The work of Stewart Brand, founding editor of Whole Earth Catalog and Long Now President, is featured in Access to Tools: Publications from the Whole Earth Catalog, 1968 – 1974 at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art through July 26th.

In 1968, Stewart Brand founded an alternative information service and distribution system within a single publication, called the Whole Earth Catalog. Influenced by the work of Buckminster Fuller, the catalog developed into an extensive reference tool for designing the environment, living spaces, and new media practices. In sections titled “Understanding Whole Systems,” “Shelter and Land Use,” “Communications,” “Community,” and “Nomadics,” the catalog publicized a compendium of useful resources, with a primary focus on books. Drawing from the holdings of the MoMA Library, this exhibition surveys many of these publications and gives a history of the catalog itself.

The New York Times says of the exhibition:

So maybe the time is ripe for a deep and wide reconsideration of the Whole Earth vision. In its generous embrace of theory and practice and its range from the cosmic to the mundane it epitomized the best impulses of American democracy. It was and still might be a great tool for thinking about how to rehabilitate our sadly distressed world.

Much of the show can be viewed on the companion exhibition site.

Maarten Lens-FitzGerald got in touch recently to let us know that someone had created a layer within the Layar augmented reality platform that geo-tags a film shown by Rick Prelinger at his annual Lost Landscapes of San Francisco event.

The film was created shortly before San Francisco’s devastating earthquake by placing an early video camera on the front of a streetcar as it rolled along Market Street toward the city’s Ferry Terminal.

If you open the Layar browser on a smartphone while standing along the route that camera took over a century ago, you’ll see what it’s operator saw – dirt & dust, horses & buggies, people on bikes and even a few early automobiles.

It’s kind of like a real-life Wayback Machine!

Game Designer Daniel Solis has issued a challenge and he’s backing it up with a cash bounty. $1,000 will go to whomever can come up with a thousand-year game:

Create a game. The game can be of any theme or genre you desire, but there is one restriction: You’re creating a “new classic,” like Chess, Tag or card games. So, create a game to be enjoyed by generations of players for a thousand years.

He’s published 8 entries so far and will continue accepting them until July 31st August 31st 02011.

The winner will be announced January 1st 02012.

Entries so far derive inspiration from Go, Taboo, the myth of Pandora’s Box, the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and plenty of other stories and concepts. You can browse the published entrants by month:

• January
• February
• March: (No entries)
• April

While many Japanese towns were completely destroyed by the tsunami in March, several escaped potentially dire fates. Some villages were warned of the dangers of building too close to water by tablets and monoliths erected in the wakes of previous disasters.

According to this AP story, the village of Fudai took a technological brute-force approach, spearheaded by a previous mayor. Kotaku Wamura was mayor of Fudai for 10 terms and, during the 70s, fought city council resistance to augment a 51-foot tall seawall with flood gates of the same height. Wamura had witnessed the 1933 tsunami and was deeply affected by the devastation.

Fudai is fortunate to be located in a valley just narrow enough to be fortified against rising waters. The size and the expense of doing so put many off his plan, but in the end, Wamura won and the floodgates were finished in 1984.

The result last March was minimal damage, isolated mostly to the city’s port, only one missing resident who insisted on checking his boat after the quake, and many new visitors paying respect and expressing gratitude at the grave of Mr. Wamura, who passed away in 1997.

Gawker blog Kotaku did a little digging of their own into Wamura and found a photograph of him, mention that his name means “good luck advantage” and point out some transliteration problems in the AP story.

Somehow I missed this story when it came out (even though it won a Pulitzer),  but today I came across it at random on of all places Jeff Bridges website who wrote a fantastic synopsis.  But as they say, the Dude abides:

Washington, DC Metro Station on a cold January morning in 2007. The man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time approx. 2 thousand people went through the station, most of them on their way to work. After 3 minutes a middle aged man noticed there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried to meet his schedule.

4 minutes later:

The violinist received his first dollar: a woman threw the money in the hat and, without stopping, continued to walk.

