Buckminster Fuller

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pages: 864 words: 222,565

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller by Alec Nevala-Lee

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American energy revolution, Apple II, basic income, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Columbine, complexity theory, Computer Lib, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, declining real wages, digital nomad, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Golden Gate Park, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hydraulic fracturing, index card, information retrieval, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megastructure, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Graham, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, remote working, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas Malthus, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Schedule of Lectures, Projects and Days” (R. Buckminster Fuller Papers, M1090, Series 4, Subseries 13, Mixed Materials 6–7) Lorance Loretta Lorance, Becoming Bucky Fuller Marks R. Buckminster Fuller and Robert Marks, The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller RBF Richard Buckminster Fuller Sadao Shoji Sadao, Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi: Best of Friends SD R. Buckminster Fuller, Synergetics Dictionary: The Mind of Buckminster Fuller UOO R. Buckminster Fuller, Utopia or Oblivion Wong Yunn Chii Wong, “The Geodesic Works of Richard Buckminster Fuller” (dissertation) PROLOGUE: GEODESIC MAN “I’ve got Bucky Fuller here”: Taylor Barcroft, interviewed by author, July 1, 2020.

Full transcripts of the Everything I Know lectures were accessible at the time of writing at the website of the Buckminster Fuller Institute (https://www.bfi.org). Except where necessary to convey aspects of the writer’s thinking or personality, spelling and punctuation have generally been standardized in quotations from letters and other primary sources. ABBREVIATIONS AHF Anne Hewlett Fuller AMS R. Buckminster Fuller, An Autobiographical Monologue/Scenario Anthology R. Buckminster Fuller, Anthology for the Millennium BFR R. Buckminster Fuller, The Buckminster Fuller Reader “BV” Loretta Lorance, “Building Values: Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House in Context” (dissertation) CP R.

Buckminster Fuller, The Buckminster Fuller Reader “BV” Loretta Lorance, “Building Values: Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House in Context” (dissertation) CP R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path Discourse R. Buckminster Fuller, Your Private Sky: Discourse EIK R. Buckminster Fuller, Everything I Know 4DT R. Buckminster Fuller, 4D Time Lock Harvard file Student folder of Richard Buckminster Fuller, Harvard University Archives, Undergraduate Student Records, UAIII 15.88.10 1890–1968, box 1690 Hatch Alden Hatch, Buckminster Fuller: At Home in the Universe “Influences” RBF, “Influences on My Work,” in Ideas and Integrities, 9–34 Itinerary “Dymaxion Index—Section 11. Schedule of Lectures, Projects and Days” (R.


pages: 339 words: 57,031

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, book value, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Californian Ideology, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Dynabook, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, new economy, Norbert Wiener, peer-to-peer, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Yom Kippur War

And in that sense, Fuller’s public persona fit well within what Peter Braunstein has called a “culture of rejuvenation” in the 1960s. See Braunstein, “Forever Young.” [ 270 ] N o t e s t o Pa g e s 5 5 _ 7 2 26. Fuller quoted in Fuller and Snyder, R. Buckminster Fuller, 12. 27. Emerson quoted in Kenner, Bucky, 149 –50. 28. Fuller, Ideas and Integrities, 35 – 43. 29. Ibid., 173. 30. Ibid., 176. 31. Ibid., 63. 32. Brand, “Buckminster Fuller,” 3, 249. 33. Fuller quoted in Fuller and Snyder, R. Buckminster Fuller, 38. By the early 1960s, Fuller was traveling more than two-thirds of every year. Kenner, Bucky, 290. 34. Brand, “Notebooks,” April 21, 1963, quotation in October 9, 1964 entry.

All quotations from materials in the Whole Earth Catalog Records appear courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries. “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” from The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster, © 1968 by Richard Brautigan, has been reprinted with the permission of Sarah Lazin Books. Portions of chapter 2 have been adapted from “Buckminster Fuller: A Technocrat for the Counterculture,” in New Views on R. Buckminster Fuller, edited by Hsiao-Yun Chu and Roberto Trujillo, © 2006 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Jr. University, forthcoming from Stanford University Press, used by permission. Parts of chapters 4 and 8 have been drawn from “How Digital Technology Found Utopian Ideology: Lessons from the First Hackers’ Conference,” in Critical Cyberculture Studies: Current Terrains, Future Directions, edited by David Silver and Adrienne Massanari (New York University Press, forthcoming), and are used by permission.

For this wing of the counterculture, the technological and intellectual output of American research culture held enormous appeal. Although they rejected the military-industrial complex as a whole, as well as the political process that brought it into being, hippies from Manhattan to HaightAshbury read Norbert Wiener, Buckminster Fuller, and Marshall McLuhan. Introduction [ 5 ] Through their writings, young Americans encountered a cybernetic vision of the world, one in which material reality could be imagined as an information system. To a generation that had grown up in a world beset by massive armies and by the threat of nuclear holocaust, the cybernetic notion of the globe as a single, interlinked pattern of information was deeply comforting: in the invisible play of information, many thought they could see the possibility of global harmony.


pages: 299 words: 19,560

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities by Howard P. Segal

1960s counterculture, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, complexity theory, David Brooks, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, deskilling, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, Future Shock, G4S, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, intentional community, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nikolai Kondratiev, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, pneumatic tube, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog

See my review in Technology and Culture, 28 (July 1987), 697–698 of R. Buckminster Fuller, Inventions: The Patented Works of Buckminster Fuller (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983) and James Ward, ed., The Artifacts of Buckminster Fuller: A Comprehensive Collection of His Designs and Drawings, 4 vols. (New York: Garland, 1985). Both were posthumous publications. The large literature on Buckminster Fuller includes Amy C. Edmondson, A Fuller Explanation: The Synergetic Geometry of R. Buckminster Fuller (Boston: Birkh€auser, 1987); Martin Pawley, Buckminster Fuller (New York: Taplinger, 1990); Robert R. Potter, Buckminster Fuller (Englewood Cliffs: Silver Burdett, 1990); J.

Potter, Buckminster Fuller (Englewood Cliffs: Silver Burdett, 1990); J. Baldwin, Bucky Works: Buckminster Fuller’s Ideas for Today (New York: John Wiley, 1996); Lloyd Steven Sieden, Buckminster Fuller’s Universe (Cambridge: Perseus, 2000); Thomas T. K. Zung, ed., Buckminster Fuller: Anthology for the New Millennium (New York: St. Martin’s, 2001); and Michael John Gorman, Buckminster Fuller: Designing for Mobility (New York: Rizzoli, 2005). See Lyman Tower Sargent, Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 81–85, for a good summary of these recent developments. The foremost history of the kibbutz is Henry Near, The Kibbutz Movement: A History, 2 vols.

In 2008 and 2009 two major museums, New York’s Whitney and Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, successively exhibited “Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe.” This was the first major retrospective on Fuller since his death in 1983 and, like the New York Public Library exhibit, bespoke a more mature acknowledgment of the continued importance of utopianism, which, in this case, combined utopian writings, structures, and communities.20 In 1968 architectural critic Allan Temko published a provocative essay in Horizon magazine entitled “Which Guide to the Promised Land? Fuller or Mumford?” Without taking sides, Temko insightfully compared the differing visions of contemporaries Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) and Lewis Mumford (1895–1990), both then at the height of their power and influence.


Norman Foster: A Life in Architecture by Deyan Sudjic

air gap, Alan Greenspan, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, interchangeable parts, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, low cost airline, Masdar, megacity, megastructure, Murano, Venice glass, Norman Mailer, Pearl River Delta, Peter Eisenman, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, three-masted sailing ship, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban renewal, white flight, young professional

The shaded streets are intended to encourage walking – no small ambition in the climate of the Gulf, where in August the temperature is a brutal fifty degrees. In its optimism and its search for answers, Masdar is an echo of the first city of the future that Norman Foster explored with his adolescent imagination growing up in Manchester. Long before he met Buckminster Fuller, he never missed an instalment of Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future. As a young teenager Foster read the comic strip, with its intricate depiction of a world of atomic-powered monorails and levitating taxis (which look a lot like Masdar’s personal rapid transits), every week in the Eagle, the comic aimed at middle-class adolescents in the England of the 1950s.

To the impressionable young, the Eagle was highly effective propaganda, not just for modern architecture but for technology. There were images of nuclear-powered ships and gas turbine-engined cars that the Eagle predicted would be the personal transport of the very near future. As portrayed by the Eagle’s artists, these vehicles bear a close resemblance to Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion car, shaped like tear drops and driven on three invisible wheels. The cities of the future were going to look like modular collections of pods. One issue had a cutaway drawing of an American Antarctic base that had been clipped together from a series of units half-buried in snow and ice.

Louis Kahn, Eero Saarinen and Rudolph tried to build a specifically American form of modernism in architecture and they in turn were attracting their own followers. Foster was well aware of the striking direction that their work had taken. He was especially interested in Louis Kahn, who managed to be both monumental and fascinated by the thinking of Buckminster Fuller. For any young architect who wanted to get close to the centre of energy for their subject, America was an essential destination in a way that England was not. What attracted Foster to Yale rather than to Harvard or Princeton were the people that he hoped would be teaching him. In spite of a moment of doubt when he discovered that Kahn had just left New Haven for Philadelphia, Foster had decided that only Yale would do.


From Satori to Silicon Valley: San Francisco and the American Counterculture by Theodore Roszak

Buckminster Fuller, germ theory of disease, global village, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, Internet Archive, Marshall McLuhan, megastructure, Menlo Park, Murray Bookchin, Norbert Wiener, Silicon Valley, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog

PRAEGER PUBLISHERS Society, edited for quote by Bill Voyd from Shelter and by Paul Oliver, copyright 1969. SAN FRANCISCO FOCUS MAGAZINE view with Stewart Brand in the for quotes from an inter- February 1985 issue. SAN FRANCISCO ORACLE for quotes from issues #6, 1967, and #12, 1967. Reprinted with permission of Allan Cohen, Editor. ST. MARTIN'S PRESS for Buckminster Fuller, An Autobiographical Monologue!Scenario by Robert Snyder, copyright 1970. ST. MARTIN'S PRESS copyright 1978. for Children of Prosperity by Hugh Gardner, The Times They Are A-Changing A shortened version of this essay was presented at San Francisco State University Alvin Fine Lecture. 1985 as the in April A few weeks before the event, student in the Public Affairs Office called arrange some campus publicity.

It 17 seemed to be saying that ingenuity deserved to be celebrated - from the stone axe and American Indian medicine to all human modern Clearly, electronics. so in saying, the Catalog spoke for an audience that wanted to see things that way. Or rather, the voices that could do that job. which it Catalog found the And of all the voices to gave a forum, none was to become more prominent than Buckminster Fuller, the formed a generation that it spaceship called Planet Earth, and write its who presumed to "operating manual" Now, Buckminster career. man who in- was already on board a Fuller had a long, long His prefabricated Dymaxion House of the late twenties (also called "the four dimensional liv- ing machine") dates back to the grandparents of the countercultural ward, his generation. story life From that point went through many ups and downs; but there can be no question (when Fuller was in his seventies) Not only did he make the magazine (in that the sixties were his zenith.

for- Thanks to that 18 him to the at San Bay Area appearance and subse- him quently to the prominence Stewart Brand gave in the Whole Earth Catalog, was launched on and most spectacular phase of the final On Fuller his career. the first page of the Catalog, the full corpus of Fuller's works was generously presented under the inscription: "the insights of itiated this catalog." became From Buckminster Fuller in- that point forward, Fuller the necessary presence at New Age confer- ences, symposia, and workshops: a sort of peripatetic global wizard audience down who might tie his awe-inspired for four or five hours at a stretch while he recited the history of the universe. What was it that made this odd figure so remarkably influential in countercultural circles?


pages: 573 words: 142,376

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff

A Pattern Language, air freight, Anthropocene, Apple II, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Beryl Markham, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Biosphere 2, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, Danny Hillis, decarbonisation, demographic transition, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, feminist movement, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Filter Bubble, game design, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, off grid, off-the-grid, paypal mafia, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Hackers Conference, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

There was also a tantalizing rumor to be chased down: Loeffler had heard of an Indian tribe, somewhere in northern Nevada or perhaps southern Utah, that had had no contact with whites. Brand kept searching for funding, with no tangible results. He tried to hold a seminar at Esalen on the project, bringing together big names, including Adams, Udall, and even Buckminster Fuller; he tried to exploit a Ford Foundation grant Raymond had gotten to explore the possibilities of suburban utopias; he wanted to display a roomful of his relevant photographs to kick-start his America Needs Indians! research project. But nothing worked. In the spring he and the Loefflers created Brand & Loeffler Design as a cover to permit them to buy equipment and supplies wholesale.

His financial investment had been only $250, he noted. He had received $1,400 of the $14,500 gross, and he had paid off everyone in just four days. While he had once been interested in Ayn Rand, he added, he increasingly viewed her laissez-faire capitalist worldview as old thinking. Now the ideas of Buckminster Fuller—pro-technology, with a deep faith that the coming of computerization and automation would result in an infinite abundance that would arrive shortly—were increasingly appealing to him. Fuller was an iconoclastic inventor and futurist who had popularized the geodesic dome and whole-systems thinking, and Brand fell under his spell while attending a series of lectures he gave in San Jose in early 1966.

The next day he went to the library and copied a list of addresses from the Congressional Directory and sent a handmade button with his slightly conspiratorial question to every senator and representative. He found another directory and sent buttons to NASA officials, United Nations officials, Russian scientists, and even members of the Soviet Politburo. He sent buttons to Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan for good measure, and to his surprise, Fuller responded that his campaign was in vain because it would never be possible see more than a little less than half of the Earth at any one time. (Sometime later, after the two men met at Esalen, Brand was able to clarify his concept, and Fuller would become a supporter.)


pages: 467 words: 149,632

If Then: How Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, company town, computer age, coronavirus, cuban missile crisis, data science, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, fake news, game design, George Gilder, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, index card, information retrieval, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Perry Barlow, land reform, linear programming, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, packet switching, Peter Thiel, profit motive, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog

“Scenarios for Using the ARPANET at the International Conference on Computer Communication,” Washington, DC, October 24–26, 1972, Computer History Museum. And see, e.g., “Demonstration Heralds Next Wave: Connecting a Network of Networks,” Electronics, November 6, 1972. For samples of these conversations, see https://web.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/dialogues.html. R. Buckminster Fuller, “Prime Design,” Bennington College Bulletin, May 1960. From R. Buckminster Fuller, Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure (Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller, 2009), 329, quoted in Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 51–58. Ibid., 104–8. Brand, “Spacewar.” Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, chs. 4 and 5.

Denby and the de Koonings made silent films starring the Safford children, Patty in a swimsuit, her little brother in a rowboat, abducted by pirates, kidnapped by a witch, rescued at the last minute: fairy tales in black and white, tales of sorcery.4 In 1951, when Ed Greenfield and Patty Safford got married, Patty’s father gave them, as a wedding gift, a rambling old wooden Victorian house on the beach. It had a fireplace made of stones from Long Island Sound. Next door, another of Frank Safford’s friends, the visionary and eccentric architect Buckminster Fuller, would build for the Saffords one of his early geodesic domes, a shell of struts of aluminum and triangles of glass and porcelain, intricately balanced, a feat of engineering, a marvel, out of this world: the future summer headquarters of the Simulmatics Corporation.5 Ed Greenfield had big ideas and big ideals, big liberal ideas.

Greenfield, McPhee, and Yale psychologist Robert Abelson, who had also signed onto Simulmatics, decamped to Pool’s house in Cambridge. Ithiel’s fifteen-year-old son, Jeremy, who was spending the summer with his father, sat in on some of their meetings, watching them pore over endless reams of computer printouts.82 Then they reconvened at Wading River, where Buckminster Fuller was just beginning work on the geodesic dome he was building for Frank Safford, next to Ed and Patty Greenfield’s house.83 They’d have had to send a staffer to take the train into New York, to feed punch cards into and collect printouts from the IBM 704 at Columbia.84 On August 25, they headed to Washington, to submit Simulmatics’ results to Bobby Kennedy and the top campaign staff during a briefing held in RFK’s office.85 Simulmatics’ three new studies were as shrewd as their initial study on black voters.


pages: 441 words: 113,244

Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity From Politicians by Joe Quirk, Patri Friedman

3D printing, access to a mobile phone, addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Celtic Tiger, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Dean Kamen, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, failed state, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open borders, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, stem cell, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, young professional

Meinhold, “Inhabitat Interview: Water Architect Koen Olthuis on How to Embrace Rising Sea Levels,” August 28, 2014, http://inhabitat.com/inhabitat-interview-water-architect-koen-olthuis-on-how-to-embrace-rising-sea-levels. Korail Wet Slum in Dhaka, Bangladesh: www.unesco-ihe.org/sites/default/files/floating_city_apps.pdf. “seadromes”: Bill Bryson, One Summer: America, 1927 (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2013). Buckminster Fuller revealed his detailed vision of Triton City: http://cup2013.wordpress.com/tag/triton-city/. There are three types of floating cities: Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path (New York: St. Martin’s Press), 332–33. The Maldives, a nation of 1,300 or so islands, may soon be submerged: Maldives Most At-Risk Economy in South Asia from Climate Change—Report, August 19, 2014, www.adb.org/news/maldives-most-risk-economy-south-asia-climate-change-report.

If the Depression had occurred in the 1959 instead of 1929, we might have colonized the seas in 1969 and laughed at the futuristic notion of walking on the moon. In a world where space stations have been floating in the sky for almost a half century, we shouldn’t be incredulous that sea stations can float on water. Seasteading should have started soon after 1967, when designer and architect Buckminster Fuller revealed his detailed vision of Triton City, a floating city for five thousand residents designed to encourage people to share resources and conserve energy. Triton City is engineered in a tetrahedronal shape to resist tsunamis. Declaring “Three-quarters of our planet Earth is covered with water, most of which may float organic cities,” Fuller published his book Critical Path in 1981 to describe his ongoing aqua project, revealing that the fundamental design proposed by our seasteading engineers had long been in place.

Johnson took the model with him and installed it in his LBJ Texas library . . . The city of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and other cities of the U.S.A. are interested in the possibility of acquiring such floating cities. Chances of one being inaugurated are now improving.” Heartbreakingly, municipal and federal regulators stalled the project, which languished until Buckminster Fuller died in 1983. A great idea from one of humanity’s greatest geniuses was never tested because old rules prevented the innovation. No matter. Sea level rise is driving ocean colonization. Sink or Swim The Maldives, a nation of 1,300 or so islands, may soon be submerged. But as island paradises sink, floating cities will rise.


pages: 312 words: 108,194

Invention: A Life by James Dyson

3D printing, additive manufacturing, augmented reality, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, coronavirus, country house hotel, COVID-19, electricity market, Elon Musk, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Indoor air pollution, James Dyson, James Watt: steam engine, lockdown, microplastics / micro fibres, mittelstand, remote working, rewilding, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, uranium enrichment, warehouse automation, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War, young professional

During my first face-to-face tutorial with him he said, “When you design something, everything about it has to have a purpose. There has to be a reason.” I looked around at the best designs of the time like Issigonis’s Mini, the new architecture of Norman Foster and Richard Rogers, and at the radical designs of the American inventor Buckminster Fuller, and I saw that Bernard was right. I have based all my design on this ever since—honest, purposeful design reflecting its technology and engineering. At the same time, this was very much the era of anything goes, a time of a brilliant flowering of new art, design, fashion, color, and music.

Most enduringly good modern buildings of the past fifty years, like the Pompidou Centre in Paris or the Lloyd’s building in London, as well as medieval cathedrals and ancient designs like the Pantheon in Rome, are defined by the structure that holds them up rather than by cladding or style. I was also really taken by the work of Buckminster Fuller. Hot news at the time in London—he had come to work with Norman Foster in 1967—he demonstrated, especially with his geodesic domes, that architecture and structure were indeed synonymous. One of “Bucky’s” most enthusiastic supporters at the RCA was my fellow-year student Anton Furst, an impulsive and hugely creative talent, who went on to design the sets for Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves, Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket—re-creating the hell of Vietnam on the site of Beckton Gasworks in east London—and Tim Burton’s gloriously dark Batman, for which he won an Oscar.

Strong, wind- and snow-proof, they found favor with the military, polar research bases, and exhibition organizers, although they were never mass produced as homes as Fuller would have liked them to be. I suspect this is principally because most people, including mortgage lenders, prefer conventional homes. Through Tony Hunt’s teaching, Buckminster Fuller opened my eyes to what was structurally possible and to just how exciting pure structure and design engineering could be. I could see that structural engineering would come to dominate architecture. I also understood that this would be true of products, too, that their technology and engineering would become more important than industrial design casings.


pages: 264 words: 68,108

Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Buckminster Fuller, Columbine, Honoré de Balzac, index card, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Paul Erdős, placebo effect

“I’ve always painted”: Ibid., 147. 479. Le Corbusier: Nicholas Fox Weber, Le Corbusier: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008); Jerzy Soltan, “Working with Le Corbusier,” http://www.archsociety.com/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.24. 480. “The process of”: Soltan. 481. Buckminster Fuller: J. Baldwin, BuckyWorks: Buckminster Fuller’s Ideas for Today (New York: Wiley, 1996); Elizabeth Kolbert, “Dymaxion Man,” New Yorker, June 9, 2008, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/09/080609fa_fact_kolbert. 482. “A series of trials”: Baldwin, 66. 483. “disconcerted observers”: Ibid. 484. Paul Erdos: Paul Hoffman, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth (New York: Hyperion, 1998). 485.

Wodehouse Edith Sitwell Thomas Hobbes John Milton René Descartes Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Friedrich Schiller Franz Schubert Franz Liszt George Sand Honoré de Balzac Victor Hugo Charles Dickens Charles Darwin Herman Melville Nathaniel Hawthorne Leo Tolstoy Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky Mark Twain Alexander Graham Bell Vincent van Gogh N. C. Wyeth Georgia O’Keeffe Sergey Rachmaninoff Vladimir Nabokov Balthus Le Corbusier Buckminster Fuller Paul Erdos Andy Warhol Edward Abbey V. S. Pritchett Edmund Wilson John Updike Albert Einstein L. Frank Baum Knut Hamsun Willa Cather Ayn Rand George Orwell James T. Farrell Jackson Pollock Carson McCullers Willem de Kooning Jean Stafford Donald Barthelme Alice Munro Jerzy Kosinski Isaac Asimov Oliver Sacks Anne Rice Charles Schulz William Gass David Foster Wallace Marina Abramovic Twyla Tharp Stephen King Marilynne Robinson Saul Bellow Gerhard Richter Jonathan Franzen Maira Kalman Georges Simenon Stephen Jay Gould Bernard Malamud A Note About the Author ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTES Photo Credits/Permissions INTRODUCTION Nearly every weekday morning for a year and a half, I got up at 5:30, brushed my teeth, made a cup of coffee, and sat down to write about how some of the greatest minds of the past four hundred years approached this exact same task—that is, how they made the time each day to do their best work, how they organized their schedules in order to be creative and productive.

