"He’s a forgotten hippie idol, a sage of 1960s counterculture. What can we learn from Bucky Fuller’s faith in technology?". Aeon has an article exploring why the ideas of Bucky Fuller are back in vogue - Buck to the future.
In the great flux of postwar United States, Fuller was convinced that the world was marshalling its resources poorly and unsustainably, and that change was a burning imperative. The world finds itself again passing through a Fullerian moment – a phase of political, environmental and technological upheaval that is both unsettling and exhilarating. Within this frame, Fuller’s life and ideas – the sound ones but also those that were tedious or absurd – ring with a new resonance. ...
As Fuller described it, the world was broken. Governments focused too much on the waging of wars, and they gave in too easily to the demands of the wealthy. Long before Occupy Wall Street, Fuller noted that the richest 1 per cent of people grew even richer at the expense of the other 99 per cent. So much was invested in the status quo that no one – designers, industrialists, financiers, scientists – worked hard enough at the fundamental task of original thinking. Meanwhile, the planet was tumbling towards a crisis, running out of energy and fouling up the environment. In other words, we’re in for ‘an absolute revolution of humanity’, as Fuller put it in Everything I Know.
The review notes the underlying motivation for one of Fuller's projects, the flying car ("The reason he wanted to make a flying car was because his first daughter died of meningitis."), which Airbus are now apparently looking to make a reality by 2018.
In his 2016 book, You Belong to the Universe, Jonathon Keats sets out to release Buckminister Fuller from “the zany sci-fi designs that made him notorious, and rescue him from the groupies who have impounded him as a cultish prophet.”
Keats, a writer and artist who whips up his own world-changing ideas through trickster gallery and museum exhibitions, comes to Fuller’s rescue by venturing beneath the veneer of his infamous inventions—the geodesic dome, flying car, world peace games, and dome over Manhattan—to expose their broader significance.
That significance can be summed up in the unwieldy title that Fuller gave himself: “comprehensive anticipatory design scientist.” The most succinct definition of the title is Fuller’s determination, he said, “to make the world work for 100 percent of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.” ...
One of the qualities Keats most admires in Fuller, who was born in Massachusetts in 1895, is the inventor’s conviction that people learn through serendipity. His bewitching inventions, books, and lectures were designed to spur serendipitous thinking in others. Fuller knew, Keats writes, that “new ideas might emerge from the chance meeting of disparate information in a curious mind.”
The guru of modern thinking about the significance of materials is Professor Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba, described by Bill Gates as “my favourite author”. In his view, physical substances remain central to modern economies in spite of all the advances in information technology, and the apparent evidence of dematerialisation is often misleading.
In his latest book, Making The Modern World, he cites computer-aided design. The Boeing 747, designed in the 1960s, required 75,000 drawings with a total weight of 8 tonnes. Using computer-aided design (CAD) for the 767 in the 1990s did away with all that paper, and cut costs and design time.
However, as Prof Smil points out, the CAD system required computers, data storage, communications, screens and electricity to run. Given the complexity of the systems involved, it is far from obvious that the switch to CAD cut United States use of materials overall.
It is true that in computing power there has been spectacular dematerialisation. All the computers sold in the world in 2011 weighed 60 times as much as the total sold in 1981, but had 40 million times the memory.
But where microchips are not the dominant component of the total design, Prof Smil wrote, there has been no even remotely similar mass decline. In some sectors, technological progress has actually made products more “material”. The Ford Model T, one of the first automobiles, weighed 540kg; the F-150 pick-up, which is its most popular model today, weighs more than 2 tonnes.
Prof Smil’s conclusion is that while dematerialisation, in the sense of reduced material use for every dollar of gross domestic product, has been a trend for decades and can continue into the future, an absolute reduction in the world’s use of natural resources is highly unlikely. If growth continues, at some point those resources will run low.
While we do not know when we will hit the limits of materials usage, we know they are out there somewhere. Tensions such as the dispute over rare earths or rising commodity costs could have serious consequences for growth.
Prof Smil’s answer is that we need to think about rational futures of moderated energy and material use. As he admits, though, it is hard to see any political leaders being prepared to offer their citizens less and less in the future; particularly not in emerging economies where billions are hoping to come closer to developed world lifestyles.
Some concept cars influence decades of automotive engineering. Some concepts never catch on. Some simply catch fire.
The Dymaxion car, designed by the visionary US architect and all-round polymath R Buckminster Fuller, may be the rare prototype for which all of these things are true.
Buckminster Fuller
“It’s full of unique and different technologies,” says Jeff Lane, director of the Lane Motor Museum in Nashville, Tennessee. “It was a failure commercially, but it tried lots of different things that have had big influence on car design.” It was a big enough influence on Lane that, 80 years later, he’s in the final stages of recreating Fuller’s first prototype.
When the first zeppelin-shaped vehicle debuted in 1933, it broke every automotive design convention save the use of round wheels. Nearly 20 feet (6.1 metres) long, it could transport 11 people and return 30mpg thanks to wind-tunnel-tested aerodynamics and lightweight aluminium-skin construction. Its engine was rear-mounted but powered the front wheels, and it was steered with a single back wheel, a less-than-intuitive arrangement that may have contributed to a fatal crash that occurred during its demonstration at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair.
A 1958 geodesic dome based on Buckminster Fuller’s design has been purchased by an Oklahoma environmental engineering firm. The historic Gold Dome building had been in danger -- its previous owner decided to put the building on the market after finding it would cost $2.5 million to repair various problems with the building, including long-standing damage to its roof.
The Bay Area attracts dreamers, progressives, nonconformists, and designers. Buckminster Fuller was all of these, and though he never lived in San Francisco, his ideas spawned many local experiments in the realms of technology, engineering, and sustainability—some more successful than others. The Whole Earth Catalog, Apple, The North Face, and Governor Jerry Brown have all cited Fuller as a key influence on several projects.
From March 31 through July 29, 2012, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) will present The Utopian Impulse: Buckminster Fuller and the Bay Area, the first exhibition to consider Fuller’s local design legacy. The presentation will feature some 65 works, including prints, drawings, photographs, documentary video, books, models, and ephemera representing some of Fuller’s most iconic projects alongside those by Bay Area designers inspired by his oeuvre.
“Late in his life Fuller selected 13 design projects for which he obtained U.S. patents and featured them in a portfolio called Inventions: Twelve Around One, to be marketed to art collectors,” notes SFMOMA Acting Department Head/ Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, who organized the presentation. “The images represent an earnest revolutionary effort on Fuller’s part that did not succeed in the way he would have liked in his time, but today stands as a totem for nonconformist thinking. This exhibition attempts to capture the wonderful eccentricity inherent in Fuller’s views and to celebrate him as a visionary.”
The Utopian Impulse opens by introducing Fuller, primarily with prints from the Inventions: Twelve Around One portfolio (1981), as well as several key works on loan from the R. Buckminster Fuller Archive at Stanford University. Pairing the artist’s own drawings of projects dating from the late 1920s through the mid-1970s with iconic imagery of built work, the portfolio commemorates his most well-known ideas, such as the 4D House (1928), a hexagonal autonomous dwelling meant to be optimally resource efficient and mass producible from factory-made kits that could be easily shipped anywhere and quickly assembled on site. Extending this optimization to transportation, Fuller’s ultra-light three-wheeled Dymaxion Car (1933) featured unprecedented fuel efficiency and an aerodynamic, teardrop shape, which was determined in collaboration with his friend, designer Isamu Noguchi. While these projects held promise in efficiency in the name of societal good, each was rife with design problems that proved too difficult to solve.
The exhibition also presents several of Fuller’s big-picture ideas, including his World Game (1969–71) project, a data-visualization system intended to facilitate global approaches in solving the world’s problems—or, in Fuller’s own words, to “make the world work, for 100 percent of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.” ...
Fuller strove for the Fordist dream of improving society through mass production, which inherently conflicted with his “more with less” philosophy promoting self-reliance, sustainability, and low ecological impact. Perhaps overambitious about his abilities to bypass business and societal norms, ultimately Fuller was not able to earn both financial and critical success for his designs, so he lectured tirelessly around the globe to survive.
“While his appeal to the government and to the counterculture movement was broad, he still never quite fit in,” says Fletcher. “Perhaps it was frustrating for him or maybe it was a calculated elusiveness. Either way, the view of Fuller as an outsider has emerged as an emblem for ‘thinking differently,’ which is a starting point for many Bay Area initiatives."
The Register notes "this time its chances of actually being built are strengthened by a 500-mile link from the existing Trans-Siberian line to the Eastern Siberian city of Yakutsk, scheduled for completion in 2013" - however I don't think anyone is holding their breath waiting for tunnel construction to start.
The high speed railway and tunnel will be a private public partnership whose economic impact could be startling. 100 million tons of freight could be moved per year using the most efficient known way of transport. Proposed tidal energy plants could provide 10 gigawatts of energy and a string of wind power fields could churn a constant supply of clean energy, serving as a vital link to a worldwide energy grid. The tunnel alone would take fifteen years to complete — and an energy and railway network would take many more — but the project would significantly change the shipping and energy industry.
In a time of austere measures by governments throughout the world we hear less and less of large-scale projects, but the economic and environmental benefits of developing critical infrastructure links is a key element to 21st century environmentally sound economic growth.
DP: What do you feel as you see the shuttle program winding down?
WG: I feel a little sadness, a little bit, because I know what we can continue to keep doing with this shuttle. It would be nice if that other program was coming along a little bit faster, and we could kind of roll right from this program to the next one.
But I think we can still use that same work force to re-tool, build solid plans and then kind of get ready to go move forward.
