That ‘misperception’ of the Catalog itself is a consequence of focusing on the influence the WEC had on New Communalism. In my view, the Catalog’s diversion from community to provide them with the “access to tools” to sustain them marks its failure.

The primary success, as I see it, was in the WELL’s ability to accelerate the adoption of the web. I’m curious to what degree or metric the WELL accelerated the adoption of personal computers and the web? Other than the increased sharing made possible by the web, I view this community, even seen in the work of ‘World Changing’, as an arbitrary one.

I’m confident we’re more than ready to return to communal ways of living as p2p principles more than suggest. Personal fabrication or modern day digitally assisted craft production is decentralizing productive control away from business control. The interest to continue the aim toward personal fabrication will break the business and governmental barriers. They must then ‘open-up’ to ‘power-down’ as they become less necessary relative to material autonomy of regenerative or cyclical productive processes of personal fabrication, until these organizations fade and return once again to the community from which these institutions are born. As long as proprietary generations and former shareholders and officials continue to keep their stuff during this transition, the economic and political transition may be as underplayed as the Internet revolution or Information Age. That of course is the best case scenario I’m working diligently to secure–at least on paper.

***

We’re already seeing this breakdown economically. I take the view expressed by the economist Robert Theobald that the collapse began during the Great Depression of 1929 onward. Theobald is the first economist, to my knowledge, to assert that technology was the primary cause for the Great Depression. That continued ignorance remains today! Governments will now become more involved as businesses refuse to ‘open source’ or prepare and work toward monetary decreases. (I’ve been laughed at after describing this necessity by group of college students–kids my age!–so I expect the same from grads on up!)

If this ignorance prevails, governments will be forced to print money to make up for the rising gap between real wages and increased productivity. The problem with this method, even if we do have a ‘Bailout for the People’ as Richard Cook proposes, cash cannot just rise exponentially to continue business growth. For one, populations in developed countries are decreasing and robotics will be needed to meet this need, which will create an additional double bust. This growing gap between wages and productivity, rich and poor, increases debt until banks see they are unable to make a return and stop lending. We’re now experiencing the debt barrier. The part that economists seem to miss is where the economy comes from 1) scarce goods and services, and most importantly, 2) the processes that make goods scarce or abundant.

I see a need for community because of the economic conditions and the foreseeable productive processes ahead.

Here’s the argument in one paragraph:

The adoption of technical innovation like software/hardware reduced employee skills/wages in ‘developed countries’ or the use of saturated labor markets abroad in ‘undeveloped countries’ to produce goods for a ‘developed country’ populace. Unable to purchase the imported goods at the exponential rates necessary for economic survival, people went into debt, precisely because they do not have the wages to purchase goods. Eventually enough lenders understand debt will not be paid. And there you have it, the greatest collapse in history.

See Robert Theobald, Richard Wolff, and Richard Cook’s complimentary views on this regard. These observers get closest to my assumptions and observations. Even these rather heterodoxical views do not go far enough.

The late Theobald, to his credit, did address the general changes necessary in business and government needing to adopt to abundant production, but his solution was mostly held in the monetary advocacy of the Basic Income. His work advocates open source before its emergence in the hacker communities. The other BI advocates to follow seem to rely on Faith that the Income itself will correct the problem. Basic Income proponents seem mostly unaware of p2p or open source culture or the decentralizating potential of production (the trend toward Abundance) found in the digitally assisted workshop (or fab lab) that gives rise to personal production. If we assume, as I do, material sharing will continue to form progressively more material autonomous communities and individuals, this means we have a cultural hang-over to deal with and a great deal of infrastructural restructuring.

***

I am having a lovely on-going conversation with Eric Hunting. Here is what Eric had to say in response to my views on the WEC and New Communalism:

I had the original Whole Earth Catalogs myself but had to give them up when I moved to New Mexico. Also long had a subscription to the Whole Earth Review which originally was intended to carry along catalog concept as a monthly publication. And for a brief time I participated in the pre-Internet (BBS-based) version of The Well on-line community, which emerged from the WEC’s community. I would certainly agree on the relationship of the WEC and its regional intellectual community to the emergence of personal computing. There was an interesting regional phenomenon that centered around -if I’m remembering the location correctly- the unlikely place of the Manzanita Sausalito houseboat community on the north side of San Francisco bay. A lot of things seemed to converge on the social circles there; WEC, Well, a host of the late 20th century independent publishers, Ted Nelson even had a houseboat there. Controversial in both the beatnik and hippie eras, it later became ‘yuppified’ but retained its character as the Bay Area’s post-Haight-Ashbury ‘free thinking zone’. It seemed as if that peculiar nature of living on water may have had some influence on perspectives. (which I find an interesting analog to my work on The Millennial Project and its goal of creating model Post-Industrial communities on water -some very likely starting in the San Francisco Bay)

