The Legacy of Steward Brand and the Whole Earth Catalogue

Stewart Brand is an American writer, editor and futurist born in 1938. He studied biology at Stanford University, design at San Francisco Art Institute and photography at San Francisco State College.

Brand did not spend a lot of time with the Pranksters but he has this gift to be at the right place at the right moment. Let’s take another example.

You might be asking yourself, what was the implication of Steward Brand in this, but Brand was there. He was advising Engelbart and the team about how to present the demo. He was also one of the camera operators of the presentation. He was always around, never in the centre of attention, but he wasn’t only a spectator.

Back in 1966, Brand launch a street campaign where he was selling protest buttons in the streets. The buttons were saying “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?” After taking some LSD on a roof of San Fransisco, he realises that nobody ever saw the earth in its entirety.

Brand was convinced that if the world could see a picture of the whole earth from space it will make people aware of us being an entity, that we could all work together to protect our planet. “People act as if the earth is flat, when in reality it is spherical and extremely finite, and until we learn to treat it as a finite thing, we will never get civilisation right.” said Brand.

It became the roots of a global environmental consciousness in the US. When Brand was asked why he wanted the world to see this picture he said:

His efforts bore fruit and his protest button made the headline of some newspapers. So when the NASA published this first picture of the whole earth on November 67, Brand used it as the cover of his brand new counter-culture catalogue he was about to release.

Essentially, the Catalogue was “a paper-based database offering thousands of hacks, tips, tools, suggestions, and possibilities for optimising your life.”

The Whole Earth Catalog is a catalogue first published in Fall 68, Brand and his team published it officially until July 71, the date on which they release the Last Whole Earth Catalogue. This publication got the National Book Award in 1971 and it was published at more than one million copies.

This book was a manual for the back-to-land people, a book of lists of tools that they need to live in communes. People went back to the land and try to reinvent civilisation. As we all know hippies communes didn’t really work out, but it leads to some interesting legacy.

The main purpose of the catalogue was to give power to the individuals. Counter-culture was a reaction of people being fed up with the government, big business and establishment. Brand wanted people to understand they could educate their self, finding inspiration and resources to do whatever they want.

The items on the catalogue were chosen if they were:

People could also send their own advice and tips to the staff, a real crowdsourced content. Nothing was sold by the catalogue, it only pointed people to where they could find the resources they need. When talking about curation, Stewart Brand said:

In the manual, you can almost find topics about everything. You can easily jump from carpentry to dogs, from clouds to death or to diving. But it wasn’t only physical tools that Brand was giving to people, 80% of the catalogue was articles about books, giving people the possibility to transform their conscientiousness, allowing them to understand the systems, the basics of how and why we ended up with these systems to rule our world. He was convinced that people need to know the old theories to be able to invent new ones.

It is important to remember that at that time, information was precious, there was no internet and TV channel choice was very limited. This manual was a real new thing, new by its process but also by its content. Stewart made a bold move by writing topics about electronics and new technologies. The people that were going back to the land, to live a life closer to nature and earth were anti-technology. The technology was coming from the government, from corporations, it was perceived as negative. But Brand wasn’t thinking like that, he said:

That’s why, in the catalogue, you found a desktop calculator from Hewlett-Packard. At that time, it was costing 4700$. Brand was convinced that when people will use technology as another tool in their everyday life, they will embrace the positive side of new technology. Brand help to put the word “personal” with the word “computer”.

With this system of pointing people to where the would be able to find the resources they need, by allowing people to share their tips in an analogue virtual way, Stewart Brand laid the foundation of a virtual community.

At the same time that hippies where abandoning their communes, facing their failure and going back to the cities, Brand was using new technologies to make some of the hippies utopias real — a community of people around the world, exchanging ideas, reflection about the future without the shadow of government and big corporation controlling the flux of information.

The WEC influenced an entire generation, including an entire generation of technologists. The most famous of them all, Steve Jobs was not an exception. In his 2005 Stanford commencement speech he said this about the catalogue:

Fred Turner in his book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture:

Two decades after the end of the Vietnam war and the fading of the counterculture, computers somehow seems poised to bring to life the counterculture dream of empowered individualism, collaborative community and spiritual communion.

Brand perfectly understood it:

Do It Yourself

The Whole earth catalogue and the Well were the cornerstones of the Do It Yourself movement. Even though, back then, this terminology was not used. It allowed people to take back the power of individualism into their life. And for me, this is where it is interesting to draw parallels with today. The DIY, thanks to the internet, is part of our everyday life. DIY is the motor of maker space, start-up, or individual creative people.

On this cover of Wired magazine is Lady Ada, she the owner of Adafruit Industries, certainly one of the biggest online community of makers. She is influential in the open-source hardware community, having participated in the first Open Source Hardware Summit and promoting it since then. The ideals of Stewart Brand are not far away, make information reachable and free.

Acces to tools

To dig into this period with my eye of digital native was mind-blowing. It occurs to me that, all my life I had access to all the information I was looking for, two clicks away. I had the complete access to tools! But how do we use this accessibility? One thing I know is that us, as digital natives, we approach problems by relying on experimentation and exchanges with our entourage. Cooperation is overriding for us. We totally understand the power of communities and shared works to achieve great things. We use community on our daily basics but we are not really aware of it, mainly as interactive designer we instinctively know that we have an online community, support and reachable help in minutes. The main questions are now, do we deserve it, do we give back to the community we are part of?

The curiosity

One other thing I got out of this small research is the importance of curiosity, now than ever, as designers, it is a real part of our job to stay informed, we need to stay on the edge of innovation if we want to be able to push the boundaries of it. We have to be aware of all the new technologies around us, of course, we don’t need to use them all or implement them but we need to acknowledge them in our design process. That’s what will make us better designer.

His motto on the opening of the Whole Earth Catalog is still as relevant as ever:

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