I had a lot more respect for Fuller before I learned about his "don't try to change behavior, technology will fix the problem" approach to nearly every societal ill including climate change.
I don't think that's a fair characterization of his concept (which he called ephemeralization), e.g. "to do more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing." He was critical of the lack of effectiveness of politics, arguing that energy put into it is unlikely to result in any real change. He showed that one could promote a radical new technological idea, and be seen as a non-threatening 'out of touch nerd' to all sides of a contentious political issue like climate change. This allows you to build cultural momentum and funding towards a solution and avoid the polarizing gridlock of politics.
He absolutely intended to radically change behavior, by replacing our current way of doing things with a very different better way, that uses less resources. Not just the same thing somehow miraculously not problematic.
Am I wrong to think that there's a very strong, quiet, deliberate push against anything 'idealist' or 'utopian', more and more?
It feels like I'm seeing a lot of articles lately that get deep thinkers quite wrong, or which use their personal character flaws to invalidate their ideas.
Nuance as a concept seems to be dying more now even than under Trump, and it feels artificial. Deliberately instigated.
No, I think you’re picking up on something I’ve observed as well. It seems like trying to look deeper into nuances and subtleties is, more often than a few years ago, dismissed as wishy washy or equivocations rather than an attempt to understand and enumerate true complexities. I think this started before the Trump era, but the the political all-or-nothing polarization that has followed since then seems to bleed over into even non political things.
Pseudo/non-scientific is one of the more popular beliefs out there, and is often quite ironic if one considers how the abilities of science has increased over time.
> It feels like I'm seeing a lot of articles lately that get deep thinkers quite wrong, or which use their personal character flaws to invalidate their ideas.
I completely agree... it's very frustrating seeing this happen to many thinkers that had a strong influence on me. I've recently seen similar 'takedowns' of Thoreau, Nietzsche, Carl Jung, Kipling, and many others that grossly misrepresent the ideas these people had, mention some personal failings, and then conclude that these people did nothing of value.
It's incredible that people writing these articles feel entitled to write a dismissal/rebuttal of a deep thinker, when they haven't even taken the time to understand the ideas.
I have the same feeling. Although, tbh, to me it seems that it has been going on for a while. Maybe over a decade or so. Sort of post-modern nihilism and obsession with negative.
World is changing, but it doesn't seem to be improving for many. And if you suggest that the direction is wrong, you are accused of being reactionary or worse.
One way is if technology creates new things that influence culture, such as the automobile, or makes things abundant that were relatively scarce before, such as industrial meat production.
We're burning fossil fuels because we figured out the technology to mine and use them.
It's an extremely reasonable POV considering that he doesn't exclude human behavior as a variable. Unfortunately, most CC extremists do this to such a degree that their arguments are laughable/psychologically concerning.
People aren't going to (and frankly, shouldn't have to if there's an option/solution) dial back their lifestyle unless they're forced at the barrel of a gun or it happens by circumstance. That it's even possible to rely on technology as a solution is a good thing and makes sense.
Why make life miserable if you don't have to? And to be clear: we absolutely don't. Any miserable outcome is redirecting technology away from a solution (e.g., safe, abundant nuclear energy) towards technocratic authoritariaism (digital IDs, CBDCs, etc) and other psychopathic control systems that rely on extreme subjugation of human beings.
> I had a lot more respect for Fuller before I learned about his "don't try to change behavior, technology will fix the problem" approach
Perhaps that view is correct, it is just that most of the people who subscribe to this philosophy are trying to solve different problems (e.g. to accrue wealth and power) while most of the people who abhor that attitude have effectively abdicated control over some of the most powerful tools to instigate change.
The reality is that you cannot change the behaviour of other people. All that you can do is add stimuli to encourage positive behaviours and remove stimuli that encourages negative behaviours. Technology is simply one of the tools in the toolbox.