But I noticed a shift in character of this movement in the evolution of the Whole Earth Review. Starting out with the same type of content of the catalogs, it became increasingly ‘fluffy’ in content, moving away from technology, Maker topics, and discussions of things being done in the real world toward art, culture, sociology, and philosophy. It started turning into a parallel of the Parabola magazine. There was nothing wrong with that other than that fact that it mirrored a shift in character of the movement it was once fostering. It changed from an active physically engaged movement seeking implementation to a passive intellectual movement more focused on the theory and aesthetics of the movement than its implementation. It’s not clear if this was something that evolved internally or externally. It seemed the editorial nature the WER changed but at the same time there was a decline in active development in the ecological technologies it once reveled in as the environmentalist movement itself shifted toward an anti-technology stance and the mainstream culture shifted toward the narcism and onanistic obsession with nostalgia in the late 1980s. This coincided with the shift in personal computing from an idealistic enthusiast’s movement focused on the future and the social benefits of its technology -very much akin to the contemporary Maker movement- to an ‘industry’ of ‘professionals’ focused on making money and ‘keeping up with the Gateses and the Jobses’.

You could probably see this reflected in the changes in the Manzanita houseboat community itself. Originally a mass of shacks, it became a focus of young early 80s avant guard architects keen on the concept of adaptive reuse. I seem to recall that one of the key people behind WEC had a houseboat made from an adapted tug boat. But by the end of the 80s or start of the 90s the place had become dominated by multi-million-dollar architect-designed floating homes. It started out symbolizing the imaginative and exuberant creativity of a certain generation and then later became a symbol of the extravagant affluence of the Information Age’s elite -the most successful sell-outs of that generation.

…

WEC seemed to be the last hold-out of 1970s Fulleresque style EcoTech and increasingly more aligned to the personal computing movement (and the Well community) than to the green movement which increasingly began to look like a religion more than anything else -and in its most fundamentalist factions today, a doomsday cult. If I understand correctly (I’m not particularly well-read on the topic), the New Communalists grew out of -or as a reaction to- the factious evolution of the Anarchist movement with the rise of ‘lifestyle Anarchists’ and Randian Libertarians.

…

WEC was more catalyst than lever. It never had what you could call an active role in shaping the movements that coalesced around it -which was probably an important aspect of its success but also a weakness later on in that it could not itself maintain the movements it fertilized and cross-pollinated once those movements themselves began to wane. It assumed no aesthetic/intellectual/organizational authority. But then, maybe that would not be a good thing. It probably always was best as a passive catalyst.

I think the crux of the misperception is that while Stewart started out to create a resource supporting communes, the idea of the Whole Earth Catalog very quickly became a resource supporting self sufficiency and thinking for yourself, without any kind of intention to support a movement. There were always teachers in Guatemala, Pentagon generals, advertising executives, urban counterculturists, proto-environmentalists, tinkerers and hackers in the WEC community. “Think for yourself, invent new ways to do things” was much broader, and in many dimensions, successful, than any kind of intentions around communes.

Will Allen’s Growing Power methodologies are being tested in a commercial upscaling that involves the transformation of an industrial slum into a fish vegetable farm and the marriage of urban artisans, agrarians, and artists in mixed model experiments.

http://www.milwaukeerenaissance.com/SweetWaterFishFarming/HomePage

The Renaissance of New Communalism
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/46afbbe4f09f07c9

a quick note, here’s an overview of the trend of peer production moving to the field of physical production: http://www.we-magazine.net/we-volume-02/the-emergence-of-open-design-and-open-manufacturing/; many of these projects are listed here at http://p2pfoundation.net/Product_Hacking.

