Stewart Brand (ed.): Whole Earth Catalog (1968-1998) & Whole Earth Software Catalog & Review (1984-1986)

The Whole Earth Catalog was an American counterculture catalog published by Stewart Brand between 1968 and 1972, and occasionally thereafter, until 1998. Although the WECs listed all sorts of products for sale (clothing, books, tools, machines, seeds – things useful for a creative or self-sustainable lifestyle) the Whole Earth Catalogs themselves did not sell any of the products. Instead the vendors and their prices were listed right alongside with the items. This led to a need for the Catalogs to be frequently updated. (source)

The Whole Earth Software Catalog and The Whole Earth Software Review (1984-1985) were two publications produced by Stewart Brand’s Point Foundation as an extension of The Whole Earth Catalog.

The Catalog and Review were notable for being “devoid of any industry advertising” and for being “accessible and user friendly – written in an glib, conversational style that takes most of the bugs out of microprocessing.”

Fred Turner discusses the production and eventual demise of both the Catalog and Review in From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Turner notes that in 1983, The Whole Earth Software Catalog was proposed by John Brockman as a magazine which “would do for computing what the original [Whole Earth Catalog] had done for the counterculture: identify and recommend the best tools as they emerged.”

Brand announced the first publication of the quarterly Whole Earth Software Review at the SoftCon trade show at the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans in March 1984. While both were published as an extension of Whole Earth, the Catalog was a large glossy book sponsored by Doubleday and published in Sausalito California while the Review was a small periodical published in San Diego.

The Whole Earth Software Catalog and Review were both business failures. The Catalog was only published twice (1.0 in June and 2.0 in Fall ’85), with only three of The Whole Earth Software Review supplements published. (source)

Wikipedia (WEC)
Wikipedia (WESC & WESR)

Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1968
Whole Earth Catalog, Spring 1969 (added on 2016-8-24)
The Last Whole Earth Catalog, 1971 (79 MB, added on 2020-4-14)
The Essential Whole Earth Catalog, 1986 (126 MB, added on 2020-4-15)
Whole Earth Software Catalog 1.0, 1984 (updated on 2012-7-18)
View online (incl. other issues)
Electronic Whole Earth Catalog (CD-ROM on Internet Archive, added on 2020-7-16)

See also:
Access to Tools: Publications from the Whole Earth Catalog, 1968-1974, online companion to 2011 exhibition at MoMA;
Index to the Internet Archive’s Whole Earth Collection, compiled by Robert Horvitz (added on 2018-8-18).

Fred Turner: From Counterculture to Cyberculture. Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (2006)

“In the early 1960s, computers haunted the American popular imagination. Bleak tools of the cold war, they embodied the rigid organization and mechanical conformity that made the military-industrial complex possible. But by the 1990s—and the dawn of the Internet—computers started to represent a very different kind of world: a collaborative and digital utopia modeled on the communal ideals of the hippies who so vehemently rebelled against the cold war establishment in the first place.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture is the first book to explore this extraordinary and ironic transformation. Fred Turner here traces the previously untold story of a highly influential group of San Francisco Bay–area entrepreneurs: Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network. Between 1968 and 1998, via such familiar venues as the National Book Award–winning Whole Earth Catalog, the computer conferencing system known as WELL, and, ultimately, the launch of the wildly successful Wired magazine, Brand and his colleagues brokered a long-running collaboration between San Francisco flower power and the emerging technological hub of Silicon Valley. Thanks to their vision, counterculturalists and technologists alike joined together to reimagine computers as tools for personal liberation, the building of virtual and decidedly alternative communities, and the exploration of bold new social frontiers.

Shedding new light on how our networked culture came to be, this fascinating book reminds us that the distance between the Grateful Dead and Google, between Ken Kesey and the computer itself, is not as great as we might think.”

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2006
ISBN 0226817415, 9780226817415
x+327+16 pages

Review: Samuel Goëta (Questions de communication, 2013, FR).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (updated 2019-2-25)

Theodore Roszak: The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (1969)

When it was published, this book captured a huge audience of Vietnam War protesters, dropouts, and rebels – and their baffled elders. Theodore Roszak found common ground between 1960s student radicals and hippie dropouts in their mutual rejection of what he calls the technocracy – the regime of corporate and technological expertise that dominates industrial society. He traces the intellectual underpinnings of the two groups in the writings of Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown, Allen Ginsberg and Paul Goodman. Alan Watts wrote of The Making of a Counter Culture in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1969, “If you want to know what is happening among your intelligent and mysteriously rebellious children, this is the book. The generation gap, the student uproar, the New Left, the beats and hippies, the psychedelic movement, rock music, the revival of occultism and mysticism, the protest against our involvement in Vietnam, and the seemingly odd reluctance of the young to buy the affluent technological society – all these matters are here discussed, with sympathy and constructive criticism, by a most articulate, wise, and humane historian.”

Publisher Anchor Books, Doubleday, New York, 1969
303 pages

wikipedia
google books

The Making of a Counter Culture (English)
El nacimiento de una contracultura (Spanish, trans. Angel Abad, 1970/1981, added on 2013-7-2)