6 minutes:

A young man leaned against the wall to listen to him, then looked at his watch and started to walk again.

10 minutes:

A 3-year old boy stopped but his mother tugged him along hurriedly. The kid stopped to look at the violinist again, but the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk, turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children.. Every parent, without exception, forced their children to move on quickly..

45 minutes:

The musician played continuously. Only 6 people stopped and listened for a short while. About 20 gave money but continued to walk at their normal pace. The man collected a total of $32.

1 hour:

He finished playing and silence took over. No one noticed. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.

No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the greatest musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, with a violin worth $3.5 million dollars. Two days before Joshua Bell sold out a theater in Boston where the seats averaged $100.

This is a true story. Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and people’s priorities.

The questions raised:

*In a common place environment at an inappropriate hour, do we perceive beauty?

*Do we stop to appreciate it?

*Do we recognize talent in an unexpected context?

One possible conclusion reached from this experiment could be this:

If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world, playing some of the finest music ever written, with one of the most beautiful instruments ever made.

How many other things are we missing?

Living in modern civilization, it can be easy to sometimes forget just how much *stuff* we rely on to meet our basic needs and just how much scientific sweat and blood it’s all taken to create. Bruce Mau illustrates this in the beginning of his book Massive Change by using the metaphor of modern air travel:

“Every plane crash is a rupture, a shock to the system, precisely because our experience of flight is so carefully designed away from the reality of the event. As we sip champagne, read the morning paper, and settle in before takeoff, we choose not to experience the torque, the thrust, the speed, the altitude, the temperature, the thousands of pounds of explosive jet fuels cradled beneath us, the infinite complexity of the onboard systems, and the very real risks and dangers of takeoff and landing.”

The technological apparatus that is modern civilization, or The Technium as Kevin Kelly calls it, allows us to fly high in style. But, it’s a complicated and often fragile mess designed to channel very powerful forces – and it can fail catastrophically if we aren’t careful. Additionally, it’s taken many generations of accumulated knowledge and expertise to craft and enable such soaring capability.

Referencing that hard-won store of knowledge, Richard Feynman once asked,

“If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words?”

Inspired by Feynman’s question, Seed Magazine asked eleven scientists,

“Imagine—much as Feynman asked his audience—that in a mission to change everyone’s thinking about the world, you can take only one lesson from your field as a guide. In a single statement, what would it be?”

Some interesting themes fall out, as well as some contradicting ideas:

• Paul Ehrlich, Carl Folke and Enric Sala all point out the reciprocity between the human economy and the biosphere, in the seeming hope of illustrating our need to conceptualize the limits in which we as a species operate.
• A psuedo-debate pops up between proponents and critics of reductionism. Robet Sapolsky, Steven Strogatz and George Sugihara weigh in.
• Marc Hauser and Dominic Johnson assert the importance of understanding evolution’s influence on our world and our selves.

It’s an interesting challenge, to distill everything we’ve learned over the last few millennia into a useful sentence. Which theories have been most important? What details would we be most hard-pressed to re-discover? Perhaps the most all-encompassing answer comes from John Wilbanks, vice president of science at Creative Commons:

“Knowledge is a public good and increases in value as the number of people possessing it increases.”

If pondering the essence of modern civilization and technology gets your gears going, don’t miss the Manual for Civilization, a list of projects focused on preserving the technical knowledge it takes to build and maintain the infrastructure on which we depend collected by Long Now’s Alexander Rose or Long Now Board Member Kevin Kelly’s Library of Utility, a proposal to collect such knowledge, and to store it in a place that might have a reasonable chance of surviving the kind of catastrophe that would make its contents necessary. Also: this.

The Aspen Environment Forum is a three day conference produced by the Aspen Institute and the National Geographic Society. Held this year from May 30th through June 2nd, the forum “will provide a critical framework for committed voices to address a significant milestone:  A global population of 7 billion and how to reconcile Earth’s finite resources with its ability to sustain our expanding human needs.”