The Apollo astronauts said that, basically by going to the moon, we learned more about the earth than we did by staying here. And those first images from the surface of the moon, of the earthrise, seeing the earth as a sphere, with this thin atmosphere, really pushes how fragile our world is, and how small our world is.
By continuing to push the technology envelope, we really learn a lot more about what’s really happening here on the earth.
DP: The space shuttle that we use to get to the space station is now retired. So how are we gonna get back and forth now?
WG: We’re gonna use the Soyuz spacecraft, which we’ve been actually using for crew rotations for about the last two years. We’ve focused the shuttle on doing the assembly activities.
DP: We rent space on the Russian aircraft?
WG: Yep. Our crews are trained in Russia to operate and help them fly the spacecraft.
DP: And doesn’t that bother anyone? I mean, doesn’t that make us sort of second-class space citizens?
WG: I don’t really look at it that way. Because if you look at the space station, it’s really an international facility. So there are Russian modules. There’s also a Japanese module. The European space agency has another module. And the U.S. has a large research facility. We provide power to the Russian side—our solar rays generate power, and provide it to the Russian side. And they do propulsion for us on the space station.
So when you ask me about transportation, it’s not different than all these other dependencies I have already. We are truly an international team. It’s not competition like it was before, where we’re gonna beat the Russians, or we’re gonna beat the Chinese.
There’s a control center in Moscow, a control center in Houston, a control center in Japan, and also in Europe. And we all work together to keep this space station flying, and operating.
I'd noted the parallels in the first episode to Fred Turner's book "From Counterculture To Cyberculture", so I wasn't particularly surprised to see Turner make an appearance in this episode, along with Stewart Brand, and the tracing of these ideas back to Bucky Fuller.
What was new about this episode was the repeating of common misconceptions about "The Limits To Growth" and the strange line of reasoning that seemed to argue that the search for "equilibrium" (ie. a scenario where our overall impact on the environment is trimmed to the point where we don't end up having the population crash as we overwhelm the planet's carrying capacity) that "Limits" undertakes is really arguing for a form of political stasis where no radical change is to be contemplated.
While this may have been a goal of the Technocrats that preceded them, it doesn't ring true for the systems theorists.
Curtis even notes that Jay Forrester and the "Limits" crew explicitly said they weren't considering politics, but discounts this as a form of dishonesty rather than accepting that the book is just outlining scenarios around resource consumption, population and pollution rather than being a political manifesto (which would have been entirely counterproductive).
Where is does veer towards politics (in the section entitled "Transitions to a sustainable system", where it prescribes the changes required to make our global economy sustainable), the practices recommended are both positive and a change from the general status quo today - it doesn't read like a manual for perpetuating elite control and forbidding political change, with the non-technical recommendations including :
* poverty reduction * nonviolent conflict resolution * accurate/unbiased media * “decentralisation of economic power, political influence and scientific expertise” * “stable populations” and “low birth rates” by “individual choice”
Curtis' main point (like Turner's before him) - that the counterculture / hippie / cyberculture ideal of a world without politics is a fantasy - is valid, but he really goes off the rails trying to blame the systems theorists and ecologists for the problems of the world today.
The section about the colour revolutions in eastern europe, in particular, seemed wildly off base - he assumes that this genuinely was a case of leaderless uprising spontaneously organised via network culture - when instead they were orchestrated from the US to expand western influence at the expense of the Russians - and naturally enough faltered once the population realised that their interests weren't really being advanced at all by the changes (just as we'll most likely see with the current "Arab Spring" equivalent).
Blue Ventures’ approach assumes that first and foremost, that the “survival of a natural habitat and the people whose lives depend on it are inseparable.” The comprehensive approach strives to give developing coastal communities the resources they need to live sustainably. They extensively research all aspects of the communities, including marine and fisheries research, family planning and public health, environmental education, fisheries management, and protected area development. They then use this knowledge to propose new ideas that would improve the environment and community residents’ lives.
In Madagascar, Blue Ventures enabled poor fishing communities to increase and diversify their incomes by protecting the biodiversity of the water. Blue Ventures volunteers are continually training and educating the residents where they work in Madagascar, ensuring that sustainable practices are maintained. Blue Ventures has also started the first community-run sea cucumber farm in Madagascar. It is a pioneering development of commercial-scale sustainable aquaculture, and it has helped to alleviate poverty in the coastal communities.
Richard Buckminster Fuller had a lot of nerve. In the 1930s, the great US inventor secured the first $1,000 he needed to build a giant futuristic car, called the Dymaxion. The socialite who gave him the cash was told: "If I want to use it all to buy ice cream cones, that will be that – and there will be no questions asked." The nearly completed Dymaxion No 1 outside the Bridgeport factory in July 1933 The nearly completed Dymaxion No 1 outside the Bridgeport factory in July 1933.
Fuller, born in 1895, is best known for his geodesic domes, but his ultimate hope was that the three-wheeled Dymaxion – which looked like a VW camper van crossed with a pinball flipper – would fly, allowing Americans to leave the highway vertically and touch down at lightweight aluminium homes, scattered wherever they fancied by a fleet of Zeppelins.
The Dymaxion was meant to be phase one of a social revolution, fuelled by the latest technology, but only three were ever built. No 1 caught fire and No 3 was turned into scrap; only No 2 survived. It now sits in the National Automobile Museum in Reno, Nevada – or it did until 18 months ago, when the architect Norman Foster decided he wanted to fulfil a dream, and build Dymaxion No 4. So he borrowed No 2 for inspiration.
"The Dymaxion had the same engine and transmission as the Ford Sedan of the time," says Foster, who worked with Fuller, his design hero, from 1971 until his death 12 years later. "However, at three times the volume, with half the fuel consumption and a 50% increase in top speed, it not only did more with less, but anticipated the 'people mover' of several decades later."
This post is the latest installment of my series on Bucky Fuller and was prompted by my reading Fred Turner's book "From Counterculture To Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism", which looks at the influence Bucky Fuller had on a range of people, in particular Stewart Brand, who helped create first the hippie counterculture and the back to the land movement of the sixties and seventies, then later the cyberculture that grew up around the San Francisco bay area.
I won't try to review the book here as I wouldn't do it justice - but I highly recommend it if you have any interest in this particular piece of history.
Brand has had a significant influence on the environmental movement which has continued through to the current day and the evolution of his views over that time is worth spending some time considering.
As they came of age, Stewart Brand and others of his generation faced two questions: How could they keep the world from being destroyed by nuclear weapons or by the large-scale, hierarchical governmental and industrial bureaucracies that had built and used them? And how could they assert and preserve their own holistic individuality in the face of such a world?
As he sought to answer those questions, Brand turned first to the study of ecology and a systems-oriented view of the natural world. Later, after graduating from Stanford and serving several years as a draftee in the army, he found his way into a series of art worlds centered in Manhattan and San Francisco. For the artists of those communities, as for Brand's professors at Stanford, cybernetics offered a new way to model the world. Even at the height of the cold war, many of the most important artists of this period, figures such as John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg, embraced the systems orientation and even the engineers of the military-industrial research establishment. Together they read Norbert Wiener and, later, Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller; across the late 1950s and well into the 1960s, they made those writings models for their work. At the same time, both the artists he met and the authors they read presented the young Stewart Brand with a series of role models. If the army and the cold war corporate world of Brand's imagination moved according to clear lines of authority and rigid organizational structures, the art worlds of the early 1960s, like the research worlds of the 1940s, lived by networking, entrepreneurship, and collaboration. As he moved among them, Brand came to appreciate cybernetics as an intellectual framework and as a social practice; he associated both with alternative forms of communal organization.
Ecology as Alternative Politics
Brand first encountered systems-oriented ways of thinking at Stanford in a biology class taught by Paul Ehrlich. By the end of the decade, Ehrlich was famous for predicting in his book The Population Bomb (1968) that population growth would soon lead to ecological disaster. In the late 1950s, however, he was concentrating on the fundamentals of butterfly ecology and systems-oriented approaches to evolutionary biology. These preoccupations reflected the extraordinary influence of cybernetics and information theory on American biology following World War II. At the level of microbiology, information theory provided a new language with which to understand heredity. Under its influence, genes and sequences of DNA became information systems, bits of text to be read and decoded. In the 1950s, as Lily Kay has pointed out, microbiology became "a communication science, allied to cybernetics, information theory, and computers." Information theory also exerted a tremendous pull on biological studies of organisms and their interaction. Before World War II, biologists often focused on the study of individual organisms, hierarchical taxonomies of species, and the sexual division of labor. Afterward, many shifted toward the study of populations and the principles of natural selection in terms modeled on cybernetic theories of command and control. ...
For Brand, even as a student at Stanford, the ability to think outside the dominant paradigm of cold war conflict both marked and made possible an advancement in human evolution. The liberation of the individual was simultaneously an American ideal, an evolutionary imperative, and, for Brand and millions of other adolescents, a pressing personal goal.
The question was, How could that liberation be achieved in daily life? Brand's search for individual freedom led to a decade-long migration among a wide variety of bohemian, scientific, and academic communities. In the course of these travels, Brand encountered both communal ways of living and a series of technocentric, systems-oriented theories that served as ideological supports for communalism. Often enough, the theories themselves were not explicitly theories of social organization so much as theories of local social practices, such as how to make art or how to take LSD or how to run a business meeting. As he moved among these communities, however, and later, when his Whole Earth Catalog became a forum in which such communities met, Brand began to see how the systems orientation of Paul Ehrlich's population biology, combined with new, countercultural modes of living, might offer an appealingly individualistic lifestyle—not only for him, but also for anyone else who could abandon the halls of bureaucratic America. ...
