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

[Mark Kohut]

*The Whole Earth Catalogue*, "the so-called *“bible of counterculture*”
first published in 1968, opens with an absolutely bonkers assertion: “We
are as gods and we might as well get good at it.”  .................huge
mainstream sales even....one might say the first was more Luddite than
not.....

The novel within its pages was called* Divine Right's Trip *by Norman
Gurney, which was not too much later also published as a stand-alone. I
have always wanted
to read it but Pynchon and others got in the way.


   - *Divine Right's Trip
   <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_Right%27s_Trip>* by Gurney Norman
   <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurney_Norman>, July 1971 edition
   - *Tales of Tongue Fu* by Paul Krassner
   <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krassner>, October 1974 edition
   - *The Rising Sun Neighborhood* by Anne Herbert
   <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Herbert_(writer)>, March 1981 edition


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Catalog

On Mon, Feb 21, 2022 at 2:58 AM Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
wrote:

> “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.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>