What kind of publication is the Global Catalogue?

20 12 12 14 On this day in February, it was Stuart Brand's 74th birthday. He shared a video on Google+, a deserted social networking site, and only got four reposts.

The video, titled "Overview", tells the story that after human beings entered space, they gained a brand-new view overlooking the earth, which had a far-reaching impact on human society. Looking back, Brand recalled the past: "1In the spring of 966, I sold a batch of badges that said,' Why haven't we seen the panoramic photos of the earth yet?' It wasn't until 1969 that such photos finally appeared, and later, I put them on the cover of the whole earth catalogue. "

This is a lonely celebration. Forty years later, the distance between man and the global catalog is as far as the lens overlooking the earth. Brand himself is no different from 40 years ago: he is divorced from the mainstream, looking for new things that excite him everywhere, and promoting some extraordinary projects that inspire the deaf-the only difference is that people were more sensitive and enthusiastic about his voice in those years, while Brand is quite lonely today.

Many people know the brand because of Steve Jobs's famous speech at Stanford University in 2005. At the end of this speech, Jobs said:

"When I was young, there was a great publication called Global Catalogue, which was regarded as the supreme treasure by our generation. Its founder, Stuart Brand, is in Menlo Park, not far from here. He created this publication with his own talent. It was in the late 1960 s, before personal computers and desktop typesetting appeared, typesetting relied entirely on typewriters, scissors and Polaroid cameras. It is like Google on paper, but it is 35 years earlier than Google: it introduces a lot of practical tools and first-class concepts with idealism. "

"Stewart and his team made several issues of the Global Catalogue, and they realized their mission at the beginning of publication, so they published the last issue. It was1mid-1970s, and I am as old as you now. On the back cover of the last issue, there is a picture of a country road in the early morning, which is the kind of scenery that people who like driving adventures often see. There is a line under the photo: stay hungry and stay stupid. This is their farewell speech when they stopped publishing. Stayhongry, Stayfoolish, this is what I have always expected of myself. Now, on the occasion of your graduation, I wish you the same. "

This publication, which was highly praised by Jobs, was very famous in the United States in the early 1970s: it could be seen everywhere in bookstores and families in urban and rural areas of the United States, with a total sales volume of 25 million copies and won the National Book Award. But like many things that Brand has done in his life-dabbling too much, mostly doing it spontaneously, without seeking results-the global catalogue came to an end at its peak, making it difficult for Brand to gain a reputation comparable to other media tycoons in the secular sense.

But for Brand, five years is enough time to promote a publication and its concept, and he has too many things to do. After the global catalog, he became the earliest trumpeter in the personal computer era, actively promoted the hacker spirit and the trend of free information (another famous saying of his: "information should be free"), and then called for immigration to space, and co-founded WELL, one of the earliest and most influential online forums in the United States. In recent years, he has devoted himself to climate change, global urbanization and life science and technology.

Peter drucker once called McLuhan and Fuller, whom Brand followed, "bards of science and technology and fanatical preachers of science and technology". These two titles are also suitable for brands. For forty years, Brand has been a pathfinder of new technologies and trends, and a link between the present and the future. Just like a person from the future, he always tries to improve his present career on the basis of future achievements.

How long is the future of mankind? Brand didn't give an answer. But the Long now Foundation, which he co-founded in 1996, is building a giant clock that has been running for 10,000 years in Nevada, USA. As the name implies, today can be 24 hours or 10000, depending on how you set your own world view.

eclecticism

Brand is no ordinary media person. He published not because he was familiar with it, but because many ideas had been suppressed for ten years and needed to be shared.

65438-0957 entered Stanford University to study biology. At that time, Silicon Valley had not yet become the center of global science and technology industry, and it would take more than ten years for companies such as Apple and Oracle Bone Inscriptions to appear, but thinking about the relationship between science and technology and the human world has emerged.

This is a watershed of the times. Before that, it was the old world where everything recovered after World War II. Everyone greedily enjoys the prosperity and tranquility brought by peace, at the cost that the state dominates everything and the individual acts as the screw of the state machine. As Ginsberg summed up: "The obvious contraction of feeling and sensory experience and the mechanical disorder of thought led to the outbreak of the Cold War ... numbness and indifference began, the mind and mind split, the head and trunk separated, and the thought was mechanized." Then there is personal awakening. People are no longer willing to follow the rules, and involuntarily move towards a new world composed of new technologies, new ideas, rock music, ecstasy and free markets.

