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Access was the product (on the Whole Earth Catalog) · Soft Ratios Research

• 0:09
  Figure: Soft Ratios Research.
• 0:12
  Ground: The voices are synthetic [pause] no act, just the thinking.
• 0:19
  Figure: Hoyd Breton, a designer at Soft Ratios Studio, teaching himself in the open [pause] which works better with a reply. [pause] If this is interesting, write a review with your thoughts.
• 0:31
  Ground: One subject at a time, twice a week [pause] Tuesday and Thursday. [pause] Today, the Whole Earth Catalog.
• 0:39
  Figure: Steve Jobs, 2005, the Stanford commencement. He ends with four words from the back cover of the 1974 Whole Earth Epilog: Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. He calls it sort of like Google in paperback form, thirty-five years before Google. And that's the story everyone keeps — the Whole Earth Catalog as the hippie bible that quietly grew up into Silicon Valley.
• 1:05
  Ground: A catalog. Not a manifesto, not a novel. A catalog.
• 1:11
  Figure: That's the strange part. It looks like the last thing you'd frame. Oversized newsprint, eleven by fourteen inches, the kind of paper that yellows and tears in your hands. Fall of 1968, sixty-three pages, run out of a little nonprofit in Menlo Park called the Portola Institute. The Last Whole Earth Catalog, published in 1971, sold a million and a half copies. In 1972 it became the first catalog to win a National Book Award.
• 1:40
  Ground: So the myth is: this thing lit the fuse. Counterculture goes in, the whole computer world comes out. But I want to know what was actually on the pages. Because a catalog sells things. What was it selling.
• 1:57
  Figure: Almost nothing. That's the first thing that breaks the story. It sold you almost nothing directly. [pause] Brand called it an evaluation and access device. You'd read a review of a tool — a tent, a book, a calculator, a windmill — and then it pointed you somewhere else to actually buy the thing. The catalog itself rarely took your money. The two words on the cover were access to tools. Not tools. Access.
• 2:24
  Ground: So it's an index. A book of doorways.
• 2:28
  Figure: And it had five tests for whether a thing got in. Useful as a tool. Relevant to independent education. High quality or low cost. Easily available by mail. And this one — not already common knowledge.
• 2:41
  Ground: Not already common knowledge. That's a strange appetite for a catalog. Most catalogs sell you exactly the thing everyone already wants.
• 2:51
  Figure: This one's whole hunger was for the thing you hadn't heard of yet. And to understand where that comes from you have to go back before the book, to a truck. [pause] 1963. Brand and his wife Lois fit out a Dodge truck as a mobile lending library and microeducation service on a commune road trip. The catalog is that truck, unfolded flat onto paper. And the outfit that housed it, the Portola Institute, was run by a Harvard MBA whose desk sign read: Fail Young.
• 3:21
  Ground: Fail Young. As a house motto.
• 3:24
  Figure: The same building later sheltered the Homebrew Computer Club, as it happens — hold onto that, it comes back. [pause] But that sign tells you the temperature of the place. Try the thing, break it early, learn cheap. [pause] And the origin of the whole object is one image. February 1966, a rooftop in North Beach, San Francisco. Brand's up there with a hundred micrograms of LSD in him, thinking about something Buckminster Fuller kept insisting — that people wrongly feel the Earth is flat. And from three stories up Brand says he could suddenly see the curve, think it, finally feel it. And he fixes on one question. Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?
• 4:09
  Ground: A photograph that didn't exist yet.
• 4:11
  Figure: So he printed buttons. Sold them for a quarter at the gate of Berkeley — got thrown off campus for it — then Stanford, Columbia, Harvard, MIT. Mailed them to NASA, to senators, to Soviet scientists, to Marshall McLuhan, to Fuller himself. In 1967 a satellite finally made the picture. It became the cover of the first catalog.
• 4:35
  Ground: Why start there, though. Of all the things a tool catalog could open on — why a photo of the planet.
