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The whole of the Whole Earth Catalog is now online
- lioeters 3y agoRelated article: The Whole of the Whole Earth Catalog Is Now Online - https://www.wired.com/story/whole-earth-catalog-now-online-internet-archive/ https://www.wired.com/story/whole-earth-catalog-now-online-i... --- I wonder if there's a torrent download of the entire archive.. Looks like this is pretty close: The Internet Archive's Whole Earth collection (98.5 GB) - https://archive.org/details/wholeearth https://archive.org/details/wholeearth
- dang 3y agoThanks - I've changed the URL to that article, since it gives more background. The submitted URL was https://wholeearth.info/ https://wholeearth.info/, and is obviously worth looking at.
- RIMR 3y agoThere are 82 items in the collection, you could do a little scraping and run all the downloads through uGet or similar download manager. Plus, each item has an auto-generated torrent. They aren't very fast generally, but you could theoretically seed the directly downloaded files if you were interested in helping distribute this.
- skyyler 3y agoA paywall on an article about something being available for free. How cute, heh. The current state of online publishing paints a grim picture for the future of the internet :o(
- happytiger 3y agoEspecially considering that most of HN is probably just excited about using this information to train AI as look at it themselves.
- roughly 3y agoI mean, if we’re gonna train AIs, I’ll take the ones trained on the WEC & family over most sources.
- jhbadger 3y agoWell, except for all the nonsense about ESP and the like. Stewart Brand and friends were ahead of the world in a lot of ways, such as realizing the need to reduce our ecological footprint and so on, but they were also unfortunately suckers for "paranormal" con-artists and other "New Age" nonsense that the 60s counterculture also was intrigued by.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoWhat paranormal/new age stuff do you consider Point Foundation/WEC/CoEvolution/WER to have been suckered by?
- yencabulator 3y ago"The Fringes of Reason" uses a lot of questions and quote marks but it looks to be a pretty breathless extolling of all things mystic. If you want to defend the writing style there, you're at the same time defending Ancient Aliens "Might there be an extraterrestrial connection behind the secrets of the pyramids?" https://wholeearth.info/p/the-fringes-of-reason?format=spreads&index=0 https://wholeearth.info/p/the-fringes-of-reason?format=sprea...
- jhbadger 3y agoFor example, they were really into Georgi Lozanov's "Super learning" which on the surface simply seems like a memorization technique to help learn things like foreign language vocabulary like are common now with tools like Anki, but Lozanov was also a self-described "parapsychologist" who believed that such techniques would expand human capabilities and allow clairvoyance!
- zoklet-enjoyer 3y agoMore relevant today than when this was published in 1986 https://archive.org/download/wholeearthreview00unse_8/page/n11_w500.jpg https://archive.org/download/wholeearthreview00unse_8/page/n...
- jareklupinski 3y agothumbing through encyclopedias published in 1938 is pretty enlightening
- ohhnoodont 3y agoIt's unfortunate how cyclical our world seems to be. Repeating the same conversations endlessly, ad nauseam.
- zoklet-enjoyer 3y agoIt's like people don't ever really change.
- rexpop 3y agoWell, we didn't exactly nip fascism in the bud the first time around. It's gotta come out root and stem, but its roots go back to antiquity.
- scyzoryk_xyz 3y agosomething about being hungry and something something about being foolish
- fuzztester 3y agostay hungry. stay foolish. steve jobs commencement speech at stanford univ 2005.
- scyzoryk_xyz 3y agoalso Whole Earth Catalog farewell words
- fuzztester 3y agoYes, those were the last words of Steve Jobs' commencement speech which I quoted above, and he said he quoted it from the Whole Earth Catalog, which he mentioned just prior, in the talk. He had read one of the original editions, since he grew up in that area in those days. And the video of Steve's talk was shared with me soon after it happened, by an older relative, who, ironically, was a top exec at a very large company, which was kind of the antithesis of what Steve was advocating that day. https://youtu.be/UF8uR6Z6KLc?si=vk4WlUG5XkCANpXN https://youtu.be/UF8uR6Z6KLc?si=vk4WlUG5XkCANpXN At around 13m10s.
