The Overview Effect
Hippie-internet and the challenge to outsize your perspective
During one of our typically divergent editorial board meetings for the first Blue Sky Republic Newsletter — where we exchange threads of unhinged ideas, bits of articles and other curiosities — we bumped into two articles: The first is a New Yorker article by Anna Wiener in 2018 which scrutinised the epitome of Californian hippiedom; The Whole Earth Catalog, published between 1968–1972 by Stewart Brand. The second article, by Ethan Siegel in Big Think, relates to the recent voyage of William Shatner (who played Captain Kirk in Star Trek) on board the Blue Origin space craft in October 2021.
Somehow, I procrastinated reading the New Yorker article as I feared it would tarnish warm memories of the catalogue. As a teenager and budding graphic designer, this outsized, of old-paper smelling, incredibly cluttered visual multiverse in my mothers’ library (an ex-hippie herself) served as an endless source of inspiration as it presents tools and instructions ranging from pottery baking, to DYI cow butchery and tips how to apply Yoga to build Life-raft Earth… Without taking the woolly articles and scatterbrained ideology behind it too serious — the catalogue did inspire my graduation project at the Willem de Kooning art school in Rotterdam in 1993 — a rather inscrutable tour guide for an imaginary landscape inspired by Dante’s Divina Commedia.
The link between these two articles is obviously the image of planet earth taken from outer space which relates to what most astronauts experience as ‘the overview-effect’ — seeing our planet from outer space. The image featured on the Whole Earth Catalog was captured by the Apollo 8 crew in 1968 of the earth-rising over limb of the moon after 45 minutes of total black-out during their orbit behind the moon.
The impact of seeing the earth in the context of immense black emptiness — this beautiful but fightingly vulnerable little blue pill, appears to affect all astronauts as a transformative experience; They seem to venture out as engineers and return to earth as activist philosophers: suddenly they realise how we are stuck in our daily, petty and irrelevant differences: economic needs now vs costs later, us versus them, nation against nation. The thing is; these realities are made up; you can’t even see borders from space.
What these astronauts have seen is a blue spec in the middle of darkness; one vulnerable and completely interdependent system protected by the flimsiest shield imaginable — the atmosphere, not much more than a breath of air… When they return to earth they seem shaken, emotional, begging leaders for unity and determination to protect what in their minds-eye appears to be on the brink of evaporation in a hostile emptiness of space.
Striking in the New Yorker article is how it unveils a subtle egocentricity in the ideology behind the Whole Earth Catalog. For the first time I started reading the ‘purpose statement’ of the crumbling catalogue. It’s impossible to ignore the focus on the individual and its power to shape his own world view. A frightening aggrandising view of the individual and the power to shape the world according to ‘his’ will — (apparently this power could only be entrusted to males). To some extend this self-aggrandising individualistic mentality has influenced a generation who are leading the world today. I realise that it’s unfair to frame the legacy of the catalog this way and I can imagine Brand’s frustration of being blamed for ideas written in foggy times some fifty years ago, but some of the ideology is reflected in the techno-libertarian beliefs driving some of the hyper-fractionalising algorithms behind our dominant social technologies, which seem to stand in the way of unity and cooperation to face the catastrophe we seem to be heading towards. First, we will have to develop a fundamental global capability to see our planet as a shared space.
So how can we find ways to experience the magic of zooming out; seeing the big — small and relearning what we actually belong to? We can’t expect space travel for all of us very soon, but we definitely need to find ways to shatter our sense of identity — we should start realising that we are no longer a resident of our house, street, neighbourhood, city or country, but of our planet. Almost like — but not really — meeting a fellow countrymen in an alien country with completely different customs and communications — suddenly he or she appears to be the best friend on the planet; you feel a rush of warmth, connection and a wish to share and stick together. Something you would not feel as strongly when that person would be standing on your doorstep; your automatic response would trigger a sense of intrusion, for example…
So, why is it that we can suddenly switch ourselves inside out: open-up to total strangers when familiar circumstances change into alien contexts? Why do we think we need to travel far to be able to drop our guards?
We can’t expect all humanity to see the planet from afar very soon, but maybe we can start to practice a simple skill: switch our perspectives and try to see the big small and the small big. Detach ourselves from petty feelings.
Maybe we can learn to hold our breath when we see something new with fresh and curious eyes. Keep ourselves from succumbing to our autopilots that prevent us from holding new ideas in the air, turn them around and study them in the sunlight.
We can start by simply looking around as if we’ve never seen our daily scene. Talk to strangers. Pretend to be in a far away country — or better; in space.
Maybe the discovery of our humanity doesn’t require a lot of unsustainable rocket fuel. Maybe we can do it while riding the tram. Let’s try it.
If you’re curious about Blue Sky Republic, just subscribe to our newsletter
