The intelligent workshop
Electronics, restoration, fault-finding, measurement, open hardware, robots, salvage and the communities that teach these skills.
A first working edition · 03 September 2026
New Earth
Catalog
A field guide to tools, systems and possible lives after the agentic turn.
For people
making a life
worth living
making a life
worth living
What this is
A catalogue before it is full.
This is the first assembled form of the New Earth Catalog: its cover, editorial promise, table of contents and the pattern every future entry will follow.
The original Whole Earth Catalog helped people find tools for lives outside the standard pattern. This project carries that question forward into a world of intelligent machines, robotics, abundant energy, advanced medicine and more available time.
It does not prescribe one approved future. It builds a wide field of possible lives—practical, attractive and honest about what exists, what is emerging and what remains to be invented.
Edition status. Structure and direction are established. Most entries are intentionally open: this edition is the frame into which research, historical echoes, field reports and recommendations will be added.
The map
Contents
The catalogue begins with the conditions of life, moves through capability and relationship, then opens into travel, inner life and futures that do not yet exist. Every major section will carry a small Then / Now / Next historical echo.
A necessary question
Homelessness, itinerancy and the right to live differently.
Place and shelter includes conventional homes, but it must also include people who live rough, move between places, or remain outside the housing system by preference, mistrust, habit or necessity.
Some people are homeless because they are unsafe, displaced, ill, exploited or excluded. Others could accept a government-provided suburban home yet choose street life, urban anonymity, mobility or independence from institutions. These realities can overlap; none should be simplified.
When material security becomes available, the question is not whether everyone can be made to settle. It is whether people can choose warmth, storage, sanitation, privacy, transport, companionship, land or a permanent home without losing the freedom to live otherwise.
Proposed entry
Abundance without settlement
What happens to homelessness and itinerant life when material security is available to everyone? Will some people choose a conventional home, while others continue living in streets, parks, vehicles, camps or temporary settlements?
The connective tissue
What runs through the catalogue.
People do not live in sections. They combine regions of the activity galaxy. These recurring strands connect the pages and keep the catalogue grounded in complete systems.
Maintenance of everything
Homes, batteries, vehicles, ecosystems, knowledge, relationships and the social infrastructure that makes freedom durable.
A wide field of lives
Automated homes, makers, scholars, artists, carers, explorers, technologists, recluses and people who want a quiet life.
The unit of the catalogue
Every entry should open a door.
A catalogue entry is not an advertisement. It is a compact piece of orientation: what something does, who it is for, what it depends on, and what it might make possible.
The first populated spreads will use the Then / Now / Next rhythm: a small historical reference, the current capability, and the possible extension into a post-agentic life.
Available nowEmergingPrototypeSpeculativeProposed
Blank entry card / ready to fill
Entry title goes here
One clear sentence describing the capability or possible life.
- Capability
- What does it let a person or group do?
- For whom
- Who might choose it, and who might be excluded?
- Status
- Available now / emerging / prototype / speculative / proposed
- Needs
- Cost, energy, skills, infrastructure and maintenance
- Evidence
- Sources, field reports, tests and known uncertainty
- Questions
- Risk, law, ethics, alternatives and control
The editorial method
Then. Now. Next.
Each major section will place the new work beside a small, source-linked historical echo from the audited Whole Earth Catalog. The past gives us a measuring stick; it does not dictate the future.
THEN — What did people once reach for? What did it cost, and what capability did it represent?
NOW — What is available, and what has changed in cost, access, scale, safety or infrastructure?
NEXT — What becomes possible when intelligence, energy and automation are widely available? What still needs to be invented?
Rights-aware by design. Historical scans in working prototypes are reference material. Final publication will use factual citation, short attributed excerpts, public-domain or licensed material, permission, or newly made imagery.
A first image for the cover wall
“The catalogue is not a list of approved lifestyles. It is a wide field.”
The work ahead is to fill that field with enough evidence and practical detail that a reader can move from recognition to experiment.
Next pages
Now we populate it.
The frame is in place. The next production pass is a small batch of fully researched entries and three designed Then / Now / Next spreads, followed by the source-linked sections that make the catalogue useful rather than merely beautiful.
View the three-spread prototype ↗