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  • Hacker News
  • This is great! I remember a turning point for me when I was feeling very low at the height of the War on Terror and jingoism appeared to have taken over the world. Just before the housing bubble popped and politics would swing the other way, but we didn't know that was going to happen yet.

    John Mayer was playing music at Macworld 2007 (wish I could find the video) and said "Steve Jobs and Apple Inc. just make life more fun. It's like the opposite of terrorism":

    https://www.cnet.com/culture/live-macworld-coverage/

    I think of stuff like the Whole Earth Catalog as the opposite of neofeudalism and tech bro culture's revisionist history.

    It doesn't have to be this way. Wealth inequality isn't invincible, or even inevitable. Back to basics works. We can get our hacker culture back. We can restore the timeline that's been stolen from us, the one we were on in the 90s before financialization and ensh@ttification ruined all the fun.

    by zackmorris
  • People may also be interested in The WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL

    Apparently it's still around at https://www.well.com/

    by CalRobert
  • This is pretty COOL! Right up my alley. I have been working on a similar project with PUNK ZINES. I have a lil loop going with Internet Archive - Scraped all of their zines and any new submissions I upload to them. Yours is much prettier than mine. NICE NICE job. Bookmark.
    by behole
  • Apparently ( https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-importance-of-Christopher-... ) one of the things that originally got computer scientists interested in Christopher Alexander was the original Whole Earth Catalog promoting his Notes on the Synthesis of Form.
    by leoc
  • Jobs called it "Google in paperback form" [1].

    I wonder what obscure (probably online?) source of information of today we'll be comparing to the mainstream sources of tomorrow.

    [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/oct/09/steve-job...

    by curl-up
  • Project like this make me stop and truly appreciate the time someone took to make this... and make me wish I had more time in my day to consume this beauty in its entirety. So much knowledge retained here.
    by ziptron
  • I recall seeing the catalog around. My (hippie) mom must have had a copy.

    I was only a kid growing up in the 70's but it definitely brings back memories of that time of optimism. There was a lot of experimentation and a willingness to try new ideas in all aspects of society. Besides the experimental education that I recall brushes with, you had Buckminster Fuller and his dome-home ideas, the U.S. space program…

    To be sure things weren't all Pet Rocks and Lava lamps but there sure did seem to be a lot more joy and fun in the world then.

    What I do these days for "comfort time" is to pull down things like these (and old magazines) in PDF form and browse them off-line.

    You can use whatever viewer you like of course, but I ended up building a crude but dedicated device (based around Raspberry Pi and a small Python app) that is just for PDF-magazine browsing. Bookmarking, a progress indicator per title so you know which magazines you've read, which one you are still working through.

    I have easily a terra-byte of magazines to still work through. As I implied though, I go back to it when I just want to decompress and shut out the present-day for a while.

    (I'm pulling all these Whole Earth Catalogs down now.)

    by JKCalhoun
  • I love the Whole Earth Catalog. That era of techno-utopian optimism is so exciting. I'm too young to have experienced more then the tail end of it in the 90s going to computer camp as a kid, but it felt like anything was possible and everything was connected.

    It is a bit sad to see where we have landed after all that.

    by solomonb

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