Gray Area is an organization devoted to understanding the evolving relationship between culture and technology through creative practice. To exist in the Bay Area is to be surrounded by a tech economy that continually projects itself three to five years into the future, every social media post promising a revelation. In this environment, grounding our thinking has always required situating ourselves historically. Since our founding in 2008, we have sought to trace the threads between the people, tools, ideas, and practices that have led us to this moment, and reveal their influence on contemporary critical and creative work.

The effort to digitize the Whole Earth publications was borne, as are all worthwhile projects, of necessity. In 2019, Gray Area convened the Experiential Space Research Lab, an attempt to co-create an immersive exhibition. Reacting to the 2018-2019 trend in “selfie museums,” the invited artist cohort developed an exhibition titled The End of You (and the Beginning of Us…): an “anti-selfie” museum that fostered an expanded relational consciousness—extending to other people, other species, and ultimately the whole living planet. Led by David McConville and Dawn Danby at Spherical Studios, the participants—ecologists, architects, designers, and researchers—began their collaborative research with a deep conceptual dive into Gaia Theory, inspired by an article originally published as “The Atmosphere as Circulatory System of the Biosphere—The Gaia Hypothesis” by Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock in CoEvolution Quarterly (Summer 1975). Finding it turned out to require a drive to Marin for a physical copy: possible but difficult. This episode made it apparent that many acquainted with the Whole Earth Catalog were unaware of the larger corpus including CoEvolution Quarterly and Whole Earth Review, extending over five decades.

Few figures have loomed as large over the imagined communities of both San Francisco and the technology field as Stewart Brand, and I see little use in an attempt to either valorize or complicate his mythology any further. The impact of his collaborations is undeniable. I have always been struck, however, by the historical fluidity in their social orientation: from the ecologically grounded communalism of the ’70s associated with the Whole Earth Catalog, through libertarian underpinnings of the ’90s internet espoused on tThe WELL, and into the complacent embrace, during the Wired-era, of corporately siloed, advertising-driven attention mines that constrain us today—the target of so much present-day arts discourse. I had the privilege to attend the combined celebration of Whole Earth Catalog’s 50th and Wired’s 25th anniversaries in October of 2018, which brought together contributors from every stage of this trajectory; witnessing their easy camaraderie I was struck by the sense of presentism. Why were these changes so easily elided? How did the value-committments of the counterculture yield to capitalist revival? The effort to digitize the full Whole Earth archive was motivated by a desire to illuminate this history, and make it available for interrogation. 

Even a cursory review of the Whole Earth archives makes obvious how much of the framing of our current conversations around climate change, the media environment, geopolitics, surveillance, social justice, etc., was formed over 50 years ago. Spending time with early volumes of CoEvolution Quarterly makes it feel as though in the intervening decades, while technical progress has advanced, social discourse has looped. This curious utopian parallax demands investigation. Hence this collection of essays, by a new generation of interdisciplinary thinkers and practitioners, which recontextualizes and revitalizes this material.

The Whole Earth Index digitization project would not have been possible without many supporters, but especially Stewart Brand, Fred Collopy, Kevin Kelly, Danica Remy, Howard Rheingold, Annie Schneider, and Hannah Scott. Thanks. I’d also like to thank all of the Whole Earth Redux authors for their thoughtful engagement with this material. I would especially like to thank Editor Hannah Scott, without whose curiosity, vision, and thoughtful leadership this publication would certainly not exist.

—Barry Threw, Executive Director, Gray Area