Whole Earth Catalog

I found a copy of this in my parents house yesterday dating back to 1972 and was it a blast from the past! Definitely a pre-cursor to the semi rambling nature of the internet today, but shaped by a definite editorial bias that is never really made explicit but of certain primary interest to people living in communes, nomads and hippies.

In case you haven't seen one first hand, it is a BIG catalog that reviews products and tells you how to get mail order catalogs from "recommended suppliers" to enable a self-sufficient lifestyle, outside the flow of big bad business entities. I guess that was a very self-empowering concept before the internet existed - that you could live your life without ever dealing with any perceived awful tackiness of malls, of bland advertising, of empty promises.

The "tools" that it recommends are seemingly random, and joined with strange short stories, (or is it a novel?) that tie the pages together. It's one of those things that you either say "genius!" or "what rubbish!" depending on your personal proclivities.

I wonder if the internet has really replaced the notion of a "Whole Earth Catalog" or if there is still a need for an editorialised lense, a sense of common purpose and ideology amidst the unfathomable scale of the internet today?