When the Whole Earth Catalog reached the public in 1968, it argued that technology could be personal, living could be communal, and information could be free. Its pages—dense with listings for books on cybernetics, how-to guides for constructing geodesic domes, and advertisements for mail order organic seeds—presented readers with supplies for forging a way of life compatible with both the dawning Information Age and the unfolding ecological crisis. This vision not only inspired a generation of back-to-the-land counterculturalists, but continues to color the aspirations of contemporary technofuturists and environmentalists alike. As Whole Earth’s mythical status has grown, however, actual copies of the Catalog have become harder and harder to come by. 

Seeking to expand access to a publication dedicated to access, Barry Threw, Executive Director of Gray Area, spearheaded the effort to digitize the Whole Earth Catalog and its subsequent imprints with support from partners at the Internet Archive and the Long Now Foundation. Anyone can now access the entire archive for free by visiting the Whole Earth Index at www.wholeearth.info. Designer Mindy Seu and developer Jon Gacnik deftly took up the challenge of making such a vast trove of material both beautiful to look at and intuitive to navigate. It’s easy to fall down rabbit holes and lose hours reading about such topics as man-made planets and communicating with dolphins. 

Working on this digitization project, I found that the more time I spent sorting back issues for scanning and, later, browsing the Index, the less fixed my idea of Whole Earth became. In my world, Whole Earth is a meme, standing in for The Californian Ideology, ’70s ecological activism, or Silicon Valley techno-utopianism, depending on who’s invoking the reference. The visual referent most often attached to this memetic version of Whole Earth is the thick, large-format Catalog, which represents a comparatively small part of Whole Earth’s history. CoEvolution Quarterly, Whole Earth Software Review, Whole Earth Review, Whole Earth Magazine, and a host of special publications built on the original Catalog’s predilection for heterodox ideas but constantly reinvented themselves in response to shifting technological and cultural tides. Swimming through the more than 20,000 pages contained within the Index, which span more than 30 years and feature writers representing divergent points along almost every conceivable ideological spectrum, it seemed we needed “an information and access device” (to use Catalog founder Stewart Brand’s locution), a compass users can consult to navigate the archive. Answering this need, Whole Earth Redux presents original essays, each of which pulls an artifact from the Index and plumbs its deeper histories, argues for why it helps us understand our present, and uses it to add nuance to the Whole Earth legacy. 

The Whole Earth Catalog was always about perspective. As the lore goes, Stewart Brand launched a campaign in 1966 asking why we hadn’t yet seen a photograph of the whole Earth after an acid trip atop a North Beach rooftop revealed to his mind’s eye the gentle curvature of our terrestrial home. The first issue of the Catalog fulfilled Brand’s perspectival ambitions with a satellite image of a cloudy Earth on its cover. This collection, however, adopts a different perspective. By zooming in on the infinite detail of the Whole Earth Index, the following essays assemble a collage that can’t be neatly resolved into a single image but reveals the complicated role Whole Earth has played and continues to play in shaping technoculture. 

Annie Schneider, for instance, recounts how bombastic debates over metric and imperial measurement systems reflected Brand and his cohort’s valorization of the irrational as a counterweight to top-down technological control. Yet as Sebastian Fernandez-Mulligan shows in his piece on Whole Earth Catalog literary agent John Brockman’s Reality Club, the hippies’ inward turn toward consciousness mingled with “a modernist confidence in technological progress”: a belief that an elite intelligentsia’s scientific discoveries would answer our human search for meaning. The flip side of this technocratic response serves as the backdrop in Kola Heyward-Rotimi’s short story about a young woman struggling to find agency in a society that has fully automated labor and moved beyond politics. Here in the present, though, the Whole Earth Catalog still offers us tools for thinking about the planet as an interconnected system and for taking actions to nurture it. Artist Matthew Halpenny updates a guide from the Index on homebrewing renewable energy, providing readers with steps for fabricating microbial fuel cells capable of harvesting energy at home and within communities.

As editor of this collection, I’m lucky that Stewart Brand included a manual for “How to Do the Whole Earth Catalog” in The Last Whole Earth Catalog (which was, despite its title, merely the precursor to CoEvolution Quarterly). In a way, Brand’s metaguide for publishing one’s own counterculture catalog presaged this very book. On stopping the Whole Earth Catalog project (at least in its original form), Brand remarked: “Rather than do the usual succession of things we prefer to cease supply, let demand create its new sources.” The hazy, do-it-yourself dreams of the 1960s gave way to a you-can-just-do-things Silicon Valley ethos; as the shiny optimism of that dream also fades under the harsh light of reality, a new demand is emerging—a demand for a future in which technology is not a weapon of power, but a tool shaped by and for human purposes. After spending time with the Whole Earth Index, a fuller picture of the Catalog comes into view—one that defies easy categorization and, though imperfectly and not always consistently, offers such a vision for technology at the scale of individuals, communities, and ecosystems. It is the aim of this publication to help answer the demand for a new vision for the Whole Earth. 

—Hannah Scott, Editor