- acl777 3y agohttps://archive.ph/j7MbB https://archive.ph/j7MbB
- bane 3y agoI never grew up knowing the Whole Earth Catalog, but in the early '80s I was a precocious elementary school student who practically lived in any library I could get access to. My school library happened to have a copy of a particularly magical book that was loosely patterned after the WEC, the "Kids' Whole Future Catalog". https://paleofuture.com/blog/2007/4/27/the-kids-whole-future-catalog-1982.html https://paleofuture.com/blog/2007/4/27/the-kids-whole-future... I obsessively checked it out of the library, pouring over page after page of exciting future and near future advancements, and in my little mind seeing a clear path from the Space Shuttle to the city of the future printed on the cover. It was one of those breathless books that showed humanity figuring out how to engineer every natural process, picture upon picture of far off space stations intermingled with then current hydroponics gardens and concepts well beyond that. I found myself competing with at least one other child and the book never hit the shelf but for a few minutes as it was almost on permanent loan in somebody's backpack. My mother looked for a few weeks trying to find where to buy it for me, but never found a bookstore with it. It was like an object sent from another dimension, mean to teach children and guide them to an inevitable future Utopia. It worked. I've worked in technology and R&D my entire career. I've yearned to bring about that future. A few years ago, thinking back to this formative codex, I went about trying to find it and happened to buy a copy on Ebay which set about a small project to get the equipment together to scan it and put it up on the internet archive as no digital version of the book exists to my knowledge. I'm almost there, but haven't quite gotten everything lined up. Many years later, I learned about the WEC and it immediately hit me that this was the adult version of the feeder league I had been participating in as a child. I can't believe the WEC is out there now. I need to get my crap together and get the Kid's Catalog up as well.
- nanna 3y agoAbout time! For years I would try to visit the Whole Earth website and be met with a barrage of PHP errors. How could a magazine which was so formative for the likes of Steve Jobs be so broke that they couldn't put their archive online properly? Still don't get what happened but happy to see someone's sorted this out.
- loxias 3y agoNice job Barry!!!! I love it when I fall out of touch with friends for about a decade, then hear of them in headlines. Man, that was a fun party (2008).
- passthejoe 3y agoThis book was my World Wide Web as a kid
- cc101 3y agoDuring 1968 through 1972 I lived a block and a half from Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Truck store, across the street from Kepler's Bookstore, and around the corner from the Mid Peninsula Free University. There hasn't been a time like that since, and I didn't know what I had until it was gone.
- fuzztester 3y agoWhy didn't you know? Too young?
- cc101 3y agoI thought it was normal.
- fsckboy 3y ago"didn't know what I had till it was gone" is a standard phrase meaning "I didn't realize how much I appreciated it till I didn't have it any more" "They took all the trees, put 'em in a tree museum / And they charged the people a dollar and a half just to see 'em / Don't it always seem to go / You don't know what you've got till it's gone / They paved paradise, put up a parking lot" -- Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWwUJH70ubM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWwUJH70ubM
- 8bitsrule 3y agoThey paved paradise and put in a parking lot. WEC: Eye-opener. Lot of fun to order exotic stuff (tools, foods, materials, clothing) from. A few for-examples: it got me to cane a seat on a (once-expensive) thrift-shop store ... and try some east-coast kinnikinic ... order tea from Canada (Merchies, still there) ... and a lot of previously unseen books (including Lloyd Kahn's). The cool comments (and stories) around the page-edges were a plus too.
- cc101 3y agoTalking about paving paradise, Kepler's is now a huge multi-story store. Several decades ago I looked in vain for even a little table or shelf with leading-edge counter-culture literature. Couldn't find anything resembling that.
- pugworthy 3y agoWhole Earth Catalog and Fox Fire books were like maker bibles for me when I was a kid. Nothing quite compares to them now days. Fox Fire books in particular were non-commercial (from my memory) and full of really interesting skills and information. They were the maker movement before it was a (tech/online) thing.
- dreamcompiler 3y agoWhat a wonderful memory. I still have all my Foxfire volumes. When a certain web browser came out I thought "They got the name backwards."
- mjmsmith 3y agoDivine Right's Trip! https://archive.nytimes.com/artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/22/divine-rights-trip-a-forgotten-hippie-novel/ https://archive.nytimes.com/artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/...