He would fumble with his wristwatch—a small, oddly feminine contraption, far too small for his big paw—and finally say, grudgingly, “C’est difficile, l’architecture,” toss the pencil or charcoal stub on the drawing, and slink out, as if ashamed to abandon the project and me—and us—in a predicament. Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) The American architect and inventor (he called himself a “comprehensive, anticipatory design scientist”) was frequently his own research subject as well (he also called himself Guinea Pig B). Just as he questioned humans’ accepted modes of living and transportation—popularizing the geodesic dome and prototyping the three-wheeled, blimp-shaped Dymaxion vehicle, among other futuristic inventions—he also eschewed traditional models of behavior.


pages: 290 words: 72,046

5 Day Weekend: Freedom to Make Your Life and Work Rich With Purpose by Nik Halik, Garrett B. Gunderson

Airbnb, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, business process, clean water, collaborative consumption, cryptocurrency, delayed gratification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, Ethereum, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial independence, gamification, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Home mortgage interest deduction, independent contractor, initial coin offering, Isaac Newton, Kaizen: continuous improvement, litecoin, low interest rates, Lyft, market fundamentalism, microcredit, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, passive income, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Skype, solopreneur, subscription business, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, traveling salesman, uber lyft

I refuse to spend my life doing the bidding of others. I will help others build their dreams but not at the expense of my own. I build my 5 Day Weekend. I live the life I love. “The minute you begin to do what you really want to do, it’s really a different kind of life.” —BUCKMINSTER FULLER Putting the 5 Day Weekend to Work For you, this book may: Be a wake-up call Offer new ideas Crystalize thoughts you’ve had before Challenge you to live life to the fullest Spur you to action It can be read from beginning to end to give you an overview.

My goal isn’t to give you an exhaustive list of alternative growth investments, but rather to teach you to think outside the box. Do your homework, and you’ll see a world of opportunity beyond what you’re taught by Suze Orman and Money magazine. “Do more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.” —BUCKMINSTER FULLER CHAPTER 19 GO BIG MOMENTUM INVESTMENTS As your cash flow from your Growth investments grows, you’ll be in a position to start considering Momentum investments. You’re probably not in a position yet to even think about Momentum investing, and you may not be for a few years. Still, this section will help to paint a vision of what’s possible and give you something to look forward to.

Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others.”19 After this experience, Bucky chose to embark on “an experiment, to find what a single individual [could] contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity.”20 He became an architect, systems theorist, designer, inventor, and the author of more than thirty books, and he was hailed as “one of the greatest minds of our times.” A Clear Purpose Unleashes Your Greatness As we learn from Buckminster Fuller, what keeps us stuck in life is a lack of purpose. Having a clear purpose unleashes the best in us and enables us to escape aimlessness, boredom, and mediocrity. “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”


pages: 239 words: 56,531

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine by Peter Lunenfeld

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, anti-globalists, Apple II, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, business logic, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, East Village, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, folksonomy, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, gravity well, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, Mother of all demos, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-materialism, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, social bookmarking, social software, spaced repetition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas L Friedman, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, walkable city, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

There has long been a split in the literature on gaming between narratologists, who emphasize the “stories” that video games generate, and the ludologists, who concentrate on game play as primary. See Ian Bogost, Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 68. 26 . The sixth chapter of R. Buckminster Fuller’s Critical Path (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981) is devoted to the world game, and the Buckminster Fuller Institute maintains a page on its cite with numerous resources, available at <http://www.bfi.org/our_programs/who_is_buckminster_fuller/design_science/ world_game>. CHAPTER 4: WEB n.0 1. See <http://flickr.com>; <http://www.del.icio.us>. The term was coined by Thomas Vander Wal. See Daniel H. Pink, “Folksonomy,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, December 11, 2005, available at <http://www.nytimes. com/2005/12/11/magazine/11ideas1-21.html?

One game that was indeed sticky involved players running around a huge and unconventional map of the world, working together to deploy resources and innovative technology to make not just their team but rather the whole globe a better place. More than a generation ago, the polymath futurist and designer R. Buckminster Fuller (of geodesic dome fame) proposed this multiplayer “design science process for arriving at economic, technological and social insights pertinent to humanity’s future envolvement [sic, a signature Fuller neologism] aboard our planet Earth.” Originally called the “great logistics game” and then the “world peace game,” it was best known simply as the “World Game.”


pages: 394 words: 108,215

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, California gold rush, card file, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, different worldview, digital divide, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, punch-card reader, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert X Cringely, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Hackers Conference, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, union organizing, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Combining his Midwestern roots with a Merry Prankster sense of cosmic adventure, Brand would create in 1968 an irresistible format in the first Whole Earth Catalog. A compendium of stuff patterned after the Sears and L. L. Bean mail-order catalogs crossed with Consumer Reports, the catalog struck a deep nerve that transcended the counterculture. Brand had come upon the idea of a “Whole Earth” two years earlier, after hearing a lecture by Buckminster Fuller. One day in North Beach, he had been sitting huddled in a blanket on the roof of his three-story apartment building looking out over the city. Having taken “a few mikes of LSD,”2 Brand was suddenly struck by the fact that the city’s buildings were not laid out in perfect parallel lines. It seemed to him that, since the surface of the earth was curved, they actually must diverge just slightly.

“Information wants to be free,” he said, and then he added in typical Brandian fashion, “and it wants to be very expensive.” The first Whole Earth Catalog was a full-on tour of the counterculture, a hodgepodge of product descriptions, advice, commentary, and quirky features laid out in a seemingly haphazard fashion, beginning with Buckminster Fuller and ending with the I Ching; it became an instant bible and a serendipitous tool for finding interesting stuff. In doing so, it also helped a scattered community that was in the process of defining itself find an identity. “We are as gods and we might as well get used to it.” Brand’s introduction began with a phrase borrowed from British anthropologist Edmund Leach that is often remembered and quoted.

Evans decided that he would become the interface between the super-straight world of information technology, SRI, and the wild and free world of the embryonic alternative society that was blossoming on the Peninsula.11 He felt that a lot of the ideas about community that Brand was exploring and the ideas that Engelbart had about a “bootstrapped community” were on the same continuum, and so he started to actively encourage a dialogue between the two worlds. Engelbart, he believed, had a receptive mind. In 1969, at Evans’s urging, Engelbart took a small group of Augment researchers to visit a commune known as Lama that had been started by Steve Durkee and Steve Baer in the mountains north of Taos, New Mexico. Baer was a disciple of Buckminster Fuller and the creator of a novel type of domelike building called a “zome.” Durkee was an artist who was Brand’s former roommate and mentor/guru. As hard as Evans tried to bridge the gap, he ended up increasing the stress on Engelbart, who in principle was open to new ideas but who was increasingly obsessing over losing control of his group.


pages: 335 words: 111,405

B Is for Bauhaus, Y Is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World From a to Z by Deyan Sudjic

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, dematerialisation, deskilling, Easter island, edge city, Elon Musk, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Guggenheim Bilbao, illegal immigration, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Kitchen Debate, light touch regulation, market design, megastructure, moral panic, New Urbanism, place-making, QWERTY keyboard, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

He sold the rights to Caterham Cars, who still manufacture its descendants to this day. What made the Lotus project work was Chapman’s ability to think his way around the production and performance issues on which every new car depends. He wasn’t the first engineer to come up with the idea of using a space frame to make a stiff but lightweight car. Buckminster Fuller had done that decades earlier when he built his Dymaxion car back in the 1930s. While Fuller was far-sighted enough to see the potential of the approach, a fatal crash at its launch blighted the Dymaxion’s future and it was Chapman who was able to make it work in the marketplace. And the brilliant Hans Ledwinka at the Czech car company Tatra – from which FA Porsche took much of the expertise for the Volkswagen – had also worked on the idea of a ‘backbone’ chassis that shaped Lotus’s approach to finding a simple and economical way to stiffen his lightweight fibreglass bodies.

He turned his attention to the young Norman Foster, who was capable, in those days, of telling potential clients that the answer to their needs might not be to build anything at all. Most unsettlingly of all for those who took a conventional view of architectural aesthetics, Foster spoke of his admiration for the maverick visionary Buckminster Fuller and his geodesic domes. As time has passed, design history has emerged as an academic subject, somewhere between cultural studies and social anthropology, a shift that I don’t find particularly appealing. But design keeps changing shape, which is why it matters. The clearest, but still not entirely satisfactory, way to define design is through its relationship with mass production.

From the first Paris exposition to the starry-eyed futurism of New York in 1939, from the welfare state optimism of the Festival of Britain in 1951 and the tawdry corporate vision of New York in 1964, each of the fairs sloganized a particular view of urbanism. The most extreme embrace of drip-dry modernity was the Montreal Expo of 1967, with its concrete housing ziggurat designed by Moshe Safdie, its Buckminster Fuller dome for the United States pavilion, and its monorails. The expo, despite all the dross and the expense, is still refusing to lie down and die. The Shanghai Expo of 2010 was the most well attended of all time, the product of the burgeoning mobility of the Chinese labouring class and the determination from governments around the world to make the best possible showing in front of this potentially enormous new market.


The Orbital Perspective: Lessons in Seeing the Big Picture From a Journey of 71 Million Miles by Astronaut Ron Garan, Muhammad Yunus

Airbnb, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, book scanning, Buckminster Fuller, carbon credits, clean water, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, fake it until you make it, global village, Google Earth, Indoor air pollution, jimmy wales, low earth orbit, optical character recognition, overview effect, private spaceflight, ride hailing / ride sharing, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart transportation, Stephen Hawking, transaction costs, Turing test, Uber for X, web of trust

The establishment of this Unity Node would allow us to create “dashboards of Earth,” or a control room for Spaceship Earth, where critical data affecting our global society could be presented in an actionable way. The idea of creating this type of information system is not new. In the 1960s, renowned inventor and visionary Buckminster Fuller popularized the term “Spaceship Earth,” and he devoted his life to identifying and communicating the interconnections between economic, social, and environmental systems to improve life on our planet. Long before environmental stewardship was prevalent in society, Fuller addressed the reality of our interconnectedness and the synergy that could be produced by working together to find ways to stop wasting the planet’s natural resources.

Fuller’s plans were well in advance of the technology of the time, and therefore his original vision for the Expo ’67 pavilion was not fully realized. However, advancements in computing and visualization technologies over the past five decades have made it possible to realize the original purpose of the Expo ’67 pavilion. The nonprofit Buckminster Fuller Institute, which is dedicated to finding innovative solutions to some of humanity’s most pressing problems, wants to use the fiftieth anniversary of Expo ’67 as an impetus to finally fully realize Fuller’s dream of creating a control room for Spaceship Earth. By renovating and incorporating modern technology into the fifty-year-old geodesic dome, which is currently the Biosphère Environmental Museum, it hopes to create a global hub for collaborative international problem solving.

By renovating and incorporating modern technology into the fifty-year-old geodesic dome, which is currently the Biosphère Environmental Museum, it hopes to create a global hub for collaborative international problem solving. This tool would be made completely open to all, so that it can be of value to society as a whole. As a result, according to Elizabeth Thompson, executive director of the Buckminster Fuller Institute, “planetary planning could be truly democratized, and changing the course of Spaceship Earth can become a cooperative human effort, rather than a task relegated to policy makers.” Fuller envisioned this control room as a global optimization tool. Today, we have the technology to fulfill Fuller’s vision.


Possiplex by Ted Nelson

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Bill Duvall, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Computer Lib, cuban missile crisis, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Herman Kahn, HyperCard, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Murray Gell-Mann, nonsequential writing, pattern recognition, post-work, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Vannevar Bush, Zimmermann PGP

Obviously libraries were not to be trusted. information wherever you could. You had to find the Clearly people were misled about libraries. They had lions of stone but feet of clay. Bucky Says It All (1947) DESIGN INFLUENCES: Bucky in 1947-8, when I was ten It was 1947, when I was ten, that Buckminster Fuller made all the newspapers. He was trying to mass-produce his Dymaxion House, and there was a lot of publicity for it; I remember reading about Bucky in a number of different places, especially newspapers. (He must have had a very good publicist.) Bucky Fuller believed we could have a new and much better and very different world.

This gave me something to hope for in a world I rather disliked. (I have always believed life should be completely different.) He said the educational system was horrible—I totally agreed; and he wanted to fix the world by design—the design of his magnificent car, the design of his house that would come in by helicopter and be lowered on a pole. Buckminster Fuller was my hero ever since. Sophistication, Age 10 I believe that at the age of ten my favorite word was “ostensibly.” I know I could recite Hamlet’s “To Be or Not To Be” and a few verses of the Rubaiyat; I could sing, write out (and accentuate correctly), numerous songs from Gilbert and Sullivan, the first verse of the “Marseillaise” and all four verses of the Star Spangled Banner.

I saw myself becoming perhaps-• a showman-intellectual,* like one of my heroes, Jean Cocteau. * A recent nice term is showman-penseur. • a theoretical explorer in some new area like my hero Benjamin Lee Whorf, an academic outlier (he was in the insurance business) who was nevertheless respected in academia, and created a field of his own. • like my boyhood hero Buckminster Fuller, a “designer and thinker”. Looking back, I tracked on the wavelengths of these three men surprisingly well. But little did I know what this agenda had cost Bucky, or what it would cost me. Perhaps I could create a field of my own, like Whorf and Bucky. Egotistical, you say? Of course. But I was going to bet my life on it.


pages: 94 words: 26,453

The End of Nice: How to Be Human in a World Run by Robots (Kindle Single) by Richard Newton

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Clayton Christensen, crowdsourcing, deliberate practice, digital divide, disruptive innovation, fail fast, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, future of work, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, lolcat, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Paul Erdős, Paul Graham, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social intelligence, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Tyler Cowen, Y Combinator

He died in 1996 at the age of 83 having published 1,475 academic papers, of which many were monumental and all substantial Tellingly, when people stopped doing mathematics he said they “had died”. When they died he said they “had left”. This unusual use of language reveals something about the way he approached the world and its problems. Of them all, by far the most telling is: “My brain is open”. Buckminster Fuller was one of the great creative forces of his time. He invented the geodesic dome, the term Spaceship Earth, and was President of Mensa He urged people to be more precise in the way they spoke about things so that they could think more effectively. “I suggest to audiences that they say, ‘I’m going “outstairs” and “instairs”.’

But if they try saying in and out for a few days in fun, they find themselves beginning to realise that they are indeed going inward and outward in respect to the center of Earth, which is our Spaceship Earth. And for the first time they begin to feel real ‘reality’.” As you know, it didn’t catch on. But it demonstrates the fierce independence of thought that gave him the ability to see and think differently. Paul Erdos and Buckminster Fuller perceived the world differently and so they used different words to label everyday activities and this in turn helped them approach problems and opportunity differently. Now, if you apply such different thinking to the fast-growing entrepreneurial business in the world we live in right now you might get “The Offer”.


pages: 544 words: 168,076

Red Plenty by Francis Spufford

Adam Curtis, affirmative action, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, asset allocation, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, cognitive dissonance, computer age, double helix, Fellow of the Royal Society, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kitchen Debate, linear programming, lost cosmonauts, market clearing, MITM: man-in-the-middle, New Journalism, oil shock, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, profit motive, RAND corporation, scientific management, Simon Kuznets, the scientific method

See Walter Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997). 2 American girls in polkadotted knee-length dresses: for photographs of the American exhibition in Sokolniki Park, and of the Muscovite visitors to it, see Life Magazine, vol. 47 no. 6, 10 August 1959, pp. 28–35, with little plastic beakers on p. 31; for descriptions of the exhibits, see Walter Hixson, Parting the Curtain; for a reading of the design politics of Buckminster Fuller’s dome, see Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, ‘Dome Days: Buckminster Fuller in the Cold War’ in Jenny Uglow and Francis Spufford, eds, Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention (London: Faber & Faber, 1996), pp. 167–92; for press reaction in the US, see New York Times, vol. CVIII no. 37,072, 25 July 1959, pp. 1–4. 3 She had added a green leather belt bought at the flea market: that is to say, at one of the legal bazaars or car-boot sales (without car boots) where Soviet citizens could sell their possessions second-hand.

See Walter Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997). 2 American girls in polkadotted knee-length dresses: for photographs of the American exhibition in Sokolniki Park, and of the Muscovite visitors to it, see Life Magazine, vol. 47 no. 6, 10 August 1959, pp. 28–35, with little plastic beakers on p. 31; for descriptions of the exhibits, see Walter Hixson, Parting the Curtain; for a reading of the design politics of Buckminster Fuller’s dome, see Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, ‘Dome Days: Buckminster Fuller in the Cold War’ in Jenny Uglow and Francis Spufford, eds, Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention (London: Faber & Faber, 1996), pp. 167–92; for press reaction in the US, see New York Times, vol. CVIII no. 37,072, 25 July 1959, pp. 1–4. 3 She had added a green leather belt bought at the flea market: that is to say, at one of the legal bazaars or car-boot sales (without car boots) where Soviet citizens could sell their possessions second-hand.

It puzzled her a bit that the Americans would pick such a thing as the centrepiece of their exhibition. It was certainly impressive, in its way, but you could tell that it sat lightly on the earth, and would soon be gone. It looked strangely casual. ‘Mm-hmm,’ said Fyodor. ‘… designed by a famous American architect, Buckminster Fuller,’ one of the girls was saying. Right across the big floor of the dome, the same speech was being made to close-packed circles of listeners as more and more people poured in. White-gloved hands pointed to exhibits around the base of the walls, and to the cluster of seven giant white screens overhead, which filled most of the span of the golden wall in front of them.


pages: 519 words: 136,708

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers by Stephen Graham

1960s counterculture, Anthropocene, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Chelsea Manning, commodity super cycle, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Elisha Otis, energy security, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, Google Earth, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Project Plowshare, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Skype, South China Sea, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, white flight, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

For permission to reproduce images we would like to thank the following in particular: David Coulthard’s car on the Burj Al Arab’s helipad, courtesy of the Jumeirah Group (p. xii); ‘City of Volume’ image, courtesy of Pierre Bélanger (p. xvi); the flat map courtesy of Neil Brenner, from Brenner’s ‘Introducing the Urban Theory Lab’ (p. 8); Lightful by Buckminster Fuller, from Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (2008), courtesy of the Buckminster Fuller Institute (p. 24); Menwith Hill NSA Base photograph courtesy of Steve Rowell (p. 35); São Paulan executive’s helipad illustration, courtesy of Eduardo Martino (p. 101); designs for Cairo skyscrapers, courtesy of Reese Campbell and Demetrios Comodromos at Method Design (p. 128); Kingdom Tower image, courtesy of Malec (p. 150); London skyscrapers image, courtesy of Darjole (p. 165); Sky Tower billboard in Mumbai, courtesy of Andrew Harris (p. 207); Skybridge in Minneapolis, courtesy of Thunerchild5 (p. 226); Bangkok’s Skytrain, courtesy of Moaksey (p. 231); Fake skyline in Hong Kong, courtesy of Drew; Underneath New York by Harry Granick, book cover (1991), courtesy of Fordham University (p. 280); ‘Sacrifice Zone’, courtesy of Kaitlin Donnally (p. 290); Awaaz Foundation poster, courtesy of the Awaaz Foundation (p. 299); Photograph of Devi Lal, courtesy of Beena Sarwar (p. 338); ‘Palestinian tunneller’, courtesy of Getty Images (p. 351); ‘urban cave’ project, courtesy of Andrea Star Reese (p. 353); ‘Urban Explorer’, courtesy of Bradley Garrett (p. 361) All rights reserved The moral rights of the author have been asserted 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-793-2 ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-996-7 (US EBK) ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-995-0 (UK EBK) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Graham, Stephen, 1965– author.

The motivating idea of the book is that it is only through such fully three-dimensional and critical perspectives that the political, social and urban struggles of our rapidly urbanizing world can possibly be understood. Strap yourself in, then, for a wild and startling ride through the three-dimensional geographies of our world. Part One: Above Social scientists need to raise their eyes from the ground Martin Parker A 1928 drawing by visionary designer, architect and polymath Buckminster Fuller, emphasizing the global, spiritual, practical and vertical challenges facing engineering, architecture and human life inherent within his idea of ‘Spaceship Earth’. (Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, 1968). 1. Satellite: Enigmatic Presence We live in a satellite enabled age.

Residents in the zones just outside the city’s business district wondered if they could benefit from an extended project or even of a second dome was possible.71 Designers in Beijing are meanwhile looking to upscale the International School’s ideas to a much larger dome enclosing a major new privatised urban park in the city.72 Architects have also suggested burying copper coils under parks to create electrostatic fields which attract smog particles from the immediate atmosphere.73 These examples of the growing interiorisation of ‘nature’ powerfully echo Buckminster Fuller’s influential ruminations between the 1940s and 1960s on the possibilities of dome-like constructions at various scales within which urban air could be precisely controlled. Famously, in 1960 Fuller suggested a giant, 400-tonne glass geodesic dome encompassing Midtown Manhattan which would permanently sustain what he called a ‘Garden of Eden’ climate’.74 Fuller claimed that ‘the cost of snow removal in New York City would pay for the dome in 10 years.’75 Today’s ‘bubbles’ for the precise manipulation of urban air contrast sharply, however, with Fuller’s urban planning ideas in one crucial respect.


pages: 179 words: 43,441

The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, circular economy, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, conceptual framework, continuous integration, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, global value chain, Google Glasses, hype cycle, income inequality, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, life extension, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, Narrative Science, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear taboo, OpenAI, personalized medicine, precariat, precision agriculture, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, reshoring, RFID, rising living standards, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social contagion, software as a service, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Technology enables greater efficiency, which most people want. Yet they also wish to feel that they are not merely part of a process but of something bigger than themselves. Karl Marx expressed his concern that the process of specialization would reduce the sense of purpose that we all seek from work, while Buckminster Fuller cautioned that the risks of over-specialization tend “to shut off the wide-band tuning searches and thus to preclude further discovery of the all-powerful generalized principles.”30 Now, faced with a combination of increased complexity and hyper-specialization, we are at a point where the desire for purposeful engagement is becoming a major issue.

