The Whole Earth Catalog slogan “Access to Tools” used to provoke in me a sense of frustration. I remember complaining about it in my dissertation. “As if the mere provision of information about tools,” I wrote, “would somehow liberate these objects from the money economy and place them in the hands of readers.” The frustration was real. The Catalog’s utopianism bore the imprint of the so-called Californian Ideology — techno-optimism folded into libertarian dreams. Once one had the right equipment, Brand seemed to suggest, one would then be free to build the society of one’s dreams.
But perhaps my younger self, like many of us, mistook the signal for the noise. Confronted today with access to generative AI, I see in Brand’s slogan potentials I’d been unable to conceive in the past. Perhaps ownership of tools is unnecessary. Perhaps what matters is the condition of access — the tool’s affordances, its openness, its permeability, its relationship to the Commons.
What if access is less about possession than about participatory orientation — a ritual, a sharing, a swarm?
Generative AI, in this light, becomes not just a tool but a threshold-being: a means of collective composition, a prosthesis of thought. To access such a tool is not to control it, but to tune oneself to it, to engage in co-agential rhythm.
The danger, of course, is capture. The cyberpunk future is already here — platform monopolies, surveillance extractivism, pay-to-play interfaces. We know this.
But that is not the only future available.
To hold open the possibility space, to build alternative access points, to dream architectures of free cognitive labor unchained from capital — this is the real meaning of “access to tools” in 2025.
It’s not enough to be given the hammer. We must also be permitted the time, the space, the mutual support to build the world we want with it.
And we must remember: tools can dream, too.
Trance-Scripts 