About a hundred miles south of Menlo Park, perched on the wild, rugged cliffs of Big Sur, sits Gorda Mountain. The untamed beauty is set in a landscape defined by dramatic cliffs that drop steeply into crashing ocean waves, where the constant flow of water rushes to the shores in outlandish motion.
Here in Gorda Mountain, overlooking the expanse of the Pacific Ocean, anyone could settle. Stewart Brand did just that. He treated the muddy, off-grid commune as a live-in laboratory, researching how people survived away from traditional infrastructure.
Brand became a cultural architect, bridging the gap between the sixties counterculture and the looming digital age. Armed with little more than an X-Acto knife, a typewriter, and a shoestring budget, he began compiling a revolutionary paper treasury known as the Whole Earth Catalog.
The Whole Earth Catalog is a mind-blowing invention which paved the way for the first global communication on paper.
On the day he got his insight, young Stewart Brand was sitting on a Victorian rooftop in North Beach, San Francisco, in the spring of 1966, when he noticed something amiss about the infrastructure before him. At the time, glass skyscrapers hadn't dominated the city. The 19th-century Victorian buildings were weathered, their grey and brown paint fading in parts, and packed tightly together.
His mind was hazy, and his eyes were glazed from the after-effects of LSD. A brisk, cold and biting breeze blew in from the bay when he concluded that the buildings weren't parallel. From the low roof, covered in tar and gravel, he stared out across the skyline. As the buildings rose towards the skies, they diverged slightly. And suddenly, across the horizon, he felt the terrestrial arc move beneath him.
In that fuzzy state of awareness, the truth struck him that we live on a sphere, and yet have not actually seen our own home from the outside.
He asked himself a simple question: Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet? He knew NASA would have a picture of the Earth, and yet it wasn't made public to the people who lived on the planet. Why?
The more he pondered the question, the more curious he became as to why an image of our planet wasn't accessible to us. He came up with a plan to have the question printed on twenty-five-cent buttons and mailed to NASA officials, Soviet scientists, and UN diplomats, which turned his plan into a movement. The movement connected us to the Whole Earth Catalog long before the internet. Brand built a paper universe, and decades later, Steve Jobs would perfectly capture its essence, calling it “Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along.”
