Whole Earth Magazine is having a cash crunch. The Spring 2003 issue is all ready to go, but there isn’t enough money for printing and mailing. I must admit, I’ve let my connection to Whole Earth fade a bit. I subscribed for several years, and I’ve always had a deep respect for the attitudes of the magazine and the people involved.

Unfortunately, as they note, it’s very tough for a magazine like them to make a go of it:

The fact is that magazines that are directed at audiences of above-average education and intelligence and that aren’t 50 percent advertising don’t make money. Harper’s, The Nation, The New Yorker , or almost any other magazine you can name requires angels, or sugar daddies/mommies, or a deep-pockets publishing empire to stay afloat.

Then, Whole Earth has this stubborn tendency to be difficult to pigeonhole. While you can’t say they are apolitical, they don’t really engage the political systems directly, so one kind of funding (that probably accounts for a lot of The Nation‘s support) doesn’t go their way. Maybe Whole Earth‘s shaggy, hippyish roots make it harder for them to find well-heeled supporters of the sort that contribute to Harper’s. And I know the main way the New Yorker makes money is by selling their subscriber list over and over and over again.

If you’ve never heard of the Whole Earth, go check out the web site. You can download most of the pending issue, revisiting the well known meme of “Singularity,” coined by Vernor Vinge, whose speech on the subject was published in the Whole Earth itself ten years ago. It also includes thoughts on the idea from Bruce Sterling and Cory Doctorow.

There’s also an interview with Jaron Lanier. Here’s his answer to “What keeps Jaron Lanier awake at night?”

That we’re losing sight of an
extremely simple common sense idea—that there’s a set of ideas
(democracy, technological optimism, entrepreneurship, the sense we can
find commonality through science and exploration) which have provided
us with almost everything good about our world. That those ideas are fundamental
to any hopes we have. The anti-globalization sort of
people have become entirely too cynical. They just view the whole class
of entrepreneurial and technologically optimistic people with suspicion.
As a result, they discount the very real almost utopian possibilities if
we all learn better ways of working together. Then there are the religious
fundamentalists, who just seem to want to go back to the twelfth century.
Nobody’s advocating for progress and problem-solving and the really
good things about modernity.

Ironically, the Whole Earth has never lost sight of this — in fact, it’s kind of their core belief. If these kinds of things keep you awake at night as well, you should consider offering them some support. If you’re willing to take the gamble that they’ll get out of this crunch you could subscribe, or you might consider purchasing their 30th anniversary commemorative reprint of the original Whole Earth Catalog. Or you could just make an outright donation.