Comment by ghc
3 days ago
If you look at the first 10 years of Whole Earth Review, starting in 1985, it's startling to see the similarities to the issues of today.
January 1985: Computers as Poison - "It is not our hand that we put into the computer, it is our attention."
July 1985: Digital Retouching - "The end of photography as evidence of anything"
Winter 1985: "Islam: Beyond the Stereotypes"
Spring 1986: "Peering into the age of Transparency" - about space surveillance
Summer 1986: “This text tries to explain how minds work. How can intelligence emerge from non-intelligence? To answer that, I’ll show that you can build a mind from many little parts, each mindless by itself.”
Fall 1986: The Fringes of Reason - Strange myths and eccentric science
Winter 1986: AmerRuss - Joining America and Russia into one country
Summer 1987: What is real & A No-Cash Economy that Works
Fall 1987: Doing Drag & Male Identity
Summer 1988: The Far Left & Far Right Converge Summer 1988: The Rights of Robots
Summer 1989: Is the body obsolete
Summer 1991: Electronic Democracy
Winter 1991: Questioning Technology
Fall 1992: Artificial Life
Whole Earth published a whole spectrum of ideas, so you can cherry pick and find things that were prescient of the trouble we would find ourselves in. But overall the publication held a very optimistic view that stands at odds with present day reality.
I'm just looking at the covers, listed by publication date. I'm not cherry picking from inside the magazines. I was too young to really remember the 80s or early 90s so I'm just surprised that people were worried about the same things back then, as if only the technology form factor has changed. The notion of computers as attention traps I find especially surprising given the state of personal computing in 1985.