The whole earth and apartheid: Media, peer-production, segregation

Abstract

This article revisits arguments in new media studies regarding how the Whole Earth Catalog and publications from the appropriate technology (AT) movement established models of networked media communication antecedent to peer-production. By emphasizing the agricultural pedagogy of back-to-the-land and rural developmental print-based communication networks, this article traces how a group of White, educated South African environmentalists, the Environmental and Development Agency (EDA), produced humanitarian AT manuals to circulate in the segregated areas of apartheid in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Reading together archival materials with Stuart Hall’s theoretical response to the historiography of imperialism and land dispossession in South Africa, Pringle argues that EDA’s print-based media communication network enacted a cultural effort consistent with what would become peer-production, and that this case study is instructive for contemporary critiques of capital-intensive digital agriculture in postcolonial contexts.