_r=0 25 Martin Ford, Rise of the Robots, Basic Books, 2015. 26 Daniel Pink, Free Agent Nation – The Future of Working for Yourself, Grand Central Publishing, 2001. 27 Quoted in: Farhad Manjoo, “Uber’s business model could change your work”, The New York Times, 28 January 2015. 28 Quoted in: Sarah O’Connor, “The human cloud: A new world of work”, The Financial Times, 8 October 2015. 29 Lynda Gratton, The Shift: The Future of Work is Already Here, Collins, 2011. 30 R. Buckminster Fuller and E.J. Applewhite, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, Macmillan, 1975. 31 Eric Knight, “The Art of Corporate Endurance”, Harvard Business Review, April 2, 2014 https://hbr.org/2014/04/the-art-of-corporate-endurance 32 VentureBeat, “WhatsApp now has 700M users, sending 30B messages per day”, January 6 2015 http://venturebeat.com/2015/01/06/whatsapp-now-has-700m-users-sending-30b-messages-per-day/ 33 Mitek and Zogby Analytics, Millennial Study 2014 , September 2014 https://www.miteksystems.com/sites/default/files/Documents/zogby_final_embargo_14_9_25.pdf 34 Gillian Wong, “Alibaba Tops Singles’ Day Sales Record Despite Slowing China Economy”, The Wall Street Journal, 11 November 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/alibaba-smashes-singles-day-sales-record-1447234536 35 “The Mobile Economy: Sub-Saharan Africa 2014”, GSM Association, 2014.


pages: 411 words: 80,925

What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live by Rachel Botsman, Roo Rogers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, Community Supported Agriculture, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global village, hedonic treadmill, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, information retrieval, intentional community, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer rental, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Simon Kuznets, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, South of Market, San Francisco, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, traveling salesman, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, web of trust, women in the workforce, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

“A Conversation with Daniel Pink,” Information Outlook (November 2001), www.conversationagent.com/2008/04/conversation-wi.html. 19. Christophe Aguiton and Dominique Cardon, “The Strength of Weak Cooperation: An Attempt to Understand the Meaning of Web 2.0,” International Journal of Digital Economics 65 (2007): 51–65. 20. Stephanie Smith, “Good Guide: R. Buckminster Fuller,” GOOD (August 14, 2007), www.good.is/post/good-guide-r-buckminster-fuller/. 21. Jennifer Sharpe, “A Social Experiment: Communes in Cul-De-Sacs,” NPR radio interview (April 2, 2009), www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102651496. 22. Wikipedia definition of a Commune posted at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commune_(intentional_community). 23.

The worlds of architecture, design, and culture have identified Smith as one to watch with her ideas on low-impact design, mass production, and alternative forms of community. She talks passionately but with authority about archetype typologies, connected lifestyles, and tribal solutions. Smith proudly admits that she is heavily influenced by the thinking of the legendary designer and pioneer of sustainability Buckminster Fuller, sharing his passion to figure out the question: “How we can make the world work for 100 percent of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone?”20 Smith was sitting in her offices at Ecoshack, a Los Angeles–based experimental design studio, when she realized that she could no longer afford to be green.


pages: 598 words: 183,531

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - 25th Anniversary Edition by Steven Levy

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, air freight, Apple II, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, corporate governance, Donald Knuth, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, Free Software Foundation, game design, Gary Kildall, Hacker Ethic, hacker house, Haight Ashbury, John Conway, John Markoff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mondo 2000, Multics, non-fiction novel, Norman Mailer, Paul Graham, popular electronics, RAND corporation, reversible computing, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, software patent, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, The Hackers Conference, value engineering, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

It took a while for him to see how computers could be used for social good, and each time he glimpsed the possibilities he suspected betrayal. One interesting project he’d been involved with was the World game. A group of California programmers, philosophers, and engineers constructed a simulation of the world. It was based on an idea by Buckminster Fuller, where you could try out all sorts of changes and see their effect on the world. For days, people ran around suggesting things and running the game on the computer. Not much came of it in terms of suggestions on how to run the world, but a lot of people met others with similar views. Not long afterward, Efrem stumbled upon Resource One, with Lee mired in its bowels.

Albrecht was involved in starting the loosely run “computer education division” of the nonprofit foundation called the Portola Institute, which later spawned the Whole Earth Catalog. He met a teacher from Woodside High School on the peninsula, named LeRoy Finkel, who shared his enthusiasm about teaching kids computers; with Finkel he began a computer-book publishing company named Dymax, in honor of Buckminster Fuller’s trademarked word “dymaxion,” combining dynamism and maximum. The for-profit company was funded by Albrecht’s substantial stock holdings (he had been lucky enough to get into DEC’s first stock offering), and soon the company had a contract to write a series of instructional books on BASIC. Albrecht and the Dymax crowd got hold of a DEC PDP-8 minicomputer.

He took a few extra chips along with him, and traded the chips with others, eventually winding up with a keyboard and a few RAM chips. “We’re talking outright thievery,” he later explained; but in Homebrew terms, Sokol was liberating a neat hack from the proprietary oppressors. Pong was neat, and should belong to the world. And in Homebrew, exchanges like that were free and easy. Years earlier, Buckminster Fuller had developed the concept of synergy—the collective power, more than the sum of the parts, that comes of people and/or phenomena working together in a system—and Homebrew was a textbook example of the concept at work. One person’s idea would spark another person into embarking on a large project, and perhaps beginning a company to make a product based on that idea.


pages: 165 words: 45,397

Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming by Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby

3D printing, Adam Curtis, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, capitalist realism, Cass Sunstein, computer age, corporate governance, David Attenborough, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, General Motors Futurama, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, haute couture, Herman Kahn, intentional community, life extension, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mouse model, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Wall-E

Vehicle design, too, has a strong tradition of concept cars designed to be displayed in shows to communicate future design directions and gauge customer reaction. Roland Barthes's famous essay celebrating the Citroen DS in Mythologies captures the magic of these visions at their high point. Buckminster Fuller's 1930s prototype Dymaxion car promoted new ways of thinking about safety and aerodynamics. More recent studies have focused on style and imagery; Marc Newson's 027C (1999) for Ford aimed to introduce new cultural references to car design, and Chris Bangle's GINA (2008) concept car for BMW suggested replacing current materials with futuristic shape-shifting materials that adjust the car's aerodynamics on the move.

BIG DESIGN: THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE Although inspirational, these externalized dreams and fantasies are still quite modest in scale-a disadvantage of working outside official systems, semiunderground, or in the privacy of one's home or studio. There are also dreamers working within the system of industry, funding organizations, universities, and markets, who are attempting to imagine a better world for all, even if sometimes they might reflect their own personal obsessions. Buckminster Fuller would usually spring to mind as an example of this but his visions are a little too technological and rational for us. Norman Bel Geddes, however, mixed modern, everyday technologies with dreams, fantasy, and the irrational. He went well beyond problem solving, using design to give form to dreams.


Reset by Ronald J. Deibert

23andMe, active measures, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Cal Newport, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, cashless society, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, confounding variable, contact tracing, contact tracing app, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, information retrieval, information security, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megastructure, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, New Journalism, NSO Group, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-truth, proprietary trading, QAnon, ransomware, Robert Mercer, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sorting algorithm, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, techlash, technological solutionism, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, TSMC, undersea cable, unit 8200, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

And if the global pandemic showed us anything, it is that the “public” is now truly planetary in scope and scale. Thanks to hundreds of years of modern industrial technological development, we now live in a “global village” (to borrow McLuhan’s phrasing).397 There’s no turning back. Complex interdependence binds us together in a single habitat that systems theorist and futurist Buckminster Fuller once aptly called “Spaceship Earth.”398 We’re in this together, for better or for worse. Detachment and retreat also ignore or at least slight the many positive uses of digital technologies, social media included. In spite of disinformation and overreaching surveillance, social media have proven highly useful for many problems.

We need an open and secure means of communicating globally in order to manage our planet and our collective affairs. It is just that the current design for it, based around personal data surveillance, is counterproductive to those aims. Outright rejection of social media is thus both undesirable and futile. Harkening back to Buckminster Fuller, we do indeed live in Spaceship Earth, but we are stuck with a poorly designed operating manual. * * * Then there are the proposals that advocate for some variation of “reform” — that is, adjustments to one or another element of social media’s business practices. Reform proposals range along a spectrum from minor to major adjustments and lesser to greater degrees of formal government intervention.

Random House; Mumford, L. (1970). The pentagon of power: The myth of the machine. Vol. 2. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. We now live in a “global village” (to borrow McLuhan’s phrasing): McLuhan, M. (1962). The Gutenberg galaxy: The making of typographic man. University of Toronto Press. A single habitat that … Buckminster Fuller once aptly called “Spaceship Earth”: Fuller, R. B. (1969). Operating manual for spaceship Earth. Southern Illinois University Press. Facebook refers cases to the board, whose decisions are binding but not enforced by law: Douek, E. (2020, May 11). “What kind of oversight board have you given us?”


pages: 231 words: 64,734

Safe Haven: Investing for Financial Storms by Mark Spitznagel

Albert Einstein, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, asset allocation, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, book value, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, cognitive dissonance, commodity trading advisor, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, fiat currency, financial engineering, Fractional reserve banking, global macro, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Spitznagel, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Schrödinger's Cat, Sharpe ratio, spice trade, Steve Jobs, tail risk, the scientific method, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve, zero-sum game

The bigger the crash‐bang‐for‐the‐buck, the less is needed—and the less its potential drag or cost when it isn't needed. It just waits in the wings, almost unnoticed, with hardly any appreciable cost burden. But when it kicks in, it produces an explosive return that more than makes up for its small cost—many, many times over. It's like that 1960s‐era slogan “More with less,” most notably from the futurist Buckminster Fuller (of geodesic dome fame). He called it ephemeralization to the limit, as in “more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.” His industrial designs followed this concept as well. (Fuller loved our disdyakis triacontahedron, which he employed in his geodesic domes.

Alas, all along he could not see the real picture. Nietzsche held a curious belief that “merchant and pirate were for a long period one and the same person,” as “mercantile morality is really nothing but a refinement of piratical morality.” If only our merchant had a little more of Nietzsche's piratical morality—better yet of Buckminster Fuller's. Then he would have seen that the solution was right under his nose all along. But it wasn't his elaborate navigational charts that were his treasure map; rather, it was Bernoulli's logarithmic map. Our merchant lived through enough of the agony and the ecstasy, the costly lost cargos, and the profitable successful ones.


pages: 343 words: 101,563

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blockadia, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Chekhov's gun, climate anxiety, cognitive bias, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, effective altruism, Elon Musk, endowment effect, energy transition, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, failed state, fiat currency, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, it's over 9,000, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kevin Roose, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, megastructure, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, microplastics / micro fibres, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the built environment, The future is already here, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Whole Earth Catalog, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

There is not much carbon in the air, all told, just 410 parts per million, but it is everywhere, and so relying on carbon capture globally could require large-scale scrubbing plantations nearly everywhere on Earth—the planet transformed into something like an air-recycling plant orbiting the sun, an industrial satellite tracing a parabola through the solar system. (This is not what Barbara Ward or Buckminster Fuller meant by “spaceship earth.”) And while advances are sure to come, bringing costs down and making more efficient machines, we can’t wait much longer for that progress; we simply don’t have the time. One estimate suggests that, to have hopes of two degrees, we need to open new full-scale carbon capture plants at the pace of one and a half per day every day for the next seventy years.

There will be those, as there are now, who insist that there is only one way to respond to the unfolding ecological catastrophe—one productive way, one responsible way. Presumably, it won’t be only one way. Even before the age of climate change, the literature of conservation furnished many metaphors to choose from. James Lovelock gave us the Gaia hypothesis, which conjured an image of the world as a single, evolving quasi-biological entity. Buckminster Fuller popularized “spaceship earth,” which presents the planet as a kind of desperate life raft in what Archibald MacLeish called “the enormous, empty night”; today, the phrase suggests a vivid picture of a world spinning through the solar system barnacled with enough carbon capture plants to actually stall out warming, or even reverse it, restoring as if by magic the breathability of the air between the machines.

James Lovelock: His “The Quest for Gaia” was first published in New Scientist in 1975, and over the years Lovelock became less and less sanguine. In 2005, he published Gaia: Medicine for an Ailing Planet, in 2006 The Revenge of Gaia, and in 2009 The Vanishing Face of Gaia. He has also advocated geoengineering as a last-ditch effort to stop climate change. “spaceship earth”: Buckminster Fuller popularized the term, but it appeared originally almost a century before him, in Henry George’s 1879 work Progress and Poverty—in a passage later summarized by George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier: The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody; the idea that we must all cooperate and see to it that everyone does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions seems so blatantly obvious that one would say that no one could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system.


pages: 286 words: 94,017

Future Shock by Alvin Toffler

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, East Village, Future Shock, global village, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, information retrieval, intentional community, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Menlo Park, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open immigration, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, social intelligence, Teledyne, the market place, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, urban renewal, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

Comments on FUTURE SHOCK C. P. Snow: "Remarkable ... No one ought to have the nerve to pontificate on our present worries without reading it." R. Buckminster Fuller: "Cogent ... brilliant ... I hope vast numbers will read Toffler's book." Betty Friedan: "Brilliant and true ... Should be read by anyone with the responsibility of leading or participating in movements for change in America today." Marshall McLuhan: "FUTURE SHOCK ... is 'where it's at.'" Robert Rimmer, author of The Harrad Experiment: "A magnificent job ... Must reading." John Diebold: "For those who want to understand the social and psychological implications of the technological revolution, this is an incomparable book."

Less patrician New Yorkers, whose ancestors landed in America more recently, arriving there from the barrios of Puerto Rico, the villages of Eastern Europe or the plantations of the South, might voice their feelings quite differently. Yet the "Vanishing past" is a real phenomenon, and it is likely to become far more widespread, engulfing even many of the history-drenched cities of Europe. Buckminster Fuller, the designer-philosopher, once described New York as a "continual evolutionary process of evacuations, demolitions, removals, temporarily vacant lots, new installations and repeat. This process is identical in principle to the annual rotation of crops in farm acreage—plowing, planting the new seed, harvesting, plowing under, and putting in another type of crop ...

Figuratively, we "use up" places and dispose of them in much the same that we dispose of Kleenex or beer cans. We are witnessing a historic decline in the significance of place to human life. We are breeding a new race of nomads, and few suspect quite how massive, widespread and significant their migrations are. THE 3,000,000-MILE CLUB In 1914, according to Buckminster Fuller, the typical American averaged about 1,640 miles per year of total travel, counting some 1,300 miles of just plain everyday walking to and fro. This meant that he traveled only about 340 miles per year with the aid of horse or mechanical means. Using this 1,640 figure as a base, it is possible to estimate that the average American of that period moved a total of 88,560 miles in his lifetime.* Today, by contrast, the average American car owner drives 10,000 miles per year—and he lives longer than his father or grandfather.


pages: 335 words: 104,850

Conscious Capitalism, With a New Preface by the Authors: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business by John Mackey, Rajendra Sisodia, Bill George

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Buckminster Fuller, business process, carbon footprint, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, do well by doing good, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, Flynn Effect, income per capita, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, John Elkington, lone genius, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, shareholder value, six sigma, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, union organizing, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

It creates value for the giver and the recipient, as well as for the larger community. Servant leaders cultivate the noble virtue of generosity. They embrace transpersonal values—such as goodness, justice, truth, love, the alleviation of suffering, the salvation or enlightenment of others—that lift them to higher levels of consciousness.8 The story of Buckminster Fuller provides a great illustration of the power of servant leadership. At age thirty-two, Fuller was living in low-income public housing in Chicago. His daughter had recently died from polio and spinal meningitis. Fuller was drinking heavily, chronically depressed, and seriously considering committing suicide.

He would begin “an experiment, to determine how much a single individual could contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humankind.”9 The answer, it turns out, is “quite a lot.” Over the next fifty-five years until his death, he patented over two thousand inventions, wrote twenty-five books, and went down in history as one of the greatest thinkers, inventors, and servant leaders who ever lived. The Buckminster Fuller game of doing as much good as possible to benefit the world is a game we can all play. Servant leaders show us how to do exactly this.10 Integrity: The Synthesis of the Virtues Perhaps the most important virtue of conscious leaders is integrity. Honesty is often used as a synonym for integrity, but integrity is a more comprehensive virtue because, while it is partly about honesty, it goes beyond just telling the truth.

Danah Zohar and Ian Marshall, Spiritual Capital: Wealth We Can Live By (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2004), 3. 5. John A. Byrne, World Changers: 25 Entrepreneurs Who Changed Business as We Knew It (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2011), 52. 6. We first heard this articulated by Debashis Chatterjee. 7. Liu, Conversations on Leadership. 8. Zohar and Marshall, Spiritual Capital, 55. 9. Wikipedia, s.v. “Buckminster Fuller,” last modified June 18, 2012, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminister_Fuller. 10. The best book we are aware of on servant leadership is still the one that identified it originally: Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness (New York: Paulist Press, 1977). 11.


pages: 480 words: 123,979

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron Lanier

4chan, air gap, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, cosmological constant, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, game design, general-purpose programming language, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, hype cycle, impulse control, information asymmetry, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lifelogging, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, peak TV, Plato's cave, profit motive, Project Xanadu, quantum cryptography, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

I became convinced our home should be made of spherical structures resembling those found in plants. Ellery said he thought I might enjoy another book, in that case. This turned out to be a roughly designed publication in the form of an extra-thick magazine called Domebook. It was an offshoot of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog.5 Buckminster Fuller had been promoting geodesic domes as ideal structures, and they embodied the techie utopian spirit of the times. Initially I was skeptical of going geodesic. “I don’t want our house to be like any other house, and other people are building geodesic domes,” I complained. Ellery argued that I’d have to get approval from the authorities to build a design, and a few geodesic domes were already standing in hippie enclaves in the same county.

It was easy to be invited to an event in an amazing home, perhaps a renovated old prospector’s shack by a stream way up high in the redwood forests, to hear tales about how flying saucers, chanting, LSD, unconventional sex, or other exotica would save the soul and the world. A fair number of these events had a technological fetish, even so long ago. The points of tech culture reference were different. Idealist techies might have been enchanted by Buckminster Fuller and his notion of world games, or of the Allende regime’s lost cause to create a cyber-Marxist utopia in Chile. This was the circuit in which I started to give talks. I hadn’t thought I was the kind of person who would enjoy speaking to an audience, but a public persona started to pop up within me like a baby desert plant that hides for years, only to reveal itself for the first time after a big rain.

Chapter 3 1.   Harold Scott MacDonald “Donald” Coxeter was the great geometer of the twentieth century. He explored the majestic domain of symmetrical forms of which geodesic domes are only a first peek. Aside from his stature in mathematics, he directly inspired not only geodesic dome architect Buckminster Fuller, but the artist M. C. Escher. 2.   Bateson was an anthropologist as well as one of the most prominent philosophers of cybernetics. I can’t possibly summarize his work here, but I will say that he charted a way out of the terrifying vision revealed by Wiener. He suggested a humble approach to technology, in which people don’t think of themselves as being placed above nature, but embedded within a larger system. 3.   


pages: 476 words: 132,042

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, c2.com, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, charter city, classic study, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer vision, cotton gin, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, George Gilder, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, life extension, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, Picturephone, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, rewilding, Richard Florida, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, silicon-based life, skeuomorphism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the built environment, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Vernor Vinge, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, yottabyte

Genetics, 180 (1). http://www.genetics.org/cgi/content/abstract/180/1/431. 127 “all outcomes would be different”: Sean Carroll. (2008) The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution. New York: W. W. Norton. 128 precisely, but elegantly, backward: Stephen Jay Gould. (1989) Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and Nature of History. New York: W. W. Norton, p. 320. 128 Buckminster Fuller once said: Richard Buckminster Fuller, Jerome Agel, et al. (1970) I Seem to Be a Verb. New York: Bantam Books. 7. Convergence 132 strung across our countryside: Christopher A. Voss. (1984) “Multiple Independent Invention and the Process of Technological Innovation.” Technovation, 2 p. 172. 132 “claimed by more than one person”: William F.

And the human organism even more so, because among all living beings (that we know about) we are the most open-ended. We have just started our evolution as Homo sapiens. As both parent and child of the technium—evolution accelerated—we are nothing more and nothing less than an evolutionary ordained becoming. “I seem to be a verb,” the inventor/philosopher Buckminster Fuller once said. We can likewise say: The technium is a tendency, not an entity. The technium and its constituent technologies are more like a grand process than a grand artifact. Nothing is complete, all is in flux, and the only thing that counts is the direction of movement. So if the technium has a direction, where is it pointed?


pages: 300 words: 81,293

Supertall: How the World's Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Our Lives by Stefan Al

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, digital twin, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Trump, Easter island, Elisha Otis, energy transition, food miles, Ford Model T, gentrification, high net worth, Hyperloop, invention of air conditioning, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Marchetti’s constant, megaproject, megastructure, Mercator projection, New Urbanism, plutocrats, plyscraper, pneumatic tube, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, SimCity, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social distancing, Steve Jobs, streetcar suburb, synthetic biology, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the built environment, the High Line, transit-oriented development, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, tulip mania, urban planning, urban sprawl, value engineering, Victor Gruen, VTOL, white flight, zoonotic diseases

For instance, people can also feel comfortable through a breeze, even when the room temperature may be relatively warm. This offered an alternative to air-conditioning, such as natural ventilation. The most futuristic of solar home creations came from the hands of American architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller. Out of frustration with inefficient homes, in the 1940s he designed a mobile mass-produced house, the Dymaxion Dwelling Machine, with an environmentally friendly footprint. Shaped like an aluminum spaceship, it was heated and cooled by natural methods. A vent protrudes from the domed roof, shaped to induce a heat-driven vortex sucking air.

“The Challenge: Tall and Super-Tall Buildings: HVAC,” Consulting Specifying Engineer Magazine, July 28, 2014, accessed April 19, 2020, https://www.csemag.com. 23.Carly Fordred, “A Tall Order,” HVAC&R Nation, March 2010. 24.John Robert, “City Planning in Frankfurt, Germany, 1925–1932: A Study in Practical Utopianism,” Journal of Urban History, November 1, 1977. 25.Donald Aitken, “The ‘Solar Hemicycle’ Revisited: It’s Still Showing the Way,” Wisconsin Academy Review 39, no. 1 (1992–93): 33–37. 26.Buckminster Fuller, “The Case for a Domed City,” St Louis Post-Dispatch, September 26, 1965. 27.“Steve Rose. “‘His Inner Circle Knew about the Abuse’: Daniela Soleri on Her Architect Father Paolo,” The Guardian, February 29, 2020. 28.Saskatchewan Research Council, “A Closer Look at the Saskatchewan Conversation House and Four Others,” April 17, 2018.


pages: 903 words: 235,753

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

In the depiction of this incipient megastructure, we can see not just new machines but also still-embryonic geopolitical institutions and social systems as well. For these, The Stack is powerful and dangerous, both remedy and poison, a utopian and dystopian machine at once (it can go either way, and as Buckminster Fuller said, it will be touch and go until the last instant). As a model, The Stack is simultaneously a portrait of the system we have but perhaps do not recognize, and an antecedent of a future territory, and with both at hand, we hope to prototype the alien cosmopolitanisms these engender for us and suggest to us.

Water has no nationality, but riverbeds are sovereign territories, we cannot allow polluted water from other nation-states to enter our country.”13 This is an amazingly succinct rehearsal of the older European nomos's juridical separation of land and sea, fixed and liquid, made into parable.14 While Fang likely was not familiar with Buckminster Fuller's admonition that “the fearful sovereign nation politicos will find that trying to arrest networking is like trying to arrest the waves of the ocean,” Fuller, it is more certain, was never given the assignment, as Fang was, of building a glass dome for a billion Internet users.15 Shifting the figure of water from a metaphor to geography, consider that for Schmitt's history of the nomos (that is, Carl Schmitt, not Eric Schmidt), the territorial domain of nations was always defended by the naval capacity over the omnidirectional glacis of the ocean in light of Google's filed patent on water-based data centers.16 This floating cyberinfrastructure would, in principle, greatly reduce the energy and cooling costs of hosting and serving the peta- and exabytes of data that will constitute an eventual planetary cloud computing platform.