This year’s speakers include Sylvia Earle, Andrew Revkin, Bill McKibben,  and Long Now’s own Stewart Brand.

Here’s a highlight from 2009 (check out more video highlights here) featuring Nature Conservancy lead scientist M. Sanjayan:

General passes to the Aspen Environment Forum cost $1,500, but Long Now Members have been offered a discounted price – members can send an email to services@longnow.org for more information.

Being in the presence of a really old tree–think 1,000 years or more–inspires awe and, hopefully, an elongating of temporal perspective. Your thoughts are led away from the familiar concerns of yesterday, today and tomorrow, and the lifespan of the tree gradually comes into focus. The rise and fall of cities and scientific paradigms become more relevant than the rise and fall of hairstyles and political buzzwords. And perhaps the younger trees nearby grew from seeds produced by that aged individual. Or, with the help of the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive, perhaps the seedling in your backyard is that aged individual.

The Archangel Ancient Tree Archive, highlighted recently in the New York Times, seeks out the very oldest and largest living individuals of several different tree species–including coastal redwoods and giant sequoias–and clones them. The purpose? Reforestation and genetic archiving. Co-founder David Milarch sees trees as key to the health of water and soil systems. As the New York Times article put it, he “preaches his love for all things arboreal with an evangelical zeal.” Fair enough. Trees play an important role in their ecosystems, just like all parts of any ecosystem do. So why collect the oldest trees? Archangel’s website provides two distinct reasons for this, which seem to stem from the two goals of reforestation and archiving. On the one hand, reforestation efforts benefit from old trees’ “demonstrated longevity.”

The trees that we collect from have coped with the margins of life in their long life span, and in that they will have the greatest health and ability to survive. As they are introduced back into the environment, the seedlings from these trees will have the greatest survivability when planted.

It should be noted, however, that genetics are not the only reason that some trees live longer than others. A tree’s supply of water or sunshine can shepherd it to longevity, and the assertion that seedlings from ancient trees will exhibit superior performance  because their DNA “is essentially a memory for surviving calamity” borders on the Lamarckian. Archangel’s idea for a genetic archive renders a much more interesting perspective, and an interesting format as well: the archive’s ‘data’ (plant DNA) will be stored by clones of the original specimens in groves of living trees, with multiple clones of the same tree growing in various locations so as to avert losing data to a single natural disaster.

We are preserving the best known genetics to give ourselves a chance at something that could be great and something we will learn about for generations to come.

…If we allow these very old trees to tip over and die, we will never have the opportunity to study those genetics in the future to understand why they were able to make it so long and get so big.

…What Archangel is doing is difficult, but we believe in the long run this work will be very valuable.

Regardless of whether or not the genes from these “very old trees” turn out to be any different from the average member of the species, the forward-thinking what-ifs here are laudable. Archangel is taking something awesome and making it available to future generations, recognizing that their knowledge and research methods will most likely be more capable than ours in unexpected ways. It’s not just about preserving trees, it’s about preserving options. And besides…what better thing to copy than a forty-story tall redwood?

After selling only 800 models last year – down from over 10,000 as recently as 02009 – the last typewriter factory in the world (according to The Daily Mail) has closed its doors and halted production. The factory was run by Godrej and Boyce and was based in Mumbai, India. The majority of the typewriters being produced in the last few years were for writers of Arabic in countries where modern PCs have yet to fully penetrate the market.

Despite the demise of industrial production, it seems likely the typewriter will live on. Kevin Kelly once said technologies are immortal and if the collector/maintainer culture that’s already going strong around typewriters is any indication, manually thwacking ink onto paper has a good run ahead of it yet:

• For the real, restored thing there’s myTypewriter.com
• Rarotype Inc. in Sunrise, Florida still manufactures printwheels for use in manual typewriters of many different brands.
• Mr. T pities the early-adopting fool: “With a typewriter from MrTypewriter.com you can rest assured that you have invested in a quality machine that has been fully tested and restored to once again provide many years of reliable service for today’s wordsmiths. “
• You can live in a typewriter factory in Emerson, IL.
• Check out these USB Typewriters for giving your iPad that vintage feel.
• The Early Office Museum explores the history of typewriters.
• IBM has an online timeline describing their contributions to typewriter technology.

