The Complicated Legacy of Stewart Brand’s “Whole Earth Catalog” | Hacker News Reader

The Complicated Legacy of Stewart Brand’s “Whole Earth Catalog”

newyorker.com

54 pointsmitchbob21 comments

About a year ago, I actually joined the WELL---it still exists, and I was curious about what it looked like.

Sadly, it turns out that it's largely moribund. There was barely anyone on there, and nothing interesting was happening.

They were more than happy, however, to take my money for the $15/month subscription fee. So happy, in fact, that they ignored my multiple emails trying to cancel. And nobody answered the phone. Ultimately, I had to contact my credit card company to block the charges.

Thankyou for that piece of anecdata.

I was thinking seriously about joining a few months ago, because I think a "social network" / forum that caters to its paying users instead of advertisers, and has a membership fee and something less than 100% anonymity to keep the riffraff away is a nice idea.

Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be a practical business model.

You'd probably like MetaFilter.

You'll like MetaFilter if you can stomach the weird ideas which seem to be required to join in, like their weird definition of "racism".

That sucks, thanks for taking one for the team to find out. I had considered doing something similar as I had read so many legends which touch on the well in some way or another.

Weird. I had no problems cancelling earlier this year.

I heard brand talk about his 2009 book Whole Earth Discipline. He surprised me as not being a rabid environmentalism but what he called a pragmatic environmentalism supporting urbanization, nuclear and genetic engineering as a way to improve humanities environmental footprint. Take the first for example: until then I hand realized that dense Manhattan has one of the lowest per capita carbon footprints in the developed world. Density reduces transportation and building interior cost.

i think there is something to this but we shouldn't forget that big cities depend on a lot of goods being transported there. So a lot of the emissions of rural areas should be counted towards big cities.

Exactly this. All of these systems are so complex that we can only ever make the crudest estimates. Similarly, people want to "fix" something by changing X and don't bother to account for all of the ripple effects of said change.

One train saves 100 trucks. Yes. For sure. Cities consume. Perhaps diffuse population would have a lower cost. I sorta think moving diverse goods to a central depot is easier and less damaging than point to point transfer.

This piece reads like a 7th grade given an assignment to write 1000 words on a confusing subject. I thought there was a second page because it ended so abruptly.

It’s a bunch of content on Brand and then makes a slew of subjective statements that seem like I’m supposed to know the author. Or look for future pieces.

So the piece informs and then adds some apocalyptic musings with no basis other than the author’s neuroses.

“ As I sat on the couch in my apartment, overheating in the late-afternoon sun, I felt a growing unease that this vision for the future, however soothing, was largely fantasy. For weeks, all I had been able to feel for the future was grief. I pictured woolly mammoths roaming the charred landscape of Northern California and future archeologists discovering the remains of the ten-thousand-year clock in a swamp of nuclear waste. While antagonism between millennials and boomers is a Freudian trope, Brand’s generation will leave behind a frightening, if unintentional, inheritance. My generation, and those after us, are staring down a ravaged environment, eviscerated institutions, and the increasing erosion of democracy. In this context, the long-term view is as seductive as the apolitical, inward turn of the communards from the nineteen-sixties. What a luxury it is to be released from politics––to picture it all panning out.“

No, it doesn't read like that at all. It appears you simply didn't like - and possibly didn't understand - the conclusion.

No, I think Prepend is right. This is painful to read, feels disjointed at times, then ends abruptly. Good articles aren't written this way.

I don’t want to have to like a conclusion to get it. I want to understand the reasoning behind the conclusion to appreciate and learn.

I honestly think you didn't understand the article. Let me summarize what I got out of it - we can agree to disagree about the quality of the prose.

In the late 60s, as the early political struggles of the the baby boomers were coming into full flower, Stewart Brand published a series of books about how to build back-to-the-land communes. While they were high quality productions and somewhat influential, they were written based on some mushy political ideologies that have since been discredited. In the present day Brand, now an old man, has realized some of his mistakes and half-heartedly distanced himself from the premises of the "Whole Earth Catalogue". Instead of a sort of pseudo-intellectual hippy libertarianism, he now identifies with the thinking of people like Steven Pinker, another baby boomer, who has written extensively about how despite the obvious growing problems of the early 21st century, everything is actually fine. The author closes by musing on the damage the boomer generation has caused.

The paragraph at the end is not a random addition - it's the point of the article. The point is: Brand had it wrong in the 60s and he has it wrong today. His calls to retreat from politics and build utopian communes in the 60s reflect his panglossian attitude now; in both cases, he washes his hands of the hard work of actually building and surviving the real world.

Also - if you're not familiar with Anna Wiener, I think her best work is the essay "Uncanny Valley": https://nplusonemag.com/issue-25/on-the-fringe/uncanny-valle...

If it isn’t understandable, isn’t that the very definition of deficient writing?

Thanks for breaking this out and providing more background. I’m completely unfamiliar with Anna Wiener and I’ve added uncanney valley to my reading list.

I think knowing this piece is part of a larger set of work helps me with my wtf perception.

It seems odd to wrap up lots of different issues in a single individuals contributions. I don’t know if boomer problems can be pinned in the whole earth catalog as a failure. It’s possible that the catalog can be valuable without curing all ailments and would like to see the authors thoughts on net positive/negative. (As opposed to description of catalog, description to current problems)

The quality of writing in America has really fallen off. NYMag, NYT, etc. used to publish at least mediocre journalism & opinions. I guess the death of print means talented people just work elsewhere, the incentives are skewed, or some combination of factors.

Try a subscription to Lapham's Quarterly, or just read it free online: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/

The New Yorker has long been one of the few outlets of long-form writing about interesting subjects. I can't tell whether you are criticizing the New Yorker or comparing it to other media.

" the incentives are skewed, "

Indeed they are. Did you click on the article? Were you presented with ads? (I will assume you didn't click any).

If so, it served its purpose. If not, you offer no value to the New Yorker.

Of course, you could give publishers money in exchange for content on a monthly basis, thereby incentivizing them to continue to produce stuff you think is worth the money.

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