See Jin Ge, “The Father of China's Great Firewall Re-defines Internet Sovereignty,” http://www.88-bar.com/tag/sovereign-internet/. Thanks to Tricia Wang for alerting me to this quote. 14.  See Xu Wu, Chinese Cyber Nationalism: Evolution, Characteristics, and Implications (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007). 15.  R. Buckminster Fuller, Grunch of Giants (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983). 16.  Katie Fehrenbacher, “Google Floats Idea of Wave Powered Data Center,” Gigaom, September 8, 2008, https://gigaom.com/2008/09/08/google-floats-idea-of-wave-powered-data-center/, and “Google to Switch on Seawater-Cooled Data Center This Fall,” Gigaom, May 24, 2011, https://gigaom.com/2011/05/24/google-to-switch-on-worlds-first-seawater-cooled-data-center-this-fall/.


pages: 720 words: 197,129

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, c2.com, call centre, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, commons-based peer production, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, desegregation, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gary Kildall, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, linear model of innovation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, PageRank, Paul Terrell, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yochai Benkler

Instead of deploring computers as tools of the old power structure, he argued that they could aid the shift in social consciousness if they were made more personal: “The machine, having been built, may now be turned to human ends, in order that man once more can become a creative force, renewing and creating his own life.”9 A technotribalism began to emerge. Tech gurus such as Norbert Wiener, Buckminster Fuller, and Marshall McLuhan became required reading in communes and dorms. By the 1980s the LSD evangelist Timothy Leary would update his famous mantra “Turn on, tune in, drop out” to proclaim instead “Turn on, boot up, jack in.”10 Richard Brautigan was the poet-in-residence in 1967 at Caltech, and that year he captured the new ethos in a poem, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.”11 It began: I like to think (and the sooner the better!)

“The Trips Festival marked Stewart Brand’s emergence as a countercultural entrepreneur—but in a deeply technocratic mold,” wrote the cultural historian Fred Turner.17 A month after the Trips Festival, in February 1966, Brand was sitting on his gravelly rooftop in San Francisco’s North Beach enjoying the effects of 100 micrograms of LSD. Staring at the skyline, he ruminated on something that Buckminster Fuller had said: our perception that the world is flat and stretches indefinitely, rather than round and small, is because we have never seen it from outer space. Abetted by the acid, he began to grok the smallness of the earth and the importance of other people appreciating that as well. “It had to be broadcast, this fundamental point of leverage on the world’s ills,” he recalled.

Brand wrote on the first page of the first edition, “A realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog.” Buckminster Fuller followed with a poem that began, “I see God in the instruments and mechanisms that work reliably.” The first edition featured such items as Norbert Wiener’s book Cybernetics and a programmable HP calculator, along with buckskin jackets and beads. The underlying premise was that a love of the earth and a love of technology could coexist, that hippies should make common cause with engineers, and that the future should be a festival where a.c. outlets would be provided.20 Brand’s approach was not New Left political.


pages: 342 words: 90,734

Mysteries of the Mall: And Other Essays by Witold Rybczynski

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", additive manufacturing, airport security, Buckminster Fuller, City Beautiful movement, classic study, edge city, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Jane Jacobs, kremlinology, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Eisenman, rent control, Silicon Valley, the High Line, urban renewal, young professional

One entry mysteriously linked Cabrini-Green to the tidal cycles of Lake Michigan, another incorporated an amusement park into the public housing project, yet another nastily suggested “circling the wagons for safety” by creating fortresslike housing structures surrounded by masts with batteries of high-intensity spotlights. One designer, apparently a devotee of Buckminster Fuller, produced a solution to low-income housing based on prefabricated concrete spheres: the houses resembled lightbulbs. The winning project was the work of two assistant professors of architecture at North Dakota State University in Fargo and a newly graduated student. Jim Nelson, Don Faulkner, and Larry Carcoana’s proposal brims with midwestern good sense.

Thus far at least, the residential work remains stylistically traditional, although a number of apartment interiors have been modernist, and with Stern you never know. A Humble Architect Montreal’s Expo 67 was the last world’s fair where architects were treated as stars. The two most impressive national pavilions were Frei Otto’s tentlike West German pavilion and Buckminster Fuller’s U.S. pavilion, a large geodesic dome. Arthur Erickson’s delicate wood pyramid housing Man and Health made up for the rather lackluster Canadian pavilion. But the brightest star at Expo was a newcomer, Moshe Safdie, a twenty-eight-year-old Israeli-born Canadian who, according to legend, had turned his student thesis into the fair’s most striking attraction.


pages: 193 words: 19,478

Memory Machines: The Evolution of Hypertext by Belinda Barnet

augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Duvall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, game design, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, Internet Archive, John Markoff, linked data, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Project Xanadu, publish or perish, Robert Metcalfe, semantic web, seminal paper, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, the scientific method, Vannevar Bush, wikimedia commons

They cover the ELF design, Xanadu, StretchText and Nelson’s screen-based graph display idea. Nelson didn’t want to hover around in the background watching the team build a part of his vision; he wanted the design to be produced as faithfully as possible. ‘Let’s put it this way: I feel that van Dam should have treated me the way he would have treated Buckminster Fuller if he’d asked Buckminster Fuller to come in’ (Nelson 2011). That didn’t happen. As observed previously, van Dam and his team wanted to explore the hypertext concept, but they also had their own plans (which Nelson strenuously opposed). The team set out to design a dual-purpose system for authoring, editing and printing text documents, which could also be used to browse and query written materials nonsequentially.


The Unicorn's Secret by Steven Levy

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Buckminster Fuller, card file, East Village, financial independence, Future Shock, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, index card, John Markoff, Marshall McLuhan, Ralph Nader, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Skinner box, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog

“There were several hundred fat Jews with beards that I got confused with constantly,” Ginsberg says of those times.) In a sense, Einhorn was venturing far beyond the anarchist Yippie Movement; he was applying educated analysis of the world in terms of systems. Kiyoshi Kurimaya, a founder of Penn’s Free University and later an editor of Buckminster Fuller’s writings, claims that Ira was a master teacher for that very reason: “Ira seemed to have a complete system. He had a unique analysis of world events and contemporary culture that was not available in any other source that I had come in contact with. And they were ideas that were later confirmed through study, sometimes a year later, and sometimes ten years later.”

When Librach appeared, he was thrown immediately off balance. For one thing, the apartment seemed to be some sort of weird communal arrangement where an unclear number of adults came and went at will. For another thing, the walls of the place were filled with bookshelves—but the shelves were empty except for one book. Its author was Buckminster Fuller, and Ira held up the book and told Librach that “Everything is in here. This is philosophy, this is history, this is art, this one book has it all.” When Ira Einhorn offered Librach some banana bread, he accepted it with dread, hoping that some hallucinogenic drug was not among the ingredients.

The latter was no small factor in Ira Einhorn’s campaign to lose—he never pretended otherwise—the Democratic nomination for mayor. “Publicity helps me to create a myth about me and I have to use that myth to do what I have to get done,” he explained to Philadelphia Magazine. At the time, Ira was hanging out with an informal aggregation that called itself The Synergy Group, in honor of Buckminster Fuller’s philosophies. The idea was to generate energies to strengthen community, particularly an undeveloped area on South Street, just below the city’s historic area. Synergy’s dominant personalities were Curt Kubiak, whom Ira had been close with since the Free University, and Tom Bissinger, a bean pole–slim playwright who had recently been in charge of the avant garde Philadelphia Theater of the Living Arts.


pages: 151 words: 38,153

With Liberty and Dividends for All: How to Save Our Middle Class When Jobs Don't Pay Enough by Peter Barnes

adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, banks create money, basic income, Buckminster Fuller, carbon tax, collective bargaining, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Mark Zuckerberg, Money creation, Network effects, oil shale / tar sands, Paul Samuelson, power law, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Stuart Kauffman, the map is not the territory, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy

And third, though recycled rent requires government action to get started, it has the political virtue of avoiding the bigger/smaller government tug-of-war that paralyzes Washington today. It is, after all, property income that doesn’t enlarge government. It could therefore appeal to, or at least not offend, voters and politicians in the center, left, and right. A TRIM TAB IS A TINY FLAP ON A SHIP or airplane’s rudder. The designer Buckminster Fuller often noted that moving a trim tab slightly turns a ship or a plane dramatically. If we think of our economy as a moving vessel, the same metaphor can be applied to rent. Depending on how much of it is collected and whether it flows to a few or to many, rent can steer an economy toward extreme inequality or a large middle class.


pages: 370 words: 97,138

Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, built by the lowest bidder, butterfly effect, California gold rush, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Hyperloop, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, operation paperclip, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, phenotype, private spaceflight, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, technological singularity, telepresence, telerobotics, the medium is the message, the scientific method, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, wikimedia commons, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

The ability to manipulate matter at the level of atoms or molecules opened up new technologies and a dizzying array of potential new applications. Some of the most exciting materials were made of pure carbon. Fullerenes are carbon molecules in the form of spheres, tubes, and other shapes. The name is a nod to the architect and designer Buckminster Fuller, since the first of the new molecules to be created was a tiny spherical cage made of sixty carbon atoms, resembling one of Fuller’s geodesic domes. Soon after buckyballs were isolated, scientists learned how to create carbon nanotubes, interlinked carbon atoms rolled in a cylinder a millionth of a meter across.

Their mission was to live in a self-sustaining environment for two years, as a prototype of how humans might one day live on Mars, or in space.1 Texas billionaire Ed Bass sank $150 million into the project, and it was variously characterized in the press as a utopian dream or a rich man’s folly. The occupants wore jumpsuits out of Star Trek—which, depending on your point of view, made them look like either consummate professionals or inmates at a county jail. Few had serious scientific credentials. The soaring architecture was inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes, but there was also a darker backstory associated with founder John Allen, who ran a commune in New Mexico that had the trappings of a cult. Allen was a metallurgist and Harvard MBA who experimented with peyote and spent the late 1960s lecturing in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district.


The Buddha and the Badass: The Secret Spiritual Art of Succeeding at Work by Vishen Lakhiani

Abraham Maslow, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, data science, deliberate practice, do what you love, Elon Musk, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, meta-analysis, microbiome, performance metric, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, social bookmarking, social contagion, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, web application, white picket fence, work culture

And together you bend reality with more force than one person ever could alone. “I’ll Drain Brains from Other Countries” One sleepless night it hit me. What if I could create a workplace so attractive that talent from around the world would willingly relocate to Malaysia and help me build my dream company? In my head, a Buckminster Fuller quote was on replay. Bucky once said: You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. This vision of building a new type of business, the World’s Greatest Workplace, fueled me. And it wasn’t going to be in New York, or Silicon Valley, or London or Berlin, or in any of the world’s most popular cities.

To the teachers who provided wisdom for this book: Drima Starlight, for being pivotal in the early days of Mindvalley and for your values process that has been key to our continued success and now the success of countless others; Cameron Herold, for your Vivid Visioning technique that took my business to new heights; Srikumar Rao, for your sage wisdom, mentorship, and support through the highs and lows; Lisa Nichols, for believing in me early on, and for your friendship and partnership in the field of personal growth; Reverend Michael Beckwith, for your spiritual guidance, your Life Visioning process, and your commitment to transformation on the planet; Naveen Jain, for blowing me away with your moonshot ideas that have expanded the way I think I run my business; Richard Branson, for suggesting I write the first book that led to this book and for inviting me to mastermind with you on Necker, and being an example of how business and life can flow together with ease; Bob Proctor, for kicking my butt and getting me to think better; Ken Wilber, for being the Father of Integral Theory whose models have shaped me, my work, and many of the ideas in this book; Tim Urban, for your genius blog that tackles the most relevant topics the world needs to know about in a way that’s witty and engaging; Tom Chi, for your stand for humanity and for setting an example for how leaders should conduct themselves in business; John Ratcliff, for inspiring other leaders to truly see their people with your Dream Manager program; Daniel Pink, for your commitment to compassionate leadership and teams that thrive; Patty McCord, for reminding the world that people are already leaders the moment they walk in a door; Elon Musk, for being a trailblazer who sets an impeccable standard for how to think ten years ahead; Barack Obama, for your mentorship and inspiration; Larry Page, for sharing the OKR system that’s transformed how we work at Mindvalley; Doug McGuff, for your super slow training, and helping me reverse my biological age; Simon Sinek, for emphasizing the importance of sharing your why; Jim Collins for encouraging me to get the right people on my bus. To the thought leaders who are no longer with us but who have influenced my life and the ideas in this book: Buckminster Fuller, for showing me how to tackle impossible problems; Terrence McKenna, for your stand for people living self-expressed lives, for your mind-bending wisdom, and for contributing to my worldview; Rumi, for your spiritual guidance and your poems that have stuck with me and shaped the way I work; Martin Luther King Jr., for inspiring us all to live bravely; and Abraham Maslow, for revolutionizing the field of human psychology with your Hierarchy of Needs.


pages: 289 words: 112,697

The new village green: living light, living local, living large by Stephen Morris

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, Buckminster Fuller, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, computer age, cuban missile crisis, David Sedaris, deindustrialization, discovery of penicillin, distributed generation, Easter island, energy security, energy transition, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Firefox, Hacker Conference 1984, index card, Indoor air pollution, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Elkington, Kevin Kelly, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McMansion, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Negawatt, off grid, off-the-grid, peak oil, precautionary principle, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review

” — Nancy Jack Todd Editor, Annals of Earth newsletter “ Hurricane Katrina will be remembered as the most important turning point in the world's awareness and reaction to global warming.” — Jeffrey Hollender President & Chief Inspired Protagonist, Seventh Generation “ We can thank Herman Daly for the concept of full cost accounting, Buckminster Fuller for the power and possibility of thinking differently, and E.F. Schumacher as the father of the act locally/think globally movement.” — Jeffrey Hollender 96 chapter 4 : The End of Nature “ I’ve heard lots of criticism of Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, from inside the green movement, but we’re already converted.

Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit, by Al Gore. Plume, 1993. The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: The Fate of the World and What We Can Do Before It’s Too Late, by Thom Hartmann. Three Rivers Press, 1998. Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development, by Herman Daly. Beacon Press, 1992. Critical Path, by Buckminster Fuller. St. Martin’s Press, 1981. The Home Energy Diet: How to Save Money by Making Your House Energy Smart, by Paul Scheckel. New Society Publishers, 2005. The Company We Keep: Reinventing Small Business for People, Community, and Place, by John Abrams. Chelsea Green, 2005. The NEW VILLAGE GREEN 99 5 ONE-STRAW REVOLUTION “ If we throw mother nature out the window, she comes back in the door with a pitchfork.” — Masanobu Fukuoka 100 T he most profound learning experience of my college career was reading Robert Ardrey’s African Genesis: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man, long since out of print, but available, used, on Amazon.


pages: 362 words: 95,782

Stephen Fry in America by Stephen Fry

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, Donald Trump, illegal immigration, intermodal, jimmy wales, Jony Ive, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

Skyscrapers Music is not the only cultural product that Chicago has exported around the world: I will come to that dread bitch, comedy, in a moment, but first it is worth remarking on Chicago’s pre-eminence as a centre of great architecture. Most people who have visited both would agree that the quality of Chicago’s skyscrapers is every bit as good, if not better, than New York City’s. Mies van de Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller are just the best-known architects to have lived and worked in Illinois; they and their reputations attracted hundreds of others. From its completion in 1973 until the erection of the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, the tallest building in the world was the Sears Tower in Chicago’s Loop, the historic heart of downtown.

Daley, Adlai Stevenson, Louis Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson, Richard M. Daley, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Al Capone, Frank Nitti, Eliot Ness, Enrico Fermi, Ernest Hemingway, James T. Farrell, David Foster Wallace, John Deere, Marshall Field, Montgomery Ward, Richard Sears, Frank Lloyd Wright, Buckminster Fuller, Mies van de Rohe, Walt Disney, Gregg Toland, Michael Mann, Roger Ebert, Gene Siskel, Jack Benny, Burl Ives, Rock Hudson, Dick van Dyke, Gene Hackman, Richard Pryor, George Wendt, Vince Vaughn, Miles Davis, Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, Bo Diddley, Herbie Hancock, Alison Krauss, Kanye West, Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey, Hugh Hefner, Cindy Crawford


pages: 304 words: 87,702

The 100 Best Vacations to Enrich Your Life by Pam Grout

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, complexity theory, David Brooks, East Village, Easter island, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, global village, Golden Gate Park, if you build it, they will come, Maui Hawaii, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, SpaceShipOne, supervolcano, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

HOW TO GET IN TOUCH Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation, P.O. Box 198, 301 Fifth Street, Medora, ND 58645, 800-633-6721 or 701-623-4444, www.medora.com. CHAPTER 3 brain retreats I always say to myself, what is the most important thing we can think about in this extraordinary moment? —R. Buckminster Fuller, American visionary, architect, and inventor When you were five, you wanted the answers to everything. You wanted to know where rain came from, why some people were bald, how music came out of that little box called a radio. Back then, it was okay not to know everything. It was perfectly acceptable to ask questions, wonder why, want to know more.

They both have incredibly beautiful campuses, workshop leaders that are a veritable who’s who, and a long list of enlightening workshops. Esalen Institute. Perched on a rocky ledge overlooking the Pacific Ocean, this 140-acre institute in Big Sur is where Gestalt therapy guru Frederick “Fritz” Perls coached Rita Hayworth and where Ida Rolf pioneered Rolfing. Joseph Campbell, Buckminster Fuller, and Linus Pauling have all given workshops here. The weathered redwood buildings and geodesic domes sprinkled about the grounds go back to the early 1960s, when Stanford graduate students Michael Murphy and Richard Price gave life to their vision of a sanctuary where thinkers of all stripes—philosophers, psychologists, artists, academics, spiritual leaders—could come together to pursue the “exploration of unrealized human capacities.”


pages: 372 words: 94,153

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next by Andrew McAfee

back-to-the-land, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, DeepMind, degrowth, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, humanitarian revolution, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Landlord’s Game, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, Mikhail Gorbachev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, precision agriculture, price elasticity of demand, profit maximization, profit motive, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, telepresence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Veblen good, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, World Values Survey

As one or both of these quests succeeded, Simon reasoned, the original scarcity would be eased, and the resource’s price would go back down. In the most extreme and intriguing case, the substitute for the resource would be… nothing at all. In his 1968 book, Utopia or Oblivion, the architect and inventor R. Buckminster Fuller wrote, “I made many calculations, and it seemed increasingly clear that it was feasible for us to do so much with so little that we might be able to take care of everybody. In 1927 I called this whole process ‘Ephemeralization,’ ” by which he meant satisfying human desires for consumption while using fewer resources from the physical world—fewer molecules, in short.

The first Foxfire book sold more than 9 million copies: Tove Danovich, “The Foxfire Book Series That Preserved Appalachian Foodways,” NPR, March 17, 2017, https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/03/17/520038859/the-foxfire-book-series-that-preserved-appalachian-foodways. “Are we now ‘entering an age of scarcity’?”: Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 3. “I made many calculations”: R. Buckminster Fuller, Utopia or Oblivion (Zurich: Lars Müller, 1969), 293. “Ephemeralization… is the number one economic surprise of world man”: Ibid., 297. The real price of all five metals had fallen by late September of 1990: Ed Regis, “The Doomslayer,” WIRED, December 15, 2017, https://www.wired.com/1997/02/the-doomslayer-2/.


pages: 432 words: 124,635

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, agricultural Revolution, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, City Beautiful movement, clean water, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, data science, Donald Shoup, East Village, edge city, energy security, Enrique Peñalosa, experimental subject, food desert, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Google Earth, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, Induced demand, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, license plate recognition, McMansion, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, power law, rent control, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, starchitect, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, wage slave, white flight, World Values Survey, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Sometimes it takes a radical shift in the urban imagination to point the way. 9. Mobilicities II Freedom Automobiles are in no way responsible for our traffic problems. The entire responsibility lies in the faulty roads, which are behind the times. —Norman Bel Geddes, 1940 Possession is becoming progressively burdensome and wasteful and therefore obsolete. —Buckminster Fuller, 1969 In 1969 a consortium of European industrial interests charged a young American economist with figuring out how people would move through cities in the future. There was a lot of money to be made by whoever could divine the single technology most likely to capture the market in the coming decades.

Become a Fighter Pilot, Not a Commuter,” The Guardian, November 30, 2004, www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2004/nov/30/research.transport (accessed October 06, 2012). “freaks and weirdos”: See http://www.boingboing.net/2003/04/15/gm-apologizes-for-fr.html for correspondence. 9. Mobilicities II: Freedom Norman Bel Geddes: Bel Geddes, Norman, Magic Motorways (New York: Random House, 1940). Buckminster Fuller: Fuller, R. Buckminster, Operation Manual for Spaceship Earth (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969). also its limitations: Evans, Gary, Richard Wener, and Donald Phillips, “The Morning Rush Hour: Predictability and Commuter Stress,” Environment and Behavior, 2002: 521–30. anxiety of waiting: Evans, John E., “Transit Scheduling and Frequency,” in Traveler Response to Transportation System Changes,” TCRP Report 95 (Washington, DC: Transportation Research Board, National Academy Press, 2004.)


pages: 571 words: 124,448

Building Habitats on the Moon: Engineering Approaches to Lunar Settlements by Haym Benaroya

3D printing, anti-fragile, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, biofilm, Black Swan, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, carbon-based life, centre right, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, data acquisition, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, Gene Kranz, gravity well, inventory management, Johannes Kepler, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, performance metric, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, stochastic process, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, the scientific method, Two Sigma, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, zero-sum game

John Lewis, author of Mining the Sky and other publications. However stellar the previous ‘influencers’ may be, the prime motivator of my intellectual life, my alpha inspiration, the ‘north star’ of my attitudes, beliefs and feelings about science , technology, nature and philosophy, as well as the ‘mentor’ I always return to, is R. Buckminster (Bucky) Fuller (1895-1983). I met Bucky Fuller briefly twice, once in the late 1960s when I was a college student and once in 1975 while I was still in medical school. In my opinion Bucky Fuller, Gerry O’Neill and perhaps Carl Sagan, whose writings and insights continue to inspire me to this day, were the last visionary geniuses of the 20th century (unfortunately none have appeared yet in the 21st century).

The challenge for reliability on Mars is to extend that “three nines” or better for a mission about 30 times longer than the Moon and much greater complexity. Who would you consider as your key influence in your pursuit of space studies? Who inspired you? I suppose I can name a few influences: Buckminster Fuller, Frank Lloyd Wright, Erich Mendelsohn, and other early Modern architects. I wrote about Bucky in my 2014 paper The Continuum of Space Architecture , describing how his reorganization of the Platonic Solids by vertices spurred my analysis for the Triangular-Tetrahedral Space Station configuration. ( 11 ) Of course, the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs played a formative role in my early thinking that the space program was the story of my life.

