Open Source Tech and the Fight Against Climate Change
Let us ponder, for a moment, what the people of 1969 must have thought when they first encountered the utopian Whole Earth Catalogue.
A large format document wrapped in NASA’s groundbreaking image of Earth floating alone in space, the WEC contained a mind-shattering blitz of disjointed information, DIY tools, and philosophical ideas, all wrapped in an intense curiosity around technology and natural systems.
If you fancy a preview of Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, please see page 3. Interested in Foam Experiments? Page 47. Considering a foray into Radical Sexual Interaction? Page 38. Ever wondered about the human daily metabolic turnover? Heres a diagram. How about our contributors’ thoughts on building The Modern Utopia?
If any of this sounds like the kind of tabs you could have open in your browser right now, that is exactly what the WEC was — a first taste of the whacky groupings of information we now gather on the internet. It was a pre-internet prototype, analogue edition. It was also heavily utopian, nature-centric, and participatory. It promoted environmental sustainability and methods for giving agency and freedom to the individual. In sharing access to tools, it called on readers to discover a transcendent form of humanity — one that moved away from the patterns of consumption & destruction that defined the post-war period — a form of humanity that could become whole.
Since then of course, much has been written about the Whole Earth Catalogue and its influence on tech culture. But recently there has been a spike of interest focusing back on its legacy — why now?
Perhaps it is because in 2019–over 50 years after its first publication — we see that the status quo of tech culture have almost entirely betrayed the benevolent, wholistic motivations of the 1960–70s. Big data, attention economics, and the untold billions in resources that dominate the modern narrative of tech innovation leave very little space for the actual BFPs (big fucking problems) we face as a species today. In a most vivid contradiction to the WEC’s anti-consumerist message, todays tech elite sell off our data to advertisers, fuel dangerous consumption patterns, and work to dominate the infrastructure of our shared digital consciousness — the internet.
This irony is most beautifully played out by Steve Jobs, the de facto bastion of tech consumption — when he closed his Stanford address with the advice “stay hungry, stay foolish” — a core message of the WEC, printed in the back of each edition of the catalogue.
Our tech status quo could (of course) go much further in defying the conventional illogic of consumption, and decide to address the urgent problems of biodiversity loss, global warming and ocean acidification — but then they haven’t found a business model for that yet have they?
And so, at Techfestival this year in Copenhagen, my collaborators at COACT and I would like to ask this question:
If we apply these values in a modern context, what would a Whole Earth Catalogue of today look like?
Practically, we believe it would include projects like tree planting drones, illegal logging mesh detection systems, honeybee health sensors, open source wind turbines, polycrop farming robots, automated aquaponics systems, low tech desalination tools, open source seed banks, and animal conservation technologies.
Culturally it would call people together to explore positive applications and ecosystems of technology, align skilled people towards sustainable ecological objectives, document the outcomes in an accessible way, perhaps enable the public to transparently fund the development, and build local protocols and political partnerships required to act towards a more sustainable future…
But these are only our thoughts — we would like to invite your participation and ideas in defining what a Whole Earth Catalogue of today could be. We would also like to explore what role an old mansion in the forest outside Barcelona is playing to bring these ideas into reality.
Please join the COACT team at Techfestival on Thursday September 5th to learn, discuss, and build a roadmap to an alternative culture of innovation.
Until then …