The same tension between global humanist ideals and local elite practice would haunt much of the New Communalist movement over the next decade, and the Whole Earth network for years after that. But in the early 1960s, the linking of the global and the local helped account for much of Marshall McLuhan's appeal within the emerging counterculture. McLuhan's simultaneous celebration of new media and tribal social forms allowed people like Stewart Brand to imagine technology itself as a tool with which to resolve the twin cold war dilemmas of humanity's fate and their own trajectory into adulthood. That is, McLuhan offered a vision in which young people who had been raised on rock and roll, television, and the associated pleasures of consumption need not give those pleasures up even if they rejected the adult society that had created them. Even if the social order of technocracy threatened the species with nuclear annihilation and the individual young person with psychic fragmentation, the media technologies produced by that order offered the possibility of individual and collective transformation. McLuhan's dual emphases also allowed young people to imagine the local communities they built around these media not simply as communities built around consumption of industrial products, but as model communities for a new society. In McLuhan's writing, and in the artistic practice of groups like USCO and, later, the psychedelic practices of groups like San Francisco's Merry Pranksters, technologies produced by mass, industrial society offered the keys to transforming and thus to saving the adult world.
No one promoted this doctrine more fervently than the technocratic polymath Buckminster Fuller. Architect, designer, and traveling speechmaker, Fuller became an inspiration to Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth network, and the New Communalist movement as a whole across the 1960s. The geodesic domes Fuller patented soon after World War II came to be favored housing on communes throughout the Southwest. Fragments of his idiosyncratic conceptual vocabulary, such as "tensegrity," "synergy" and "Spaceship Earth," bubbled up steadily in discussions of how and why alternative communities should be built. And Fuller himself—seventy years old in 1965, short, plump, bespectacled, and, when he spoke in public, often clad in a three-piece suit with an honorary Phi Beta Kappa key dangling at the waist— seemed to model a kind of childlike innocence that many New Communalists sought to bring into their own adulthoods. If the politicians and CEOs of mainstream America were distant and emotionally reserved, Fuller was playful and engaged. And like his young audiences, he displayed a highly individualistic turn of mind and a deep concern with the fate of the species. Fuller made his name designing futuristic technologies such as the three wheeled Dymaxion car and, most famously, the geodesic dome, but the roots of his interests reached deep into America's pre-industrial past. ...
Fuller, like Emerson, saw the material world as the reflection of an otherwise intangible system of rules. But unlike Emerson and the Transcendentalists, Fuller linked that system of rules not only to the natural world, but also to the world of industry. During World War I, Fuller had watched his four-year-old daughter Alexandra die of infantile paralysis, contracted in part, he believed, because the family's home was badly built. At the time, he was working as a contractor with the navy. Earlier, as a junior officer, he had seen how, with proper coordination, extraordinary industrial resources could be mustered to solve military problems. In his view, his daughter had died directly from a disease but indirectly from a failure to distribute the world's resources appropriately. This conviction grew during World War II and the early years of the cold war, when once again Fuller saw the full scope of industrial production at work, as well as the inequality with which the world's resources were distributed. What humankind required, he came to believe, was an individual who could recognize the universal patterns inherent in nature, design new technologies in accord with both these patterns and the industrial resources already created by corporations and the military, and see that those new technologies were deployed in everyday life.
In a 1963 volume called Ideas and Integrities, a book that would have a strong impact on USCO and Stewart Brand, Fuller named this individual the "Comprehensive Designer." According to Fuller, the Comprehensive Designer would not be another specialist, but would instead stand outside the halls of industry and science, processing the information they produced, observing the technologies they developed, and translating both into tools for human happiness. Unlike specialists, the Comprehensive Designer would be aware of the system's need for balance and the current deployment of its resources. He would then act as a "harvester of the potentials of the realm," gathering up the products and techniques of industry and redistributing them in accord with the systemic patterns that only he and other comprehensivists could perceive. To do this work, the Designer would need to have access to all of the information generated within America's burgeoning technocracy while at the same time remaining outside it. He would need to become "an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist." Constantly poring over the population surveys, resource analyses, and technical reports produced by states and industries, but never letting himself become a full-time employee of any of these, the Comprehensive Designer would finally see what the bureaucrat could not: the whole picture.
Being able to see the whole picture would allow the Comprehensive Designer to realign both his individual psyche and the deployment of political power with the laws of nature. In contrast to the bureaucrat, who, so many critics of technocracy had suggested, had been psychologically broken down by the demands of his work, the Comprehensive Designer would be intellectually and emotionally whole. Neither engineer nor artist, but always both simultaneously, he would achieve psychological integration even while working with the products of technocracy. Likewise, whereas bureaucrats exerted their power by means of political parties and armies and, in Fuller's view, thus failed to properly distribute the world's resources, the Comprehensive Designer would wield his power systematically. That is, he would analyze the data he had gathered, attempt to visualize the world's needs now and in the future, and then design technologies that would meet those needs. Agonistic politics, Fuller implied, would become irrelevant. What would change the world was "comprehensive anticipatory design science.' ...
At another level, though, the swirling scene at the Trips Festival, and Brand's role in it, represented a coming together of the New Communalist social ideals then emerging and the ideological and technological products of cold war technocracy. The festival itself was a techno-social hybrid. The Longshoreman's Hall surrounded dancers with the lights, images, and music of electronic media. The bodies of many dancers were infused with LSD. To the extent that they felt a sense of communion with one another, the sensation was brought about by their integration into a single techno-biological system within which, as Buckminster Fuller put it, echoing Norbert Wiener, the individual human being was simply another "pattern-complex." Brand himself had organized the event in keeping with the systems principles he had encountered at Stanford and afterward. Far from asserting direct control over events, he had built an environment, a happening, a laboratory. He had set forth the conditions under which a system might evolve and flower, and he had stocked the biological and social worlds of those who entered that system with technologies that allowed them to feel as though the boundaries between the social and the biological, between their minds and their bodies, and between themselves and their friends, were highly permeable. He had helped found a new tribe of technology-loving Indians, artistic engineers of the self. Very soon these new Comprehensive Designers would set out from San Francisco to found their own communities in the wilderness.
When they got there, thought Brand, what they would need most would be tools and information.
Stewart's particular genius has been in the creation of forums (ranging from magazines to conferences to online discussion groups to consulting organisations) that have enabled people with expertise in different disciplines to come together and exchange ideas about innovative uses of technology.
The Whole Earth Catalog and the back to the land movement
One of the better reviews of Turner's book looks at the emergence of sixties youth culture and influence thinkers like Marshall McLuhan, Paul Ehrlich and Bucky Fuller had on Brand the counterculture in general.
Turner gives the label “ New Communalism” to the utopian impulses that led both to the portion of the sixties counterculture which found its central text in the Whole Earth Catalog, and to the embrace of technology which found itself eventually at home in the 1990’s with some aspects of insurgent Republicanism. He suggests further that the values of the communal 1960’s utopian movement exemplified by Brand and his Whole Earth Catalog were not co-opted and distorted in later years by the forces of capitalism or the state as some believe, but rather became a part of the cyberculture of both creators and users of computers and new forms of computing.
The book opens with the defining computational metaphor as expressed by contemporary writers such as Esther Dyson, John Perry Barlow and Kevin Kelly: digital technologies transcend the world of governments and restrictions, and are instead tools by which stultifying bureaucracies can be overthrown and new, flexible ways of living, working, and producing for a strong economy can be achieved. Yet, to the students of the Berkeley Free Speech movement in which these writers began and which provided the origin of the counterculture, cybernetics represented a militarized and menacing force antithetical to the longed-for new society. The students of the Berkely Free Speech movement of the 1960’s and their colleagues across the country sometimes demonstrated and protested using computerized punch cards as the emblem of a repressive society.
In spite of the 1960’s students’ perceptions, Turner suggests that the seemingly closed world of the military-industrial complex was not monolithic. Within that complex, beginning with the great collaborative research enterprises of World War II, could be found a computation subculture bound by, in anthropological terms, a “trading language” and a “legitimacy exchange” which facilitated border-crossing and group work by professionals from various backgrounds. At the same time, Norbert Wiener and his associates, pioneers of cybernetics and associated with the wartime computing effort, expressed an idea of human being as automated mechanical information processors but with an added, more benign idea of a system in which men and machines collaborated. Thus it seems, even in the founding metaphors of computing, there were possibilities for divergence in how computing was regarded, along with spaces in which computing work was boundary-spanning and non-hierarchical.
It was the youth culture of the 1960’s, emerging as it did as a reaction against the systems which included the computing of the time, which added the notion of a liberated egalitarian society and communal ideals. It was during this time that two youth movements emerged. One was political, as represented by the SDS and the civil rights struggle, which became the so-called New Left. The other, more inward-turning, embracing new ways of consciousness and relationships and accompanied by drugs and rock and roll music, became the “counterculture”. It is in this non-political, utopian stream that Turner places the countercultural origins of cyberculture in the New Communalism. It is here that Turner arrives at the central questions he hopes to answer: how did the systems visions of the cold war and the seemingly antithetical communitarian visions of the New Communalists become so entwined that, years later as the Internet evolved out of the Cold War systems, it could appear to many to be the New Communalist ideal reborn? Here, Turner suggests, is the pivotal role of Steward Brand as the node connecting these networks.