(Sent in by Katie Malone – thanks!)

I imagine a library atop a remote mountain that collects the essential information needed to re-learn practical knowledge essential to civilization. This depot, open to anyone who journeys there, is the cultural equivalent of the Svalbard seed bank, a vault on the Arctic Circle that holds frozen seeds of crop plants from around the world. The utilitarian documents in this vault would be the seeds of culture, able to sprout again if needed. It would be the Library of Utility, and it would serve as civilization’s backup.

Most great libraries of today have a broad mandate to be very inclusive. They contain “everything.” This everything is being duplicated in digital form by Google and others as the long-desired Universal Library. But the library at the top of the mountain would be different. It would be a very selective library. It would not contain the world’s great literature, or varied accounts of history, or deep knowledge of ethnic wonders, or speculations about the future. It has no records of past news, no children’s books, no tomes on philosophy. It contains only seeds. Seeds of utilitarian know-how. How to recreate the infrastructure and technology of civilization so far. The library would gather the knowledge needed to recreate itself — all the mechanical structures of brick, mortar, glass — the library itself. One could think of it as a manual for making a physical library with books and paper. Or a manual for reconstruction the infrastructure of civilization. A civilization reboot manual, which has also been discussed at the Long Now Foundation and in various science fiction stories. From the seeds of know-how archived here you could regrow the arts of printing, or metalworking, or plastics, or plywood, or laser discs.

This information is not usually found in libraries, or in books, or even on the web in text. These days much instructional and utilitarian information is conveyed in YouTube clips. Partly because video is a good way to show how something is done, but also because it is much easier to record a video that put things into words and diagrams. But often that ease lowers the quality of instruction. If you had to rely on a university library to find instructions on how to make sheet metal from ore, or even to find and extract the ore, or to make plastic from oil, or to grow silicon to make make a chip, it would be very difficult. Usually such utilitarian knowledge is missing from books, but even when it is present in the library, it is dilute and spread throughout many books or journals. A lot of this utilitarian knowledge is implicit knowledge and passed along outside of written documentation. And when written down, these documents are often not the type to find their way into libraries.

It need not be a giant library. It may be possible to fit all the essential information needed to bootstrap the infrastructure of civilization into 10,000 books or so. And unlike the Universal Library of Google, it would be on paper. In a century or so, paper-based books will be rare. But paper books will outlast any digital platform and paper requires the least amount of technology to access. Paper will be universally readable at any period. You can’t say that about floppy disks, CD-Roms, and PDFs.

But rather than containing merely shelves of books, this Library of Utility would contain sequences of books. Depending on where you wanted to start, you would visit different documents. If you already knew how to make glue, you could immediately start the instructions on making plywood. But if you did not know how to make water-proof glue, you would begin at a different point. Or if you knew glue and wood spinning, but did not know about hydraulic presses, you’d get a different set of instructions. That multi-forking seems pretty hypertext; would not digital be better for this? Yes, it would be better, but would be done in paper as a back up.

Perhaps the Library of Utility is usually sealed airtight, say through the winter, and it is opened a few times, or a few months, a year for adding books and research. This is a 10,000-year Library, encased in an impermeable shell that could last for hundreds of years without human attention if it came to that. So the Library of Utility would be built to house the most essential 10,000 books for 10,000 years, a library of practical knowledge that could be bootstrapped to restart civilization at any point it might be needed.

There is no need to wait for the Library to be built at the top of the mountain. It could be started now, in any garage. What books would you bring to it if you could?

(The image on top is of small monastery in the Himalayas, near Paro, Bhutan. There were only a few books in it. The second image is of the Svalbard seed bank. No books, only seeds.)

This article was cross posted from The Technium.