The entrance consists of a separate structure that accommodates an air lock and a storage area for the space suits. Figure 4.23.Layout of Four-Apartment PSSMS. (Courtesy T.Y. Lin International) Moore et al. proposed two inflatable concepts, one based on Chow and Lin, and the other based on the work of Buckminster Fuller. ( 45 ) This conceptual study suggested possible interior configurations for the Chow and Lin structure. TransHab TransHab is a unique hybrid structure that has an inflatable shell surrounding a central hard structure core. ( 46 ) ( 47 ) It has the packaging and mass efficiencies of an inflatable structure, and the advantages of a load -carrying hard structure.


pages: 194 words: 49,310

Clock of the Long Now by Stewart Brand

Albert Einstein, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, Danny Hillis, Eratosthenes, Extropian, fault tolerance, George Santayana, Herman Kahn, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, life extension, longitudinal study, low earth orbit, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, nuclear winter, pensions crisis, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Metcalfe, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog

My old biology teacher, Paul Ehrlich, has a formula declaring that environmental degradation is proportional to “population times affluence times technology.” It now appears that the coming of information technology is reversing that formula, so that better technology and more affluence leads to less environmental harm—if that is one of the goals of the society. “Doing more with less”—Buckminster Fuller’s “ephemeralization”—is creating vastly more efficient industrial and agricultural processes, with proportionately less impact on natural systems. It is also moving ever more of human activity into an infosphere less harmfully entwined with the biosphere. Given its roots, the Packard Foundation is particularly well suited to evaluate and foster what a Buddhist engineer might call right technology.


pages: 98 words: 29,610

From Bauhaus to Our House by Tom Wolfe

Bonfire of the Vanities, Buckminster Fuller, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Peter Eisenman, plutocrats, The Chicago School, urban renewal

Gropius’ own firm in Cambridge was not called Walter Gropius & Associates, Inc., or anything close to it. It was called “The Architects Collaborative.” At Yale the students insisted on a group project, a collaborative design, to replace the obscene scramble for individual glory. NOW, IN THE LATE 1940s AND EARLY 1950s , BUCKMINSTER Fuller came into his own. Fuller was an American designer with an endless stock of ingenious notions, one of which was his geodesic dome, a dome created of thousands of short, thin metal struts arranged in tetrahedra. Fuller’s dome fit in nicely with the modern principle of creating large structures with light surfaces out of machine-made materials and using tensions and stresses to do the work that massive supports had done for the old (bourgeois) order.


pages: 357 words: 100,718

The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update by Donella H. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, Dennis L. Meadows

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, Climatic Research Unit, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, financial independence, game design, Garrett Hardin, geopolitical risk, Herman Kahn, income per capita, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, means of production, new economy, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, systems thinking, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Review

A system cannot function well if its information streams are corrupted by lies. One of the most important tenets of systems theory, for reasons we hope we have made clear in this book, is that information should not be distorted, delayed, or sequestered. `All of humanity is in peril," said Buckminster Fuller, "if each one of us does not dare, now and henceforth, always to tell only the truth and all the truth, and to do so promptly-right now"5 Whenever you speak to anyone, on the street, at work, to a crowd, and especially to a child, you can endeavor to counter a lie or affirm a truth. You can deny the idea that having more things makes one a better person.

Examples of networks known to the authors and in their field of interest are the Balaton Group (www.unh.edu/ipssr/Balaton.html), Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA), Center for a New American Dream (CNAD; wwwnewdream.org), Greenlist (www.peacestore.us/Public/Greenlist), Greenclips (wwwgreenclips.com), Northern Forest Alliance (wwwnorthernforestalliance.org), Land Trust Alliance (wwwlta.org), International Simulation and Gaming Association (ISAGA; wwwisaga.info), and Leadership for Environment and Development (LEAD). 4. Such an intermediate step is illustrated by ICLEI, an international association of (currently 450) local governments implementing sustainable development. See www.iclei.org. 5. R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981). 6. Abraham Maslow, The Farthest Reaches of Human Nature (New York: Viking Press, 1971). 7. J. M. Keynes, foreword to Essays in Persuasion (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932). 8. Aurelio Peccei, One Hundred Pages for the Future (New York: Pergamon Press, 1981), 184-185.


pages: 323 words: 95,939

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Andrew Keen, bank run, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, big-box store, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, cashless society, citizen journalism, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, disintermediation, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, Elliott wave, European colonialism, Extropian, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, Inbox Zero, invention of agriculture, invention of hypertext, invisible hand, iterative process, James Bridle, John Nash: game theory, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Merlin Mann, messenger bag, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, passive investing, pattern recognition, peak oil, Peter Pan Syndrome, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, Ralph Nelson Elliott, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, scientific management, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, social graph, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, technological determinism, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

Robertson, Natural Prozac: Learning to Release Your Body’s Own Anti-Depressants (New York: HarperOne, 1998). 28. All quotes from Mark Filippi are from interviews I conducted with him in February and March 2012. 29. “Tensegrity” is a term used most famously by Buckminster Fuller to describe the structural integrity of various systems. See R. Buckminster Fuller, “Tensegrity,” 1961, at www.rwgrayprojects.com/rbfnotes/fpapers/tensegrity/tenseg01.html. 30. See http://Lifewaves.com or http://somaspace.org. 31. Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From (New York: Riverhead, 2010). 32. Kutcher Tweeted in defense of a fired college football coach, only learning later that the coach had covered up a child molestation.


pages: 199 words: 57,599

Secrets of the Millionaire Mind by T. Harv Eker

Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, Donald Trump, fear of failure, high net worth, Maui Hawaii, Parkinson's law, passive income, retail therapy

Most people are so stuck in their egos that everything revolves around me, me, and more me. But if you want to be rich in the truest sense of the word, it can’t only be about you. It has to include adding value to other people’s lives. One of the greatest inventors and philosophers of our time, Buckminster Fuller, said, “The purpose of our lives is to add value to the people of this generation and those that follow.” We each came to this earth with natural talents, things we’re just naturally good at. These gifts were given to you for a reason: to use and share with others. Research shows that the happiest people are those who use their natural talents to the utmost.


pages: 224 words: 62,551

Now I Sit Me Down: From Klismos to Plastic Chair: A Natural History by Witold Rybczynski

A Pattern Language, Buckminster Fuller, classic study, company town, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton

The owner of DESTA was Anton Lorenz, a significant if somewhat shadowy presence on the Berlin prewar avant-garde furniture scene. Lorenz was neither an architect nor a craftsman; he is sometimes described as a businessman, but he wasn’t exactly that either. In some ways he resembles his contemporary Buckminster Fuller—an inventor-entrepreneur. Born in Budapest, Lorenz accompanied his wife, Irene, an opera singer, to Leipzig. In time, he acquired a metalworking business that made locks. In Berlin, Lorenz met his compatriot Kalman Lengyel and became a partner in Standard Möbel, fabricating Marcel Breuer’s tubular furniture in his workshop.


pages: 220 words: 64,234

Fewer, Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects by Glenn Adamson

big-box store, Biosphere 2, blood diamond, blue-collar work, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, dumpster diving, fake news, Ford Model T, haute couture, informal economy, Jacquard loom, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kintsugi, Mason jar, post-truth, race to the bottom, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, trade route, VTOL, white flight

The sad fact is that, as Adams puts it, “most plastics are just not compatible with life.” As a space architect, Adams is in an unusual position. She does not enter her created microcosms imaginatively, like a child with a dollhouse, but literally, shaping a miniature prototype of our whole planetary situation.9 We are all living, as the visionary scientist Buckminster Fuller used to say, on Spaceship Earth. By understanding the difference between the material environment we actually inhabit and the one we would need in order to survive on Mars, without the abundant resources of our own lushly habitable planet, we may be able to get some measure of the distance between the way we live now and the type of existence that would be permanently sustainable on Earth.


pages: 361 words: 117,566

Money Men: A Hot Startup, a Billion Dollar Fraud, a Fight for the Truth by Dan McCrum

air gap, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Citizen Lab, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, forensic accounting, Internet Archive, Kinder Surprise, lockdown, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, multilevel marketing, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, price stability, profit motive, reality distortion field, rolodex, Salesforce, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Vision Fund, WeWork

‘Being successful in payments is a little bit different to being successful in McDonald’s, or a social network. You need a good combination of technology and local flavour, local understanding, local elements,’ Braun said, adding a long list of countries where Wirecard operated. Hoping to spur something quotable, I tried a left-field question about the architect Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome. Wirecard’s 2009 annual report had included a whole riff about how Fuller’s design for a spherical building – the best-known of which is Disneyland’s golf ball-like Epcot Center – somehow related to the practice of mergers and acquisitions. There was a baffled silence, then Iris interjected.