Brand’s own intellectual journey into the counterculture began as a Stanford student learning about the then-new system-oriented ecological theories of population biologist Paul Ehrlich. After college and military service, he found his way into the avant-garde arts scene in New York city. These artists were developing a countercultural artistic system which were labeled “happenings”—seemingly spontaneous, egalitarian, and participatory, combining lighting, drama, music, art and systems thinking along with Eastern mysticism and involving multidisciplinary collaboration in a workshop setting. These artists were steeped in the communication theories of Marshall McLuhan which celebrated new media and tribal social forms, and the ideals of futuristic technology of architect Buckminster Fuller. Indeed, Brand credited Fuller as the inspiration for the Whole Earth Catalog.
Brand maintained that given access to the information we need, humanity can make the world a better place. The Whole Earth Catalog magazine he founded was promoted as a "compendium of tools, texts and information" which sought to "catalyze the emergence of a realm of personal power" by making technology available to people eager to create sustainable communities. Brand eventually achieved his goal of persuading NASA to release the first photo of the Earth from space (wandering around for some time wearing a badge saying "Why Haven't We Seen A Picture of the Whole Earth?") and the photo became the cover for the Catalog.
There is an interview by Massive Change with Stewart that describes his first meeting with Bucky Fuller and the story of his "whole earth" badge:
Massive change: What was Bucky Fuller's reaction to your button campaign that asked, "Why haven't we seen an image of the whole earth yet?"
Stewart Brand: It was all because of LSD, see. I took some lysergic acid diethylamide on an otherwise boring afternoon and came to the notion that seeing an image of the Earth from space would change a lot of things. So, on next to no budget, I printed up buttons and posters and sold them on street corners at the University of California, Berkeley. I went to Stanford and back east to Columbia, Harvard, and MIT. I also mailed the materials to various people: Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, senators, members of the U.S. and Soviet space programs.
Out of everyone, I only heard back from Bucky Fuller, who wrote, "Dear boy, it's a charming notion but you must realize you can never see more than half the earth from any particular point in space." I was amused, and then met him a few months later at a seminar at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. I sat across from his lunch table and pushed the button over to him, asking him what he thought about it. He said, "Oh yes, I wrote to that guy." I said, "I'm the guy. So what do you think? What kind of difference do you think it will make when we actually get photographs of the earth from space?"
There was this slow, lovely silence. Then he said, "Dear boy, how can I help you?"
Whole Earth (and later Wired) editor Kevin Kelly has noted that style of the Whole Earth Catalog preceded the modern internet / blogosphere, and was eventually made redundant by it.
For this new countercultural movement, information was a precious commodity. In the 1960s, there was no Internet; no 500 cable channels. Bookstores were usually small and bad; libraries, worse. The WEC not only gave you permission to invent your life, it gave you the reasoning and the tools to do just that. And you believed you could do it, because on every page of the catalog were other people doing it. This was a great example of user-generated content, without advertising, before the Internet. Basically, Brand invented the blogosphere long before there was any such thing as a blog. ...
This I am sure about: it is no coincidence that the Whole Earth Catalogs disappeared as soon as the web and blogs arrived. Everything the Whole Earth Catalogs did, the web does better.
The Whole Earth Catalog was succeeded by a journal called CoEvolution Quarterly (CQ). CQ often included content related to futurism and the science of ecology, including authors like Lewis Mumford, Howard T. Odum, Karl Hess, Ivan Illich, Wendell Berry, Ursula K. Le Guin, Gregory Bateson, Amory Lovins, Hazel Henderson, Gary Snyder, Lynn Margulis, Eric Drexler, Paul Hawken, John Todd, Kevin Kelly and Donella Meadows (and not to forget Bucky Fuller of course), many of whom would be familiar to students of peak oil and the limits to growth.
The Whole Earth Catalog was something of a bible for the "back to the land" movement of the hippie counterculture, however its influence waned as the seventies progressed and the hippies became disillusioned with communal life out of the cities and as they faded from media attention.
The hippies weren't the first (or the last counterculture) to emerge - there are some interesting parallels with the German Wandervogel of the early 20th century (who, like the followers of the "local currencies" movement of that period, eventually went rogue) and with the modern day "rippies" trying to go off the grid in the US.
The WELL
Between 1968 and 1972, two communities began to mingle within blocks of the Whole Earth Catalog offices in Menlo Park. One, centered around the Stanford Research Institute and composed primarily of engineers, was devoted to the ongoing pursuit of increased human-computer integration. The other, clustered around the Catalog and the countercultural communities it served, focused on the pursuit of individual and collective transformation in a New Communalist vein. Stewart Brand positioned himself between these worlds and, in a variety of ways, brokered their encounter. - From Counterculture to Cyberculture
In the mid-1980's, Brand cofounded the "Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link" (WELL) with Larry Brilliant (now of Google.org), the prototype online community which still continues today and spawned both the EFF and Craigslist.
As it turned out, psychedelic drugs, communes, and Buckminster Fuller domes were a dead end, but computers were an avenue to realms beyond our dreams. - Stewart Brand
In a review of Turner's book, The New York Times noted that it was unsurprising that many members of the counterculture would end up being part of the "computer revolution".
It might be argued that so prevalent was the counterculture, and so experimental and energetic were its most vocal proponents, that it would have been surprising had many of them not found their way to the computer revolution. But Mr. Turner demonstrates something more essential in the continuity.
First, he suggests, we are mistaken in thinking that the postwar technological world was dominated by hierarchies and rigid categories. Under the influence of the mathematician Norbert Wiener, it became increasingly common to think of humans and machines as interacting elements of “cybernetic systems” — organisms through which information flowed. This also led to a different way of thinking about living organisms and their networks of interaction.
Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1964: “Today we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.” Buckminster Fuller proposed the idea of a Comprehensive Designer, a creator who would embody “an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.”
These writers were the patron saints of the “Whole Earth Catalog,” their books appearing alongside macramé and carpentry manuals, their ideas presumably brought to life in the commune, where the natural and human world would be bound together, creating a single organism from which new possibilities would unfold.
During this period Brand coined the famous expression "information wants to be free", though that was only half of his commentary at the time.
On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.” That was eventually compressed into “Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. - Stewart Brand
GBN was co-founded by Brand and is a classic example of his ability to assemble a diverse group of thinkers - in this case including people like Francis Fukuyama, Pierre Omidyar, Freeman Dyson, Peter Gabriel, Bill Joy, Amory Lovins, Paul Hawken, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.
The Viridian Design Movement
At the beginning of the 21st century, author and futurist (and GBN member) Bruce Sterling published what he dubbed "The Viridian Manifesto", looking to spark a design movement to solve the problem of global warming and other collisions with the limits to growth. Since Bruce published his manifesto, a range of web sites that I'd categorise as Viridian have sprung up, with some openly acknowledging this heritage and other perhaps entirely oblivious to it - and with many of them also noting Bucky Fuller as an inspiration.
One of Stewart Brand's recent projects is a collaboration with computer scientist Danny Hillis to build the "Clock of the Long Now", a 10,000-year timepiece; his Long Now Foundation also runs a number of related projects, such as the Rosetta Project, cataloguing the world's languages, and the Long Bets ("the arena for accountable predictions") website.
Wired And Newt Gingrich - Did Something Go Terribly Wrong ?
Turner's book ends on something of a down note, as it describes how Brand and the Wired crew become involved with Esther Dyson, Newt Gingrich and the mid-90s "Republican Revolution".
One chronicler of both the counterculture and the cyberculture that followed it is RU Sirius (whose "Mondo 2000" magazine was prominent in the pre-Wired era). RU has a review of Turner's book in which he notes his disquiet with the period when "Brand's digital countercultural elite" engaged with Gingrich and co.
While I welcome Turner's critical vision, I must say honestly that, although I was repulsed by the Gingrich alliance and by much of the corporate rhetoric that emerged, at least in part, out of Brand's digital elitist clan — I think Brand's tactics were essentially correct. Turner implies that valuable social change is more likely to happen through political activism than through the invention and distribution of tools and through the whole systems approach that is implicit in that activity. But I think that the internet has — palpably — been much more successful in changing lives than 40 years of left oppositional activism has been. For one example out of thousands, the only reason the means of communication that shapes our cultural and political zeitgeist isn't COMPLETELY locked down by powerful media corporations is the work that these politically ambiguous freaks have accomplished over the past 40 years. In other words, oppositional activism would be even more occult — more hidden from view — today if not for networks built by hippie types who were not averse to working with DARPA and with big corporations. The world is a complex place.
RU has some more choice words about the failure of cyberculture (like the counterculture before it) to make the world a better place, lamenting the atomisation of modern society and the power this has gifted to faceless corporations in this interview with Jon Lebkowsky (another fixture of the Viridian movement) entitled "It's Better to be Inspired than Wired".
Cyberculture (a meme that I'm at least partly responsible for generating, incidentally) has emerged as a gleeful apologist for this kill-the-poor trajectory of the Republican revolution. You find it all over Wired - this mix of chaos theory and biological modeling that is somehow interpreted as scientific proof of the need to devolve and decentralize the social welfare state while also deregulating and empowering the powerful, autocratic, multinational corporations. You've basically got the breakdown of nation states into global economies simultaneous with the atomization of individuals or their balkanization into disconnected sub-groups, because digital technology conflates space while decentralizing communication and attention. The result is a clear playing field for a mutating corporate oligarchy, which is what we have.
I mean, people think it's really liberating because the old industrial ruling class has been liquefied and it's possible for young players to amass extraordinary instant dynasties. But it's savage and inhuman.
Maybe the Wired elite think that's hip. But then don't go around crying about crime in the streets or pretending to be concerned with ethics.
