Between 1968 and 1972, Stewart Brand published The Whole Earth Catalog. For Kevin Kelly, the Catalog was essentially “a paper-based database offering thousands of hacks, tips, tools, suggestions, and possibilities for optimizing your life.” For Steve Jobs, it was a “Bible” of his generation, a kind of Google 35 years before Google came along. (On a side note, I highly recommend the commencement speech where Jobs made those comments.) The very good news is that The Whole Earth Catalog and some related publications are now available online. You can read them for free, or download them for a fee. Start delving into things here.
While we’re on this subject, I should also highlight a project that has more recently occupied Stewart Brand’s time. The Seminars About Long Term Thinking is a monthly speaking series hosted by Brand and organized by the Long Now Foundation, which hopes to provide a counterpoint to today’s “faster/cheaper” mind set and to promote “slower/better” thinking. You can access the thought-provoking seminars as a podcast (iTunes - Feed - Web Site) and otherwise find it hosted in our Ideas & Culture Podcast Collection. Have a good weekend.
via Boing Boing
“In the beginning, Stewart Brand created the Whole Earth Catalog. And the earth was without the web, google or blogging (which the Whole Earth Catalog is credited with inspiring). Steve Jobs described it as “an amazing publication… one of the bibles of my generation… It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions”. ” Emma Ridgeway on Arts & Ecology blog at http://mtblog.typepad.com/arts_ecology