• 4:41
  Figure: Because the picture is the argument. One whole thing, no borders on it. The idea being: if you can hold the entire planet in a single image, you can imagine holding your own life whole too — feeding yourself, building your own shelter, teaching yourself. The opening line of the catalog is exactly that ambition. We are as gods and might as well get good at it.
• 5:04
  Ground: We are as gods. [pause] That's the line that gets quoted, and it's the one I don't trust. It's enormous. It's the whole techno-swagger folded into six words.
• 5:17
  Figure: It is grandiose. But read the sentence that follows it. So far, remotely done power and glory — as via government, big business, formal education, church — has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. The godhood he means isn't launching rockets. It's smaller. It's the ordinary person conducting his own education, shaping his own corner of the world. The grandeur is aimed at the smallest possible scale of power.
• 5:47
  Ground: So the biggest sentence in the book is arguing for the tiniest unit of power. Keep going — what's actually inside it.
• 5:57
  Figure: Seven sections, running from the vast down to the practical. It begins with Understanding Whole Systems — and with Buckminster Fuller — then runs through Shelter and Land Use, Industry and Craft, Communications, Community, Nomadics, and Learning. L.L. Bean belongs in Nomadics.
• 6:15
  Ground: So it goes from the philosophy of whole systems all the way down to a good pair of pants.
• 6:22
  Figure: A zip-off Bean pant made the last edition, yes. And here's the entry I keep circling back to. In the Communications section, 1968, sitting next to tipis and beads and the I Ching, there's a Hewlett-Packard 9100A. A programmable desktop calculator. Announced that March. Priced at four thousand nine hundred dollars.
• 6:45
  Ground: Next to a tipi.
• 6:47
  Figure: Next to a tipi. And a 1968 Hewlett-Packard ad in Science called that machine a personal computer — among the first documented uses of that phrase. So the object we've since built the entire world around is sitting in this newsprint hippie catalog. The 9100A was in Communications — while tipis appeared under Shelter and Land Use, and the I Ching under Learning.
• 7:14
  Ground: And that should feel like a contradiction. Counterculture on one page, a five-thousand-dollar computer on the next. Why doesn't it.
• 7:23
  Figure: Because the catalog didn't sort things by tribe. It sorted by one question: does this give a person more reach over their own life. A tipi does. A calculator does. The I Ching, used to make a decision, does. The categories we'd fight about — hippie, technologist — it just didn't see them. And that's the thing Fred Turner puts his finger on decades later.
• 7:46
  Ground: Turner being the historian who traced where all this went.
• 7:50
  Figure: His book is From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 2006. His sharpest line: the catalog wasn't really offering the tools you'd need to farm — not the backhoes. It was offering tools to rethink your position in the world — to imagine yourself as part of something larger, something made of information. He says that's the actual seed of what came after: a sense of community without bodies, a feeling that information could make the social world visible.
• 8:18
  Ground: So the deepest tool in a book of tools wasn't a thing you could hold at all. It was a way of standing.
• 8:26
  Figure: And there's a second scholar who traced it the other direction — Andrew Kirk. His argument is that the catalog quietly rewired what it meant to be an environmentalist. Before it, the movement was mostly about wilderness — save the far-off untouched place, go march for it. The catalog suggested something close to heresy: that staying home and modifying your toilet, or bolting a solar collector onto your roof, might matter more than taking to the streets.
• 8:55
  Ground: Everyday environmentalism. The planet saved from the kitchen and the tool shed instead of the picket line.
• 9:02
  Figure: That's the phrase for it — everyday environmentalism. It opened the movement to a city person, a renter, anyone with a wrench. Windmills, solar, ecological design. It called that appropriate technology and put it within arm's reach.
• 9:18
  Ground: So the same book gets blamed for techno-utopian swagger and credited with teaching people to fix their own toilet. Both true. It carried its own correction inside it.
• 9:30
  Figure: Which spins the whole question back around. If it sold almost nothing, and the real tool was a posture rather than an object — then what were people actually buying, a million and a half times over?