It's particularly sad and poignant for me to witness how comfortably the subcultural contempt for the normal, the hunger for novelty and change, and the basic anarchistic temperament that was at the core of Mondo 2000 fits the hip, smug, boundary-breaking, fast-moving, no-time-for-social-niceties world of your wired mega-corporate info/comm/media players. You can find our dirty fingerprints, our rhetoric, all over their advertising style. The joke's on me.
RU interviewed Turner about his book (the audio can be found here [mp3]), noting the Fuller connection and the failure of the counterculture to achieve long term change because of their refusal to engage with politics.
RU Sirius: Brand works his way through Wiener to Buckminster Fuller, another systems thinker.
Fred Turner: Brand has had a series of very powerful intellectual inspirations. Fuller would be one, Kesey would be another. For Brand, Fuller was a model in two senses. He was a model of systems thinking, and he was also a model of an intellectual entrepreneur. Fuller moved from university to university, from setting to setting, knitting communities together. That's what Brand learned to do. He learned to do it partly by watching Fuller.
RU: Fuller was, in a sense, one of the first cyber-Ronin, the wandering techno-entrepreneur type that is much touted later in the 1990s by people like John Brockman and "Wired" magazine.
FT: Absolutely. I think of Fuller and Kesey and Brand as P.T. Barnums. They are people who can't ride a trick horse, can't ride an elephant, can't ride a trapeze. And yet they build the rings of the circus; they bring the performers in; and they learn the languages and the styles of the circus. And they speak the circus' meanings to the audience. Brand has very much been the voice of a series of very important circuses.
RU: So, into the hippie era, Brand is part of the Merry Pranksters for a while; he does the "Whole Earth Catalog," but he's never really a hippie. And most hippies are not, generally, systems thinkers. "Hey man, spare change, I'm going to Woodstock" isn't systems thinking. Brand is very much off on his own distinctive trip. And yet there is this through-line that takes Brand from the avant-garde through the trips festivals to Whole Earth and on to the Global Business Network and then on through the creation of "Wired." Can you describe what those memes or through-lines are?
FT: There's a misapprehension that has plagued a lot of Americans, including a lot of historians, about the 60s counterculture. We tend to think of the counterculture as a set of anti-war protests; as drug use and partying. But we don't tend to differentiate between two groups that were very importantly differentiated in that time: the New Left, and the group that I've called the New Communalists. Brand speaks to the New Communalists. Though it's mostly forgotten now, between 1966 and 1973 there was the largest wave of communal activity in all of American history.
Between 1966 and 1973, conservative estimates suggest that 10 million Americans were involved in communes. Brand speaks to that group by promoting the notion that small-scale technologies like LSD, stereos, books, Volkswagens; are tools for building new alternative communities.
The New Left wanted to change the world by doing politics in order to change politics. They formed SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). They protested. Brand and his group turned his backs on all that. Brand said, what we need to do is go out and build these communities, and my job is to build a catalog of tools through which people can gain access to the technologies that they can build communities around. So the core idea that migrates from the 60s to the 90s is the idea that we can build small-scale technologies and communities of consciousness around those technologies. So we no longer need to do politics per se. That idea kicks in again in the 80s around the rise of the personal computer, the ultimate in small-scale technology. It gives us the idea of virtual community, a distributed community gathered around small-scale technologies. And it ultimately plays very directly into the beliefs of Newt Gingrich in the 1990s. ...
RU: The new communalist movement failed pretty much entirely. The idea of leaving behind the urban and suburban settings and going off and starting your own world failed. Even in terms of ecological or environmental ideas, the hip idea now is urban density. The attitude about tools survived, but the idea of back-to-the-country was pretty much useless.
FT: The idea of back-to-the-country didn't work. But I think something deeper didn't work, and it haunts us today, even as it underlies a lot of what we do. The notion that you can build a community around shared style is a deeply bohemian notion. It runs through all sorts of bohemian worlds. The notion that if you just get the right technology you can then build a unified community is a notion that drove a lot of the rural communal efforts. They thought by changing technological regimes; by going to 19th century technologies; by making their own butter; sewing their own clothes — they would be able to build a new kind of community. What they discovered was that if you don't do politics — explicitly, directly, through parties, through organizations — if you don't pay attention to and articulate what's going on with real material power, communities fail.
So I argue that there's a fantasy that haunts the internet, and it's haunted it for at least a decade. And it's the idea that if we just get the tools right and communicate effectively, we will be able to be intimate with one another and build the kinds of communities that don't exist outside, in the rest of our lives. And I think that's a deep failure and a fantasy.
The fantasy hasn't died entirely however, with one unlikely champion being the leader of Britain's rebranded "progressive" conservatives, David Cameron, saying we're entering a new era - where governments have less power (and less money) and people empowered by technology have more.
Jamais Cascio has echoed Turner's claim that in order to be effective, politics cannot be avoided, in an essay entitled "The End Of Politics Delusion".
You have my express permission to kick the next person -- especially someone advocating the embrace of radical forms of technological advancement -- who tells you that they wish nothing more than to get rid of, move beyond, or otherwise avoid "politics." Kick them hard, and repeatedly. They have adopted a profoundly ignorant and self-serving position, one that betrays at best a lack of understanding of human nature and society, and at worst a malicious desire to preemptively shut down any opposition to their goal. ...
In the early days of the dot-com era, this attitude resulted in the absence of digital tech industry voices in Washington, DC, allowing the incumbent telecom and entertainment industries free rein to write laws and buy politicians without opposition. Companies and industries that had considered themselves beyond politics found out just how wrong they were. Stung by that experience, today's advocates of the "escape politics" position usually articulate it as more of a wishful whine, as with [Peter] Thiel's line ["In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms..."] ...
there's a profound ignorance across the tech advocacy community of the importance of politics to human society. Politics means conflict, debate, and frustration. It also means choice. A world without politics is a world where disagreement is illegitimate. It's a world where your ability to choose your future -- to make your future -- has been taken away, whether you like it or not.
Brand's Environmental Heresies And The Eco-Pragmatist Manifesto
Since "Counterculture to Cyberculture" was published Brand has continued to be active, creating a large amount of controversy in the environmental movement with an article on his "EnvironmentalHeresies" - taking aim at 4 areas where he thinks the environmental movement has gone the wrong way - population growth, urbanisation, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power.
Wired had an interview with Brand where he puts the case for the formation of huge slums in the developing world as a positive thing (the opposite to the argument made in Mike Davis' "Planet Of Slums").
Wired: What makes squatter cities so important?
Stewart Brand: That's where vast numbers of humans—slum dwellers—are doing urban stuff in new and amazing ways. And hell's bells, there are a billion of them! People are trying desperately to get out of poverty, so there's a lot of creativity; they collaborate in ways that we've completely forgotten how to do in regular cities. And there's a transition: People come in from the countryside, enter the rickshaw economy, and work for almost nothing. But after a while, they move uptown, into the formal economy. The United Nations did extensive field research and flipped from seeing squatter cities as the world's great problem to realizing these slums are actually the world's great solution to poverty.
Wired: Why are they good for the environment?
Brand: Cities draw people away from subsistence farming, which is ecologically devastating, and they defuse the population bomb. In the villages, women spend their time doing agricultural stuff, for no pay, or having lots and lots of kids. When women move to town, it's better to have fewer kids, bear down, and get them some education, some economic opportunity. Women become important, powerful creatures in the slums. They're often the ones running the community-based organizations, and they're considered the most reliable recipients of microfinance loans.
Wired: How can governments help nurture these positives?
Brand: The suffering is great, and crime is rampant. We made the mistake of romanticizing villages, and we don't need to make that mistake again. But the main thing is not to bulldoze the slums. Treat the people as pioneers. Get them some grid electricity, water, sanitation, crime prevention. All that makes a huge difference.
The 4 "heresies" form the foundation of Brand's latest book "WHOLE EARTH DISCIPLINE: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto" (along with another one - geoengineering will be required to mitigate global warming), which Brand discusses in this Long Now seminar called "Rethinking Green".
Personally I'd say Brand has 2 of his original 4 "heresies" right - population (which isn't the problem many believed back in the 1970's - and some grim hangers on still think today) and urbanisation (with "cities are the future" being a key Viridian catchphrase).
I remain somewhat dubious about genetically modified crops and think Brand is simply wrong about nuclear power, which is (at best) an expensive diversion of resources from our key task of replacing and extending our existing power generation capacity with truly clean and renewable power sources (in fact, its a remarkable about-face to go from promoting tools for individual use to recommending the ultimate centralised power source, one which can't be used by individuals and always requires massive government subsidies and regulation, and completely at odds with his "Long Now" school of long-term thinking for that matter).
The topic of Geoengineering is worthy of a post of its own, so I'll leave that for later.
Brand discusses "Whole Earth Discipline" in this talk at EDGE.
About 40 years ago I wore a button that said, "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?" Then we finally saw the pictures. What did it do for us?
The shift that has happened in 40 years which mainly has to do with climate change. Forty years ago, I could say in the Whole Earth Catalog, "we are as gods, we might as well get good at it". Photographs of earth from space had that god-like perspective.
What I'm saying now is we are as gods and have to get good at it. Necessity comes from climate change, potentially disastrous for civilization. The planet will be okay, life will be okay. We will lose vast quantities of species, probably lose the rain forests if the climate keeps heating up. So it's a global issue, a global phenomenon. It doesn't happen in just one area. The planetary perspective now is not just aesthetic. It's not just perspective. It's actually a world-sized problem that will take world sized solutions that involves forms of governance we don't have yet. It involves technologies we are just glimpsing. It involves what ecologists call ecosystem engineering. Beavers do it, earthworms do it. They don't usually do it at a planetary scale. We have to do it at a planetary scale. A lot of sentiments and aesthetics of the environmental movement stand in the way of that.