The field is in its infancy, but showing great promise and early successes, such as Arduino,

Nathan: in the above comment it’s difficult to distinguish my quoted paragraphs from your answers, perhaps in the future useful to put a < just before quotes? I think that the attitude towards technology of intentional communities needs more study, I personally doubt it's as clearcut as you say, only some of them being explicitely 'luddite' (which I respect as a choice as well) Michel

Thanks for adding your deep sense of experience here. I’m honored!

I did spend some time in community at Pumpkin Hollow in Liberty, TN for several months. I was asked politely to leave; we all shed tears. (It wasn’t because I didn’t do the dishes!) It was a small collect, but I did get to know those living at Short Mountain Sanctuary nearby, where I overcame my homofelia, as it was a gay community, and observed the variety of struggles and dramas of community life from that perspective.

Below I hope explains what I mean by failure in response to Michel and Howard’s comments.

I measure Whole Earth’s ‘failure’ to mean its failure to develop unified network of physically autonomous communities. Today we have strong virtual communities, but the talk has yet to match what is lived as I see it. The goals of Open Source Ecology probably best represents what I mean by ‘success’ if the Catalog were to reform. OSE is not a bunch of random stuff that one can only learn partially about before a purchase, but an integrated package in which a community can construct for the cost of labor and materials themselves.

Howard

Here are a couple of videos of John Coate, who raised three children and spend 12 years on The Farm, then was instrumental in the WELL culture.

http://blip.tv/file/787638/
http://blip.tv/file/805566/

Thanks for these sources, Howard. I watched them before writing the article. If I was unable to express the content of them it is because I set myself to write something short within a limited amount of time, experience, and ability.

Howard

This is wrong in so many ways that I don’t have the time or energy to deal with it in detail. This isn’t a Hollywood movie with a big successful or failed revolution scene. The culture was changed irrevocably in so many ways.

Hi Howard,

Thanks for the acknowledgment and expressed concern here. I expect harsh criticism. For one, I did not live during this time. Another, Fred’s book is mostly what I had to go on. Beginning last week or so I became a crash course student of this era after Michel suggested I look at the Catalog for clues on how to write the Intentional Community 2.0 proposal.

The Hollywood movie approach as you see it was probably caused by trying to pack lots of information into a short essay based on a limited set of sources and my own bias. For you or anyone that has time to examine the parts for historical accuracy, I’ll correct it and keep it in mind when describing that era later.

The Catalog group was very successful in many ways, for one, at bringing people together to establish life long personal and business partnerships, accelerated by the WELL, to grow the Whole Earth community. Yet, I will not consider Whole Earth a ‘success’ until this community is able to establish autonomous community both physically and virtually.

Michel

Just a few remarks. Whenever dissatisfaction occurs with a mainstream social system, as occured in the sixties, different reactions are possible.

Hi Michel,

I agree. At least one important aspect of P2P I’ve experienced is one must be critical of the one-size fits all approach as expressed in mass production. The essay does have a bias toward community; no doubt communities are organized in a variety of ways.

The New Left is the active political opposition route, while what you describe as new communalism, a term I haven’t heard before, took the route of actively constructing new lifestyles, both on the individual level, and on a communal level.

Right. I did not successfully describe the Whole Earth as community networked to attempt a whole or well rounded Individual. I’m going to go on a limb here and say this over-emphasis on individualism separated and alienated to the degree causing the failure I see.

What I didn’t see in reading WER, was any particular focus on ‘escaping government control’. I think that is a libertarian prejudice.

That may be a New Communalist ideal rather than expressed by the Catalog?

As you say, WER in many ways prefigured the open ethos, and it is not useful to retro-actively critique them for failing to see the material possibilties of our age.

I applaud what part of the catalog was open, like the financial records. I will be critical with historical practice just as I would existing proprietary methods. These were a bunch of smart guys; even knowing the racial and gender closure at the time; why then could Brand and friends not foresee the goals we’ve set at Open Manufacturing? The Catalog’s purpose seems very close to those of OM. With the p2p and long tail economy it seems obvious now to open up the ways of getting stuff done. Yes, publish the blue print, the bill of materials, list of distributors, accounting records. Open the distribution process, how does it work? On and on, until the material autonomy of the community is stable enough for Individuality to form without being nagged by a bunch of Others. We have personal computers now where anyone in the world has the potential to improve these processes!

Why was this not clear then? Why is it not today, for the most part? There is evidence to suggest Open Manufacturing principles generate more value when opening sourcing the Enterprise.

