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Musings Report 2024-9 3-2-24 Access to Tools, Tools for Living: 50 Years of Forgetting
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Access to Tools, Tools for Living: 50 Years of Forgetting
The Whole Earth Catalog--famous for its cover photos of Earth from space and the catalog's simple three-word raison d'etre--access to tools--was first issued in Fall 1968, the brainchild of Stewart Brand and likeminded others. The Catalog gathered the many threads of systems thinking, ecology, sustainability and self-learning / self-empowerment into one mind-expanding volume of books, tools and supplies that could be mail-ordered.
The function and purpose of the Catalog were clearly and succinctly stated. The function:
The Purpose:
I recently paged through the age-worn copies of the WEC in our collection of "books we can't part with but we don't have room on the shelves for" and was struck by several things:
1. Virtually all the tools listed were domestically manufactured in the U.S.
2. All the tools were durable and built to last, many for a lifetime or even several lifetimes.
Compare this to the current economy, where virtually all tools and appliances are made to fail, either by design (planned obsolescence, so we have to constantly replace them, generating reliable profits) or by default (using cheap, poorly made / minimal quality control components), and the majority are manufactured overseas. There are no domestic manufactures of most tools and appliances; we're dependent now on long, intrinsically fragile (i.e. easily disrupted by any link breaking) supply chains of low-quality, disposable goods.
While this transition to a globalized Landfill Economy is certainly profitable for corporations, is it Progress for us as individuals--on the human scale--and for civilization and the planet? Clearly not. Rather, its "gross defects obscure actual gains."
There is more going on here than just a reduction of quality. All these manufactured goods are commodities, interchangeable in the global market; if one happens to be of higher quality, it is indistinguishable in the marketplace, which views every kilo of wheat as equal to any other kilo of wheat. That one kilo is high in nutrients and the others are low in nutrients doesn't compute in global markets.
We're also now dependent on debt to fund our consumption. The global marketplace has been hyper-commoditized and hyper-financialized: all debt is equal and can be traded globally, and all components and goods are interchangeable and can be traded globally.
3. The values, ethos and intellectual currents that course through The Whole Earth Catalog have been forgotten, as lost to our time as an ancient civilization of crumbling palaces and vine-choked temples.
Steeped in an awareness of resource limits and systemic vulnerabilities (runaway feedback loops, etc.), the goal of this ethos was living well with judicious use of resources enabled by self-learning / self-empowerment rather than "living well" by overconsuming for little actual gain once the consequences are toted up.
In other words, living well isn't the result of over-consuming resources, it's the result of fashioning a high-quality life of real food prepared with care, quality tools, an appreciation of beauty, the joys of learning and doing rather than consuming, and living with integrity rather than trying to impress other over-consumers.
The ideals of self-organizing, self-learning and self-empowerment powered an explosion of new enterprises and organizations, many sprouting in the San Francisco Bay Area: the Homebrew Computing Club (Palo Alto) that led to Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs meeting and founding Apple; The Whole Earth Access store (Berkeley), Nolo Press (do-it-yourself legal guides, Berkeley); Chez Panisse (farm to table, California cuisine, Berkeley); the Co-Op Supermarket (Berkeley); Bookpeople (small-press book distributors, Berkeley) and The Owner Builder Center (Berkeley), where I worked part-time for nearly a decade, and a slew of books covering topics from the global impact of diet and food (Diet for a Small Planet) to global consumption and systems (Limits of Growth).
This is what led me to move to Berkeley in the 1980s, where I began working for The Owner Builder Center within weeks of my arrival. These ideals inspired many people around the nation and world, including Steve Jobs and many of the founders of the World Wide Web a.k.a. the Internet.
This ethos has been replaced by a corporatized "no limits" "super-abundance": there's plenty of resources to fuel our Landfill Economy essentially forever, and "no limits" technology will come up with a solution that's painless (and highly profitable) to any limits we do encounter. (AI!)
The concept of limits has been abolished as outdated. Or so we imagine; perhaps the real world still has limits, and what has no limits is our hubris, blindness and pride. There are limits not just on resources but on globalization, financialization, debt, costs and the biosphere. Which limit will be reached first remains to be seen.