The next post in the series will look at one of the key enablers of a fully renewable energy powered future - smart grids - and how they are a stepping stone towards one of Bucky's visions - the Global Energy Grid.
While I remain unconvinced any of the vertical farming schemes proposed within cities will ever be viable, this latest one from Inhabitat looks like something Bucky Fuller would approve of - Plantagon.
Lots of cities have farmers markets, but most — if not all — of the produce comes from rural farmers that use oil-intensive methods of transportation to cart around their food. With 80% of all people on the planet projected to live in cities by 2050, food production will have to move into cities if it is to remain cost-efficient. A Swedish-American company called Plantagon has conceived of an incredible solution: a massive urban greenhouse contained within a geodesic dome. The vertical farm, which consists of a spiral ramp inside a spherical dome, is currently in the development stages.
According to Plantagon, the farm “will dramatically change the way we produce organic and functional food. It allows us to produce ecological [resources] with clean air and water inside urban environments, even major cities, cutting costs and environmental damage by eliminating transportation and deliver directly to consumers. This is due to the efficiency and productivity of the Plantagon® greenhouse which makes it economically possible to finance each greenhouse from its own sales.”
An Alaskan company has crossed Bucky Fuller's geodesic dome with walk-in cooler and come up with the Artic Dome [their spelling]. Intershelter's twenty foot diameter dome is built like a boat, with a gelcoat exterior and a core of P2000 insulation, a material that "combines thermal reflective technology with the high insulating properties of a specially formulated EPS foam core."
Each piece is 70 pounds so that it can be shipped easily and assembled quickly. While the materials are not particularly green, they pair it with a Sol-Cool heat pump unit that runs off solar panels and a wind turbine.
It is also not really a Geodesic dome as designed by Buckminster Fuller, which was made of triangular elements. These appear to be built from very clever overlapping pieces that remind me of fish scales more than anything else. But it has many of the attributes of a Geodesic dome, both good and bad.
According to Libby Tucker in the New York Times, The domes can be reused for up to 50 years and can withstand up to 40 feet of snow and 160-mile-an-hour winds.
There are a couple of layouts that look quite comfortable, although having had a twenty foot diameter dome, I can attest that they are tough to furnish. These were designed for emergency and commercial uses in extreme temperatures; I hope they introduce a model with a bit more glazing. But at about fifteen thousand bucks for 315 square feet for the insulated version, it is a great start.
The Sydney Morning Herald recently had an editorial calling for consideration of a 4 day working week as a response to economic contraction and alternative to making employees redundant.
DECIMATE. This word used to have a highly specific meaning: the killing of every 10th person, chosen by lot, as punishment by the Roman army for mutinous legions. The same concept comes to mind in the present economic contraction, as one in every 10 people employed by the private sector could lose their jobs as companies cut costs to survive in a credit freeze.
Private enterprises are the lifeblood of the Australian economy but are also the least insulated from the rolling shocks of the highest single-year decline ever recorded on the Australian sharemarket, and the sharpest downturn in Australian wealth ever recorded. The number of job ads is in free-fall. Anecdotal evidence is pouring in that job ads are generally being swamped by job applicants.
Each day brings new bad tidings on the employment front. Yesterday it was the International Monetary Fund announcing it may cut its growth forecast for Australia to zero for 2009. Mighty Microsoft announced it would cut 5000 jobs worldwide, although the cuts would not extend to Australia. The day before, the nation's largest private employer, Wesfarmers, which has a mostly casual workforce of 200,000, announced it expected to cut the hours worked by staff. BHP announced more than 3000 job cuts in Australia. David Jones said it would decimate its administrative staff, that is, cut one in 10 back-office jobs.
The spectre of unemployment is casting the longest and darkest shadow over the economy and consumer sentiment. To survive this downturn in confidence and investment, private companies, which do not have the luxury of being supported by the taxpayer, are having to cut costs.
So how to ease the pain and share the burden? In order to minimise the trauma of involuntary redundancies, we believe inadequate consideration is being given to the non-voluntary four-day week as an alternative to redundancy. This may be administratively difficult. We are under no illusions about the workplace legislation imposed on employers by federal and state governments, which is ridiculously complex and burdensome. This idea may also be opposed by unions paranoid about a Trojan horse of lower pay and more onerous conditions. But surely a four-day week, either voluntary or imposed, is preferable to involuntary redundancies.
The idea of a 4 day working week isn't an entirely abstract one for me, as my current employer has been significantly cutting back on staff levels over the past 6 months. The manager of my team took the approach of offering us all reduced work hours rather than having to let anyone go, which we've all accepted, so I'm now seeing what a 4 day week is like (and having just come back from a 4 day weekend hiking in the Snowy Mountains I can't say I have any complaints so far).
Australia isn't the only country considering reducing standard working hours - The Independent recently had an article titled "Britain is facing return of three-day week", quoting government sources as saying "Shorter hours would be preferable to mass unemployment". Car manufacturer Jaguar is currently considering a 4 day week to reduce costs.
Japan is also adopting the approach of reducing employee working hours in preference to firing people as they deal with their slump in exports and consumption, with the practice known locally as "work-sharing".
While the usual reason for adopting a shorter work week is economic, there is also an argument that working less hours reduces consumption and waste and can thus be justified on environmental and health grounds.
One country that shifted to a shorter work week some time ago was France, with their 35 hour week. In recent years this has been rolled back by President Sarkozy, sparking a lot of resentment by affected workers. The New York Times had an article on this, pointing out that relaxed working hours have long been part of French culture:
THE new French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has made no secret of his antipathy to his country’s 35-hour workweek. This drastic solution to unemployment was mandated by the leftist government of Lionel Jospin in 2000. The intention was to share out the available work more evenly and to allow workers to spend more time with their families. Its long-term effects on the economy are still unclear.
In the autobiography-manifesto that he published during his presidential campaign, Mr. Sarkozy wrote of “the harm that the 35-hour week has done to our nation”: “What madness it is to think that the way to increase wealth and create jobs is to work less!” On Oct. 1, he effectively abolished the 35-hour week by removing fiscal penalties on overtime. The strikes and protests in France this month give a taste of the unions’ reaction to President Sarkozy’s measure.
President Sarkozy’s 19th-century predecessors would have been amazed that such comparatively small adjustments are treated as matters of economic life and death. They, too, were worried by the snail-like progress of the French economy, and wondered how to compete with the industrial powerhouse of Britain. But they were faced with something far more ruinous than unemployment.
Economists and bureaucrats who ventured out into the countryside after the Revolution were horrified to find that the work force disappeared between fall and spring. The fields were deserted from Flanders to Provence. Villages and even small towns were silent, with barely a column of smoke to reveal a human presence. As soon as the weather turned cold, people all over France shut themselves away and practiced the forgotten art of doing nothing at all for months on end.
In the mountains, the tradition of seasonal sloth was ancient and pervasive. “Seven months of winter, five months of hell,” they said in the Alps. When the “hell” of unremitting toil was over, the human beings settled in with their cows and pigs. They lowered their metabolic rate to prevent hunger from exhausting supplies. If someone died during the seven months of winter, the corpse was stored on the roof under a blanket of snow until spring thawed the ground, allowing a grave to be dug and a priest to reach the village.
The same mass dormancy was practiced in other chilly parts. In 1900, The British Medical Journal reported that peasants of the Pskov region in northwestern Russia “adopt the economical expedient” of spending one-half of the year in sleep: “At the first fall of snow the whole family gathers round the stove, lies down, ceases to wrestle with the problems of human existence, and quietly goes to sleep. Once a day every one wakes up to eat a piece of hard bread. ... The members of the family take it in turn to watch and keep the fire alight. After six months of this reposeful existence the family wakes up, shakes itself” and “goes out to see if the grass is growing.”
It is unlikely this was hibernation in the zoological sense. While extreme cold might have set off a biological response normally seen only in squirrels, bears and marmots, human hibernation probably reflects a sensible, communal decision to stay in bed for as long as possible.
But the French seem to have been particularly sleepy. They “hibernated” even in temperate zones. In Burgundy, after the wine harvest, the workers burned the vine stocks, repaired their tools and left the land to the wolves. A civil servant who investigated the region’s economic activity in 1844 found that he was almost the only living presence in the landscape: “These vigorous men will now spend their days in bed, packing their bodies tightly together in order to stay warm and to eat less food. They weaken themselves deliberately.”
President Sarkozy’s campaign slogan, “Work more to earn more,” would have meant nothing to most French peasants. After the Revolution, government officials complained that farmers were “abandoning themselves to dumb idleness,” instead of undertaking “some peaceful and sedentary industry.” Income acted only as a deterrent. The people of Beaucaire on the Rhône made enough money at their summer fair to spend the rest of the year “smoking, playing cards, hunting and sleeping.”
Until the 20th century, few people needed money. Apart from salt and iron, everything could be paid for in kind. Economic activity was more a means of making the time pass than of making money, which might explain why one of the few winter industries in the Alps was clock-making. Tinkering with tiny mechanisms made time pass less slowly, and the clocks themselves proved that it was indeed passing.
In modern France, where the overheated ski stations of the Alps and the Pyrenees are busier in winter than at any other time, no one is proposing a return to the five-month year. But perhaps there are lessons to be learned from those hibernating ancestors who shared their homes with heat-producing herbivores.
