Whole Earth Catalog

The Whole Earth Catalog was an American counterculture publication created by Stewart Brand and published from 1968 to 1972, with occasional later editions, subtitled "Access to Tools." A large-format oversized magazine printed on newsprint, it carried no merchandise of its own but reviewed and gave ordering information for books, machines, seeds, building methods, and ideas judged useful to people pursuing self-sufficiency and self-education, organized into sections that began with "Understanding Whole Systems." It opened with the line "We are as gods and might as well get good at it," won the National Book Award for Contemporary Affairs in 1972, and spun off the magazine CoEvolution Quarterly and, later, the online community the WELL.¹²

Access to Tools

Brand launched the first Whole Earth Catalog in the autumn of 1968, working out of Menlo Park, California, and produced it on typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras with a small staff. He conceived it as a way to give the newly dispersed back-to-the-land communes and counterculture households access to the tools, knowledge, and suppliers they needed, and as a community meeting place in print where readers could recommend items to one another. Each entry described an item, explained why it mattered, gave its price and the address to order it from, and was set in a dense collage of text and image that let unrelated tools and ideas sit side by side on the page.¹³

The catalog's evaluation criteria were stated on its opening pages: an item was listed if it was deemed useful as a tool, relevant to independent education, high in quality or low in cost, and easily available by mail. The categories ran from "Understanding Whole Systems" through "Shelter and Land Use," "Industry and Craft," "Communications," "Community," "Nomadics," and "Learning," placing cybernetics, general systems theory, and the geodesic design science of Buckminster Fuller at the front of the book; the first section stated that "Buckminster Fuller's insights initiated this catalog." Brand put a NASA photograph of the whole Earth seen from space on the cover, the image he had campaigned to have released.³⁴

We Are As Gods

The catalog's statement of purpose, printed at the front of the early editions, began with the declaration "We are as gods and might as well get good at it." The full passage read that "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," and that in response "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." The catalog presented itself as the agent and instrument of that personal power.⁴⁵

The formula expressed the publication's animating conviction that individuals equipped with the right tools and information could bypass large institutions and take direct charge of their lives and environments. Brand returned to the phrase across his career, opening his 2009 book Whole Earth Discipline with the revised line "we are as gods and have to get good at it" and lending it to the 2020 documentary We Are as Gods.⁵⁶

The National Book Award and the Last Whole Earth Catalog

In June 1971 Brand published The Last Whole Earth Catalog, intended as the final and most complete edition, a 448-page compendium that gathered and expanded the material from the earlier issues. In 1972 it won the National Book Award in the category of Contemporary Affairs, the first time a catalog had received the award, with Stewart Brand credited as editor. The recognition marked the publication's passage from a counterculture artifact to a mainstream cultural object reviewed in the national press.²⁷

Brand had announced that the catalog was ending, and he distributed a portion of the proceeds at a "Demise Party" held at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco in June 1971, where he handed out cash to attendees to fund worthy projects. The catalog did not in fact end permanently; further editions appeared, including The Next Whole Earth Catalog (1980), and the brand continued through related publications for decades.³⁷

CoEvolution Quarterly and the WELL

In 1974 the catalog's staff founded the CoEvolution Quarterly, a small-circulation magazine that carried longer essays and continued the catalog's mix of ecology, systems thinking, design, and politics; its title came from a concept of coevolution drawn from the biologists Paul Ehrlich and Peter Raven. The CoEvolution Quarterly published writers including Gregory Bateson, whose ecology-of-mind essays it excerpted, and it later merged with the Whole Earth Software Review to become the Whole Earth Review.⁸⁹

In 1985 Brand and Larry Brilliant founded the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, or WELL, a dial-up computer conferencing system that grew out of the readership of the Whole Earth Review and became one of the most influential early online communities and a seedbed of internet culture. The historian Fred Turner traced the line from the Whole Earth Catalog through the CoEvolution Quarterly and the WELL in From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (2006), the standard scholarly account of the network of people and publications that the catalog created.⁹¹⁰

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

The back cover of the final 1974 edition carried a photograph of an early-morning country road under the words "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish," the editors' farewell message as they signed off. In his commencement address at Stanford University on June 12, 2005, Steve Jobs recalled the catalog as a formative influence, describing it as the work of Stewart Brand made "with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras" and calling it "sort of like Google in paperback form, thirty-five years before Google came along, idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions."¹¹

Jobs told the graduates that the back cover of the catalog's final issue bore the photograph of the country road with the line "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish," and he closed his speech by repeating those words as his own wish for them. The address, delivered when Jobs was chief executive of Apple, carried the catalog's parting phrase to a global audience and became one of the most widely circulated invocations of the publication.¹¹¹²