To find a specific word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook reader. 1A Mauritius fund 79–89, 115, 134, 250 advisors’ fees 88 Ernst & Young investigation 135 7995 transaction codes 16, 19, 42, 101 Absolute Poker 30 acai berry sellers 61 Acai Berry King see Willms, Jesse Achleitner, Paul 224, 231–2 Adyen 175 AIM market 91 Akhavan, Hamid ‘Ray’ ix, 118 and Animo Associates 278–9 and Marsalek 227, 278, 285 arrested USA 285 sentenced 304 Al Alam Solutions 245, 246, 249, 258, 272, 276–7, 301 and Allied Wallet 210 and Third-Party Acquiring 200–202, 221 rebrands as Symtric 277 unsecured loans/no income 286–7 Wirtschaftswoche on 261 Al Alawi, Kumail 69–70 Ali, Marsalek’s bribery contact 184 Alken Asset Management 119, 140 Allied Wallet 210–11, 304 Allscore Beijing, Wirecard and 250 Alphaville blog (FT) 52–3, 54, 91, 258 Camp Alphaville 52–3, 55–6, 96, 112–13 House of Wirecard series 91 and Ingenico/Wirecard 108 ‘Rabble’ 54, 96 Schillings on 119 Anderson, Pamela 223 Angermayer, Christian 198–9, 239 Animo Associates, Wickford 278–9, 283–4 APG Protection 255, 257n Arafat, Yasser 266 Ardiss, Katherine, and 1A/Hermes deal 83–4 Ashazi Services, Bahrain 67–71, 72–7 Asian Internet Gaming conference 57–8 Assion, Rüdiger, KPMG report meeting 290 Austrian coalition government collapse 2019 263 Austrian Interior Ministry, and refugees/stabilization 265–9 Austrian People’s Party 196 Aykroyd, Dan 21 Badel, Antoine 119, 140 BaFin and Earl 208–10, 294 and Palos 116 ban Wirecard shorting 180, 182, 186, 226, 240–41 blamed by MPs 302 criminal complaint against McCrum and Palma 195 on market manipulation 139, 172 reforms 305 Baker Tilly 85 Banc de Binary 211 Banco de Oro (BDO) 274 declares Wirecard documents spurious 294 Bandits xii ‘Bank of Oman’ 181 Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI) 274 declares Wirecard documents spurious 293–4 Barber, Lionel xii, 54, 107, 141, 143–4, 169, 175, 176, 177, 205, 206, 224, 225, 247, 257, 259, 270, 299 and FTI 261–2 on FT bribery accusation 207 on Nick Gold tapes 220–23 on Novichok story 244–5 on Wirecard story 1–6 reviews McCrum and Zatarra 132 Barclay Brothers, Sunday Business 53–4 Barth, Hubert 167, 305 Batson, Chris 173 Bauer, Christopher ix, 45, 62, 249 and Third-Party Acquiring 200 denies running PayEasy 193–4 in Manila 58 meets KPMG 275–6 on Ashazi Services 70–71 Palma seeking 191–4, 207 reported dead 303 Bauer-Schlichtegroll, Paul ix, 14 and Electronic Billing Systems (EBS) 12–14, 17 and Flynt Publications 11–12 and InfoGenie reverse takeover 17 and Wagner 10 buys Wirecard for porn billing 12–13 moves to supervisory board 27 divests from Wirecard 31, 46 Bäumler-Hösl, Hildegard 183–6, 209–10 Bavarian police, 2015 Wirecard raid 101–3 Bayerische Wirtschaft 31 Bellenhaus, Oliver x, 10, 44, 261 and EBS 18–19 and prepaid credit cards 18 CardSystems Middle East 200–202 Al Alam meeting 276–7 and Allied Wallet 210 and Wirecard special audit 252 driving 39–40 personal habits 199–200 surrendered/co-operated 303 BellTrox 298–9 Bergermann, Melanie, on Al Alam 261 Roland Berger 233 Bergman, James, PayEasy 62 Berntsen, Gary 178 Bharara, Preet, hedge funds prosecution 35–6 Bijlipay card reader 80–81 Bill (purported Wirecard source) 244, 282 Bitcoin, Braun on 250 Blank Rome, and Wirecard self-review 102–3 Block, Carson xi, 93, 99 Doing Business in China for Dummies 37 Marsalek tries to bribe 118 on Casino supermarkets 112–13 on NMC Health 261 on Sino Forest 36–7 Bloomberg, Ali on bribing 184–5 Blue Ridge hedge fund 121 Bluetool 97 Bosler, Tobias 107 and the Turkish boxers 33–4 on Wirecard accounts 32–4 Bournewood (BVI entity) 97 Boyd, Roddy, ‘Great Indian Shareholder Robbery’ 146–7 Branston & Gothard 53–4 Braun, Dr Markus, Wirecard CEO ix, 25–34, 46–7, 60, 103, 110, 111, 145, 154, 172, 176, 229, 231, 234 on Ashazi 76–7 and Deutsche Bank 232 loan 147 and FT imaginary clients story 248–52 offers interview 259–60 orders Marsalek to get FT onside 230 intimidates short sellers 31–4 in French Riviera 197 and visit by heavies 197 Ingenico, revives purported bid 117–18 and IT systems 41–4 and KPMG report blames KPMG for delay 289 cash loan January 2020 288 Gill on 301–2 KPMG meeting 290 on publication 291 rejects supervisory board advice 289 suspicions of 287 not fired 294–5 resigns 296 arrested 303 management style 64 and McKinsey report 234–5 on Project Tiger 174, 175 SoftBank, and Wirecard 197–200, 203, 205, 237, 238 Vienna weekends 196–7 on Wirecard and Bitcoin 249–50 on Wirecard Asian non-offices 93 on Wirecard Brazil/Turkey MCAs 236 and Wirecard DAX Index membership 156, 159–60 on Wirecard total integrity 74–7 Zatarra Report 107 Kroll to investigate 117–19 Earl on 124 Wirecard London presentation 111 Braun, Sylvia 64 Bribery Act 207 Brinken Merchant Incorporations 44 British Virgin Islands and shell companies 44 Wirecard and 31 Bub Gauweiler 183 Buckminster Fuller question 75 Budde, Andreas 203 Buffett, Warren 65, 95 Bundestag, Wirecard inquiry 302 critical report on EY 305 MPs apologize to FT 302 Burtnick, Nelson, Marsalek on 62–3 Cambridge Analytica story 150, 241 Camp Alphaville 52–3, 55–6, 96, 112–13 CardSystems Middle East 200–202 Casino supermarkets 112–13 CellarDoor 53 CenturionBet 102n Cerberus 231 chargebacks nutraceuticals scam 47–9 Visa 2009 crackdown 49 China, Wirecard buying Allscore Beijing 250 Chinese frauds exposure 36–7 Chuprygin, Andrey xi and GRU 268 Citadelle Corporate Services, uncooperative 271, 272 Citigroup AsiaPacific deal with Wirecard 145–6, 152–3 Project Tiger summary papers sent to 167–8 Click2Pay (Wirecard online wallet) 13–19 Clifford Chance, and Manila trustee meeting 272–5 Cloudflare 109 CMS lawyers 17, 243 CNBC, Braun interview on FT and accounts 203–4 Coathanger King 244, 257, 282 Cobb, Oliver, on Wirecard 144–5, 236–7, 298 Cohodes, Marc 226 ‘Colin’ (Marsalek’s friend) x, 86–7, 88–9, 277, 278, 301 at P61 116 in Singapore 133–4 on Dr Rami 278 barbecue 279–80 Commerzbank 157, 292 accuses FT of market manipulation 172 retracts 174 losses 304 Committee to Protect Journalists 187 ConePay, purported creditor, non-existent 187–90 Connaught outsourcing company 94 Control Risks, and R&T information flow 202–3 Covid, travel issues 276 credit cards high-risk processing 43–4, 47 payments, post–2008 scrutiny 47 prepaid/unbranded, for Click2Pay e-wallets 17–19 Credit Suisse 23 and Wirecard/SoftBank bond 238 Crypto currency, Braun on 250 Dahmen, Martin (EY) 292 and Singapore audit 202–3 Al Alam meeting 277 and Manila trustee meeting 272–5 on Third-Party arrangements 251–2 ‘Dale’, whistleblower, on Wirecard UK & Ireland 245 Dallas investigation 227, 282 Daniel Stewart stockbroker 134n Dave the IT guy 109, 113, 123 Davies, Paul 238 DAX 30 28, 236, 287, 288 Dennis, Jonathan 213, 215, 216, 217, 241 Der Spiegel 195, 263 Deutsche Bank 3, 183, 196, 224, 305 and Braun loan 288 Samt and Marsalek decide to buy 231 Wirecard and 27 Dialectic Capital hedge fund 105 Dolan, Shane 261 Döpfner, Mathias 177 Dowson, Simon x, 44, 97, 278–9 Reuters investigation 122 Dun & Bradstreet 233 Duterte, Rodrigo 187, 221, 251, 273 Dyer, Geoff 194 Earl, Matthew xi, 94–5, 109–12, 185–6 and BaFin on Zatarra 109 case dropped 141–3 explains Wirecard to 208–10 avoiding Perring 123–4 Kroll on 119, 130 on Markus Braun 124 on Wirecard/Hermes 95, 97–100 reports to FBI on Wirecard critics hacking 208 reports to Mastercard on Wirecard 208 talks on Sky News 298 Toronto University on hacking gang 208, 298–9 under siege 127–31 faked photo of 257 outed on Twitter 127 phished/attacked online 131–2 shadowed 127–9 VisMas Files 124 EasyJet 233 Eaze 285 Edelman, KPMG report meeting 290 Eichelmann, Thomas 233, 235, 249, 294, 296 backs Braun and special audit 271–2, 283, 288–9 El Obeidi, Rami xi, 218–19, 301 Elder, Bryce 108, 117–18 Electronic Billing Systems (EBS) 12–14, 17, 18–19 Elvins, Hayley xi, 255, 256–7, 257n Emery, Bruce 144–5, 236 Enderle, Franz 183, 242 Ennismore hedge fund 91 Epsilon Investments 134 Ernst & Young 76, 77, 237, 248, 249 and CardSystems 201 litigation against 305 and NMC Health 261 and Wirecard Singapore 154, 167–8, 201–3 Wirecard/1A/Hermes investigation 135–8, 144 Wirecard special audit 249–50, 251–2 alerts BaFin 294 and Al Alam Solutions 201, 277 and Manila trustee meeting 272–5 completing audit 292–4 on Third-Party arrangements 251–2 Ernst & Young Canada 37 European Securities and Markets Authority 180 Exxon, on BellTrox 299 Federal Trade Commission, and Allied Wallet 210 Fieldfisher, and Singapore audit 203 financial crisis 2008 23–4 financial markets betting schemes 61 Financial Conduct Authority 99, 109, 255 Financial Times Alphaville see Alphaville Festival of Finance 112–13 Lex column 21–2 North American edition, Lex column 22–4 office, London 1–2 people xii moves back to Bracken House 205, 206–7 newsroom 169 surveillance discovered 173–4 office New York 20–24, 35–8 scepticism culture 37–8 Wirecard investigations/stories 1–7 and short-sellers set-up 212–19, 220–25, 228 blamed for Wirecard short attack 107 Braun orders Marsalek to get FT onside 230 declines Braun interview offer 259–60 FT’s QC blocks Project Tiger story 4–6, 168 puts questions to Wirecard 218 Singapore investigation story published 170–71, 174 accused of market manipulation 172 blames Zatarra 107 Wirecard suing for misuse of business secrets 194–5 Singapore/Philippines stories 236 Wirecard imaginary clients story 248–52 Wirecard action vs. 242–3 internal investigation 240–42 see also specific FT people Fleep messaging service 82 Flutter group 213, 241–2 Flynt, Larry, and Bauer-Schlichtegroll 11–12 Foster Mitchell, Victoria 261 Foulis, Patrick 21 Frankfurt stock exchange (Deutsche Börse) 25 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 180, 305 Freedom Party Austria 178, 263 Freis, James 294–6 Friend Finder 43 Fritsche, Klaus-Dieter 250 Froehlich Tours 191 FTI Consulting 111, 261–2 Full Tilt 30, 62–3 G2Pay payment processor 29–31, 102 G2Pay Dublin 39, 42–4 G2Pay Toronto 30, 42 begins to shrink 45–6, 59–60 ICC-Cal issues 49–51 Mastercard fines 42 miscoded 7995 transactions 42 upfront payment to Wirecard 30–31 Gattringer, Wolfgang, and Libya refugee project 266–9 General Electric 153 German civil legal system 242–3 German institutions, investor confidence in 93 German press supports Wirecard 110 Geschonneck, Alexander 251, 290 Getnow 278 GI Retail 105 GI Technology 86 Gibraltar, Wirecard and 31 Gill, Evelyn (Pav’s mother) 160, 162, 166–7, 168, 171, 306 Gill, Pav, Wirecard AsiaPacific legal counsel x, 152–60 and Ng investigate finance team 155–8 and whistleblower 154–5, 156, 158 Ng & Steinhoff, Telegram chats 157–8, 163 on Braun/Marsalek 301–2 on Wirecard Singapore 161–5, 171 ousted 158–60 Project Tiger copies 158–60 thriving 305–6, 307 Gold, Nick xii, 212–13, 229, 254–5 El Obeidi on 219 IVA agreed 306 Kroll to investigate 117–19 on FT about to expose Wirecard 213–17 recorded/quoted 221–2, 241–2 Goldman Sachs 249 Goomo travel firm 87, 88, 133, 135, 137 P61 HQ 116 Görres, Andrea, and Wirecard x self-review 102–3 special audit 252 Graham and Dodd, Security Analysis 95 Grant Thornton 30 Greenvale Capital 144–5, 236–7 GRU (Russia Military Intelligence) 263–70 Guardian 53 Gupta, Varun 89 Gustenau, Brigadier, on refugee project 267 Guttenberg, Karl-Theodore zu 250 Hallbergmoos, Wirecard office 9–11 Hamilton, Ben (re Kroll), fishing visit to Earl 129–30 Handelsblatt 177, 186, 219, 222, 229 Hanson, Nigel xii, 3–6, 106, 125, 170, 171, 175, 194, 205, 243 on McCrum’s correspondence hacked 121–2 on FT/short-sellers set-up 220–22 reviews McCrum and Zatarra 132 Harper Gray 174 Harris, Daniel, and Wirecard shorting rumour 182–3 Harris, James 115 Helms, Matthias (Wirecard due diligence) 135–7 Hempton, John xi, 55–6, 74, 188–9 Henseler, Alfons 234 Herbert Smith Freehills (law firm) 175, 220, 221, 223, 224 Hermes i-Tickets 78–89 Earl on 95–7 Ernst & Young investigation 135–8 Ramasamy on 111 Hodgson, Camila 149 ‘Hollins, Ian’ 96, 112, 123–4, 127, 226, 305 Honourable Artillery Company 52 House of Wirecard Alphaville series 91 HSBC 185 Hufeld, Felix 294, 305 Hume, Neil 54 Hustler, Flynt Publications, Bauer-Schlichtegroll and 11–12 ICC-Cal 27, 48 miscoded 7995 transactions 42 Merchant IDs crackdown 50–51 Wirecard cash stolen 50–51 IIFL Wealth 82 Inatec 46, 61, 63, 97, 116 InBev and Budweiser story 54 Indo-German Chamber of Commerce 250 InfoGenie reverse takeover 17 Ingenico purported bid for Wirecard 108, 117–18 Investors Chronicle 21 Israeli security Wirecard executives and 50–51 Iwersen, Sönke 219, 222 J-Capital Research 92–4, 98, 113, 121 ‘Jack’, whistleblower 166, 188 Jakab, Spencer 23 Jenkins, Patrick 141 Jilson (photographer) 187 Jon, on short sellers surveillance 254–7 Jones Day 130 Jones, Sam xii, 126 on FT office surveillance 173 on Marsalek, Libya, GRU and Wagner 263–70 Kalixa, Senjo buys 138 Kaminska, Izabella 223–4 Kepler Cheuvreux 292 Khalaf, Roula 173, 259–60, 270, 302 Khan, Imran 1 Khawaja, Ahmad ‘Andy’ 210, 304 Kilbey, Gary xii, 115, 306 and Marsalek 147–51 on Wirecard shorting rumour 181 on Wirecard story news leak 170–71 Kilbey, Tom xii, 147, 148–51 and Marsalek 182 Kirch, Leo 183 Kirch Media 109–10, 142 Kirk, Stuart (US Lex team) 35 Kleinschmidt, Kilian on Marsalek 264–5 reaction to Marsalek and Libya 269–70 testifies 302 Klestil, Stefan 232–3, 234 Knöchelmann, Dietmar x, 29–31, 45 KPMG 26 on 1A/Hermes 85, 88 Wirecard special audit 249, 250–51 Al Alam meeting 277 complains of obstructions/delays 287 Manila trustee meeting 272–5 on PayEasy client non-existence 276 PayEasy meeting 275–6 seeking Wirecard Singapore cash 271–6 draft report to supervisory board 286–90 enforces deadline 290 final report, no evidence for Third-Party Acquiring 291 Braun’s spins on 285, 287, 291–2 Kramp-Karrenbauer, Annegret 231 Krisper, Stephanie, on Marsalek contact 264–5 Kroeber, Susannah, on Wirecard Asian offices 92–4 Kroll investigations 58 accusatory letter to Earl 129–30 seeking Zatarra, 117, 119 Kukies, Jörg 231, 249–50 Kurniawan, Edo x and Ernst & Young 135–8, 154 on cash definition issues 259 FT and 6–7, 174 head of Wirecard Asia Pacific finance team 138, 153–8, 161, 170, 172, 210, 246, 301 and Hong Kong unit accounts 154 on ‘round tripping’ funds 155–8 paperwork 258 Wirecard supports 170 and Project Tiger 158, 165–6 vanished 176, 303 Kurz, Sebastian 196, 266 Lauterbach, Anastassia 233–4, 235, 249, 287 Lehman Brothers 22–3, 47 Leitz, Sven-Olaf 251 Ley, Wirecard CFO ix, 28, 31, 46, 50–51, 60, 64, 78, 79, 136, 142, 153, 236, 291 on Deutsche Bank 239 and Hermes 84, 85 and Kirch Media 109–10 on Wirecard Asian non-offices 93 Wirecard cash flow statement 90–91 and Wirecard self-review 102–3, 104 confronts Greenvale 144–5 KPMG report meeting 290 arrested 303, 304 Liao, Bob 139 Libya Marsalek and 116 cement plants 116, 135, 151, 247, 267, 268 creating strong border force 269 refugees as guest workers 266–9 Kleinschmidt’s reaction to 269–70 GRU and 268–9 Rami El Obeidi 255–6 Lincolnshire police 125–6 Linklaters 88 Lipscomb, Dashiell 200 Lordship Trading blog 95 Louis XIII project 231, 239 M’Cwabeni, Vuyiswa 233, 234 Macquarie, on Wirecard 139 Madoff, Bernie, Ponzi scam 23–4 Mail on Sunday 261 Majali, Yousef 105, 121 Manager Magazin allegations 261 Eichelmann interview 271–2 on forensic audit 249 on FT bribery 207 on Wirecard board 234–5 Maria, Tolentino’s paralegal 273 Marques, Eduardo xi, 299 on Senjo and 1A 146 on Wirecard and SoftBank 210 shorts Wirecard stock 59 Marsalek, Jan (Wirecard chief operating officer) ix, 39, 40, 46–51, 64, 153, 154, 172, 226 and 1A fund 115 Al Alam meeting 276–7 on Ali, FT and Bloomberg bribery scam 183–6 and Akhavan 278 whistleblower on 285 and Animo Associates 278–9 on Burtnick hiring 62–3 on Cambridge Analytica 150 and CardSystems Third-Party Acquiring 200–203 and Chuprygin; Gustenau; Gattringer 268–9 and Click2Pay 11, 13–16 ATM cards for e-wallets 17–19 on Deutsche Bank 239 and Dr Rami 278 on Elon Musk/Tesla 151 and Nick Gold tapes 217–19 Kilbeys, pays off 151 suspected of story news leak 170 G2Pay pressured 46 and Gold 213–14 and Goomo travel firm 87, 88–9 and Hermes i-Tickets/1A 78–89 and fake clients special audit 251–2 at Colin’s barbecue 279–80 crying drunk 279–80 and FT fake clients story 248–52 Third-Party Acquiring cover story 258–9 defends Third-Party business 234, 235–6 on Inatec 61 on Ingenico purported bid 108 and IT systems 41–4 on Israeli politics 178–9 on KPMG report publication 291 KPMG report meeting 290 post-audit, offers raw data 287–8 stalls 294–5 suspended not fired 294–5 fired, police charge 296 disappears to Minsk 300 and Kurniawan 136–8 on Libya 151 and refugees as guest workers 266–9 cement plants 116, 135, 151, 247, 267, 268 on creating strong Libya border force 269 Manila trustee meeting 273–5 management/lifestyle 64 extreme Covid precautions 277–8 extravagance, employee on 177–8 new information on 263–70 office 115–16 office, Samt on 252–3 P61 villa 115–16, 269, 277, 278, 280 questions about 247 Sabines (two assistants) 115, 116, 269, 279, 300 on McCrum 149 McKinsey report on 234, 235 and Novichok documents 303 recipe 179–80 story 244 and nutraceuticals chargebacks scam 47–9 PayEasy meeting 275–6 police take inbox archives 101–3, 104 Rami El Obeidi link 256 ‘Ray’, correspondence from 178 and Samt 229–30 decide to buy Deutsche Bank 231 on Senjo 138 in Singapore 134–5 and Singapore audit 201–3 in Project Tiger papers 166 on Singapore cash new Manila trustee 272 Turkey money replaces Singapore 278 and Smaul 65–6 nutraceutical processing deal 59–63 on Syria visit with Russian military 266 on Telegram 150 on Wirecard misunderstood 149 and Zatarra Report 114–19 suspects UK leak 116–17 targets McCrum and Palos 116–19 tries to bribe Carson Block 118 Marsalek, Viola 252, 253 Martiradonna, Francesco 102n Mastercard 43 fines G2Pay 42 Project Tiger summary papers sent to 167–8 compliance person 118–19 on Wirecard 208 Mateschitz, Dietrich 15 Mattias, Wulf 232–3, 249, 271 MCA Mathematik (Greenvale alias) 236–7 on forensic audit 249 McCrum, Charlotte (author’s wife) 22, 55, 126–7, 165, 174, 205, 256, 285, 297 targeted by Wirecard 175 McCrum, Dan early career 20–24, 35 New York FT office 20–24, 35–8 joins Alphaville 55–6 moved to FT Lex 141, 143–4 FT internal investigation 240–41 personal life 22–3, 105, 120, 140–41, 165, 205, 225, 227–8, 285, 297–8, 299 improves home security 126–7, 131–2 surveillance fears 257–8 and Nick Gold tapes 220–25, 228 Wirecard investigations/stories Animo Associates 283–4 and Ashazi Services, Bahrain 67–71, 72–7 blog post on Wirecard short attack 106 Exocet on fake clients 247–8, 272, 300 and Macquarie Wirecard meeting 139–40 following-up Wirecard Third-Party Acquiring 221 Marsalek said to intend bribe 147–50 and Palma, accused of bribery and threats 207 criminal case dropped 302 and Pav Gill 161–5 Singapore story publication 1–7 telephone interview with Braun 74–7 testifies to Bundestag inquiry 302 and Zatarra accusations against 127, 132 correspondence hacked 121–2, 125–6 decides to move on 132 Kroll to investigate 117–19 Marsalek’s security to investigate 116–19 meets with Earl and Perring 100 Schillings on 119 on whistleblowers protection 302–3 see also specific people or stories McKinsey 35, 233 Wirecard compliance review 252 on Wirecard Third-Party business 234, 235 and Wirecard/Deutsche Bank 239 Merchant Category Codes 16 Merchant ID (MID) 16 Visa/Mastercard and 43 Merkel, Angela 250 Metropolitan Police 208 Mishcon de Reya 127, 142, 143 Moody’s 237 Mubadala, takes over SoftBank loan to Wirecard 238 multilevel marketing pyramid schemes 61 Munich public prosecutor 183 Munich Security Conference 231 Murphy, Gary 226–7 Murphy, Paul xii, 52–5, 106, 115, 143–4, 170, 171, 172, 177, 194, 211, 225, 228, 237, 245, 246–7, 263, 278, 297, 298, 299, 302, 306 and Ashazi Services story 67, 68, 69, 73 has Alphaville IT secured 125 at Alphaville’s vaudeville 223–4 and Coathanger King/Bill 282–3 on FT/short-sellers set-up 220–22 denies shorting rumour 181 frightens Animo Associates director 279 FT internal investigation 241–2 Marsalek said to intend bribe 147–51 on SoftBank and Wirecard 205–6 spy story published 260 and surveillance informers 254–8 and Wirecard source 243–4 on Wirecard story 1–6, 100 Naheta, Akshay 198, 210, 237, 238 Narayanan, Veerappan 88 Nasdaq exchange 24 Neteller 16, 29 Neuer Markt Frankfurt 17 Neukeferloh, Grasbrunn, Wirecard move to 14 Newcastle Building Society prepaid card unit 66 Newton, Helmut 14 Ng, Royston 153, 154, 209 and Gill investigate finance team 155–8 Marsalek implicates in Bloomberg scam 185–6 Nikkei 144, 194, 205, 206, 222 Nix, Alexander 241 NMC Health 261 Novichok documents leaked 303 GRU and 268 Marsalek story 244 recipe, Marsalek and 179–80 Novum stockbroker 134n nutraceuticals charges scam 47–9 Marsalek deal with Smaul 59–63 O’Connor, Sarah 149 O’Murchu, Cynthia xii, 149, 261, 282 O’Sullivan, Henry x, 117, 249, 250, 271, 278 arrested 304 and Hermes i-Tickets 78–89 and Senjo loan 138 in Singapore 133–4 and Third-Party Acquiring 200 WalPay 102 Odey, Crispin 257 Öner, Ahmet 33–4 online casinos/gambling and banks 16 and Click2Pay 14–16 and Wirecard 14–17 countries outlawing 45–6 USA bans 2006 29 online poker legal grey area 29 US indictment 2011 62–3 7995 transactions 42–3 online porn billing, Bauer-Schlichtegroll and Wirecard 12–13, 43 online wallets 13, 16–17, 29 Orbit travel agency 87, 88 Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons 179 Ortiz, Carlos, and Wirecard self-review 102–3 Osterloh, Martin 47–9, 57–8, 199, 301 P61 (Marsalek’s villa) 115–16, 269, 277, 278, 280 Pacha club 15 Pacquiao, Manny 304 Pago (Deutsche Bank) 27 Pal, Alasdair 298 accusations against 127 on Dowson paperwork factory 122 Palldium phase 2 surveillance dossier 257 Palma, Stefania (FT) xii, 176, 243, 276, 299, 300 accused of bribery and threats 207 criminal case dropped 302 finds whistleblower Jack 166 in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur 165 meetings with Gill and Evelyn 163–4 hostile-environment training 193 seeking Christopher Bauer 191–4 seeking ConePay 187–90 Palos, Brett 116–19, 257 Paolucci, Paul 208 Pauls, Heike, analyst xii, 292, 304 accuses FT of market manipulation 172 retracts 174 on ‘buying opportunity’ 175 Paulson, John, and Sino Forest 36–7 PayEasy Solutions 58, 62, 70–71, 258, 272, 301 and Third-Party Acquiring 200 KPMG and 249, 275–6 no information 191–4 unsecured loans/no income 286–7 PayPal 2 Perring, Fraser xii, 95, 96–7, 109–13, 179, 226, 257 faces prosecution for Zatarra 141 further activities 305 on ‘Ian Hollins’ 96, 112, 123–4, 127, 226, 305 Kroll on 119 on Wirecard/Hermes 95, 97–100 outed on Twitter 127 reports demand to name Zatarra people 124–5 wants expenses 123–4 Perry, Leo xii, 210, 299 on Wirecard 67, 73, 90–92, 139–40 Philippines Wirecard new trustee meeting 272–5 Wirecard purported partners 187–94 Palma’s story published 195 Poker Stars 30, 42n Pollard, Brett 261 Ponzi scam (Madoff) 24 Portsea Asset Management 226 Prima Vista Solusi 66 Project Panther 239 ‘Project Tiger’ 155–8 Gill saves copies 158–60 information flow 202–3 summary papers sent to banks/auditor 167–8 taken over by Marsalek 157–9 ProtonMail 178, 227 Puck, Wolfgang 134, 148 Putin, Vladimir, foreign policy speculative 269 matryoshka doll 252 Quadir, Fahmi 225–7 on Akhavan and Marsalek 285 attacked 281–2 and Marsalek whistleblower 226–7 Safkhet Capital, FBI source 281–2 on Wirecard Pennsylvania 226 Quintana-Plaza, Susana 233, 289 Quirk, Mark 278–9, 284 Rajah & Tann, Project Tiger 155 Gill seen with McCrum 162 interim report 167 information flow 202–3 Report 177, 243 Braun on 287 Ramasamy, Ramu and Palani ‘The Boys’ x, 79–80, 81–9 at London presentation 111 blamed for Hermes accounts 137 Wirecard falling-out 155 Rami El Obeidi, Dr and Marsalek 278 and short sellers surveillance 255–6 sends FT flowers 260–61 Randall, Jeff 53 Raynor, Greg xi, 255, 257n Mancunian facilitator 213–17 refugees/stabilization, Austrian Interior Ministry, and 265–9 Reichert, Jochen, on Zatarra weaknesses 109–10 Reserve Bank of India 83 Reuters, on Dowson paperwork factory 122 Reynolds Porter Chamberlain (RPC, law firm) 107, 222, 224–5, 228, 240–2 on Zatarra Report 107 FT internal investigation 240–2 Robert Smith 261 Roddy 95–7, 112–13, 123 at Wirecard London presentation 111–12 on Wirecard/Hermes 95, 97–100 seeks advice 99, 100 sees vehicles shadowing Earl 129 Roland Berger 233 RP Richter (auditor) 30 Rubie, Saif 213, 216, 217 Russian diplomat, at Colin’s barbecue 279–80 Russian military in Syria 266 Novichok 179–80, 244, 268, 303 Wagner Group soldiers 268–9 Russian Military Intelligence (GRU) 263–70 Sabines (Marsalek’s two assistants) 115, 116, 269, 279, 300 Safkhet Capital 281–2 Samt, Mr (Marsalek’s PR) x, 217–19, 229–30, 231, 252–3 Santego Capital 81 SAP 233 Schäfer, Daniel 177 Schillings law firm 91 blames FT for Wirecard short attack 107 letters to FT on Zatarra 132 on McCrum/Alphaville 119 on Wirecard story 4–6, 170–71 replaced 175 Schneider, Dagmar 279 and KPMG special audit 251, 252 KPMG report meeting 290 Manila trustee meeting 273–5 Schneider, Klaus (SdK), on Wirecard accounts 34 Schütt, Michael 59, 97 Schütz, Alexander 196–7, 198 on FT 196–7 apologizes 304–5 Schwager, Market Wizards 95 SdK (Schutzgemeinschaft Der Kleinaktionäre) on Wirecard 31–4 Sender, Henny 24 Senjo 134, 138, 258, 272, 301 and Third-Party Acquiring 200, 202 buys Kalixa 138 KPMG to consider 249 unsecured loans/no income 286–7 Sewing, Christian 231, 232 ShadowFall Research 185, 209 Shah, Amit 82–8 Shanmugaratnam, R.


pages: 358 words: 118,810

Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia by Adrian Shirk

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Buckminster Fuller, buy and hold, carbon footprint, company town, COVID-19, dark matter, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Haight Ashbury, index card, intentional community, Joan Didion, late capitalism, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, medical malpractice, neurotypical, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, transatlantic slave trade, traumatic brain injury, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

The school was started in 1933 by a bunch of scholarly dropouts and rogue academics of the time—well-connected wild men with big egos and rich friends—and its growth was quickly buttressed by making itself a haven for many Bauhaus artists and scholars fleeing Nazi Germany. Josef and Anni Albers, M. C. Richards, and Heinrich Jalowetz, other famous folks joined the faculty. (Over the years, they’d be joined by Willem de Kooning, Robert Creeley, John Cage, and Buckminster Fuller, among others.) For the first several years, they ran the school out of a giant neoclassical conference center in the mountains called the Blue Ridge Assembly, which was owned by liberal Presbyterians who needed the building only for the summer months. Classes were experimental, free-form, discussion-based, lecture-based, studio-based.

The BMC students lived and slept in really tight quarters elsewhere on the campus, in bunkhouses of no fewer than eight people, but everyone had a private studio and workspace of their own guaranteed. As I continued moving down the narrow hallway, slowly, like a ghost, one of the guides gestured out the window, saying that Buckminster Fuller built one of his first geodesic domes just off to the side there, down in the grass. We looked out the window on to nothing, but could imagine it there, a great white polygon structure being gestured to by Fuller himself, that bespectacled, white-haired man in a three-piece suit who ended up so strangely providing the later hippie commune movement with its most enduring architectural symbol.


pages: 144 words: 43,356

Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence by Calum Chace

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, discovery of the americas, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Flash crash, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hedonic treadmill, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, life extension, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter Thiel, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, wage slave, Wall-E, zero-sum game

One thing that is clear, though, is that the belief that AGI could arrive within a few decades is not the preserve of a few crackpots. Sober and very experienced scientists think so too. It is a possibility we should take seriously. Creating an AGI is very hard. But serious consideration of exponential growth makes very hard problems seem more tractable. Buckminster Fuller estimated that at the start of the twentieth century the sum of human knowledge was doubling every century, and that by the end of the second world war that had reduced to twenty-five years. (40) Now it takes 13 months and in 2006 IBM estimated that when the internet of things becomes a reality the rate would be every 12 hours. (41) The football stadium thought experiment illustrates how progress at exponential rate can take you by surprise – even when you are looking for it.


pages: 124 words: 40,697

The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow

airport security, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Buckminster Fuller, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, fudge factor, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, luminiferous ether, Mercator projection, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Turing machine

That may sound as outrageous as the theory in which the table disappears whenever we leave the room, but in this case the theory has passed every experimental test to which it has ever been subjected. N 1999 A TEAM OF PHYSICISTS in Austria fired a series of soccer-ball-shaped molecules toward a barrier. Those molecules, each made of sixty carbon atoms, are sometimes called buckyballs because the architect Buckminster Fuller built buildings of that shape. Fuller’s geodesic domes were probably the largest soccer-ball-shaped objects in existence. The buckyballs were the smallest. The barrier toward which the scientists took their aim had, in effect, two slits through which the buckyballs could pass. Beyond the wall, the physicists situated the equivalent of a screen to detect and count the emergent molecules.


pages: 239 words: 45,926

As the Future Catches You: How Genomics & Other Forces Are Changing Your Work, Health & Wealth by Juan Enriquez

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, borderless world, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, creative destruction, digital divide, double helix, Ford Model T, global village, Gregor Mendel, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, Helicobacter pylori, Howard Rheingold, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, new economy, personalized medicine, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, spice trade, stem cell, the new new thing, yottabyte

., Harold Kroto, and Richard Smalley … Who fought each other … And the world … To discover and build … New molecules … Out of the world’s most studied element … Carbon.4 Before 1985, no one knew … That you could lattice carbon … To build geodesic molecules (which look like soccer balls)… On a nano scale. The structure of these compounds resembles the domes that a famous architect … Named R. Buckminster Fuller … Used to design … So they are called fullerenes … And may be the key to building nano scale … Medicine transporters … Super-strong tubes … Transistors.5 In February 2000, IBM scientists announced that they were starting to think about designing a computer on a molecular scale … A computer that could float through the air.


pages: 138 words: 40,525

This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook by Extinction Rebellion

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, banks create money, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, Colonization of Mars, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, drug harm reduction, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, feminist movement, full employment, Gail Bradbrook, gig economy, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, mass immigration, negative emissions, Peter Thiel, place-making, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, rewilding, Sam Altman, smart grid, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, the scientific method, union organizing, urban sprawl, wealth creators

Different sites request help with at least half an hour’s notice; roving support teams moving between sites help report potential issues in advance and coordinate reinforcements. Make sure that all reinforcements are heavily armed with chocolate bourbon biscuits – I personally believe these to be the true power source of a successful rebellion. — Buckminster Fuller 24/ A POLITICAL VIEW CAROLINE LUCAS MP Climate breakdown is inseparable from politics. The melting ice caps, the scorching heatwaves and the staggering declines in animal and insect populations are the direct result of failures by people in power. Irreversible changes to the natural world are taking place because our economy is built on the assumption that precious minerals, fresh air, clean water and rare species can magically regenerate themselves in an instant.


pages: 138 words: 41,353

The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, high net worth, illegal immigration, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, offshore financial centre, open immigration, Patri Friedman, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, technoutopianism, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks

The League of Nations and its successor, the United Nations, were in no way committed to ending state sovereignty, and Davis believed that humans should belong to a bigger, more inclusive, almost universal community. This brand of cosmopolitanism was in vogue: Luminaries such as Albert Einstein (who was once stateless), Albert Camus, and Buckminster Fuller began advocating for some variant on a world government. In the United States, World Federalist movements were cropping up and joining forces, hoping to unite humanity to prevent another war. The New Yorker published an editorial in its June 5, 1948 issue about Davis: “renouncing US citizenship in order to become a citizen of the world is an exciting gesture.”


pages: 798 words: 240,182

The Transhumanist Reader by Max More, Natasha Vita-More

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological principle, data acquisition, discovery of DNA, Douglas Engelbart, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, experimental subject, Extropian, fault tolerance, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, friendly AI, Future Shock, game design, germ theory of disease, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, impulse control, index fund, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Pepto Bismol, phenotype, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, presumed consent, Project Xanadu, public intellectual, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, RFID, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, silicon-based life, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, stem cell, stochastic process, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, the built environment, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, VTOL, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

New York: Houghton Mifflin. 2 Aesthetics Bringing the Arts & Design into the Discussion of Transhumanism Natasha Vita-More “Transhumans want to elevate and extend life … let us choose to be transhumanist not only in our bodies, but also in our values … toward diversity, multiplicity … toward a more humane transhumanity …”1 Imagine a future designed by Frank Gehry that models elements of a “great logistic game” as conceived by Buckminster Fuller, within a monumental Christo installation, kinetically lit by James Turrell, scored by Philip Glass, and sung by Adele. Introduction The emergent course of technology is at once explicable and baffling. It has precipitated questions about a shifting human paradigm that remain unanswered by postmodernism.