In September, at the General Assembly of the United Nations, President Sarkozy proposed “un New Deal écologique et économique,” but without explaining how economic growth can be reconciled with conservation. If he is serious about saving the planet, and if he wants to reassure the unions that workers will still have time with their families, he should consider introducing tax incentives for hibernation. The long-term benefits of reduced energy consumption would counterbalance the economic loss. There has never been a better time to stay in bed.
Reducing Energy Use Through A Shorter Working Week
One institution that has recently adopted the shorter for all workers is the Utah state government in the US, which switched to a four-day week last year primarily to save money on electricity, gasoline and other energy expenses.
Similar schemes seem to be under consideration throughout the US, with Google News throwing up examples in Florida, North Carolina and Minnesota.
Reducing the working week is an approach for reducing energy consumption recommended by a number of peak oil observers - both recent ones like Aaron Newton and older ones like Bucky Fuller, who argued that many people worked in jobs that did not produce sufficient value to justify the expense of energy required to do them.
The computer will also have verified both of the important findings of the brilliant Denver, Colorado oil geologist, Francois de Chardenedes ... regarding the amount of energy employed as heat and pressure, for the length of time initially that it took nature to photosynthetically process Sun radiation into the myriad of hydrocarbon molecules that comprise all the vegetation and algae ... a large percentage of which Sun-energy-nurtured-and-multiplied molecules are ultimately processed into petroleum.
The script of de Chardenedes' "Scenario of petroleum Production" makes it clear that, with all the cosmic energy processing (as rain, wind and gravitational pressure) and processing time (paid for at the rates you and I pay for household electricity), it costs nature well over a million dollars to produce each gallon of petroleum. To say "I didn't know that" doesn't alter the inexorable energy accounting of eternally-regenerative, 100-per-cent efficient - ergo, 100-pr-cent concerned - physical energy Universe.
We find all the no-life-support-wealth-producing people going to their 1980 jobs in their cars or buses, spending trillions of dollars' worth of petroleum daily to get to their no-wealth producing jobs. It doesn't take a computer to tell you that it will save both Universe and humanity trillions of dollars a day to pay them handsomely to stay at home. - Buckminster Fuller - Critical Path
The Society Of Sloth
One figure who should be familiar to most peak observers that has considered working less as a solution of sorts to peak oil is Jay Hanson. One of Jay's "thought experiments" that is less Malthusian than usual for him (albeit quite coercive) is one he dubbed "The Society Of Sloth".
The society of sloth adopts a technocrat style energy based currency is is distributed equally amongst all by a global government with a mandate to protect the global commons. Jay (echoing Hubbert and Fuller) says that:
With modern technology, probably less than 5% of the population could produce all the goods we really “need”. A certain number of “producers” could be drafted and trained by society to produce for two years. The rest can stay home and sleep, sing, dance, paint, read, write, pray, play, do minor repairs, work in the garden, and practice birth control.
In Praise Of Idleness
There is a large body of work justifying working less not on energy or environmental grounds, but purely on the basis that long working hours are simply not necessary, and that idleness is a virtue in and of itself.
One classic example of this is Bertrand Ruseell's 1932 essay, "In Praise Of Idleness", in which he describes the work ethic (be it the feudal variety manifested in the Protestant work ethic or the modern - at the time of writing - worship of manual work by the Marxists) as a relic of a bygone age and shorter working hours as the natural way for dealing with increased industrial productivity.
This theme continues to appear with some regularity, with some examples that caught my eye in recent years including Jason Godesky's "In praise of laziness (looking at the issue from a primitivist point of view), Gene Longsdon's "The lovely, life-saving virtue of laziness" (small scale farming) and Mark Slouka's "Quitting the paint factory: On the virtues of idleness" (idleness as the foundation of democracy). One writer even went so far as to recommend "idle parenting", declaring it results in "happy children" who have learnt how to fend for themselves.
Sometimes the idolisation of idleness is more a product of cynicism and disengagement from seemingly meaningless work, as in this French example celebrating the "sloth ethic", as documented in Crinne Maier's book "Hello Laziness!: Why Hard Work Doesn't Pay".
According to a report released Monday by Boston University's School of Lifestyle Management, more than 180 trillion leisure hours were lost to work in 2004.
"The majority of American adults find work cutting into the middle of their days—exactly when leisure is most effective," said Adam Bernhardt, the Boston University sociology professor who headed the study. "The hours between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. are ideally suited to browsing stores, dozing in front of the television, and finishing the morning paper. Daytime hours are also the warmest and sunniest of the day, making them perfect for outdoor activities. Unfortunately, most Americans can't enjoy leisure during this time, for the simple reason that they're 'at work.'"
There is a dormant site called "Why Work: Creating Livable Alternatives To Wage Slavery" which has collected essays, book excerpts and articles by Bob Black (such as The Abolition of Work), Robert Anton Wilson, Bertrand Russell, Buckminster Fuller, Jean Liedloff and others on the theme of virtuous laziness.
While most advocates of laziness seem to come from the left (Karl Marx's son-in-law Paul Lafarge, for example, wrote a tract called "The Right To Be Lazy" during a period of enforced semi-idleness at Saint Pélagie Prison, though apparently he couldn't help but put his time to a form of productive endeavour), the more anarchically inclined denizens tend to regard the socialists and communists as being just as work obsessed as the capitalists.
After all these years, and after reading Bob Black's The Abolition of Work, I have finally realized just what was wrong with Marxism. Oh, the Marxists talked a good game - working in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, lounging around to watch the sunset; 20-hour workweeks; month-long vacations; etc. But when you get down to it, they are still drawing from the same poisoned well that has parched Western civilization for the last 500 years: the Protestant Ethic, which freed Europe from Catholic voodoo only to feed its heads with doodoo, such as "work is the outward sign of moral perfection." While Luther was telling people that what counted was faith and the Holy Spirit, not work and deeds, Calvin helped spread silly ideas, like the one that people had to be at constant physical labor or idleness would tempt them to sin. Deep down, this is the root of the Puritan Ethic: why even today the neo-Puritans hate Hollywood with such passion: they feel that if we are not kept busy with mindless, rote work, then we will be seized by the carnal passions and led to sin.
Marxists claim that workers are overexploited. So what is their solution? Have the workers take over the factory to "restore the dignity of work." Make everybody do manual labor, like the Pol Pot regime did in Cambodia and the Incas did in Peru - as Mao said, "let there be no separation between the work of the hands and the work of the mind." Our goal should be to increase production. Deep down Marxists, while despising capitalism, only want to hijack what they see as its main notable achievement, accomplished through the Industrial Revolution: mass production. They do not want to abolish the assembly line, only bring more of us to its trough. Let the elite fat cats sweat with the so-called "working class." Rather than wanting us to all enjoy the life of leisure led by the fat cats, the Marxists' main goal is motivated by envy - they want to force the fat cats to suffer as the "working class" has suffered.
I finally saw through the Marxist illusion when I realized the deep-set opposition to automation of mass production. Marx could not have predicted the development of robots, and yet his so-called followers oppose them with tooth and nail. Why should we force people to do machine-like rote work? Why not have machines do the work of machines? Marxists fight automation because they claim it threatens jobs. You remember what "jobs" are, right? They are the things that society tells us we have to work 9 to 5 at and be "productive," right? Marxists deep down view people as units of production. They hate people who refuse to be productive, who will not work, the so-called "lumpenproletariat" who refuse to be a part of anybody's 'productive forces.' Marxists do not have a true liberatory vision. They want to "liberate" the working class from its exploitation by the finance class. But they do not want to liberate everyone. They want to turn us all into "workers."
Bakunin, Kropotkin, Proudhon, and other anarcho-syndicalists, libertarian-socialists, and anti-technocrats at the International realized that this was the fatal flaw of Marxism. "Work" as we know it should be abolished - that is, the requirement that all of us "mass produce" things that other people need - and taken over by robot labor. This is the promise of post-industrial society, and yet some Marxists greet it with horror. After all, even capitalist industrialism raised the standard of living of the working class to an incredible degree. Yet, things like nanotechnology and the miniaturization revolution have abolished the fundamental assumptions of Marxism and of economics in general. There will be no more scarcity. More and more can be produced with less and less - of energy, capital, resources, and, yes, human labor as well. People can and always will produce the things they or those they know want with their own hands, or, if they are skilled artisans, the things that others want, but with time, precision, and care. But there will be no more mass production.
If you understand Black, Bookchin, Fuller, Henderson, or others, then you know that the industrial revolution is at an end. The Modernist assumption, that the way our lives could improve was through industrialization and urbanization, is at an end. Industrialism is a massive roaring engine, to whom we have sacrificed so many human lives, and whose appetite threatens to consume and poison the world today. But if we "downsize" and "localize" what we make - Schumacher's "small is beautiful" - and do it with robots, we will not need industrialism anymore. There is nothing radical, revolutionary, or liberatory in the industrial vision. Putting more of us into the factories will not accomplish anything. No matter how "friendly" you make the factory - slow down the assembly line, improve worker safety, give hour-long coffee breaks, have ten people doing the job of two - the factory remains a factory. A place where workers' safety, health, and mental well-being is challenged each and every day.
Marxists are still hung up on this concept of "use value." Something is only worth as much as the amount of "work" - mindless routine labor - that went into its making. They react with horror to the way the economists have been 'brainwashing' us with the silly notion of "exchange value" - i.e. that something is worth as much as you or I are willing to pay for it - because it does not attach any value to the "work" of the robot-human who produced it. Marxists hate artists - at least, those who do not practice social realism - because they produce things that have no "use." You cannot "use" a painting or sculpture, any more than you can a smile or a rainbow. The value of art does not come from the hours of sweat the painter put into the canvas. No, it comes from how much someone enjoys the painting. Yes, you heard me right. Enjoyment. Pleasure. It doesn't fit into the dim, dingy workers' universe of the Marxists. That people might want things not so much that they can use them, but simply because they enjoy having them.
