The Complicated Legacy of Stewart Brand's "Whole Earth Catalog"

In the fall of 1968, the Portola Institute, an education nonprofit in Menlo Park, California, published the first edition of the "Whole Earth Catalog": a compendium of product listings, how-to diagrams, and educational ephemera intended for communards and other participants in the back-to-the-land movement. The catalogue's founder, Stewart Brand––a photographer, writer, former army lieutenant, impresario, and consummate networker––had spent part of the summer driving a pickup truck to intentional communities in Colorado and New Mexico and selling camping equipment, books, tools, and supplies to the residents. Brand returned to the Portola Institute (a gathering place and incubator of sorts for computer researchers, academics, career engineers, hobbyists, and members of the counterculture), hired a teen-age artist to handle layout, and began production on the catalogue's first edition. At the height of the civil-rights movement and the war in Vietnam, the "Whole Earth Catalog" offered a vision for a new social order--one that eschewed institutions in favor of individual empowerment, achieved through the acquisition of skills and tools. The latter category included agricultural equipment, weaving kits, mechanical devices, books like "Kibbutz: Venture in Utopia," and digital technologies and related theoretical texts, such as Norbert Wiener's "Cybernetics" and the Hewlett-Packard 9100A, a programmable calculator.