• 9:41
  Ground: Hold that one. Because I think the answer's hiding in how it was made, and who made it. [pause] Tell me about the reviews first.
• 9:50
  Figure: A lot of them weren't written by staff at all. Readers sent them in. Brand's own notes were short — people called them haiku-like. The catalog described itself as continuously updated, in part by the users. So you'd read a review, disagree, mail in your own, and in the next edition your words are on the page and someone else is reading you.
• 10:12
  Ground: So the reader becomes the writer. The thing you're buying is a conversation you're already standing inside.
• 10:19
  Figure: And it was made on almost nothing. Two objects, really. An IBM Selectric Composer — a heavily modified electric typewriter that could set justified, proportional type, camera-ready, the kind of work that used to demand a professional typesetter. And a Polaroid camera, the MP-3, for the pictures. Brand called it, arguably, the first desktop publishing.
• 10:42
  Ground: Put that in scale for me. What did that replace.
• 10:45
  Figure: In 1968 the real machine was hot metal. A Linotype — molten metal poured into molds, one whole line cast at a time as a solid slug. One operator could do the work of five or six hand compositors, but make one typo and you recast the entire line. It was industrial. It belonged to newspapers and publishing houses. What Brand had was a fancy typewriter and an instant camera on a desk. The staff said all their equipment fit in five boxes.
• 11:18
  Ground: So the catalog wasn't just telling people they could do things for themselves. It was itself a thing done for oneself. The medium is the demonstration.
• 11:28
  Figure: The book about access was made with access. That isn't decoration. That's the argument proving itself right there on the object. [pause] And they trusted the object so much they got playful with it. In the last 1971 edition, running along the bottom margins, page after page, is an entire novel. Gurney Norman's Divine Right's Trip. A whole counterculture road novel, threaded through the margins of a catalog. You'd be reading a review of a wood stove, and there's fiction crawling along the bottom of the page.
• 12:02
  Ground: A novel you have to read the catalog to finish.
• 12:06
  Figure: John Updike praised it later. It's a real book. And that's the confidence of the thing — it treated its own pages as somewhere anything useful or alive could live. Tools, philosophy, a birth-control listing, a serialized novel. Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman a few inches from a study of a commune.
• 12:27
  Ground: Was that just chaos, though. Or did the mess mean something.
• 12:31
  Figure: Brand reviewed Atlas Shrugged with the line: this preposterous novel has some unusual gold in it. The catalog could place that praise alongside radically different material, including The Population Bomb and studies of communal living. The politics didn't line up into one team, on purpose. The rule was never do you agree. It was: is there something here a person could use.
• 12:56
  Ground: I don't want to make it a saint, though. Who was this person it kept picturing. Because a catalog for everyone is usually, underneath, a catalog for someone.
• 13:06
  Figure: Turner names it plainly. The reader the catalog imagined was masculine, entrepreneurial, well-educated, and white. It turned away from questions of gender and race and class, toward individual empowerment — the lone person remaking his own life. [pause] In 1970 Gil Scott-Heron recorded Whitey on the Moon, a bitter answer to all that cosmic wonder — a reminder of everyone the view from up there leaves out. And the catalog's whole cover was that cosmic stare. The Earth from space.
• 13:41
  Ground: So the same photograph that meant wholeness to Brand meant erasure to someone standing somewhere else. The whole Earth has no borders on it. It also has no people on it. You can't see who's been left out from three stories up. Or from orbit.
• 14:03
  Figure: And the techno-optimism cracked even inside the office. The early faith — Fuller's faith — was that good engineering could solve the ecological mess. By 1971 Brand's own staff were doubting whether that was too centered on the human, too sure the machine could fix what the machine had helped break. Brand himself, much later, called himself post-libertarian, an eco-pragmatist — admitted he'd underrated the role of government. The certainty didn't hold.
• 14:35
  Ground: So we've got a grand claim, a real crack running through it, and a beautiful object. What survives all that? What's actually left standing when you peel the myth off?