An artist is sharing his creative vision with you, and you pay him as thanks for that. Someday, there will be no workers, only artists. Like the artisans of old, the only things people will make will be the things they want to. Everything else, especially the thing that everybody needs - food, clothing, shelter, and so forth - will be made by robots, who can make them more efficiently. Robots do not complain, do not have "health" to be insured or threatened by industrial processes, do not make mistakes (if programmed correctly), and do not need to be paid. The "bosses" have known this for thirty years. Only the "workers," those neo-Luddites, seem to want to protect their neat unionized niche in the assembly plant from the new technology of automation. They do not realize that the boss is their liberator. He has liberated them from the factory. Marxists call this "unemployment," and treat it as a tragedy, because in our society someone must somehow be "employed" in order to have the things they need to feed themselves and their families.
The truly humane, post-Marxist society will be one in which no one needs to have a "job." The idea is an obsolete concept. For the so-called "middle class" the idea is an especial absurdity. These people get in their polluting cars, wait in traffic jams, and search frenetically for parking, all so they can go to an "office" where they do things that could just as easily be done at home with a computer and a modem. But we seem fixated on this idea, that we must go somewhere else, "work" for eight hours, and then come home again. The "work" of the middle class may not be as physically exhausting as that of the "working class," but it is as equally rote, boring, repetitive, and unoriginal, focusing on the copying and recopying of information. That is something that could be done much better by artificially intelligent computers. As one writer once put it, 95% of people move matter from one place on earth to another, and 5% keep track of where they put it. In our post-industrial society, there is no need for either "labor" or "management." Both have become equally obsolete.
The Economics Of Abundance
The idea of a post-scarcity society, where industrial processes are so well automated that little human labour is require to produce all our material needs, isn't a particularly well studied one, though obviously both Bucky Fuller and the technocracy people have promoted it versions of it in the past.
The primary exception is information production, where the rise of the internet and the ability to copy and distribute information at negligible cost has made it a topic of interest for thinkers like Chris Anderson and his theory of "The Long Tail", who suggest the "Tragically Neglected Economics of Abundance" are worthy of greater attention.
The economics of abundance do get quite a bit of attention amongst science fiction authors however (mainstream economists preferring to dwell in the present, and perhaps the past, as much as possible).
There are some signs that even in the world of material goods some parts of the world are approaching a post scarcity-economy with most people in the developed world have few material wants that they cannot satisfy (and you could make the case that the reason that this could be true for everyone, if not for the way society and the economy is currently structured) - countries like Japan have long needed to export unwanted second hand cars to places like New Zealand, for example.
One person who has made an attempt to try and describe what abundance looks like is Walt Frazier, in his essay "A World Based On Abundance", though this seems overly-utopian in many ways and I'm not sure human nature is such that all the characteristics specified could ever be met (conflict isn't always based on economics / survival and some things will always remain "scare" - large houses facing onto Palm Beach, for example).
Whether or not we ever reach a global, post scarcity economy is a matter for debate, though I'd like to think that it is possible or at the very least a useful "target" of sorts.
I'll close with a quote from Robert Anton Wilson's paper "The RICH economy":
If there is one proposition which currently wins the assent of nearly everybody, it is that we need more jobs. "A cure for unemployment" is promised, or earnestly sought, by every Heavy Thinker from Jimmy Carter to the Communist Party USA, from Ronald Reagan to the head of the economics department at the local university, from the Birchers to the New Left.
I would like to challenge that idea. I don't think there is, or ever again can be, a cure for unemployment. I propose that unemployment is not a disease, but the natural, healthy functioning of an advanced technological society.
The inevitable direction of any technology, and of any rational species such as Homo sap., is toward what Buckminster Fuller calls ephemeralization, or doing-more-with-less. For instance, a modern computer does more (handles more bits of information) with less hardware than the proto-computers of the late '40's and '50's. One worker with a modern teletype machine does more in an hour than a thousand medieval monks painstakingly copying scrolls for a century. ...
Unemployment is not a disease; so it has no "cure."
This tendency toward ephemeralization or doing more-with-less is based on two principal factors, viz:
1. The increment-of-association, a term coined by engineer C.H. Douglas, a meaning simply that when we combine our efforts we can do more than the sum of what each of us could do seperately. Five people acting synergetically together can lift a small modern car, but if each of the five tries separately, the car will not budge. As society evolved from tiny bands, to larger tribes, to federations of tribes, to city-states, to nations, to multinational alliances, the increment-of-association increased exponentially. A stone-age hunting band could not build the Parthenon; a Renaissance city-state could not put Neil Armstrong on the Moon. When the increment-of-association increases, through larger social units, doing-more-with-less becomes increasingly possible.
2. Knowledge itself is inherently self-augmenting. Every discovery "suggests" further discoveries; every innovation provokes further innovations. This can be seen concretely, in the records of the U.S. Patent Office, where you will find more patents granted every year than were granted the year before, in a rising curve that seems to be headed toward infinity. ...
Unemployment is directly caused by this technological capacity to do more-with-less. Thousands of monks were technologically unemployed by Gutenberg. Thousands of blacksmiths were technologically unemployed by Ford's Model T. Each device that does-more-with-less makes human labor that much less necessary.
Aristotle said that slavery could only be abolished when machines were built that could operate themselves. Working for wages, the modern equivalent of slavery -- very accurately called "wage slavery" by social critics -- is in the process of being abolished by just such self-programming machines. In fact, Norbert Wiener, one of the creators of cybernetics, foresaw this as early as 1947 and warned that we would have massive unemployment once the computer revolution really got moving.
It is arguable, and I for one would argue, that the only reason Wiener's prediction has not totally been realized yet -- although we do have ever-increasing unemployment -- is that big unions, the corporations, and government have all tacitly agreed to slow down the pace of cybernation, to drag their feet and run the economy with the brakes on. This is because they all, still, regard unemployment as a "disease" and cannot imagine a "cure" for the nearly total unemployment that full cybernation will create.
Suppose, for a moment, we challenge this Calvinistic mind-set. Let us regard wage-work -- as most people do, in fact, regard it -- as a curse, a drag, a nuisance, a barrier that stands between us and what we really want to do. In that case, your job is the disease, and unemployment is the cure.
"But without working for wages we'll all starve to death!?! Won't we?"
Not at all. Many farseeing social thinkers have suggested intelligent and plausible plans for adapting to a society of rising unemployment. Here are some examples.
1. The National Dividend. This was invented by engineer C. H. Douglas and has been revived with some modifications by poet Ezra Pound and designer Buckminster Fuller. The basic idea (although Douglas, Pound, and Fuller differ on the details) is that every citizen should be declared a shareholder in the nation, and should receive dividends on the Gross National Product for the year. Estimates differ as to how much this would be for each citizen, but at the current level of the GNP it is conservative to say that a share would be worth several times as much, per year, as a welfare recipient receives -- at least five times more.
Critics complain that this would be inflationary. Supporters of the National Dividend reply that it would only be inflationary if the dividends distributed were more than the GNP; and they are proposing only to issue dividends equal to the GNP.
2. The Guaranteed Annual Income. This has been urged by economist Robert Theobald and others. The government would simply establish an income level above the poverty line and guarantee that no citizen would receive less; if your wages fall below that level, or you have no wages, the government makes up the difference.
This plan would definitely cost the government less than the present welfare system, with all its bureaucratic red tape and redundancy: a point worth considering for those conservatives who are always complaining about the high cost of welfare. It would also spare the recipients the humiliation, degradation and dehumanization built into the present welfare system: a point for liberals to consider. A system that is less expensive than welfare and also less debasing to the poor, it seems to me, should not be objectionable to anybody but hardcore sadists.
3. The Negative Income Tax. This was first devised by Nobel economist Milton Friedman and is a less radical variation on the above ideas. The Negative Income Tax would establish a minimum income for every citizen; anyone whose income fell below that level would receive the amount necessary to bring them up to that standard. Friedman, who is sometimes called a conservative but prefers to title himself a libertarian, points out that this would cost "the government" (i.e. the taxpayers) less than the present welfare system, like Theobald's Guaranteed Annual Income. It would also dispense with the last tinge of humiliation associated with government "charity," since when you cashed a check from IRS nobody (not even your banker) would know if it was supplementary income due to poverty or a refund due to overpayment of last year's taxes. ...
What I am proposing, in brief, is that the Work Ethic (find a Master to employ you for wages, or live in squalid poverty) is obsolete.
Delivered from the role of things and robots, people will learn to become fully developed persons, in the sense of the Human Potential movement. They will not seek work out of economic necessity, but out of psychological necessity—as an outlet for their creative potential.
As Bucky Fuller says, the first thought of people, once they are delivered from wage slavery, will be, “What was it that I was so interested in as a youth, before I was told I had to earn a living?”
The answer to that question, coming from millions and then billions of persons liberated from mechanical toil, will make the Renaissance look like a high school science fair or a Greenwich Village art show.
Next
This post is the second in a 4 part series that began with my review of Bucky Fuller's book "Critical Path".
Next up I'll look at at how Bucky's ideas influenced modern day techie culture, via the cold war technocrats and the hippie "back to the landers" of the 60s and 70s, with a review of Fred Turner's book "From Counterculture To Cyberculture".
I'll conclude with an in-depth look at progress towards the global energy grid Bucky advocated, and why its become an increasingly good idea.
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