worship godesses that can create rifts in the space/time continuum. :) no,
it is just an "addiction" caused by reading the Whole Earth Catalog when I
was a little kid back in the 1960s.
http://www.edge.org/documents/digerati/Brand.html
-
http://www.duhcentral.com/mis/curriculum.htm
---excerpt---
IDEAS:
cybernetics, understanding whole systems, tool, ecology
NOTES: Stewart Brand was running around in the mid-sixties (when NASA had
taken its first satellite photos of the earth with the entire round profile
in the frame but wouldn't release them to the public), handing out protest
buttons which said, "WHY HAVEN'T WE SEEN THE WHOLE EARTH?" And sure enough,
when detailed color pictures taken by the Apollo Eight crew of our home
planet were published right after Christmas 1968, they galvanized the
public and helped in the popularization of the ecology movement. As Joni
Mitchell sang:
"In a highway service station, over the month of June, Was a photograph
of the Earth taken coming back from the Moon. And you couldn't see a city
on that marble bowling ball, Or a forest or a highway, or me the least of
all."
It was this type of romanticization of the Whole Earth which lead me to the
Whole Earth Catalog. Actually, the WEC (as it calls itself) began as a mail-
order catalog for back-to-the-land communes, but it had an eccelctic,
holistic view that quickly took it into cybernetcis and systems theory, and
I followed. As I explained in the introduction, these "catalogs" edited by
Stewart Brand first introduced me to most of the ideas and thinkers listed
in this essay.
QUOTE: The WHOLE EARTH CATALOG got started in a plane over Nebraska in
March 1968. I was returning to California from my father's long dying and
funeral that morning in Illinois. The sun had set ahead of the plane while
I read Spaceship Earth by Barbara Ward. Between chapters I gazed out the
window into dark nothing and slid into a reverie about my friends who were
starting their own civilization hither and yon in the sticks and how could
I help. The L. L. Bean catalog of outdoor stuff came to mind and I pondered
upon Mr. Bean's service to humanity over the years. So many of the problems
I could identify came down to a matter of access. Where to buy a windmill.
Where to get good information about bee-keeping. Where to lay hands on a
computer without forfeiting freedom... Shortly I was fantasizing access
service. A Truck Store, maybe, travelling around with information and
samples of what was worth getting and information where to get it. A
Catalog too, continuously updated, in part by the users. A Catalog that
owed nothing to the suppliers and everything to the users. It would be
something I could put some years into. Amid the fever I was in by this
time, I remembered Fuller's admonition that you have about 10 minutes to
act on an idea before it recedes back into dreamland. I started writing on
the end papers of Barbara Ward's book (never did finish reading it). ...
Understanding whole systems is knowing how to fly. You can rise above local
circumstances, travel with blurring speed, and set down in a place wholly
distant, strange and wonderful. Or maybe not so wonderful, in which case
you best know how to take off in a tight situation, and remember where home
is. The price you pay for understanding is the grim knowledge of trade-offs
in design. That you can have an airplane that goes fast or one that lands
in 200 ft., but not both. That to save these people you may have to starve
those people. By and by you dwell in a wilderness of conflicting
considerations. If you survive your wishful solutions -- and there's
usually margin -- you may become a wily and sky-hooked metaphysician. The
solutions are always meta. The means always funky field expedient. ...
Evolution and cybernetics are going to come together. This is the edge of
knowledge right now, and it's right at the heart of education, and the
schools don't know it.
[-- all from The Last Whole Earth Catalog, 1971]
{HYPERLINK "https://www.well.net/mwec/home.html"}
---end---
regards,
ep
ps, one day I *will* own the 2 volume OED!!!
On 23 May 2001, at 7:19, Mark Leith wrote:
> ... where do you get all the time from to collate this
> extraordinarily extensive yet thoroughly interesting psycho babble? :)
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