Whole Earth Redux Publication Release Party @ Gray Area

Celebrate the release of Whole Earth Redux, a collection of essays offering new perspectives on one of the counterculture’s most influential publications.

Whole Earth Redux is a collection of essays offering new perspectives on the legacy of the Whole Earth Catalog, the publication that defined California’s counterculture. When the Catalog reached the public in 1968, it argued that technology could be personal, living could be communal, and information could be free. That vision not only inspired a generation of back-to-the-land hippies, but has also shaped nearly sixty years of dreams about the future, influencing everyone from Silicon Valley founders and climate activists to space colonists and open-source advocates.

This collection features original writing that appraises the legacy of the Whole Earth project, excavates its deeper histories, argues its importance for understanding the present, and imagines the alternate realities it inspires. Each essay focuses on an artifact from the Whole Earth Index, the first complete online archive of the Whole Earth Catalog and its subsequent imprints produced by Gray Area in collaboration with the Internet Archive and the Long Now Foundation. With Whole Earth Redux, a fuller picture of an iconic publication comes into view—one that defies easy categorization and, though imperfectly and not always consistently, offers such a vision for technology at the scale of individuals, communities, and ecosystems.

Whole Earth Redux is published by Gray Area with generous support from the Incite Institute at Columbia University.