Former editors | Kevin Kelly, Howard Rheingold,Ruth Kissane, Peter Warshall, Anne Herbert (writer) |
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Categories | Environment, Science, Politics |
Frequency | Quarterly |
First issue | January 1985 |
Final issue — Number |
Spring 2003 Issue 110 |
Company | Point Foundation |
Country | United States |
Based in | Sausalito, California |
Language | English |
Website | http://www.wholeearth.com |
ISSN | 1097-5268 |
Whole Earth Review (Whole Earth after 1997) was a magazine which was founded in January 1985 after the merger of the Whole Earth Software Review (a supplement to the Whole Earth Software Catalog) and the CoEvolution Quarterly. All of these periodicals are descendants of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog.
The last published hard copy issue of the magazine was the Winter 2002 issue. The next issue (Spring, 2003) was planned but never published in hard copy format. Bruce Sterling attempted to solicit funds for this issue by writing that "friends at Whole Earth Magazine have experienced a funding crunch so severe that the Spring 2003 special issue (#111) on Technological Singularity, edited by Alex Steffen of the Viridian curia, hasn't been printed and distributed. Whole Earth is soliciting donations to get the issue printed, and has put some of the content online." Eventually, elements of the 2003 issue appeared only in digital format on the Whole Earth website.
Fred Turner discusses the creation of the Whole Earth Review in From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Turner notes that in 1983, The Whole Earth Software Catalog was proposed by John Brockman as a magazine which "would do for computing what the original [Whole Earth Catalog] had done for the counterculture: identify and recommend the best tools as they emerged." The first issue was released in the Fall of 1984. The Whole Earth Software Catalog was a business failure, however, and was only published twice, with only three of The Whole Earth Software Review supplements published . At the same time, another Brand publication, CoEvolution Quarterly evolved out of the original Whole Earth Supplement in 1974. In 1985, Brand merged CoEvolution Quarterly with The Whole Earth Software Review to create the Whole Earth Review.