- pazimzadeh 3y agoI didn't realize it was so commercial. It's just advertisements for hippie? So you can engage in consumerism and still feel good about yourself? The Whole Earth Magazine seems much more interesting than the Catalog
- mtraven 3y agoNo advertisements, just reviews of things they thought were good.
- solomonb 3y agoIt was a mail order catalog for back to land communards.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoIt was never really a mail order catalog in the sense that there was no single place to order the stuff (the Whole Earth store did open later, but it just a slice of what appeared in the WEC and CoEvolution Quarterly). It was, as others have noted, reviews of "good stuff" and info on how (maybe) to get it.
- solomonb 3y agoMaybe they didn't maintain their own inventory, but it pretty clearly gives you contact info and pricing for ordering all the various products. A ton of items also say "OR Whole Earth Catalog" which I think implies you could send the money to WEC and they would make the order for you?
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoThat came later, when they opened the store. It only applied to stuff they decided to carry, though given that they reviewed it in print that was likely because the reviews were almost all positive.
- kiernanmcgowan 3y agoStay Hungry, Stay Foolish https://wholeearth.info/p/whole-earth-epilog-october-1974?format=spreads&index=321 https://wholeearth.info/p/whole-earth-epilog-october-1974?fo...
- dudeinjapan 3y ago— The words of Dear Leader Kim Jong Un to his people
- NIL8 3y agoClever :)
- stevenjgarner 3y agoDoes anybody also remember the Loompanics [1] book catalog? After the Last Whole Earth Catalog went away, I found even browsing through the titles in Loompanics a mind-altering experience. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loompanics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loompanics
- bookofjoe 3y agoYes! I loved the Loompanics catalogs and occasionally ordered books from them: mind-blowingly subversive.
- shmde 3y agoGrowing up with World Book Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia Britannica for Windows 98 this just looks more metal and punk versions of it.
- b800h 3y agoIf you're looking for a quick link, it's at https://wholeearth.info/ https://wholeearth.info/
- b800h 3y agoThese magazines were beautiful. It's a shame that little on the web can compete with them on that front. The Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension was a fair crack, when it first came out, but that analogue look, with real human artwork is loads better.
- Andrew018 3y ago[dead]
- lock-the-spock 3y agoWhile this is amazing, I wonder if there is any modern print book series or magazine series that comes close. I'd love to share this with my kids, but digital format is not ideal. Any suggestions (in EN but also any other major European languages in my case).
- IG_Semmelweiss 3y agoI'd like the same. I know the spanish version, but not the english one
- samjohnation111 3y ago[dead]
- avipars 3y agoLink to jump over the paywall: https://archive.md/j7MbB https://archive.md/j7MbB
- wslh 3y agoIt is just ironic that the Wired article is behind paywalls while the WEC is available for anyone for free.
- nojvek 3y ago> The Whole Earth Catalog preached self-reliance, teaching young baby boomers how to build their own cabins, garden sheds, and geodesic domes after they had turned on, tuned in, and dropped out—well before they grew wealthy enough to buy up all the three-bedroom single-family homes. What a great punch line. Worth reading the whole article.
- bookofjoe 3y agoI read every single word of this catalog starting the day it was released in 1968, just after I turned 20. In one of the many biographies of Steve Jobs I've read since, he remarked that he read every word of it when it came out. He was 13 years old at the time.
- blueridge 3y ago"Living Poor With Style Whatever else the Energy Crisis may mean, one thing is certain, prices of everything will continue to rise. When the economy is berserk the sane citizen will participate minimally. For city dwellers this is the best book on acquiring that skill. Living Poor and Living with Style are far from a contradiction in terms both consist of a loving (slightly detached) attention to detail. Here are 600 pages of intelligent detail for $1.95."
- mtraven 3y agoNice resource, but it desperately needs an index or full-text search feature. I grew up on Whole Earth Catalog (and Ted Nelson's Computer Lib / Dream Machines, another great counterculture publication of the era). Certainly opened up entire worlds of possibility.
- cosmojg 3y agoLink to the actual catalog: https://wholeearth.info/ https://wholeearth.info/ In a lot of ways, it seems our simulation truly began in 1970.