[T]he tactics that Brand deployeed in the Catalog—peer production, aggregation, and curation—became models for digitized processes that have dramatically enlarged and diversified membership in the public sphere. At the same time however, the Catalog and community it served should remind us of the hidden costs of putting our hopes for social change in the technology-empowered, expressive individual and ideology of holism.
Fred Turner at his Web site, paper (PDF) from an exhibition at Haus der Kulturen der Welt. The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside. (via protoslacker)