The first person who influenced Brand's worldview was his teacher paul ehrlich, who later included two books on population growth and its impact in the global catalogue. However, when Brand was at school, ehrlich's research direction was biological evolution. His conclusion was that, unlike the traditional dualism, the individual was both a part of a complete system and a self-contained system. Individuals, groups and their environment are in constant exchange, so that it is difficult to distinguish each other.

The influence of this view lasted for a long time. Brand was the first person in the United States to call on the American government to publish a panoramic view of the earth, because he hoped that more people could look at their relationship with the world from a macro perspective-every issue of the Global Catalogue he published in the future would be covered with photos of the earth. Not only that, he also specifically noted in the photo of the earth on the back cover of the last issue of the Global Catalogue: "We can't piece it together, it is a seamless whole." (It should be noted that the problem of stay hungry and staying stupid mentioned in Jobs' speech is not the last global catalog in 197 1, but the Epilog of the Whole Earth published in 1974).

Like most young people who grew up in the Cold War, Brand sought various ways to achieve self-liberation in his daily life. Fortunately, he met USCO, a pioneer art organization on the east coast, Ken Kesey, the author of Leaping into the Madhouse, who lives on the west coast, and a happy prank led by him.

USCO is a mixture of semi-performing groups and semi-communes. They are fascinated by oriental mysticism and are willing to accept new technologies. They use different techniques to create a performance atmosphere, but the purpose of their pioneering performance is to change the audience's concept of the world. Among them, Brand came into contact with Norbert Weiner, Buckminster Fuller and marshall mcluhan.

Wiener first proposed that people are also machines to some extent, and machines can be endowed with purposeful behaviors like people. His Cybernetics integrates more than ten disciplines, such as radio communication, neurophysiology, psychology, mathematical logic, media science, etc., and finally returns from the study of machine control to the analysis of the real world: biology, machines and society are similar, all through the self-regulating system of processing information. In a sense, his research is consistent with ehrlich's: both oppose simple binary opposition, and both regard information round-trip as a way of system self-improvement.

Fuller and McLuhan, who became famous almost at the same time, have opposite views: Fuller thinks that science and technology leads to divinity, and perfect science and technology creates the ultimate harmony between man and the universe, while McLuhan thinks that science and technology is an extension of man and a way for human self-improvement and evolution. Although their views are quite different, in an era of hostility to technology and thinking that computers are cold machines, these two technical experts can be said to reach the same goal by different routes. And they made Brand, a non-engineer, start thinking: technology is not only a force for social change, but also a tool for cultural creators.

Times make heroes, and Weiner, Fuller and McLuhan are all celebrities of that era. Even though there was a clear distinction between humanities and science and technology at that time, all kinds of people in society were willing to find ways to know the world in the 1960 s, which made us feel ashamed of today's era of entertainment to death.

Compared with the influence of USCO on Brand's knowledge structure, Ken Kesey created spiritual liberation for him. Brand wrote to Cauchy to express his admiration for reading "Leaping over the Madhouse" and entered the other side's circle from then on. In Cauchy's shop, he tried psychedelic drugs and other psychedelic drugs, as well as the bohemian lifestyle since the beat generation.

In addition, Brand went to the Indian reservation in central Oregon to shoot brochures. For three years, he has been in intermittent contact with the cultures of Indian races such as Blackfoot and Navajo. In the Indian world, the harmony between man and land makes Brand deeply feel that he is a white social professional with a split heart, and also makes ehrlich's thoughts echo Wiener from afar.

Can people live like God? Look down on the world like God, understand the complete operation rules of the world, be omnipotent like God, and be responsible for the future of the earth? This has become the brand core concept of his life.

At that time, Brand got a unique opportunity. He wandered between science and art, non-mainstream culture and Indian civilization for ten years, which made him release himself and become a unique candidate to make a certain sound.

"Google on paper"

The birth of the global catalog began with a small idea.

