The materialization of counterculture: Whole Earth Catalog

Abstract

This article deals with the materialization of the Counterculture of the 1960s in the United States, in the form of a series of publications that brought together different alternative communities, with the objects and theories that circulated among them. We sought to follow, according to the Actor-Network Theory (LATOUR, 2005; LAW, 1992), the mediating items considered most relevant at the time by the participants themselves. We analyze the publication Whole Earth Catalog and how it articulated a radical appropriation by alternative communities of cutting-edge technologies, such as computers, as well as ancestral technologies. In addition, we seek to understand how the Whole Earth Catalog put in circulation objects, theories and images about the entire Earth, inside and outside these communities, publishing, for example, the first images of the planet Earth seen from the outside.