Michel, clearly you agree now that moving forward in this direction is appropriate, right? Of course, that is subject to the peers that create or members of a business or manufacture a physical product. Regardless, based on the simple observation of people rather having stuff for free, businesses will need to align with this whether they want to or not. Regardless, if people do not share how thier stuff is made and do not see the wealth this generates by securing that one can better produce locally and personally, the P2P movement then will have failed.

Intentional Communities went their own way. While there seems to be a consensus that ‘communes failed’, only some of them did, many also continued to exist in various forms, and I’ve read somewhere that more people live collectively now than in the sixties. This should be verified, but would cast a differnt perspective on the concept of ‘failure’,

Right. I view Intentional Community as a different model altogether. From my experience, which still needs further confromation, is that these communities are proprietary in nature, highly critical of technology and view it as destroying the planet, and mostly stay to themselves. ICs are quietly growing, based on IC.orgs findings.

What’s True About Intentional Communities: Dispelling the Myths
http://www.ic.org/pnp/myths.php

We listed 540 intentional communities in North America in the 1995 edition of our Communities Directory–up from 300 in our 1990/91 edition. Several hundred more communities (who declined to be listed) are in our database. We estimate there are several thousand altogether.

Here is one purpose of that organization I’m particularly focused on at the moment, because I see this one in particular as the weakest link in the grand chain.

The Fellowship for Intentional Community’s Non-profit Purposes
http://fic.ic.org/purposes.php

TO FACILITATE EXCHANGE of information, skills, and economic support among individuals, existing intentional communities, cooperative groups, and newly forming communities;

This organization has failed in that regard from what I can tell. I would revise the first part “TO FACILITATE THE SHARING” instead, of course. When tech savvy open source people apply cyberculture to to the communities world, I see a bright future here.

I view IC.org like a big barrel of idle fuel. They are ready for the next step. I believe what I invision, a vision I hope that shared in one way or another, has the potential to mature as infrastructures taken for granted fails.

The Federation for Egalitarian Community appears to have this potential as well. I can see IC.org having a Federated arm so communities can become more than a directory, but also sharing and trade partners under an ascribed social contract, open source as a matter of course. We just need to define clearly what we mean by open source and consider having one or more community Federations. That general idea is embodied in the IC 2.0 proposal I’m writing. I will blog about it here once its taken shape.

When you fully commit to living with others (lets set the bar at hundreds of others) in a completely new social format, and you share a mission to affect change in the world, you don’t call it failure if you don’t fulfill the mission. You learn.

thanks for writing this. As Howard Rheingold has indicated elswhere in an email, the complexity of a social movement is difficultly summarized in a failure vs. success dichotomy. I was too young at the period to offer any firm judgdment, but I was a regular reader of the Whole Earth Review and have at least one of the Catalogs at home.

Just a few remarks. Whenever dissatisfaction occurs with a mainstream social system, as occured in the sixties, different reactions are possible. The New Left is the active political opposition route, while what you describe as new communalism, a term I haven’t heard before, took the route of actively constructing new lifestyles, both on the individual level, and on a communal level. In my experience, the WER, wasn’t particularly focused on communal life at all, but rather on providing tools and ideas for anyone wanting to change life in concrete ways. I personally think that many things came out of it, even as it did not fundamentally change the power structure of society. Alternative medicine, alternative education, the sense that people could change through personal and collective psychological work, organic farming and permaculture, etc… Lots of these alternatives were strenghtened, both as autonomous practices but also as being accepted, though in diluted forms, by mainstream society.

What I didn’t see in reading WER, was any particular focus on ‘escaping government control’. I think that is a libertarian prejudice. It was more about actively constructing personal and social alternatives, with no particular hostility to government as such. I think the neocon feeling of ‘government is not the solution, but the problem’, came much later, and not particularly through this NC movement.

As you say, WER in many ways prefigured the open ethos, and it is not useful to retro-actively critique them for failing to see the material possibilties of our age. But again, conflating new communalism with the WER may confuse rather different social movements.

Intentional Communities went their own way. While there seems to be a consensus that ‘communes failed’, only some of them did, many also continued to exist in various forms, and I’ve read somewhere that more people live collectively now than in the sixties. This should be verified, but would cast a differnt perspective on the concept of ‘failure’,

Michel