Word: earthed
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Yourself Utopia, Want a computer? The catalogue offers a choice: a spiffy, $4,900 Hewlett-Packard tabletop model with a 19-register magnetic core memory-or a $1.95 book of instructions on how to build one yourself. Want to start a commune? The Whole Earth Catalog lists how-to books on primitive house building (adobe huts, log cabins, teepees, metal domes constructed from jettisoned auto bodies), organic farming, sewage disposal, practical sociology. It also reprints a letter from a disillusioned former commune member who writes: "If the intentional community hopes to survive, it must be authoritarian...
...pages, the catalogue lists more than 300 items, each of which may be ordered directly from the manufacturer or from the Whole Earth Truck Store in Menlo Park, Calif. They include books (mostly old), magazines (mostly new), potters' kick wheels, tape recorders, solar stills, Kaibab boots, programmed reading cards, natural foods, Aladdin lamps and a list of experimental schools compiled by John Holt, author of How Children Fail...
Gods do not make bricks, of course -or build sun domes, or scramble for sassafras in the shrubbery of Central Park. But for people who do, or want to, the Whole Earth Catalog is an almost inexhaustible compendium. Although it is specifically aimed at "technological dropouts" (in the words of its authors), the catalogue's phenomenal success shows that it has a far vaster range of appeal. It is a sort of Sears, Roe-buck-Consumer Report for the minorities of the cybernetic age-from activists who want to improve the environment or create a Utopian society to abdicants...
Foam-Rubber Swords. Nonliterary objects offered for sale in the Whole Earth Catalog range from the practical to the whimsical, from power tools and tractors to "Boffers"-$11 foam-rubber swords that the catalogue calls "the first significant advance in weaponry since the encounter group." The Ashley Thermostatic Wood Burning Circulator is an $80 Franklin stove, equipped with a thermostat, that will go up to twelve hours without refueling. The Inquiry Box is a $19.96 gadget designed to teach theory building and theory testing: "By pulling and pushing the things that stick out and by poking around inside with...
Although the Whole Earth Catalog is selling briskly across the U.S. and abroad, it may soon become a collector's item. Brand plans to cease publication in 1971. "If by that time there aren't people and ideas around doing a better job than we have, then we'll have failed," he says. Brand expects to keep the Truck Store operating as a mail-order service, but his personal plans are indefinite-to say the least. "I may just spend a while having fantasies," he says. "But 1971 is a long time from now -like a generation...