NYT: A Crunchy-Granola Path From Macramé and LSD to Wikipedia and Google

[DeepModem Mom]

Connections
A Crunchy-Granola Path From Macramé and LSD to Wikipedia and Google
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: September 25, 2006


A counterculture classic

The pages are yellowed, the addresses and phone numbers all but useless, the products antique, the utopian expectations quaint. But the “Whole Earth Catalog” — and particularly “The Last Whole Earth Catalog,” published in 1971, which ended up selling a million copies and winning the National Book Award — has the eerie luminosity of a Sears catalog from the turn of the last century. It is a portrait of an age and its dreams.

Deerskin jackets and potter’s wheels, geodesic domes and star charts, instructions on raising bees and on repairing Volkswagens, advice on building furniture and cultivating marijuana: all this can be found here, along with celebrations of communal life and swipes at big government, big business and a technocratic society.

Can this encyclopedia of countercultural romance have anything to do with today’s technological world, a world of broadband connections, TCP/IP protocol and the Internet? The Internet, after all, began during the cold war as an attempt to create a network of computers that would be resilient in case of nuclear attack. Its instigator, the United States Department of Defense, was at the very center of the culture being countered by the “Whole Earth Catalog.” How could the romantic, utopian culture of the 1960’s, with its deep suspicions about modernity and its machinery, be closely linked to one of the most important technological revolutions of the last hundred years?

Yet as Fred Turner points out in his revealing new book, “From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism” (University of Chicago Press), there is no way to separate cyberculture from counterculture; indeed, cyberculture grew from its predecessor’s compost. Mr. Turner suggests that Stewart Brand, who created the “Whole Earth Catalog,” was the major node in a network of countercultural speculators, promoters, inventors and entrepreneurs who helped change the world in ways quite different from those they originally envisioned....

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/25/arts/25conn.html

[OneBlueSky]

1. still have a bunch of Whole Earth Catalogues, including the last one . . .

and I think a supplement or two printed after that one came out . . . I used to spend hours reading those things -- and learned a hell of a lot doing so . . . great, great stuff . . .

[Sal Minella]

2. Yes, have mine too, they're a sort of touchstone of sanity in my

haphazard collection of books over the years.

[lapfog_1]

3. Somewhere, Jon Postel and Richard Stevens are smiling... n/t

[gumby]

4. Why is macramé mocked?

Perhaps for the same reason Rush Limbaugh mocks the quilt tradition. Mock something as 'women's work' and it provides a universal dismissal.

That sexism shit is just the starting point of this bullshit review of a book that seems equally suspect.

Almost every sentence in this review can be 'counter-cultured' by an equal counterpart on the right. But it is only the 'crunchy-granola' side that is mocked. I am so sick of this media-made stereotyped version of the '60s.

This book was published by University of Chicago Press. Isn't that the same University that gave us the utopian Milton Freedman and was the breeding ground for today's utopian neo-cons?

Who is more 'Utopian' than today's neo-cons? Instead of learning how to do things oneself, as presented in 'Whole Earth Catalog,' the neo-cons choose to use the taxpayer funded military might of the U.S. to bomb themselves into 'Utopia.'

The 'hippies' are mocked because the real welfare queens of deadly force mock everyone who isn't on their Destruction Train.

Perhaps the author and the reviewer mistake 'counterculture' for democracy? Seems like neither can stand the dirty masses. "..cyberculture grew from its predecessor’s compost." "Compost"?? "Compost"??

Now that the netroots are having an effect in current politics, we/they are now being demeaned in sexist/'dirty' terminology dug up from some shag carpeted, right-wing psychedelic version of the '60s.

How tired.
How pathetic.

[enough]

5. Well said, gumby. (nt)

[greenman3610]

6. totally totally true

I used to read Coevolution Quarterly religiously (it was the
continued supplement to the Whole earth Catalog)

You could follow the entire embryronic developement of the
world wide web in those pages... the early work with
hypertext, the WELL, computer hacking, pre
photoshop "photoshopping" of digital images.., and always the continuing exposition of the
guiding meme of the world as a network, a web of
interrelationships

....so much so, that
when the real thing arrived, it was as if it had already been
mapped out..

[GliderGuider]

7. Remember the Community Memory Project?

Precursor to the freenets, BBS's and newsgroups that came later, it was a convergence of computer technology, the free speech movement and community re-visioning initiatives of the late '60s and early '70s. The "network" meme has always been intrinsic to the alternative culture and free speech movements. The internet blended seamlessly with their goals, and potentiated them enormously.

Power to the People!
Down with The Man!
Turn on, Tune in, Drop out.

All of you who have despaired at the loss of momentum and the failure of the counterculture movement to make as many permanent changes as we'd have liked, take heart. There is an enormous new opportunity looming on the horizon. All those physical and social skills, the value systems based on cooperation, human contact and respect for the planet - those are all going to be fundamental survival values in the post-oil era that's virtually upon us.