1968 In March, Brand's father died. On the plane home, he happened to realize that many of his acquaintances were leaving the city to live in communes-from 1965 to 1972, there were thousands of communes in the United States, many of which were founded by hippies who opposed middle-class life. They hope that this will gradually turn America into a kingdom connected by small communities based on the same beliefs.

When people start a new life elsewhere, Brand thinks of shopping catalogs that are common in life and convenient for people to buy a lot of things at one go.

After several months of preparation, in July of that year, Brand and his wife started a "commune trip" in a Dodge pickup truck. He printed a six-page mimeographed catalogue, covering about 120 kinds of goods, and filled the car with goods. In a month, they sold goods worth about $200, which was very inefficient. After returning home, he stopped the truck shop in Menlo Park and called it "Global Truck Shop", and then turned his energy to the derivative product of this idea: the six-page mimeographed catalogue became a global catalogue, which was officially published in the autumn of 1968.

To be precise, this is not a magazine, but a catalogue. The first global catalog is only 6 1 page, and the 98 articles involved are all books of various colors selected by Brand himself. Different from magazines, the global catalogue does not change the content of each issue, but only adds appropriate goods and content. By 197 1 year, the last global catalogue was 448 pages thick, including 1072 entries, and the bibliography remained almost unchanged. Most of the recent 1000 articles are recommended and commented by readers.

Like the catalogues of stores such as IKEA, it tries to recommend a lifestyle. Unlike the IKEA catalogue, its purpose is not to guide consumption. Brand's ambition can be found in his preface to the global catalogue:

"We are gods, and we may be able to do this role well. So far, the problems brought by distant power systems (such as government, large enterprises, education system and church) have basically offset their benefits. Corresponding to this dilemma and its benefits, a personal and private power is emerging-a power for individuals to realize self-education, gain enlightenment, shape their own environment, and share their adventures with interested people. The Global Catalogue is willing to find and promote tools that can promote this process. "

Just a hundred words is the condensation of Brand's philosophy of life. And this publication can also be called a gift of the knowledge structure obtained by its previous ten years of travel. As it happens, it has become a bibliography and toolbox for researchers in universities, artists who prefer technology and hippies in communes.

The book includes seven parts: understanding the complete system, housing and land use, industry and handicrafts, communication, community, nomadism and learning.

Except for the first part, most of them are composed of practical knowledge and how to obtain relevant tools: from how to identify wild animals and plants to how to tie ropes, from adopting babies to how to keep accounts, to how to build windmills, buy hydraulic coal mining pumps and power data, and then mail-order cheap cameras from Hong Kong. Usually, Brand will look for the best books in this field, which have some contact information of related companies.

The first part of this book, "Understanding the Complete System", is a list of books listed by brand. As summarized in its title, it fully shows Brand's ambition: to understand how the whole world works and make it serve him. It represents the knowledge of a group of people:

-McLuhan

Buckminster fuller

Norbert Wiener

-Levi Strauss's Melancholy Tropical and other anthropological works.

-Jung's psychoanalytic theory

-The buildings of Antonio Gaudi and Los Ed Wright.

-paul ehrlich's Population Biology.

-Christopher Alexander's "formal synthesis" of design methods.

-Spencer Brown explains the formal rules of philosophical theory with mathematics.

-D.W. Thompson's On Growth and Biological Morphology is about the law of biological evolution.

-Tao Te Ching

-All kinds of maps and photos about the earth, as well as books on how to transform the earth.

……

Looking at the recommendation of the book recommended by Brand, we can imagine that he did not try to violently sell the ideas in the book.

For example, the introduction of Fuller's works on the third page of the opening simply says: "Fuller's insights have created a global catalogue", while the comprehensive introduction is: "Christopher Alexander is a designer who is often quoted by other designers. This book attempts to talk about the essence of current design problems, involving fields far beyond what ordinary people know and can integrate. "

But readers trust their taste. When Xerox PARC established the library, its employee Alan Kay took the librarian directly to the truck mall of the global catalog and bought a copy of all the books displayed there. In the future, Xerox invented the graphical user interface and mouse, and Alan Kay was regarded as the most important thinker in the technology industry. In addition, people affected by the global catalog include Jobs, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Wikipedia founder Jim Wells.

