"We Can't Put it Together; It Is Together"

Remember Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalogue?

Oh, bah, you're too young to remember Steward Brand and the Whole Earth Catalogue?

Well, before they had the Internet, they had this giant book sort of like a seed catalogue, see, or the Sears & Roebuck Catalogue. It had all this hippie stuff in it that was highly cool. I remember spending hours -- days -- leafing through it and ordering the really wonky stuff from it that I could afford out of my allowance. There was even a running comic strip along the bottom that was really wierd and incomprehensible, and aside from the stuff it sold, it had advice, and stories, and all kinds of lore and insights and just...stuff. Like the Internet is now, kinda, only more homey. And more hippie.

Anyway, the Whole Earth Catalogue sprang up out of the 1960s San Francisco culture and was published in until the 1970s, back when there were things like the Vietnam War and then later Charles Manson and Altamount and all kinds of things driving rifts through society, and everything felt splintered -- the Earth, too, which everyone thought was going to get so polluted or blown up by nuclear bombs that it would all fracture. And then this *other* idea began to get memed around about Gaia or the Earth being Whole. And Stewart and the other Merry Prankster types out in CA coined this phrase, which they put on the back of the Whole Earth Catalogue: "You can't put it together. It *is* together."

This deep saying became a catchword for every kind of situation where it seemed at first as if you had to do all this complicated stuff to put something together, but if you could just grok it, and go with the flow and stuff, well, then, you were on the groove train to realizing it was already together and you could stop striving and just Be.

In the same way, it's dawning on some people that while they were holding discussions in Panelverse and plotting road maps and trying to control the whole thing called "the Metaverse", why, it was *already out there and already cookin' with gas.*

As Walker Spaight (Mark Wallace) has blogged on 3pointD.com, summarizing a talk by Joi Ito,

"The whole concept of cyberspace is holding us back a little bit," says Iot. "It’s not the case that cyberspace starts when you log into an immersive virtual world like Second Life or World of Warcraft," Ito said. I couldn’t agree more. The virtual world is simply a seamless extension of the real world. “We need to rethink the idea of cyberspace,” Ito said.

Perhaps cyberspace began back with the Whole Earth Catalogue, binding up the country's wounds with Bag Balm and Neat Foot's Oil. Or perhaps you could say it began with the Bible -- something underlying cultures, overlaying cultures, something that is a mental construct of Another World, and Other Life. "I was in my Other Life," my son just told me, awaking, sick, from a dream in RL. There's First Life. Then there's Second Life. So what do you call those things that you see in your head when you fall asleep in RL? If SL takes up your lucid dream space, then it's Other Life. Can you sleep less and get by with less REM recovery sleep if you play SL?

Well...sure...the Metaverse is everywhere...look at what Yeats said at the top of this blog...except like the atmosphere around planets, there are places with thicker or thinner oxygen layers, places where you can barely survive in, or reside well in or not, with all the requirements of log-ins, costs, expulsions, filters, bans, gated communities, skilling, levels, hordes -- it's more complicated than the Erie Canal's check gates.

It probably is already out there, and probably will ultimately get more homogenized and polished than it is now, which is all wild and wooly and knocked together in people's basements (right Jarod? Some of it is!) and held together with scotch tape and cans of Coke weighing the tape down. (I'm not finding that eerie blue picture of the server host the Lindens use in San Francisco, it really makes you think.)

Where is the Metaverse? Are we soaking in it? Are we late for it? Are we out of it (Hiro Pendragon says I'm not keeping up with all the developments, though of course, I have Walker to do that for me and I just have to read his blog 3 times a day, gosh, does he ever get around Panelverse!)

In Panelverse, to be sure, they are mapping out something, and it's not clear how everyone will get on board, when it's been staked out already by the usual suspects (I often wonder how Esther Dyson ever gets any work done, as she has been on every panel on the subject of computers and the future known to mankind).

In Panelverse, even Walker has admitted that Ralph Koster said they needed more criticism (they should have invited me!) and that they had to meet f2f to really get it cooking.