It's more than coincidental to those of us who track historical-economic cycles that the "gas crisis"--where the essential fuel of the US economy was no longer super-abundant and you actually had to wait in lines to get gasoline--was 50 years ago. If Peter Turchin's 50-year cycle plays out (he predicted it would start in 2020, so we're already four years into it), then super-abundance may well collapse into scarcity, something that is currently as unimaginable as it was in 1972.
The admired authors of The Whole Earth Catalog era--Buckminster Fuller, Gregory Bateson, Ivan Illich, to name a few--are forgotten, rarely cited or mentioned. The revolutionary terms of the era--cybernetics, small is beautiful--might as well be hieroglyphics on a broken obelisk protruding from the sand.
This is not surprising, for how many influential thinkers of 1920 were still widely known in 1970? What is surprising is the total refutation of what had been learned about systems and limits, the passive acceptance of centralized, homogenized monopolies and cartels and the dominance of centralized credentials and compliance--the exact opposite of self-learning / self-empowerment.
This is why I wasn't sorry leaving Berkeley: it too had become corporatized, homogenized, focused on "innovation" as the means to generate outsized profits and private wealth. As control was increasingly consolidated and centralized, policies became heavy-handed and inauthentic as optics/PR took center stage. Soaring costs squeezed out all the quirky unique bits that had found ways to survive or even thrive in the nooks and crannies. The town--and region--had slowly lost its soul, and perhaps the same can be said of many other places.
There are a few islands of self-learning that have expanded wonderfully. We have Big Tech-owned and curated YouTube University, offering free (ad-sponsored) how-to videos on a truly amazing scale. I use YTU frequently. The Web offers nearly unlimited opportunities to learn.
The problem isn't self-learning; the tricky part is self-empowerment as centralized hierarchies now dominate the social, economic and political realms.
Though the ideals of self-learning / self-empowerment seem quaint and outdated, values don't become outdated, they simply cycle through history. Ralph Waldo Emerson, author of the 1841 essay "Self-Reliance" that inspired my book Self-Reliance in the 21st Century, would have approved of the ethos of useful tools, independent education (self-learning), high quality, low cost, easily available to anyone willing to learn new skills promoted by The Whole Earth Catalog's purpose and function.
In a way, Stewart Brand was channeling Emerson, reinvigorating values and ideals that had been buried by a century of increasingly centralized industrialization.
Critics have pointed out the Catalog was just another compendium of consumption: change your life by buying more stuff. Point taken, but we need to distinguish between ever-expanding debt-fueled consumption of intentionally disposable products--the Waste Is Growth Landfill Economy--and buying tools for living that enable a lower consumption, more sustainable, human-scale measure of well-being.
We still use a portable fluorescent light that connects to a car battery for camping that was purchased from the Catalog almost 50 years ago. What can we buy today that will still work 50 years from now? Next to nothing. Perhaps this isn't actually Progress, but the opposite of Progress.
Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, the book that changed the world (2013, UK Guardian)
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From Left Field
NOTE TO NEW READERS: This list is not comprised of articles I agree with or that I judge to be correct or of the highest quality. It is representative of the content I find interesting as reflections of the current zeitgeist. The list is intended to be perused with an open, critical, occasionally amused mind.
Many links are behind paywalls. Most paywalled sites allow a few free articles per month if you register. It's the New Normal.
Ultra-processed foods linked to heart disease, diabetes, mental disorders and early death, study finds
Sick to Death: Unhealthy Food and Failed Technologies--decline of nutrients in food...
Birth rates fall to all-time lows in Japan and South Korea
Why South Korean women aren't having babies
STORMY MONDAY (1966) John Mayall's Bluesbreakers live (the soon-to-be legendary guitar tone of a Gibson Les Paul and a Marshall amp) (4:44 min)
Don’t Be Evil -- until it's profitable to be evil....
God to Humans: "Just Pick the Tallest Guy"
The Unfunded Liability Death Trap (via Tom D.)
Corporate Ozempic -- AI and declining headcounts...
A new company is shipping Arctic ice from Greenland to chill posh drinks in Dubai (via Cheryl A.)
Why Is Mercury Stubbornly High in Tuna? Researchers Might Have an Answer.
How Bad Can It Get for Hollywood?
"If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story." Orson Welles
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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