Yet another post hating on Fuller without understanding his work or ideas. I would like to quote what I posted two weeks ago about this:
> I think there is a lot of desire to 'cancel' historical tech visionaries like Fuller nowadays, because we are all burned out, depressed, and disengaged- feeling that our efforts have no real effect, and are pointless. It's easier to say people like Fuller didn't really do much, than to admit that we are capable of so much more.
> Instead of thinking of him as a con-artist and self promoter, realize that his actions also fit someone that - well into his late 80s, still felt the joy, open mindedness, and limitless possibilities that young kids feel, and is usually burned out of us. He was so excited about what was possible!
These articles aren't "cancelling" Fuller, they're just dispelling some of his mythology. Indeed, there may be a modern trend towards disillusionment with self-proclaimed visionaries, but that's not necessarily any worse (or better) than what came before. We can evaluate Fuller's legacy with clear eyes and manage to conclude that, while his energy and enthusiasm was laudable, that idealism alone will not save the world.
(And I say this as someone whose favorite map projection is, by far, the Dymaxion map.)
Agree. No one is trying to cancel him. It's just his legacy is greatly overinflated and his inventions had minimal or no impact on everyday life. It goes to show the power of marketing and perseverance if anything.
The thing that this article mentioned and that your comment doesn't pick up on is that there is a new biography out on Fuller. This article is a quasi review, and the contents of the new book doesn't consist solely of uncritical praise. It's a proper biography and contains details that weren't widely discussed before. Unsurprising: not everything about a person's life will be good.
Opining about why people are talking about the less rosy aspects of Fuller's life right now is like if you transported yourself back to the release of Isaacson's biography on Jobs and concerned yourself with why people were discussing the negative details regarding the incidents that Isaacson wrote about.
The author worked with bfi.org to write the book. Calling this "hating on Fuller without understanding his work or ideas" or an attempt to cancel him is silly. (Not least of all because, you know, he's dead.)
Thanks for the context. I have been confused to see so many seemingly out of the blue critical posts about Fuller recently, and wasn't aware of this biography. I'm sure he's far from a perfect person... but his ideas have really had a positive impact on my life, and it would be a real shame if he was relabeled as a con artist that created nothing of value, thus discouraging others from benefiting form his books and ideas.
This article isn't really about Bucky Fuller so much as it is about a 21st century skeptic's view of technological optimism. The criticisms feel weak unless you are predisposed against his philosophy.
In so far as the critique has any merit, it comes from comparisons to him and others who make careers out of commentary and punditry (inherently self-aggrandizing professions). I think that type of work is actually legitimate, though it is a) basically what publications like Slate and TNR are for and b) not really a complete summary of Fuller's work, which succeeded in genuine contributions to architecture.
I was actually thinking of him just the other day when I realized that over the last decade or two that I've started to think of my philosophy as "Shithouse Earth" from when Jim Morrison said he was just looking to get his kicks in before the whole shithouse went up in flames. I've noticed that that seems to be how we all operate now, though not many will admit it; perhaps not even to themselves.
Quite a long way we've come from Fuller's Spaceship Earth ideas indeed.
I’m noticing it migrating into something more zen, I look to fully experience each day
Probably has to do with growing older as well
Growing up there was a sense that changing how the world worked was just out of reach, the birth of the PC & Internet made it seem like just a matter of time
Now I appreciate more and more how very far out of my control it all is
Which has helped me zoom in on where my choices do make an impact
I wouldn’t say I’m more optimistic because of it, but I am more grateful
Inventing a public persona for fun and profit is a tradition in America (I can't speak for other countries.) I read a really good book on the topic many years ago: "Inventing Mark Twain: The Lives of Samuel Langhorne Clemens." I should read it again, because it was very interesting. Ben Franklin was another one from humble beginnings that turned himself into a world renown Parisian diplomat and inventor, among many other things.
Edit: my favorite story of self-reinvention is the story of Korla Pandit. I love it because it's something I would have done.