Walker writes that at this Panelverse junction, he was given a purple star and the title "Communicator" for his badge (!).  Gosh, I don't know whether to ask whether they got a pogrom with that, or milk and cookies. It is just so...special.

I counted 6 women out of the 51 Metaverse Mappers, and 3 Asians; the rest were white guys and gals. Oh, well, the public is now invited to participate.

I think what they may discover in time is that cyberspace, the interstices betwen things, was *always there*. Always *here*. It's Vernadsky's noosphere.

Comments

[Andrew Burton, aka Jarod Godel]

Steven Levy's book "Hackers" has a great history of how the "Whole Earth Catalog" and the PC revolution kind of coincided. It's a great book all around.

[Luciftias Neurocam]

Prok, you don't know me, and I can't say that I often agree with your arguments, but this is a beautifully written piece. I barely remember the Whole Earth catalogue, but this is an interesting analogy.

As for the metaverse mappers, maybe I'll see what they're up to. I'm not white, after all, I'm Irish.

[Prokofy Neva]

Jarod, Steward Brand is also renowned for founding the Well. And yes, he and others around the Whole Earth Catalogue were also involved in the PC and Internet revolution, I guess. On Wikipedia (never any source, but, it seems not to be the only source), Steve Jobs is quoted as saying the Whole Earth Catalogue was kinda like a web search engine, a Google.

Well, kinda, sorta, if the only thing you wanted to search for in life were roach clips, long-handled metal rakes, and powerful electric camp toilets. That is, the stuff in there was everything from soup to nuts but it was selected by Soup to Nuts, not any kind of real diversity of culture. It had a tremendous impact on people's consciousness in a certain stratum, but I imagine anybody over 30 simply ignored it, because for them, Life Magazine, the Penny's catalogue, and the Johnny Carson who were far more powerful cultural meme disseminators than this thing that was mainly for hippies and their wannabees.

What you could say about the WEC was that it was more fun to read and browse then it was to actually order any of the stuff and use it. That was its charm. Of course, it was a charming and groovy lure to taking on board an ideology and way of life that actually proved rather destructive to quite a few.

The ideology disseminated by the WEC was actually at odds with the free market and liberal notions of democracy. First, it bypassed most of the glories of Judeo-Christian civilization in establishing 1) one true God 2) the rule of law 3) the sanctity of the individual and the dignity of the individual and 4) the state and church's role in protecting these rights.

Just have a taste of what they believed -- which is merely the kernel of what the whole tekkie-wiki-geeky belief system is today:

"We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far, remotely done power and glory - as via government, big business, formal education, church — has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing — power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG"

What's first established is that government, authority, church, etc. are all "remote controllers" and "grossly defected" --although there's really no proper case made for this, it's just one of those divine inspirations that you're supposed to just grok.

Second, the individual is celebrated - but there's nothing to protect one individual from another individual endlessly pursuing his personal pleasure.

Fuck-you hedonism, etc. It's all there. What's funny, though, is back then, there these hippies who arrogated themselves "as gods" and then "tools" which at least they conceived of as tools they'd control.

Now, the tools are as gods too, and the people making the tools are as gods, and they're just about unstoppable. Still, we must try : )

[Andrew Burton, aka Jarod Godel]

The WEC's ideals sound a lot like of like Jack Kirby's fictional race known as The Hairies. Here's an exerpt from "Jimmpy Olsen" #135:

"The Hairies do not view the mysteries and wonders about them as we do. What we conquer, we impose out will upon and violate it for our own needs. Our behavious generates the problems that arise to confront us with equal menace.

The Hairies operate with the forsight and viability within a pattern without rules or dogma. They wing it with a zest to live and learn and make existence an art form instead of mad, grim march toward death. They exert no pressures on their fellows. They strive to give each other what they can -- and that can be quite a bit, in view of the fact that each hairie considers the other a most valuable and miraculous organism."

[Prokofy Neva]

each hairie considers the other a most valuable and miraculous organism

That's the part I'm not seeing in the descriptions of the WEC today, nor do I remember it in the culture disseminated in the past. That was one of the things that often turned me off to hippies that I actually knew and lived with in RL -- the selfishness and heedlessness of others. There are many documentary accounts and novels written on this theme.