"To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting." - R. Buckminster Fuller
Ever since last week, as the comic con geeks and sci-fi nerds were celebrating Star Wars day around the globe (May the Fourth be with you), I've been dwelling on the not-so-fiction based topics centred around the future and human society. I got to thinking about the ideas I had formulated back in the days of my youth about what I imagined the future (this present) would be like. Helping a friend re-organize and add fixtures to her garage over this weekend drew me to thinking about and the subject of the futuristic architecture and living space again; put into the context of the stuff of what I had envisioned decades ago in my teen years.
I wasn't very hopeful in those formative years that we would ever survive as a society, or that I would even survive to adulthood given that the media was always reporting on the sabre-rattling between NATO and the Warsaw Pact nations, spelling out that the Cold War was going to turn hot any second with little or no warning. It was depressing knowing that the most radical advancements in technology then always seemed to be in the hands of the military, which made it feel even more like the race toward Armageddon seem inevitable. There was more than one teacher I had tuned into reminding us of all that gloomy business. I got into reading magazines like Omni*, Popular Science, and Popular Mechanics when I was about twelve or thirteen, more to escape that fear than anything: to turn toward looking into some sort of future that didn't involve some sort of annihilation. Back then, I was actively being a 'futurist': actively speculating what the future technologies and society would be like if we survived, or altogether managed to avoid such destruction. I'm, of course, thankful that events occurred where the scenario of being reduced to a pile of ashes or stricken with the lingering torturous suffering of radioactive fallout never happened, but sadly, neither did the better future that I was preparing for come to fruition either. The forecasted future(s) of technical innovation and social evolution that was to provide enough for every citizen on this planet to live comfortably with an abundance of energy and material resources for physical and societal well-being never came, nor is development coming quickly enough for such possibilities. It's great to see that for the most part, we have been able to stamp out and hamper hard-core global Communism to allow ingenuity, technology and efficiency to thrive. Now all what we have to do is stamp out and hamper hard-core global Capitalism and religious theocracies, and the respective crushing poverty, oppression and ignorance it brings to billions. All these radical systems I mentioned do nothing good for the ecology and environment of this planet.
I was very intrigued back then by the work and writings of Richard Buckminster Fuller. He was such a brilliant man. He got me turned on to his version and vision of applied geodesic geometry, the concept of tensegrity, and synergetics. Also, it was he who got me absolutely hating my geometry class in high school at the time, which seemed in comparison so backward, so primitive, so dull with all the in-class recitation, and rote learning of proofs that we would never have practical use for in the real world. There was nothing creative about it; learning from a teacher who didn't do much more than regurgitate from an antiquated textbook from the 1950's. Each minute in that class felt like a step backward into some sort of intellectual retardation. I dropped it. To do that for an entire school year was hell to me.
Today, I'm very disappointed to see that geodesic dome designs aren't more commonplace for being used as self-sufficient homes, or at the very least ones that are used as greenhouses for local sustainable food growth to avoid the cost of shipping. I'm upset that there still isn't a pan-global hydro line network, lines across the Bering Strait to make a Trans-Siberian/Trans-Manchurian hydro line that switches energy from one continent to another at times when low night time use occurs the surplus production gets diverted to the other side of the globe when and where the need is high during their respective daytime hours, thus making the use of that water powering turbines more effectively and efficiently, thus relying less on other more destructive and wasteful power production. It angers me that South Korea and China have more Mag-Lev bullet trains than this continent, a supposedly more technically advanced one. As a citizen of Earth, I'm pissed off that there is money galore to peck into pristine spots on the Earth to access oil and natural gas with methods that contaminate and pollute the water, but isn't yet an established infrastructure for a cleaner hydrogen economy.
The one established trend that I'm glad was predicted correctly by Becky Fuller and is the phenomena he coined as "ephemeralization" or dMass: the trend of being able to do more with less energy and material** and resources. Think of the mass of material that a smart phone has been able to do away with as computing memory capacity with a given amount of chip-space gets ever more faster and powerful as it falls within concordance with Moore's Law. I attached a You Tube video which gets the point across better than I can.
Another great thinker I respect is Jacque Fresco who was a peer to Bucky Fuller, the founder and creator of the Venus Project. He is a (yet) living contemporary architect and social engineer for resource-based synergistic systems.
Buckminster Fuller would be rolling over in his grave if he knew that the average schmuck with a cellphone or tablet, something that has manifold times the computing power that was used to put a man on the moon, is using an obscene amount of time doing nothing more with it than trying to reach a next level of Candy Crush instead of using an app or apps to actually make a difference in their lives.
*- Omni was a futuristic magazine, but unfortunately, it itself didn't have a future. It stopped publication in the early 90's. However, I heard rumours that it may be revived in a digital edition. Omni is an interesting title, because as it relates to Fuller, it was frequently used as a prefix by him in a lot of his visionary writings.
**- Bucky would argue that there really is no such thing as solid "material", but rather "energy-events".