Whoa now! Just because they’ve got a bizarre phobia doesn’t mean that we’ve got to jump straight to sterilization. (Do we even know if the phobia is heritable?)
Back when all the youfs were swallowing neodymium bearing balls for lulz, I ended up going down the "bucky balls" and related rabbit hole on wikipedia. The article on Buckminster Fuller just screams PR astroturf - having read several times in sequence, I still had no idea who tf he was or what is he notable for.
New age techno woowoo with tessellated spheres is my lasting impression.
When they disparage Fuller being in a line-up in an Apple Commercial that includes Dylan, Einstein, Muhammad Ali - my first thought is that it's not that he doesn't fit in because he's not actually notable but that he does fit in - those people notability are also a product of PR. Dylan in particular is in the business of 'image'. Ali for sure and even Einstein's fame was hugely out of proportion with his actual contributions. MLK's job was to grab minds (for a good cause). I used to hate sales and maybe most engineers do but it's really a fact of human existence.
Well I considered my wording and maybe it's the wrong word but for example, Maxwell isn't well known beyond people who are interested in science. So although Einstein's contributions were great there are many many others who don't have the PR.
The radome at the airport here in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil is a geodesic dome. I imagine there must be thousands more around the planet. This idea and the philosophy behind it had, and have, legs.
His last book was a group biography of three science-fiction authors (Robert Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and Isaac Asimov) and the writer-editor John W. Campbell. These men, like Fuller, interpreted advances in specialized fields for the public, making forceful arguments about the future, which they said would be science-driven, tech-enabled, (mostly) better in every way. This worked, in part, because these guys had something: preternatural confidence, and personal charisma.
These sort of people, like L. Ron Hubbard, died off because of increased skepticism and increased transparency. After ww2 you had this huge credulous population, and with considerable purchasing power due the post-war property and economic boom. The internet, and scandals such as Watergate and perceived hypocrisy of religious and political leaders and institutions, made people more skeptical overall, and also made it easier for people to verify claims.
Modern versions of this type of person exist, they're just pessimistic. The latest rising star in this category I've encountered is Peter Zeihan, a man who writes extensively about geopolitics and forecasts a great deal of doom and gloom (though America will be fine, he says, which helps his sales I'm sure). IIRC his latest book was one of the best-selling non-fiction books this year.
He's funny, explains complex topics in a way that's understandable to lay people, and gives the impression of knowing his business quite well.
In reality, the vast majority of his predictions over the past two decades have not come true e.g. saying China, Russia, and Canada would all break up by 2020. He is also wrong about specific technical claims e.g. how efficient certain renewable technologies can be in different locales (I have enough of a background to check some of these figures by hand).
> In reality, the vast majority of his predictions over the past two decades have not come true e.g. saying China, Russia, and Canada would all break up by 2020.
Two decades? Is there some other source for these predictions other than the book series he kicked off 8 years ago?
The claims in his 2014 book are much more measured:
- Russia needs to deal with Ukraine by 2020 (one of his few concrete timelines, a couple years off)
- Increased Albertan autonomy will enter mainsteam political discussion (Danielle Smith)
- China will run into issues from an unstable financial system (Evergrande)
I think it's clear his background is not technical, he's more than a little hyperbolic, but I don't think he does as poorly as you mark him. Unless he has some other more aggressive set of predictions than the ones I've found, he still has a good 30 years before he can safely be called a hack.
It may be easier to verify claims, but I think the last several years have established that’s only true if you both really want to know the truth and place faith in the right sources.
I attended a lecture by Buckminster Fuller when I was thirteen, in Burlington, VT. I was starstruck and inspired. I used a spaced repetition method to partially memorize his talk and reproduced part of it for my science class the following day.
He spoke about putting a dome over Winooski, and showed artists renditions of it. He bounced a tensegrity sphere. He spoke of his 50-year experiment (from the moment he chose not to commit suicide and instead see if he could do good in the world).
I have, all my life, been influenced by his slightly nutty intellectual spirit.
