From counterculture to cyberculture: How Stewart Brand and the 'Whole Earth Catalog' brought us 'Wired' magazine

This dissertation traces the history of the Whole Earth network of journalists and publications and its impact on public definitions of new technological, political and economic formations from the early 1960s to the late 1990s. Drawing on archival research and extensive interviews, as well as analytical resources from the fields of media studies and science and technology studies, the project tracks the development of three Whole Earth forums: the Whole Earth Catalog, the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (an on-line system popularly known as the WELL), and Wired magazine. It shows how each of these forums brought representatives from the worlds of scientific research and technology development together with journalists, countercultural figures and businessmen. In this way, it argues, the Whole Earth network helped join two seemingly antagonistic American intellectual streams: the critique of agonistic politics that emerged in the counterculture of the 1960s, and the cybernetic theories that Norbert Wiener and his colleagues developed in the weapons laboratories of World War II. Thanks in large part to the Whole Earth network, it concludes, this intellectual fusion and the rhetoric and practices associated with it became cornerstones of 1990s cyberculture.