BEg2 ch 7 Well people (nostalgia for Whole Earth Catalog)

[Michael Bailey]

“Nobody here in the Alley’s about to snoot you the way you get snooted by
those folks in Marin. Oh, I’m sorry, you’re not Well people, are you?”

  “Hell no,” cackles Lucas, “we’re as sick as they come.”

The Well - “whole earth ‘lectronic link” was - egads, it’s still around! -
is a virtual community.

I remember logging in from a 386 and getting snooted back in the 90s
myself.

The members there - at least some of them - really did refer to themselves
as Well people.

And to be fair I was quite ignorant (some things never change (-;)

The Whole Earth Catalog was a publication that came out in the 60s &
purported to be a manifesto as well as a source for things people might
want to get involved in like back to the land, community organizing, just
about anything really.

The founder, Stewart Brand, in 1966, had an LSD insight like, “why haven’t
we seen a picture of the whole earth.” So he went to NASA and got them to
release such a picture. Then Brand - using insights from Buckminster
Fuller, Lewis Mumford, and anthropologist Gregory Bateson - proceeded to
found the whole earth catalog and to be an early adopter of computers,
worked with internet pioneer Douglas Engelbart, used his influence to
“bring it to the people” & thus came about the Well.

I think the Well had many of the problems of the internet in miniature
years before they became apparent elsewhere. And many of the good things.


Steve Jobs said the (printed) whole earth catalog was like Google before
the internet.

It was fun to read. The Last Whole Earth Catalog (1971) was printed on huge
paper, and had a story serialized on the bottom corners of the pages, about
this hippie driving around in a VW van and finally becoming rooted on a
farm he inherited, raising chickens and revitalizing the soil with their
manure.

Looking up from the story, you might see info about geodesic domes,
intentional communities, yadata yadata yadata - seed catalogs, recycling,
book reviews, anything really. Drinking from a firehose. Really was like a
print Google. They stressed access to tools but a lot of that stuff was
heavy duty pumps and whatnot that lightweights like me noted only briefly
in passing. “Drill press, yeah okay, but is DR’s girlfriend going to leave
him? He just hung out with those Swedish girls in their tent briefly, but
she’s mad because he wouldn’t spring for a motel room in Vincennes.”

Pretty cool though, all in all.

So maybe they had something to snoot about.


There was even a “next whole earth catalog” that came out in the early 80s
with a story on the page corners by Paul Krassner, which if anything was
even better. By then they were already flogging computers big time.