Lately I had the good fortune to hear from an old friend of mine, Richard “RJ” Jergenson, who, along with his brother Phil is one of the pioneers of the grid beam construction and prototyping system. I’ve written about this elsewhere, but suffice to say, as others have, that if you want to look for the technological roots of the Maker movement, grid beam is a key component, perhaps the key component. But I digress.

In the late 80’s I worked at a small educational software startup in Palo Alto that was about as perfectly evocative of that era as one could imagine. We all worked in an old building owned by the president of the company. Offices were on the basement floor, desks arranged between half walls topped with peace lilies. In the center of the space was an indoor garden complete with trickling, babbling fountain. Together our eccentric crew worked on Macintoshes running HyperCard to create kids’ software for teaching them about the world we live in, the environment, diversity and, later, history and math. It was a damned interesting job. I had the thumping title of “Director of Research” but found myself writing documentation and even doing quite a bit of coding (or “scripting” for you purists out there).

This is where I first encountered Whole Earth Review, which I only knew vaguely. The company usually had the latest issues laying around, plus some back issues. If you aren’t familiar with this magazine, you should be, even though it ceased publication near the turn of the millennium. It contained some of the most incisive, inventive, and provocative writing around. It was tailor-made for generalists like myself, especially those who wanted to change the world. Here, with each new issue, were the tools and ideas you’d need to accomplish that, with virtually no aspect or field of knowledge neglected. When the company started to go under (or maybe it was when I was laid off once; I don’t remember exactly), I absconded with as many of the back issues as I could find as the basis of my own collection. I also subscribed until they ceased publication, but lately I’ve decided to start acquiring whatever back issues I can.

But back to my conversation with RJ. He put me on to a book by  Andrew Kirk titled Counterculture Green. The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism. Apart from being a pretty good capsule history of at least one slice of the counterculture, Kirk takes us on a trip through the development of the Whole Earth Catalog, whose success eventually led to the journal Coevolution Quarterly, which in turn became Whole Earth Review. 

For me, this book was a revelation as to the depth and breadth of the contributions of WEC founder Stewart Brand and his compadres made not only to the fledgling environmental movement, but to the culture in general. Notice I did not say “counterculture,” for that implies that everything they did remained on the fringes and eventually died there or, worse, became unfashionable. The truth is that so much of what we find in current society, from simple living to personal computers, had at least some early connection with WER. I received only yesterday a copy of issue 44 I had ordered from a bookseller with “Computers as Poison” on the front cover. Published in January of 1985, this was one year after the first Macintosh appeared, and the personal computer revolution was just winding up. This may seem counterintuitive for a journal with a certain sympathy for technical solutions, but this particular issue leveled some very trenchant criticisms of this new technology; what it might mean for us as people and how we interact with others, how it alters the power structure between people and government, corporations, and so on. Considering that Whole Earth started one of the very first online communities, the WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link)–which is still around, by the way–this willingness to self-critique remains remarkable, even exemplary. I might also add that in perusing the articles in WER 44, they seem as fresh and relevant today as ever.

So, to that end, as I continue to assemble my personal collection of WER and CQ issues, I’ve started reading them for insights into our current crisis. These guys saw it coming, and they proposed answers that brim with wisdom and insight.