It is conceivable that anyone who has seen the works involved in the global catalogue will be affected. Or, you can know a thing or two by looking at Jobs: The Global Catalogue opposes people becoming gears of the state machine, and advocates that people and society should find the true meaning of their existence. Jobs dropped out of school because he could not learn "how to spend his life" in college; In the era of hostility and fear towards science and technology at the end of11960 s and the beginning of11970 s, the global catalog was the first media to regard science and technology as a tool to change human lifestyle and enhance creativity, so it is not difficult to understand why Apple set its mission as "providing tools for those who have the ability to change the world". The Global Catalogue was the only publication that spanned science and technology, eastern religions, mysticism and commune social theory at that time. The combination of science and technology and humanities was Apple's basic idea.

Even, in a sense, Jobs is the "comprehensive designer" described by Buckminster Fuller, who is highly praised by Brand, in his work 1963: "A new comprehensive talents, he is an artist, inventor and mechanic, an objective economist and a strategist with development ideas". One is not an expert, but he can examine the technology and strategy created by experts from a higher angle.

Far from bearing fruit, with the gradual cessation of the American commune movement, Brand announced the end of the global catalog at 197 1. He even held a closing party for this purpose. In front of 500 invited readers, he took out $20,000, hoping it would become a new tool. More than an hour later, more than 50 people came to the front desk and put forward various ways to use the money. Brand wrote it down on the blackboard one by one. ...

afterwards

The global catalogue was born in 1968 and closed at 197 1, and its life span is not long. The main issue has only been published six times, including various supplements and supplements after 197 1, and there are only 34 volumes.

After that, Brand moved to different emerging fields. He began to pay attention to the rise of hackers in 1972, and began to think about space migration at the end of 1970, and regarded it as the continuation of the commune movement in that year. 1982, brand was invited to co-sponsor the global software catalog to find and recommend the best "tools" for PC users, while in 1985,

If Brand makes up his mind, this online community, which was born in 1985 and gathered a large number of high-quality users, can become a star stock in the future Internet bubble. Its active users include software tycoon Mickey Kapoor, hacker Kevin Mitnick, grateful dead band members and a large number of mainstream media reporters, which makes it look like Twitter 20 years before Twitter was born. Both AOL and Microsoft have carefully studied how to design a system to support a large number of users online at the same time-but he faded out of the specific operation of WELL early, and then simply quit the community because he was attacked by other users on the forum.

If Brand is careful, it is difficult to predict whether WELL, once a competitor of AOL, will change the direction of the Internet. But obviously, after 1990, the era of Brand has passed.

In his time, there was fierce resistance to power, abundant curiosity about the whole world and self-transformation of ordinary people. That time was not comfortable, but it was exciting enough. It is in this era that technology has changed from a force resisted by people to a tool for human self-evolution. But obviously, what brand, McLuhan and Jobs didn't expect, technology went downstream and eventually became a mass consumer product and a new psychedelic drug that softened our minds.

In the early 1980s, when Jobs led the team to develop Macintosh, he wanted to name the computer "Bicycle" to help the human brain run further. But Macintosh finally lost to PC. One of the reasons for the failure is that there are many games on the open PC system. When Jobs made a comeback, whether listening to music on the iPod, brushing Weibo's iPhone or playing Angry Birds on the iPad became the new entertainment choices.

This makes Brand feel like a lonely explorer today. And he still walks in different fields as he did in his twenties. In addition to ten thousand years, he also participated in several projects: one is Rosetta Project, which means "Rosetta Stone", trying to preserve the endangered languages in the world; The other is to use DNA samples to resurrect extinct species.

Why do you want to do these romantic and unrealistic jobs? Brand's answer is: "I think we have become too short-sighted. Everything changes quickly, and everyone is doing a lot of things at the same time. Investment is also for short-term returns, and democracy is also dominated by the short cycle of election alternation. It is good to make rapid progress, but it is too opportunistic. When everything is changing rapidly, the future looks like tomorrow. But what really matters is the future in ten or a hundred years. "

On the official homepage of Wannian, in the photos of the mountains in Nevada where Wannian is located, there is a poem by T.S. Eliot: "We should not stop exploring/all our explorations/finally go back to our starting point/get to know it for the first time." This is the brand's 10,000-year declaration.