Not word for word. But it was a speech about his project: doing more with less. He spoke about his Dymaxion car and how it met its tragic end, and his Dymaxion houses idea. He said a lot about domes and the benefits thereof. He was very keen to tell us about triangles and tensegrity. He may have shown his Dymaxion map.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadStep 2 : live it
It's an effective algorithm. Maybe even better than "invent a bunch of stuff".
The face and memes live for a thousand years. The Dymaxion fades pretty fast.
Ironically, though we are obsessed with machinery and endlessly discuss it, study it and work at it, it is only a tiny corner of our world.
Which means that villains are very attractive right now. Somebody you can accuse of something heinous. Because a victim needs a victimizer.
He absolutely intended to radically change behavior, by replacing our current way of doing things with a very different better way, that uses less resources. Not just the same thing somehow miraculously not problematic.
Summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephemeralization
This is a different idea than blind technological optimism, although they seem similar on the surface.
It feels like I'm seeing a lot of articles lately that get deep thinkers quite wrong, or which use their personal character flaws to invalidate their ideas.
Nuance as a concept seems to be dying more now even than under Trump, and it feels artificial. Deliberately instigated.
... Am I being overly paro here?
No, I think you’re picking up on something I’ve observed as well. It seems like trying to look deeper into nuances and subtleties is, more often than a few years ago, dismissed as wishy washy or equivocations rather than an attempt to understand and enumerate true complexities. I think this started before the Trump era, but the the political all-or-nothing polarization that has followed since then seems to bleed over into even non political things.
Pseudo/non-scientific is one of the more popular beliefs out there, and is often quite ironic if one considers how the abilities of science has increased over time.
I completely agree... it's very frustrating seeing this happen to many thinkers that had a strong influence on me. I've recently seen similar 'takedowns' of Thoreau, Nietzsche, Carl Jung, Kipling, and many others that grossly misrepresent the ideas these people had, mention some personal failings, and then conclude that these people did nothing of value.
It's incredible that people writing these articles feel entitled to write a dismissal/rebuttal of a deep thinker, when they haven't even taken the time to understand the ideas.
World is changing, but it doesn't seem to be improving for many. And if you suggest that the direction is wrong, you are accused of being reactionary or worse.
Technology is doing vastly more for climate change than behavior.
An end user can’t tell if electricity came from a wind farm or a coal power plant.
We're burning fossil fuels because we figured out the technology to mine and use them.
People aren't going to (and frankly, shouldn't have to if there's an option/solution) dial back their lifestyle unless they're forced at the barrel of a gun or it happens by circumstance. That it's even possible to rely on technology as a solution is a good thing and makes sense.
Why make life miserable if you don't have to? And to be clear: we absolutely don't. Any miserable outcome is redirecting technology away from a solution (e.g., safe, abundant nuclear energy) towards technocratic authoritariaism (digital IDs, CBDCs, etc) and other psychopathic control systems that rely on extreme subjugation of human beings.
Perhaps that view is correct, it is just that most of the people who subscribe to this philosophy are trying to solve different problems (e.g. to accrue wealth and power) while most of the people who abhor that attitude have effectively abdicated control over some of the most powerful tools to instigate change.
The reality is that you cannot change the behaviour of other people. All that you can do is add stimuli to encourage positive behaviours and remove stimuli that encourages negative behaviours. Technology is simply one of the tools in the toolbox.
> I think there is a lot of desire to 'cancel' historical tech visionaries like Fuller nowadays, because we are all burned out, depressed, and disengaged- feeling that our efforts have no real effect, and are pointless. It's easier to say people like Fuller didn't really do much, than to admit that we are capable of so much more.
> Instead of thinking of him as a con-artist and self promoter, realize that his actions also fit someone that - well into his late 80s, still felt the joy, open mindedness, and limitless possibilities that young kids feel, and is usually burned out of us. He was so excited about what was possible!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32513327
(And I say this as someone whose favorite map projection is, by far, the Dymaxion map.)
