Why Haven’t We Heard the Whole Earth Yet?

In 1966 Stewart Brand, then best known as an acid pioneer associated with Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and an artist working with the avant-garde multimedia art collective USCO, had an epiphany.

Having dropped some LSD on a roof in San Francisco he looked down from ‘300 feet and 200 micrograms up’ and realised that from there he could see that the earth was curved. ‘I had the idea that the higher you go the more you can see the earth as round’.

Brand realised that despite ten years of space exploration there had as yet been no public photographs of the whole earth. His first reaction was to print up a batch of badges with the legend ‘Why Haven’t We Seen a Photograph of the Whole Earth Yet?’

His next, more far-reaching response was to found a combination of magazine and mail order catalogue, known as the Whole Earth Catalog, promising ‘access to tools’ to help produce alternative forms of being and living. The catalog was crucial for the extraordinary coming together of acid and silicon in Northern California that would result in the personal computer revolution and lay the ground for our current hyper-technologised society.

In 2005, nearly 40 years after Brand had his LSD epiphany, Google released Google Earth, a program enabling the user to view satellite images of almost any part of the earth. The default view when the program is started shows an image of the earth suspended in space that is similar to the photograph of the earth taken from the moon used by Brand for the cover of the Whole Earth Catalogs.

Google Earth is the realisation of a fantasy of, as the narration to Thomson and Craighead’s film Flat Earth, puts it, ‘the age old dream; to look down from above’, as well as ‘the dream of flying; the dream of transcendent mastery’. It is the earth seen from a bomber plane or even a missile and is a reminder that the space program that made possible the photograph of the whole earth used by Brand for the catalogs, was initiated largely to prevent the Soviet Union gaining military control of space.

It is also a reminder that the computer technologies taken up by the counterculture to help produce the personal computer and internet revolution were themselves products of Cold War military funding, especially through the Advanced Projects Research Agency (ARPA) of the American Defense Department. Thus there is a much closer relation than the founders of Google would probably care to admit between the technologies that enabled Google Earth and those that are facilitating the bombing of Iraq.

One of the consequences of war waged through such means is that the human suffering it entails is concealed from the public and thus from the volatility of public opinion. We are allowed to forget that there are humans below the bombs, with voices and stories to tell.

This is exactly what Thomson and Craighead’s Flat Earth achieves as it elegantly alters Google Earth, by linking a bomb's-eye view of the lives of those in the places observed, as recorded in blogs. We get glimpses of the lives of American and Japanese teenagers, an African villager, a London policeman and, perhaps most poignantly, a woman in Tehran, anticipating future American bombing.

In giving us these glimpses Flat Earth acts as a vital corrective to the ocular imperialism of Google Earth and, by extension, of the internet in general, which is concealed from us by its counter-cultural credentials.

Charlie Gere is Reader in New Media Research and Director of the Institute for Cultural Research at Lancaster University.