Whole Earth’s 50th Anniversary
The first Whole Earth Catalog was published 50 years ago, in autumn 1968. As you probably remember, it catalyzed and shaped a range of psychosocial changes, especially among our generation, and it spawned groundbreaking publications like CoEvolution Quarterly, Space Colonies, the Whole Earth Software Review, etc.
From 1977 to 1990 I was the art editor of CoEvolution Quarterly and Whole Earth Review. Now I’m helping Stewart Brand and his wife organize Whole Earth’s 50th-anniversary reunion and celebration at the San Francisco Art Institute on 13 October 2018. There will be an exhibition, a series of 5-minute talks by editors and contributors to the publications, screenings of videos, and opportunities to meet and mingle with other attendees. We aim to keep nostalgia secondary to the continuing relevance – even prescience – of the Whole Earth “agenda” as the consequences of climate change and the scale of Anthropocene extinctions become clearer.
If you want to attend this event, a few tickets are still available at $100 each. Use the 50th Anniversary’s web page and order tickets directly.
The anniversary also prompted us to assemble a collection of original resources, interviews, analyses and sample copies of our various publications for the Internet Archive. Here is a link to the collection’s still-growing index.
The most popular item in the Archive’s collection is my July 2018 interview with R. Crumb.
The painful end to Whole Earth‘s publishing in 2003 – as candidly described by the liquidator – is also worth reading.
>BOB<
Robert Horvitz
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If you missed the Whole Earth anniversary party – and most of you did – a video was recorded of the private party for contributors and staff on October 13th. It featured a series of 5-minute “lightning talks” that were mostly very good – or at least fun. Here’s a link to the video:
https://archive.org/details/LightningTalks_201810
I make multiple brief appearances at the end of the video as we assembled to pose for a group photo: I’m the guy in the pink shirt.
Note that there are two versions of the video at that link above. The MP4 is very high resolution – so high it might not play on your internet connection. In that case, try the OGG version which is lower resolution but the same content.