• 14:46
  Figure: There's one more scene, and it's the one I can't stop turning over. Brand planned the ending from the start — he liked, in his own words, the notion of stopping. [pause] So in June 1971 they threw a Demise Party, at the new Exploratorium inside the Palace of Fine Arts. The invitation read: you could come as a tool. Brand showed up barefoot, in a monk's robe. And in front of fifteen hundred guests he pulled out twenty thousand dollars in cash and said: decide together what to do with it. You can't give it back. You have to reach consensus.
• 15:19
  Ground: Fifteen hundred people. In a room. With twenty thousand dollars and no rules.
• 15:26
  Figure: The debate ran all night — town meeting, then argument, then brawl, then bitching session. By eight in the morning the fifteen hundred were down to twenty. And the money, by then, was fourteen thousand nine hundred and five dollars. The twenty entrusted the sum to one man to hold until they could reconvene: a dishwasher named Fred Moore.
• 15:49
  Ground: What happened to it.
• 15:50
  Figure: Honestly — no one can cleanly say. That's the truth of it. But here's the fact that sits right next to that one. [pause] Four years later, 1975, Fred Moore co-founded a little group that met in a garage in Menlo Park. The Homebrew Computer Club. First meeting March fifth, 1975. Among the people who passed through it: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.
• 16:14
  Ground: So the money became Apple.
• 16:16
  Figure: No. That's exactly the leap I won't make, and neither should the story. The sources we have don't trace that cash into that club. Moore's bring back more than you take is documented; the Demise money reaching Homebrew is not. They're two true facts standing near each other, and the myth wants desperately to weld them into a straight line.
• 16:36
  Ground: And that's the whole temptation with this catalog, isn't it. Two true things standing near each other, and the pull to draw the arrow. Counterculture here, Silicon Valley there — draw the arrow. Hippie book here, the phone in your pocket there — draw the arrow.
• 16:55
  Figure: The arrow is where the myth lives. The facts are quieter, and stranger. A man got handed fourteen thousand dollars at dawn, and later loved computers. Both true. The line between them is something we add afterward, because a line is more satisfying than a coincidence.
• 17:13
  Ground: So peel the arrow off. Take away Jobs, take away the birth-of-Silicon-Valley story. What's actually left on the table.
• 17:23
  Figure: A book that sold almost nothing. That's the durable core. It didn't move product — it pointed. Every review was a door to somewhere else: a supplier, a maker, another book. Its whole value was in aiming your attention past itself.
• 17:39
  Ground: And it let the reader become the writer. It was partly made by the people reading it. That's the piece that still feels alive to me — not we are as gods, but the humbler thing underneath. Here's what I found useful. What did you find. Pass it on.
• 17:59
  Figure: And it planned to end. That's the rarest part. A thing that's working, selling a million and a half copies, and its maker builds the stopping right into it — throws a party for its own death, and at dawn has the remaining money entrusted to Fred Moore pending another decision. Most successful things fight never to die. This one treated finishing as part of the design.
• 18:22
  Ground: Point past yourself. Let the people using the thing shape it. Know when to stop. Take the whole cosmic myth away and those three plain habits are what's left standing. And not one of them needs the word gods.
• 18:38
  Figure: Not one of them needs a computer, either, or a coast, or a particular decade. They'd work on a single shelf of hand tools. Point past yourself. Let the people using the thing remake it. Build in the ending.
• 18:52
  Ground: Here's where I keep landing. The whole thing began with a man wanting a photograph that didn't exist yet — the Earth, whole, from far enough away to watch it curve. We have that picture now. It's on everything. It's so ordinary it's become wallpaper.
• 19:12
  Figure: He wanted it after thinking about Buckminster Fuller's insistence that people wrongly perceived the Earth as flat. And he was right. From that distance you also can't see the people it leaves out.
• 19:24
  Ground: The picture he risked getting thrown off campus for — the whole Earth, seen from far enough away that every division disappears — is that the most honest way to see the thing we all share, or is it the one distance from which you can no longer see anyone at all?