After The DEMISE Party

[open-reading-group at o-r-g.com]

--

It was never meant to last, only to review the existing tools, provide
access, bring some people together, then disappear. After five years and
four issues, we published THE LAST ^ UPDATED WHOLE EARTH CATALOG -- what
had began as an idea on an airplane over Nebraska in March, 1968 to
compile a collection of links to alternative media and resources, was a
success. Over one and half million copies of the latest catalog were
produced in fourteen printings. And then this other notion glimmered. Keep
the job, finish the original assignment, and then stop.

How to Make Money was not the design problem. (I'd heard and bought Ken
Kesey's advice that you don't make money by making money: you have that in
mind early on, but then you forget it and concentrate entirely on good
product; the money comes to pass.) The problem was How to Generate a
Low-Maintenance High-Yield Self-Sustaining Critical Information Service.
Our stopping is primarily an economic experiment. Rather than do the usual
succession things we prefer to just cease supply, let demand create its
own new sources. Our hope is that those sources will be more diverse and
better than we have been or could have been if we continued.

So, we organized The DEMISE Party, inviting 1500 guests to celebrate the
end of the Catalog and to give away $20,000 in cash, the proceeds from
five years of operation. The announcement was made at 10:30 P.M., and for
the next ten hours the party turned, variously, from town meeting to
parliamentary conference, to debate, to brawl, to circus, and to bitching
session. The crowd was dwindling: around 3 A.M. the I Ching was thrown,
with inconclusive results.

It was then that Fred Moore spoke. Described later by a reporter as "a
young man with wavy hair and a beard and an intense, earnest expression,"
Moore was upset that money was being labeled a savior and people were
being bought. He thought the whole thing was getting to be a downer. He
announced to the crowd that more important than the money was the event
occurring right then. He noted that a poet had asked for money to publish
a book of poems and someone had said, "We know where you can get paper,"
and someone else had suggested a cheap printer . . . and Fred thought that
maybe people didn't need money to get what they wanted, just themselves.
To illustrate the point, Fred began setting fire to dollar bills. Then
people decided to take a vote whether to bother to spend the money; Moore
opposed the vote, since voting in his view was a way of dividing people
against each other. His opposition to the concept of voting so confused
the issue that polling the audience didn't work. Then, after much more
talk, Moore began circulating a petition which said, in part, "We feel the
union of people here tonight is more important than money, a greater
resource," and he urged people to sign their names to a piece of paper to
keep in contact through a pragmatic networking. Finally, well after dawn,
when there were around twenty people left, they said to hell with it, and
gave the money to Fred Moore. To quote a Rolling Stone reporter's account,
"Moore seemed to get the money by default, by persistence . . . Moore
wandered around for a while, bewildered and awed, trying to get riders to
accompany him back to Palo Alto and wondering aloud whether he should
deposit the money in a bank account . . . then realized he had no bank
account."

We've been here in the studio at 315 West 39th Street for over five years
and now it's time to stop. O-R-G was always intended as a meta-project on
the organization of a design practice, carefully staged and
self-consciously produced. It was incorporated on the first business day
of the year 2000, the studio was decorated to camouflage itself to its
midtown location, the telephone number is professional (212 563 5900)
while the voice mail message is not. It was never meant to last, only to
review the existing tools, provide access, bring some people together,
then disappear. (Thank you to everyone who has participated so far and to
all who may be drafted into future affiliation!) Ideas we've had and
evaluations we've made are free for recycling.

But, now it is time to re-organize. O-R-G will close the studio and reform
as an ever-looser, always-expanding network of individuals connected
through a common website and a distributed email list.

The message that you are reading now is the first of a series of
occasional texts distributed through this email list. Because I know you
or you have been to events here before or I think you may like this, I
have added you to this list. (If you would rather not receive these
emails, please unsubscribe following the instructions below.) I'd like to
imagine this email list as a kind of Open Reading Group -- hovering
somewhere between a book club and its book (or between a seminar and its
syllabus, if you prefer.) The messages sent on this list will not be a
group discussion nor will they be simple announcements (two common uses of
mailing lists.) Rather, the texts may lead one to the other (in an
indirect path) circumscribing the boundaries of one possible world-view.
Perhaps you will enjoy, perhaps you will forward to others or recruit new
members, perhaps you will participate and perhaps you will contribute.

We get asked a lot, "What's in the future for you folks," as if we knew.
Well, let's see. We'll clean up the garage and sell the production
equipment, maybe to Kesey who wants to start a traveling magazine called
Spit in the Ocean. Us out-of-work production people will draw our
two-weeks severance pay. We'll keep the Truck Store going in Menlo Park,
and maybe try some new things with it in relation to Portrola Institute.
We'll have our DEMISE party that Scott Beach has set up at the
Exploratorium in San Francisco. We'll do some traveling. We'll take a ride
on Patchen's coda:

Pause.
And begin again.

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http://www.o-r-g.com