bit of hand-waving to get to the crux: the current HN collective is mostly unaware of recent decades, and does not care for it. Unless one makes a pandering connection with some name visible in the present day. It's a sad state.

There have been some HN stories about the Long Now foundation, which would be a simple, present path for readers to know about Stewart Brand. But these stories weren't popular either.

Edit: observations are not assumptions. Bemoaning the sad state of the world is normal when you observe intellectual or moral decay.

Let's stop making assumptions about "the collective", shall we? Submit articles you think are interesting, and make substantial comments that contribute and promote interesting discussion. Bemoaning the "sad state" of whatever doesn't help one single bit (and comes off poorly as well). The guidelines ask us not to complain that a submission is inappropriate: I think that likely goes for complaining about a submission's reception in general.

You can only control what you yourself do. I regularly review my comments to see how they've contributed constructively to discussion: and that's not just by looking at their vote tallies. Sometimes I'm not happy with what I've done, and I try to do better. Are there responses at all? Are there substantive follow ups? Are the responses worse? A pet peeve of mine are the large number of snarky rhetorical questions that poke at others' comments rather than charitably teasing out the heart, and make stronger followups. Complaining about that would only make people defensive, which would make things worse.

Constructive comments make for better discussion make for better participation which makes for better submissions and better comments. Focus on what you can do, and do it.

It's unpredictable, because a much smaller pool of people visit the new page and upvote stories. As a fallback, sometimes the mods will promote a story to the front page.

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