Complete Whole Earth Catalogs Archive Available Online and Free | Hacker News Reader

Complete Whole Earth Catalogs Archive Available Online and Free

wholeearth.info

59 pointsyarapavan7 comments

"The Whole Earth Catalog" was a groundbreaking publication that first appeared in 1968 and continued intermittently until 1998. It was created by Stewart Brand and his team as a tool for the counterculture and the burgeoning environmental movement, and it played a significant role in shaping the ethos of the 1960s and 1970s.

The catalog contained product listings, essays, and articles on a wide variety of topics, including alternative energy, sustainable living, self-sufficiency, and personal empowerment. It was known for its eclectic mix of content, its DIY ethos, and its commitment to a holistic, systems-oriented view of the world.

"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 the 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."

The quote by Steve Jobs in his famous stanford commencement speech - stay hungry, stay foolish - was from Oct 1974 edition, last page.

Direct link: https://wholeearth.info/p/whole-earth-epilog-october-1974?fo...

For a British kid from an impoverished background this was (early 70s) my Internet, vast range of content, intelligently selected and with capsule reviews/extracts of everything which was included.

When, 20 years later, I first saw the Web this was what I hoped it would become, I was disappointed.

I felt like the early web lived up to this, though in retrospect it may have already been in quality decline compared to the earlier (Internet&BBS) protocols.

We have taken the wrong path. The Internet we got was not the Internet we wanted. Today we have the Internet through a fog of advertising. It’s been turned into some hellish mix of Tee-Vee advertising and junk-mail pamphlets and of course the DM bots which are just the Internet’s version of robocallers selling insurance, replacement windows, and “government free money, apply now!”.

The Whole Earth Catalog is hard to describe except that it was an attempt to make the world wide web, long before the web, in print, back in the 1970s. From the masthead:

>FUNCTION

>The WHOLE EARTH CATALOG functions as an evaluation and access device. With it, the user should know better what is worth getting and where and how to do the getting…

>PURPOSE

>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 the 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.

Whole Earth and its offshoots were leaders of the techno-optimism movement in the 1970s and 80s — that technology, devolved to the individual, was a powerful force for good. It was highly influential in the rise of the PC, including with both Apple founders, and their entire circle of Bay Area hippie-nerds.

Recent and related:

The whole of the Whole Earth Catalog is now online - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37872774 - Oct 2023 (81 comments)

Thanks for sharing. I was looking for the most famous quotes by Steve Jobs from 1975 edition "Stay Hungry Stay Foolish". Wish it was there. :-)

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