Hippy Internet - The Whole Earth Catalog
Seriously...
BBC
4.1 • 885 Ratings
🗓️ 22 December 2015
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sukhdev Sandhu travels to the epicentres of countercultural America in Woodstock and San Francisco to tell the story of a book of hippy philosophy that defined the 1960s and intimated how the internet would grow long before the web arrived. With Luc Sante, Eliot Weinberger, Kenneth Goldsmith, Ed Sanders, Lois Britton, and Fred Turner Producer: Tim Dee.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hi, welcome to the Seriously Podcast with Me Testament. |
| 0:08.0 | Before we get to the main event, I just wanted to let you know about the |
| 0:10.7 | Seriously website. Check out BBC.co. UK |
| 0:13.7 | forward slash seriously and there you can find documentaries to feed the |
| 0:17.2 | hungriest of appetites and the most curious of minds. If you want to get in |
| 0:20.4 | touch with us use the hashtag R4, we'd love to hear from you. |
| 0:24.9 | And remember, if you subscribe to Seriously, you get two documentaries from the mighty BBC |
| 0:29.1 | Radio 4 every week straight to your listening device. |
| 0:32.1 | Brilliant, right? |
| 0:33.4 | Now on with the show. It was a coffee table book for people who didn't have coffee tables. |
| 0:47.0 | Yeah rabbit raising, horseshoeing. |
| 0:54.0 | Real farmers were not reading the holers catlock. |
| 0:57.0 | Elliot Weinberger, Poet translator, critic, is looking at a large format book on his |
| 1:07.2 | kitchen rather than his coffee table at his home in New York City. It's a paperback but a big oversized one with the heft of an old |
| 1:16.9 | Atlas. Its 450 densely printed pages are brittle and yellowing. Its cover is mostly black and sports a |
| 1:27.1 | photograph of the earth taken from space. The title in white letters above reads The Whole Earth Catalog. |
| 1:38.0 | Page after page after page is full of things to buy, things to learn, things to think about, things to dream of. |
| 1:47.0 | I think the Whole Earth Catalog was very American and probably couldn't have come from someplace else. |
| 1:55.0 | First of all, the model is the Sears robot catalog from the 19th century |
| 2:00.0 | and people who lived in rural areas, people who lived on farms were dependent on this |
| 2:08.0 | fat catalog that arrived once a year. Secondly, I think that the motto for the United States is really not |
| 2:17.8 | Eplerius Unum but it's do it yourself. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.