I would agree, yes, he had some objectively interesting ideas and proposals.
The idolizing masses surrounding him makes it impossible to critique things like his Synergetics textbook, which was … not good to be generous.
Opining about why people are talking about the less rosy aspects of Fuller's life right now is like if you transported yourself back to the release of Isaacson's biography on Jobs and concerned yourself with why people were discussing the negative details regarding the incidents that Isaacson wrote about.
The author worked with bfi.org to write the book. Calling this "hating on Fuller without understanding his work or ideas" or an attempt to cancel him is silly. (Not least of all because, you know, he's dead.)
In so far as the critique has any merit, it comes from comparisons to him and others who make careers out of commentary and punditry (inherently self-aggrandizing professions). I think that type of work is actually legitimate, though it is a) basically what publications like Slate and TNR are for and b) not really a complete summary of Fuller's work, which succeeded in genuine contributions to architecture.
Quite a long way we've come from Fuller's Spaceship Earth ideas indeed.
I’m noticing it migrating into something more zen, I look to fully experience each day
Probably has to do with growing older as well
Growing up there was a sense that changing how the world worked was just out of reach, the birth of the PC & Internet made it seem like just a matter of time
Now I appreciate more and more how very far out of my control it all is
Which has helped me zoom in on where my choices do make an impact
I wouldn’t say I’m more optimistic because of it, but I am more grateful
Edit: my favorite story of self-reinvention is the story of Korla Pandit. I love it because it's something I would have done.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korla_Pandit
It’s out of print and used books from people I don’t know gross me out. It’s weird I know. Like a phobia almost.
"My goal of late has been to develop procedures for mold contaminated collections that keep staff safe"
https://siarchives.si.edu/blog/conserving-archival-collectio...
Definite interest in the reader's health, as well as archival, going on here.
It might not be fully legal, but it looks like there's no way for you to buy the book from a source that would support the author/publisher anyway
New age techno woowoo with tessellated spheres is my lasting impression.
Hugely?. I'd accept there was some variance (as you'd expect) but hugely made me stop and consider what you mean here.
Remember we are talking about public fame.
These sort of people, like L. Ron Hubbard, died off because of increased skepticism and increased transparency. After ww2 you had this huge credulous population, and with considerable purchasing power due the post-war property and economic boom. The internet, and scandals such as Watergate and perceived hypocrisy of religious and political leaders and institutions, made people more skeptical overall, and also made it easier for people to verify claims.
I've been to Tapachula, Chiapas and it's wild. If you ever go, ask the mototaxi guys for a balsa across the river for a fascinating experience.
He's funny, explains complex topics in a way that's understandable to lay people, and gives the impression of knowing his business quite well.
In reality, the vast majority of his predictions over the past two decades have not come true e.g. saying China, Russia, and Canada would all break up by 2020. He is also wrong about specific technical claims e.g. how efficient certain renewable technologies can be in different locales (I have enough of a background to check some of these figures by hand).
Two decades? Is there some other source for these predictions other than the book series he kicked off 8 years ago?
The claims in his 2014 book are much more measured:
- Russia needs to deal with Ukraine by 2020 (one of his few concrete timelines, a couple years off)
- Increased Albertan autonomy will enter mainsteam political discussion (Danielle Smith)
- China will run into issues from an unstable financial system (Evergrande)
I think it's clear his background is not technical, he's more than a little hyperbolic, but I don't think he does as poorly as you mark him. Unless he has some other more aggressive set of predictions than the ones I've found, he still has a good 30 years before he can safely be called a hack.
He spoke about putting a dome over Winooski, and showed artists renditions of it. He bounced a tensegrity sphere. He spoke of his 50-year experiment (from the moment he chose not to commit suicide and instead see if he could do good in the world).
I have, all my life, been influenced by his slightly nutty intellectual spirit.
Any part of the speech you recall?
Systems thinking plus a lot about triangles.