What might hippies learn from management science? A lot, the Catalog’s editors seemed to think, reviewing books like Managing in Turbulent Times, The Age of Discontinuity, and The Effective Executive by business school professor Peter Drucker more than 10 times throughout Whole Earth history. Stewart Brand writes almost missionarily about Drucker in the Spring 1983 issue of the CoEvolution Quarterly: “I think Peter Drucker is an angel, he writes like one, and insight as frequent and lasting as his is not human.”

Drucker, much like Ayn Rand, let Catalog readers—frustrated by seemingly inevitable war, conformity, and inequality—imagine a theory of change, to bulldoze stodgy institutions and embrace utopian post-industrial life. In Brand’s words: “[Atlas Shrugged] is the only fiction alive that lets you identify with glee on the industrial, Earth-moving level of action.” These promises became more tantalizing as the hippies became knowledge-worker yuppies, Wired’s bread and butter, free-wheeling entrepreneur-engineers who’d build Silicon Valley and several generations of technology companies. It was Rand and Drucker, invoked as early as 1969, who taught these Californian Ideology foot soldiers to throw off their organizational shackles, to “just do things” and stick it to the man. Is “agency” as buzzword really so new?