The most referred to methods for enhancement include regenerative medicine, nanomedicine, and brain preservation. 4 Primarily as suggested by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in “Cyborgs and Space” (1960) and tangentially as suggested by Donna Haraway in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Haraway 1990). 5 As suggested in The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future (Smith and Morra 2007). 6 Primarily as understood by transhumanists as a stage of human transformation, succeeding transhuman, and tangentially as suggested in How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Hayles 1999). 7 As understood by Randal Koene as “whole brain emulation” and more recently “substrate-independent minds.” http://www.kurzweilai.net/pattern-survival-versus-gene-survival. 8 Life expansion means increasing the length of time a person is alive and diversifying the matter in which a person exists (Vita-More 1997 [revised 2011]). 9 “Transcentury UPdate,” a cable public TV show aired in Los Angeles and Telluride, Colorado, from 1986 through 1993, and broadcast numerous segments on the political and ethical issues of technology and segments on building scenarios for the global distribution of technology (green energy etc.), the latter largely based on Buckminster Fuller’s distribution plan (Fuller 1982). References Ascott, Roy (1989) Aspects of Gaia: Digital Pathways Across the Whole Earth. Paper presented at annual Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria. Broderick, Damien (1997) The White Abacus. New York: Avon Books. Burgess, Lowry (2008) Studio for Creative Inquiry, Carnegie Mellon University. http://www.cmu.edu/studio/fellowships/index.html.

Especially noteworthy is the fact that one individual may have many different ­avatars, thereby becoming a multiplex or protean personality. Decades ago, psychiatrists described this as multiple personality neurosis or some form of split personality (Thigpen and Cleckley 1957; Lifton 1971), but in future we may decide that the most effective mode of being is ­pluralism. Buckminster Fuller (1970) used to say, “I seem to be a verb.” Perhaps today we should say, “I am a plural verb in future tense.” Avatars and Simulation Under the right conditions an avatar in a virtual world can substantially enhance the abilities of the user – the person who owns and operates it. Since ancient times, philosophers have debated the meaning of reality.


pages: 390 words: 125,082

Years of the City by Frederik Pohl

Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, card file, East Village, Maui Hawaii, medical malpractice, pattern recognition

They hadn’t always realized the implications of that thought, of course; that was why so many cityscapes from about 1920 showed tall, skinny skyscrapers dominating the scene—that was so everyone could have an outside window, or something like it, and so the city could breathe. But that was before air-conditioning. That was before Buckminster Fuller, reasoning from energy considerations, declared the skyscraper a disaster. If you wanted, said Fuller, to design a nearly perfect radiator—which was to say, a system that would waste as much energy as it possibly could—you would come up with something very like the skyline of almost any city in the world.

The same strategies were open to City-Bear, and Brandon knew where to find out about them. He pulled out the Feigerman & Tisdale report and studied it. Yes. His memory had been correct; the strategies were there. City-Bear could enclose itself, like the fur of an animal, in a thermally opaque coat—as Buckminster Fuller proposed, a great dome over the city. Or City-Bear could bury itself in a deep cave, where the worst winter winds could not follow. Below the ground the temperature is steady and bearable all year round—thus the art of “terratecture,” to take advantage of this free gift. Not entirely free, Brandon discovered.


Howard Rheingold by The Virtual Community Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier-Perseus Books (1993)

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Alvin Toffler, Apple II, bread and circuses, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, commoditize, conceptual framework, disinformation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, experimental subject, General Magic , George Gilder, global village, Gregor Mendel, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Ivan Sutherland, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, license plate recognition, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, multilevel marketing, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Oldenburg, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Great Good Place, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, urban decay, UUNET, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

The Whole Earth Catalog originally emerged from the Haight-Ashbury counterculture as Stewart Brand's way of providing access to tools and ideas to all the communards who were exploring alternate ways of life in the forests of Mendocino or the high deserts outside Santa Fe. The Whole Earth Catalogs and the magazines they spawned--Co-Evolution Quarterly and its successor, Whole Earth Review--seem to have outlived the counterculture itself, since the magazine and catalogs still exist after twenty-five years. One of Whole Earth's gurus, Buckminster Fuller, was fond of using the analogy of the tiprudder--the small rudder on very big ships that is used to control the larger, main rudder. The tiprudder people who steer the movements and disciplines that steer society--the editors and engineers, scientists and science-fiction writers, freelance programmers and permaculture evangelists, grassroots political activists and congressional aides--continued to need new tools and ideas, even though they were no longer a counterculture but part of the mainstream.

I don't even think that's right. I think it's something more. I think, in a sense, it is shared consciousness. In the 1980s, Frank Odasz and his wife, Reggie, worked in rural Montana as educators who were determined to improve the living conditions for their community by "thinking globally and acting locally," as Buckminster Fuller advised. They were enthusiastic about the educational potential of computer technology, especially the kind of CMC technology they had seen through Chariot, the conferencing system Dave Hughes and his partner Louis Jaffe ran in Old Colorado City as a successor to Dave's original "Rogers' Bar" BBS.


Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is the Next Competitive Advantage by Roger L. Martin

algorithmic management, Apple Newton, asset allocation, autism spectrum disorder, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Frank Gehry, global supply chain, high net worth, Innovator's Dilemma, Isaac Newton, mobile money, planned obsolescence, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Salesforce, scientific management, six sigma, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Wall-E, winner-take-all economy

They focus your attention and clarify your thinking.” 13 Rather than an enemy, constraints are features that make the task at hand more exciting, the problem more wicked, and the status for releasing the constraint that much loftier. Constraints point the validity-oriented design thinker to the locus of needed innovation. They frame the mystery that needs to be solved. Instead of telling us what we cannot do, constraints help us reframe the problem and discover new opportunities in the process. Buckminster Fuller is a hero to designers because he was inspired, not discouraged, by a seemingly intractable physical constraint: buildings get proportionally heavier, weaker, and more expensive as they grow larger in scale. The problem inspired him to make a logical leap to a structure that becomes proportionally lighter, stronger, and less expensive as it grows larger in scale—the geodesic dome.


pages: 181 words: 50,196

The Rich and the Rest of Us by Tavis Smiley

"there is no alternative" (TINA), affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, ending welfare as we know it, F. W. de Klerk, fixed income, full employment, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, job automation, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, traffic fines, trickle-down economics, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor

As in desperate times of yesteryear, the dispossessed are coming up with imaginative ways—some legal, others not so much—to address the crisis of poverty while still attempting to hold the government accountable for the safety and well-being of its citizenry. Their voices, methods of survival and imaginations are crucial in shaping their—and our—destiny. REMAKING AMERICA “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” —R. Buckminster Fuller Since business leaders have prioritized the path to profit at all costs and opted to transport American jobs overseas, we have no choice but to explore other ways to create jobs in our own communities and insist that the government create immediate job opportunities for all categories of the “poor.”


pages: 212 words: 49,544

WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency by Micah L. Sifry

1960s counterculture, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital rights, Evgeny Morozov, Gabriella Coleman, Google Earth, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Network effects, RAND corporation, school vouchers, Skype, social web, source of truth, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

The back-channel was coming to the foreground. The modern transparency movement was about to take off. 48 MICAH L. SIFRY 3 From Scarcity to Abundance You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. ––R. Buckminster Fuller The fundamental change powering the networked age of politics is the shift from scarcity to abundance. Thanks to the rapid evolution of computer processing power, all kinds of goods that were once expensive to produce have become cheap. Beyond the declining price of a personal computer or a backup drive, elemental changes in the economics of information, connectivity, and time have occurred: y Information: The cost of making an electronic copy of any kind of data and sharing it with others has dropped to almost zero.


pages: 183 words: 51,514

Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration by Buzz Aldrin, Leonard David

Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, Elon Musk, gravity well, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, private spaceflight, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Strategic Defense Initiative, systems thinking, telepresence, telerobotics, transcontinental railway, Tunguska event, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

When my dad came up with an idea, he would seek out the people who were doing the most creative thinking at the moment. They would usually pick up the phone when he called. At one point he began to look critically at the design of the space station. The structure just didn’t seem efficient. I recall that he became enamored with geodesic structures, so he naturally called on Buckminster Fuller. Now that was an amazing set of conversations. At the time it seemed like competing soliloquies. But I began to see many more of Bucky’s ideas creep into the design. And it is not just the well known and famous who captured my father’s attention. If anyone had an idea that fit in my dad’s vision of the future, he would go and talk to them.


pages: 301 words: 85,263

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle

AI winter, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, congestion charging, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Eyjafjallajökull, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Flash crash, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Greyball, Haber-Bosch Process, Higgs boson, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Bridle, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Leo Hollis, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, oil shock, p-value, pattern recognition, peak oil, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stem cell, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, Uber for X, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks

The last of these is my favourite addition: the ‘winglets’ that now adorn the wingtips of most aircraft. These are a recent invention, developed by NASA in response to the 1973 oil crisis and gradually retrofitted for commercial aircraft to increase fuel efficiency. They always bring to mind the epitaph of Buckminster Fuller, as written on his gravestone in Cambridge, Massachusetts: ‘Call me trimtab.’ Tiny in-flight adjustments, performed at scale. This is what we remain capable of. History – progress – does not always go up and to the right: it’s not all sunlit uplands. And this isn’t – cannot be – about nostalgia.


pages: 351 words: 94,104

White City, Black City: Architecture and War in Tel Aviv and Jaffa by Sharon Rotbard

British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, continuation of politics by other means, European colonialism, gentrification, global village, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, megastructure, New Urbanism, Pearl River Delta, Peter Eisenman, The future is already here, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal

Illustrative examples include Le Corbusier forcibly plotting the Villa Savoye in the middle of a meadow in Poissy or Adolph Loos’ description of the modern villa by the lake in his essay, Architecture.225 Occasionally, this architectural invasion took a more explicit form – in the mobile homes of Voisin, in Buckminster Fuller’s Geodesic domes, in Israel’s very own ‘Wall and Tower’ settlements, in Jean Prouvé’s Tropical House and House of the Lone Settler in the Sahara. In certain instances, architects were utterly unambiguous about this kind of architectural violence and how they intended to make use of it – Marinetti’s Futurist manifestos carried the call for war, Albert Speer eagerly endorsed the ‘ruin value theory’, Claude Parent and Paul Virilio declared their intention to ‘take over the site’.226 These examples prove that the visual and stylized violence inherent in modern architecture, as much as the violence turned against it, did not just end with debate and academic commentary; it addressed something so fundamental that if pushed, people would willingly, literally, kill and be killed for it.227 White would play a unique role in all this: it had already seduced modern architecture and it would become the representative of both Mediterran-eanism (courtesy of Le Corbusier) and Easternism (as in the famous Nazi postcard showing the Weisenhof neighbourhood in Stuttgart as an Arab village).


pages: 245 words: 83,272

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard

"Susan Fowler" uber, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, Dennis Ritchie, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, life extension, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Saturday Night Live, school choice, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, TechCrunch disrupt, Tesla Model S, the High Line, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture , yottabyte

“I got it out of the house.”9 When it came to tinkering, many makers of Minsky’s generation felt that conventional rules didn’t apply to them. For example, Minsky liked to tell a story about some friends of his who built an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) in the backyard of a house that once belonged to architect Buckminster Fuller. This attitude, that creating mattered more than convention (or laws), was what people of Minsky’s generation passed on to their students. It shows up later in the behavior of tech CEOs like Travis Kalanick, who in 2017 was ousted from his top position at Uber for (among other things) creating a culture of sexual harassment.


pages: 279 words: 88,538

The Lost Art of Running: A Journey to Rediscover the Forgotten Essence of Human Movement by Shane Benzie, Tim Major

Buckminster Fuller, do what you love, Kickstarter

This comes down to something that James explained is referred to as ‘tensegrity’ (a concept formed from the words ‘tensional’ and ‘integrity’). This is where individual components – in our case, our bones – float in a sea of tension. This concept was first developed by artist Kenneth Snelson and then furthered by architect and designer Buckminster Fuller. Snelson created sculptures using steel bars connected by wire. The bars did not touch one another but were held in place by the tension of the wires. In the same way, their work suggested that our bones float in the soft tissue – in a sea of tension – and that the soft tissue adjusts the stiffness of the system in response to the forces acting on the body.


pages: 171 words: 54,334

Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia by Becky Hogge, Damien Morris, Christopher Scally

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Buckminster Fuller, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, disintermediation, DIY culture, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jacob Appelbaum, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, mass immigration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Mother of all demos, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

The outsized volume was divided into several sections: “Whole Earth Systems” stood out at the front, followed by “Shelter and Land Use”, “Industry and Craft”, “Communications”, “Community”, “Nomadics” and “Learning”. Interspersed throughout the catalogue, but particularly in the front section, lie texts about computer science, informatics, brain research and cybernetics. A two-page spread is given over to the works of Buckminster Fuller. The September 1966 edition of Scientific American, subtitled simply “Information”, is touted as “the best introduction we’ve seen to computer science”. Opposite it sits a gushing review of the HP 9100A Calculator, “the best of the new tabletop number-crunchers”. On the previous page sits a review of The Human Biocomputer, an exploration into psychedelics and sensory deprivation by the neuroscientist John Lily, inventor of the flotation tank.


pages: 223 words: 52,808

Intertwingled: The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson (History of Computing) by Douglas R. Dechow

3D printing, Apple II, Bill Duvall, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, game design, HyperCard, hypertext link, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, knowledge worker, linked data, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mother of all demos, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, semantic web, Silicon Valley, software studies, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Home Computer Revolution, the medium is the message, Vannevar Bush, Wall-E, Whole Earth Catalog

I avidly studied the details of my comic books, from the language and visual angles to the dots of the color. And I listened to radio programs with every fiber of my brain. I had four main media heroes in my first 10 years, and they are my heroes now: Walt Disney, Leonardo da Vinci, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Buckminster Fuller. They worked in different media, but in much the same way. Each was independent, visionary and original. All these years I have tried to be like them: independent, able to see what others could not, and creating new designs others could not imagine. I also learned a lot about show business; I happened to have inside connections.


pages: 696 words: 143,736

The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil

Ada Lovelace, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, fudge factor, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, information retrieval, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, ought to be enough for anybody, pattern recognition, phenotype, punch-card reader, quantum entanglement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K

The Nanotube: A Variation of Buckyballs Three professors—Richard Smalley and Robert Curl of Rice University, and Harold Kroto of the University of Sussex—shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their 1985 discovery of soccer-ball-shaped molecules formed of a large number of carbon atoms. Organized in hexagonal and pentagonal patterns like R. Buckminster Fuller’s building designs, they were dubbed “buckyballs.” These unusual molecules, which form naturally in the hot fumes of a furnace, are extremely strong—ahundred times stronger than steel—a property they share with Fuller’s architectural innovations.12 More recently, Dr. Sumio lijima of Nippon Electric Company showed that in addition to the spherical buckyballs, the vapor from carbon arc lamps also contained elongated carbon molecules that looked like long tubes.13 Called nanotubes because of their extremely small size—fifty thousand of them side by side would equal the thickness of one human hair—they are formed of the same pentagonal patterns of carbon atoms as buckyballs and share the buckyball’s unusual strength.

BRUTUS.1 A computer program that creates fictional stories with a theme of betrayal; invented by Selmer Bringsjord, Dave Ferucci, and a team of software engineers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. Buckyball A soccer-ball-shaped molecule formed of a large number of carbon atoms. Because of their hexagonal and pentagonal shape, the molecules were dubbed “buckyballs” in reference to R. Buckminster Fuller’s building designs. Busy beaver One example of a class of noncomputational functions; an unsolvable problem in mathematics. Being a “Turing machine unsolvable problem,” the busy beaver function cannot be computed by a Turing machine. To compute busy beaver of n, one creates all the n-state Turing machines that do not write an infinite number of Is on their tape.


How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr

Albert Einstein, book scanning, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, citizen journalism, City Beautiful movement, clean water, colonial rule, company town, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, friendly fire, gravity well, Haber-Bosch Process, Howard Zinn, immigration reform, land reform, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wikimedia commons

It had worked well enough in an age of east-and-west sail, but the editors of Life deemed it “a mental hazard” in an age of aviation, when planes could reach Eurasia from North America by flying north over the Arctic Sea. There were other options, and the public was oddly willing to learn about them. Life devoted a fifteen-page spread to the “Dymaxion map” by the inventor Buckminster Fuller: fourteen detachable segments that could be folded into a tetradecahedron or assembled into various flat maps, as the user chose. More popular was the “polar azimuthal projection” perfected by the dean of wartime cartography, Richard Edes Harrison. It showed the continents huddled around the North Pole, a jarring angle of view that highlighted aviation routes and showed how dangerously close North America was to Germany’s European empire.

Thompson, A Sense of Power: The Roots of America’s Global Role (Ithaca, NY, 2014); and Stephen Wertheim, “Tomorrow the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy in World War II” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2015). “a mental hazard”: “Maps: Global War Teaches Global Cartography,” Life, August 3, 1942, 57–65. “Dymaxion map”: “R. Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion World,” Life, March 1, 1943, 41–55. Richard Edes Harrison: Alan K. Henrikson, “The Map as an ‘Idea’: The Role of Cartographic Imagery During the Second World War,” The American Cartographer 2 (1975): 19–53; Susan Schulten, “Richard Edes Harrison and the Challenge to American Cartography,” Imago Mundi: The International Journal for the History of Cartography 50 (1998): 174–88; Susan Schulten, The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880–1950 (Chicago, 2001), chap. 9; and William Rankin, After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, 2016), chap. 2.


pages: 313 words: 92,053

Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life by Colin Ellard

Apollo 11, augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, classic study, cognitive load, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, Dunbar number, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Lewis Mumford, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, megastructure, mirror neurons, Mondo 2000, more computing power than Apollo, Oculus Rift, overview effect, Peter Eisenman, RFID, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, sentiment analysis, Skinner box, smart cities, starchitect, TED Talk, the built environment, theory of mind, time dilation, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen

The Design Hub at Melbourne’s Royal Institute of Technology is composed of thousands of polished disks that rotate to follow the sun, lowering the energy costs of the building, and one day serving as a power plant using an array of photovoltaic cells. Similarly, Chicago architect Tristran D’Estree Sterk designs shape-shifting buildings whose organically curved and pleasing outer envelopes use the principles of what Buckminster Fuller called “tensegrity”’ to alter their very form in response to readouts from sensors. So far, these sensors are designed to measure things like air temperature and sunshine, with the main goal of producing a pleasant internal atmosphere with the minimum of energy expenditure. Although such structures certainly take advantage of modern sensing gear and materials to produce accommodations that make for greener buildings, they are really only a small step beyond the simple feedback mechanism of a thermostat on the furnace of a house.


pages: 378 words: 94,468

Drugs 2.0: The Web Revolution That's Changing How the World Gets High by Mike Power

air freight, Alexander Shulgin, banking crisis, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, drug harm reduction, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, fiat currency, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, frictionless, fulfillment center, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, John Bercow, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, means of production, Menlo Park, moral panic, Mother of all demos, Network effects, nuclear paranoia, packet switching, pattern recognition, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, pre–internet, QR code, RAND corporation, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, trade route, Whole Earth Catalog, Zimmermann PGP

The Shulgins wrote the preface to Stolaroff’s book Thanatos to Eros (1994) detailing his experiences with LSD, MDMA, mescaline and a number of Shulgin’s creations.2 Author Stewart Brand, who coined the phrase ‘Information wants to be free’ in 1984, was responsible for filming the Mother of All Demos, and that same year he launched the Whole Earth Catalog, the ad-free samizdat techno-hippy bible. Its esoteric and wide-ranging content, from poetry to construction plans for geodesic domes by physicist Buckminster Fuller, from car repair tips to trout-fishing guides and the fundamentals of yoga and the I-ching, was hacked together using Polaroid cameras, Letraset and the highest of low-tech. It now reads much like a printed blog; it was a paper website, in the words of blogger and author Kevin Kelly, that was sprinting before the web even took its first shaky steps.3 Its statement of intent in its launch issue reads like a manifesto that has been realized by today’s web users: ‘A realm of intimate personal power is developing – the power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.


Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen by Dan Heath

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Albert Einstein, bank run, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, food desert, high-speed rail, Housing First, illegal immigration, Internet of things, mandatory minimum, millennium bug, move fast and break things, Nick Bostrom, payday loans, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, self-driving car, Skype, Snapchat, subscription business, systems thinking, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

“Remember, always, that everything you know, and everything everyone knows, is only a model,” said Donella Meadows, the systems thinker. “Get your model out there where it can be shot at. Invite others to challenge your assumptions and add their own.… The thing to do, when you don’t know, is not to bluff and not to freeze, but to learn. The way you learn is by experiment—or, as Buckminster Fuller put it, by trial and error, error, error.” Looking back on the open-office miscue, Imber said she wishes she had tried some experiments with her staff in the State Library Victoria in Melbourne. The library has many different kinds of environments, ranging from open, collaborative spaces to more solitary ones.


pages: 181 words: 62,775

Half Empty by David Rakoff

airport security, Buckminster Fuller, dark matter, double helix, gentrification, global pandemic, Google Earth, Herbert Marcuse, phenotype, RFID, subprime mortgage crisis, twin studies, urban planning, urban renewal, wage slave, Wall-E, Y2K

The Monsanto House featured such theretofore unheard-of marvels as a microwave, an ultrasonic dishwasher that rose from beneath the counter, closed-circuit-TV intercoms, and an electric razor. Old footage shows that it really was a wonder. A gorgeous building with walls of plastic windows, perched atop a central post, echoing Buckminster Fuller’s visionary Dymaxion House. The House of the Future was simultaneously sleek and voluptuous; imagine a gigantic futuristic cold-water faucet: a lovely white plus sign of a building with the mid-century grace of Eero Saarinen’s TWA terminal, gently inflated like a water wing. Contemporary accounts of the advent of electricity on the domestic front almost always make mention of a horrified realization of the kinds of filth people lived with before they could see it properly illuminated.


pages: 217 words: 63,287

The Participation Revolution: How to Ride the Waves of Change in a Terrifyingly Turbulent World by Neil Gibb

Abraham Maslow, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, gentrification, gig economy, iterative process, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kodak vs Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, Network effects, new economy, performance metric, ride hailing / ride sharing, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route, urban renewal, WeWork

But I believe we also have at our fingertips the means to create a new golden age for humanity – a world that really does work for everyone. And that is what I am interested in. The game is on. Which is why this book is really an invitation. How to use this book “We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims” R Buckminster Fuller 1. A manifesto for those who are out to change the world 2. A framework for transformation in the new economy 3. How to be a billionaire – in three easy moves Books are pretty old tech. The basic structure of the modern book goes back to the invention of bookbinding and the printing press.


pages: 219 words: 63,495

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know by Richard Watson

23andMe, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, Charles Babbage, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, computer age, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, dematerialisation, Dennis Tito, digital Maoism, digital map, digital nomad, driverless car, Elon Musk, energy security, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, gamification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, hive mind, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Shuttleworth, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peak oil, personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Florida, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, smart transportation, space junk, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, telepresence, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Turing test, urban decay, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, young professional

The robot uses smart software to tell what’s edible and what’s not and uses a laser-guided robotic arm to grab the biomass and put it in a hopper that connects with an internal combustion engine, which in turn powers an onboard battery. Why do this? The answer is partly that wars depend on energy (soldiers increasingly rely on battery-powered devices) and partly that wars are often fought in remote regions where supply chains can be easily disrupted. “Either war is obsolete or men are.” Buckminster Fuller, author, inventor and futurist Friend or foe? When it comes to drones, or UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), these are principally surveillance tools not weapons at present. Payloads are generally small and they’re vulnerable to ground defense because of their slow speed. But give it a few decades and things will change.


pages: 599 words: 98,564

The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans by Eben Kirksey

23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, double helix, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental subject, fake news, gentrification, George Floyd, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, microdosing, moral panic, move fast and break things, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, special economic zone, statistical model, stem cell, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technological determinism, upwardly mobile, urban planning, young professional

* * * Later that night, as Adam Zaretsky talked about his dream of creating a genetically modified child, he said that he was captivated by “the wonders of bodily diversity.” Adam wanted to make sure that CRISPR did not get monopolized by the gigantic corporate megaliths that increasingly exert control over our daily life. His goal was to get past what Buckminster Fuller once called the “gross universal cash heist” and explore new flamboyant possibilities for the human body. If we really let loose with CRISPR, the question will no longer be “who can wear more gaudy socks,” Adam said, but “who can have more gaudy toes, you know, who can have the most beautifully patterned shell.”


pages: 245 words: 64,288

Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy by Pistono, Federico

3D printing, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, future of work, gamification, George Santayana, global village, Google Chrome, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, illegal immigration, income inequality, information retrieval, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, longitudinal study, means of production, Narrative Science, natural language processing, new economy, Occupy movement, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, post scarcity, QR code, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, Rodney Brooks, selection bias, self-driving car, seminal paper, slashdot, smart cities, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, technological singularity, TED Talk, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce

I know, these words are radical. And possibly naive. The result of a young mind, oblivious to the intricate fabric of society, who has nice dreams, but no real understanding of complex systems and economic behaviour. As it turns out, that is almost a word-by-word quote of the great genius futurist Buckminster Fuller, interviewed in 1970 by New York Magazine.170 The point is that “We prefer to invent new jobs rather than trying harder and inventing a new system that wouldn’t require everybody to have a job.”171 With this book, I have posited that robots will your job, but that’s OK. I will go one step further.


pages: 243 words: 66,908

Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Meadows. Donella, Diana Wright

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, clean water, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, game design, Garrett Hardin, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, peak oil, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, Stanford prison experiment, systems thinking, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, Whole Earth Review

Working with systems, on the computer, in nature, among people, in organizations, constantly reminds me of how incomplete my mental models are, how complex the world is, and how much I don’t know. The thing to do, when you don’t know, is not to bluff and not to freeze, but to learn. The way you learn is by experiment—or, as Buckminster Fuller put it, by trial and error, error, error. In a world of complex systems, it is not appropriate to charge forward with rigid, undeviating directives. “Stay the course” is only a good idea if you’re sure you’re on course. Pretending you’re in control even when you aren’t is a recipe not only for mistakes, but for not learning from mistakes.


pages: 222 words: 70,132

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

It was Stewart Brand who suggested that Lama might provide an atmosphere, as John Markoff wrote, “to create a meeting of the minds between the NLS researchers and the counterculture community animated by the Whole Earth Catalog.” The land outside Taos was full of alternative communities—Morningstar East, Reality Construction Company, the Hog Farm, New Buffalo, and the Family, to name a few. Steve Durkee and Steve Baer, both disciples of Buckminster Fuller and close friends of Stewart Brand, ran Lama, and the architecture of the buildings hewed closely to Bucky Fuller’s geodesic dome design. Fuller believed that what society needed was not more specialization but a new type of generalist, whom he called a comprehensive designer. For Bucky the problem of humanity’s survival was one of design, and he thought the “artist-scientist” could solve it: If man is to continue as a successful pattern-complex function in universal evolution, it will be because the next decades will have witnessed the artist-scientist’s seizure of the prime design responsibility and his successful conversion of tool-augmented man from killingry to advanced livingry—adequate for all humanity.


pages: 222 words: 70,559

The Oil Factor: Protect Yourself-and Profit-from the Coming Energy Crisis by Stephen Leeb, Donna Leeb

Alan Greenspan, book value, Buckminster Fuller, buy and hold, currency risk, diversified portfolio, electricity market, fixed income, government statistician, guns versus butter model, hydrogen economy, income per capita, index fund, low interest rates, mortgage debt, North Sea oil, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, profit motive, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War, zero-coupon bond

Our whole national mindset has to change. It would have been nice, of course, if the big push to develop alternative energies had been made before we reached this pass. Even before the first Arab oil embargo it was clear to some people that it made no sense to rely so heavily on fossil fuels. Buckminster Fuller was an early visionary in this area, as in many others. In 1969 he wrote in his book Utopia or Oblivion: “There are gargantuan energy-income sources available which do not stay the processes of nature’s own conservation of energy within the earth crust ‘against a rainy day.’ These are in water, tidal, wind, and desert-impinging sun radiation power.


pages: 281 words: 71,242

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer

artificial general intelligence, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, Colonization of Mars, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, income inequality, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, PageRank, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, yellow journalism

If some of these sentiments sound familiar, it is because they have echoed in dozens of Apple commercials over the years. In a way, this was a theory of radical individualism and self-reliance—a forerunner of Silicon Valley libertarianism. But Brand had studied the works of such thinkers as Buckminster Fuller, Norbert Wiener, and Marshall McLuhan. All of his intellectual heroes wrote about the importance of looking at systems and networks. This was where the notion of the Whole Earth came in. Brand wanted his readers to think ecologically, to see how everything relates to everything else, to understand their place in the web of life.


pages: 281 words: 72,885

Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World by Mark Miodownik

3D printing, active measures, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, California gold rush, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, liquidity trap, New Urbanism, stem cell, trade route

A clue to how this might be done came with the discovery of a fourth carbon structure, one that was found in the most unlikely of places: the flame of a candle. In 1985 Professor Harry Kroto and his team discovered that inside a candle flame carbon atoms were miraculously self-assembling in groups of exactly sixty atoms to form super-molecules of carbon. The molecules looked like giant footballs and were nicknamed “buckyballs” after the architect Buckminster Fuller, who had designed geodesic domes with the same hexagonal structure. Kroto’s team received the 1996 Nobel Prize for chemistry for this discovery, and also woke everyone up to the fact that the microscopic world might contain a whole zoo of other carbon structures that had never been seen before.


pages: 200 words: 71,482

The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester

Buckminster Fuller, deep learning, Ernest Rutherford, Khartoum Gordon, Murray Gell-Mann, stakhanovite, wage slave

Charles Onions 3 was still alive, and helped Burchfield until the mid-1960s. In the end, 50,000 words were added— including (as Burchfield wrote in his final Preface to Volume IV) several which their creators helped to define: Anthony Powell, for example, helped with acceptance world, A. J. Ayer with drogulus, Buckminster Fuller with Dymaxion, J. R. R. Tolkien—a former assistant and walrus expert—with hobbit, and the cosmologist Murray Gell-Mann with quark. Psychedelic, coined in 1957, but popular at the time that Volume III was being printed, made it, just in time. Robert Burchfield, the New Zealand-born lexicographer who created the four-volume supplement to the completed OED, which appeared between 1972 and 1986.


pages: 208 words: 67,288

The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True by Richard Dawkins

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Buckminster Fuller, double helix, Ernest Rutherford, false memory syndrome, Fellow of the Royal Society, gravity well, Gregor Mendel, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, phenotype, Richard Feynman, the scientific method

Carbon chemistry is rather like the toy construction kit called Tinkertoy. In the laboratory, chemists have succeeded in making carbon atoms join up with each other, not just in simple loops but in wonderfully shaped Tinkertoy-like molecules nicknamed Buckyballs and Buckytubes. ‘Bucky’ was the nickname of Buckminster Fuller, the great American architect who invented the geodesic dome. The Buckyballs and Buckytubes scientists have made are artificial molecules. But they show the Tinkertoyish way in which carbon atoms can be joined together into scaffolding-like structures that can be indefinitely large. (Just recently the exciting news was announced that Buckyballs have been detected in outer space, in the dust drifting near to a distant star.)


pages: 391 words: 105,382

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations by Nicholas Carr

Abraham Maslow, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Airbus A320, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, computer age, corporate governance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, failed state, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, game design, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, lolcat, low skilled workers, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, mental accounting, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Snapchat, social graph, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

“Within ten years after initiating space migration,” Leary wrote, “a group of a thousand people will be able to get together cooperatively and build a new mini-world cheaper than they could buy individual homes down here. When you’ve got new ideas you can’t hang around the old hive.” During the seventies, Leary had plenty of company in calling for the establishment of elite experimental colonies beyond the bounds of established society. Buckminster Fuller, Gerard O’Neill, and Jerry Brown, among others, argued for the necessity of expanding the American frontier to create zones of technological and social experimentation where innovation could proceed unhampered by outdated laws and traditions. The migration of the self-selecting elite would eventually help the more timid who chose to stay behind, Leary argued, as it “allows for new experiments—technological, political, and social—in a new ecological niche far from the home hive.”


pages: 260 words: 77,007

Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google?: Trick Questions, Zen-Like Riddles, Insanely Difficult Puzzles, and Other Devious Interviewing Techniques You ... Know to Get a Job Anywhere in the New Economy by William Poundstone

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, cloud computing, creative destruction, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, full text search, hiring and firing, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, index card, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, lateral thinking, loss aversion, mental accounting, Monty Hall problem, new economy, off-the-grid, Paul Erdős, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, sorting algorithm, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, why are manhole covers round?, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Kepler guessed this was the densest packing possible, but he was unable to supply a proof. Kepler’s conjecture, as it was called, remained a great unsolved problem for centuries. In 1900 it made David Hilbert’s famous list of twenty-three unsolved problems in mathematics. A number of people have claimed to prove it, including the architect Buckminster Fuller, of geodesic dome fame. All such resolutions were quickly rejected as wrong until 1998, when Thomas Hales offered a complicated, computer-assisted proof showing that Kepler was right. Most believe his result will stand up, though the construction of a formal proof is currently ongoing. Hales estimated it would take another twenty years.


pages: 238 words: 73,824

Makers by Chris Anderson

3D printing, Airbnb, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, business process, carbon tax, commoditize, company town, Computer Numeric Control, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deal flow, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, DIY culture, drop ship, Elon Musk, factory automation, Firefox, Ford Model T, future of work, global supply chain, global village, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, IKEA effect, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, planned obsolescence, private spaceflight, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, spinning jenny, Startup school, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Y Combinator

Brand wrote on the first page of the first edition, “A realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by The Whole Earth Catalog.” Buckminster Fuller followed with a poem that began, “I see God in the instruments and mechanisms that work reliably.”13 The Homebrew Computer Club, where Jobs and Wozniak brain-stormed the first Apple computer, was founded on these principles. Today it carries on in hundreds of makerspaces, each using twenty-first-century tools to try to effect the same sort of revolutionary social and economic change.


pages: 232 words: 72,483

Immortality, Inc. by Chip Walter

23andMe, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur D. Levinson, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, CRISPR, data science, disintermediation, double helix, Elon Musk, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Menlo Park, microbiome, mouse model, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Thomas Bayes, zero day

Everything to Kurzweil was a pattern, from human consciousness to the sound of a plucked violin string to the letter “B” (what defines the “B”-ness of a “B”?). His inventioneering made him very acceptable sums of money, and also led to an assortment of prestigious prizes: the Lemelson-MIT Prize, Carnegie Mellon’s Dickson Prize, and the Grace Murray Hopper Award. Kurzweil soon found himself operating more in the mold of Edison or Buckminster Fuller than your average, workaday academic: a gifted inventor who sprayed ideas, software, and gadgets around like confetti. But all of that would come later. For now, Kurzweil was simply enjoying the benisons of life at MIT. He liked the room-size computers, the constant projects, and the ethereal confines of one of Cambridge’s finest schools.


Blood Music by Greg Bear

Buckminster Fuller, double helix, Future Shock, Recombinant DNA, Silicon Valley

“You don’t understand me, Edward. Look at the images again. That’s not trauma.” “Look, there’s thickening here,” he indicated the ankles, “and your ribs—that crazy zigzag interlocking. Broken somewhere, obviously. And—” “Look at my spine,” Vergil suggested. Edward slowly rotated the image on the screen. Buckminster Fuller came to mind immediately. It was fantastic. Vergil’s spine was a cage of triangular bones, coining together in ways Edward could not even follow, much less comprehend. “Mind if I feel?” Vergil shook his head. Edward reached through the slit in the robe and traced his fingers along the back.


pages: 423 words: 118,002

The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World by Russell Gold

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, activist lawyer, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, American energy revolution, Bakken shale, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, California energy crisis, Carl Icahn, clean water, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, financial engineering, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), man camp, margin call, market fundamentalism, Mason jar, North Sea oil, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, precautionary principle, Project Plowshare, risk tolerance, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Upton Sinclair

Mitchell Energy was a substantial company—not a giant like Mobil or Amoco, but a respectably sized independent oil and gas explorer. Having pulled himself up from poverty to wealth, Mitchell’s focus began to meander. In the early 1970s, he attended a think-tank retreat in the Rocky Mountains, where he met and fell under the sway of Buckminster Fuller, the futurist and inventor. Fuller, an iconic figure at the time, popularized the term “Spaceship Earth.” The Earth’s resources, he argued, were limited and needed to be used wisely, not frittered away. Fuller first spurred Mitchell’s interest in growth and depletion. At the end of a few days spent with Fuller talking about global overpopulation and environmental catastrophes, the futurist asked the oilman, “What are you going to do about it?”


pages: 403 words: 111,119

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global village, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Minsky moment, mobile money, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, price mechanism, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wikimedia commons

No other academic discipline has managed to provoke its own students – the very people who have chosen to dedicate years of their life to studying its theories – into worldwide revolt. Their rebellion has made one thing clear: the revolution in economics has indeed begun. Its success depends not only on debunking the old ideas but, more importantly, on bringing forth the new. As the ingenious twentieth-century inventor Buckminster Fuller once said, ‘You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.’ This book takes up his challenge, setting out seven mind-shifting ways in which we can all learn to think like twenty-first-century economists.


pages: 426 words: 115,150

Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Achieving Financial Independence: Revised and Updated for the 21st Century by Vicki Robin, Joe Dominguez, Monique Tilford

asset allocation, book value, Buckminster Fuller, buy low sell high, classic study, credit crunch, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, fiat currency, financial independence, fixed income, fudge factor, full employment, Gordon Gekko, high net worth, index card, index fund, intentional community, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Menlo Park, money market fund, Parkinson's law, passive income, passive investing, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, Richard Bolles, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, software patent, strikebreaker, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond

The “nine to five till you’re sixty-five” pattern, so recent in human history but so pervasive today, seems like the only choice for someone who is neither a sports nor entertainment superstar nor an eccentric. After all, there are bills to pay and an identity to maintain, and besides, what would I do with my life if I didn’t have a job? Is More Better? And many of us are out there “making a dying” because we’ve bought the pervasive consumer myth that more is better. Even though Buck-minster Fuller likened the earth to a spaceship, we cling to the silver-screen images of the Frontier, where “there’s always more where that came from.” We build our working lives on this myth of more. Our expectation is to make more money as the years go on. We will get more responsibility and more perks as we move up in our field.

Life After the Crossover Point The essence of FI is choice. Once you’ve passed the Crossover Point you have choice about how you fill the hours of your day and the days of your productive life. There is no formula for how you live after the Crossover Point. And that’s the point. You are free to invent your life. You are free to explore what Buck-minster Fuller meant when he said, “We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.” You have a choice. SUMMARY OF STEP 8 Each month apply the following equation to your total accumulated capital and post the monthly investment income as a separate line on your Wall Chart: When you begin investing your money according to the guidelines offered in the next chapter, start entering your actual interest income for your monthly investment income on your Wall Chart (while still applying the formula to your further savings).


pages: 636 words: 202,284

Piracy : The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates by Adrian Johns

active measures, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, commoditize, Computer Lib, Corn Laws, demand response, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Mont Pelerin Society, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, pirate software, radical decentralization, Republic of Letters, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, software patent, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, The Home Computer Revolution, the scientific method, traveling salesman, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog

To make this pirate revolution work, experts (“technical freaks”) would be needed, and Hoffman recommended that readers find them in the world of amateur radio. He also directed them to Radical Software, a periodical emanating from a New York group of artists in the brandnew homeproduction medium of videotape. Operating oxymoronically as the Center for Decentralized Television, Radical Software was heavily influenced by Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller, and also by Norbert Wiener’s antiproprietorial vision of information. The magazine proclaimed in the first lines of its first issue the imperative to universalize access to information, not least by abjuring copyright. It included what it called a “pirated” interview with Fuller, and invented a symbol to represent the “antithesis” of ©.

In print, there was of course Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, a guide to “tools” useful for readers impatient with the conformities of American consumerism. Launched in 1969, the catalogue touched on an extraordinary range of topics, from cybernetics and communication theories to agriculture and medicine, with an eclectic individualism purportedly inspired by Buckminster Fuller. It grew with successive editions until by 1971 it was almost 450 pages long. Its influence was demonstrated by the People’s Computer Company, a project overseen by Brand and Robert Albrecht (whom Ted Nelson hailed as the “caliph of counterculture computerdom”). The PCC was both a publication and an institution.


pages: 287 words: 81,970

The Dollar Meltdown: Surviving the Coming Currency Crisis With Gold, Oil, and Other Unconventional Investments by Charles Goyette

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, Elliott wave, fiat currency, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, housing crisis, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, index fund, junk bonds, Lao Tzu, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, McMansion, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, National Debt Clock, oil shock, peak oil, pushing on a string, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, short selling, Silicon Valley, transaction costs

Baytex Energy Trust, BTE; Enerplus Resources Fund Trust, ERF; Penn West Energy Trust, PWE. CHAPTER FOURTEEN Real Things Can’t Live Without ’Em One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever. —Ecclesiastes 1:4 Wealth is the progressive mastery of matter by mind. —Buckminster Fuller Agriculture When investment legend and commodities bull Jim Rogers says that ten years from now instead of twenty-nine-year-old stockbrokers driving Maseratis, it will be twenty-nine-year-old farmers, he’s making an important point about the shifting economy. People’s spending hierarchies experience dynamic changes in lean economic times.


pages: 303 words: 81,071

Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan

3D printing, augmented reality, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, driverless car, fake news, Free Software Foundation, friendly fire, gentrification, global supply chain, hydroponic farming, Internet of things, Mason jar, messenger bag, off grid, Panamax, post-Panamax, ransomware, RFID, rolling blackouts, security theater, self-driving car, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, surveillance capitalism, the built environment, urban decay, urban planning

It seems alien to him, like this. He got so used to seeing it shattered for the last decade. Through the recording it looks like an ode to a forgotten, lost future—smeared with bird shit and graffiti, glass panels missing here and there, CCTV cameras retrofitted to its frame. For some reason his mind fills with Buckminster Fuller, that book he read about him, the way he was heralded by designers and architects as a neglected hero, the one that would have built us a utopia if he’d been given half a chance. And how someone had told him that was all bullshit, and people thought of him so well only because his plans never got built.


pages: 309 words: 81,975

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? by Aaron Dignan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, DevOps, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gender pay gap, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Goodhart's law, Google X / Alphabet X, hiring and firing, hive mind, holacracy, impact investing, income inequality, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loose coupling, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, mirror neurons, new economy, Paul Graham, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, remote working, Richard Thaler, Rochdale Principles, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, six sigma, smart contracts, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, source of truth, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The future is already here, the High Line, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, universal basic income, WeWork, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Except, it turns out, it doesn’t, and it won’t.” Growth has delivered extraordinary benefits to humanity, but at a cost. The question is: Can we lift everyone up without destroying the planet? And even if we can, what then? GDP growth can’t continue forever with finite resources. Of course, this is not a new idea. In 1968 R. Buckminster Fuller warned us about this in his masterwork Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Decades earlier, philosopher Bertrand Russell offered a damning critique of our approach to abundance in his essay “In Praise of Idleness.” Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins.


Toast by Stross, Charles

anthropic principle, Buckminster Fuller, cosmological principle, dark matter, disinformation, double helix, Ernest Rutherford, Extropian, Fairchild Semiconductor, flag carrier, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, glass ceiling, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, Higgs boson, hydroponic farming, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, Khyber Pass, launch on warning, Mars Rover, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, NP-complete, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, performance metric, phenotype, plutocrats, punch-card reader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, slashdot, speech recognition, strong AI, traveling salesman, Turing test, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Review, Y2K

We don’t know how to create them or close them; all we can do is send people through, or pile bricks in the opening.” He nearly bites his tongue, because there are more than three worlds out there, and he’s been to at least one of them: the bolt-hole on XK-Masada, built by the NRO from their secret budget. He’s seen the mile-high dome Buckminster Fuller spent his last decade designing for them, the rings of Patriot air defense missiles. A squadron of black diamond-shaped fighters from the Skunk Works, said to be invisible to radar, patrols the empty skies of XK-Masada. Hydroponic farms and empty barracks and apartment blocks await the senators and congressmen and their families and thousands of support personnel.


pages: 247 words: 81,135

The Great Fragmentation: And Why the Future of All Business Is Small by Steve Sammartino

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Dunbar number, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, gamification, Google X / Alphabet X, haute couture, helicopter parent, hype cycle, illegal immigration, index fund, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, lifelogging, market design, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe's law, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, Rubik’s Cube, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, The Home Computer Revolution, the long tail, too big to fail, US Airways Flight 1549, vertical integration, web application, zero-sum game

In this sense our world becomes one, where everything is information, where knowledge is converted into actual objects and where the internet crosses the chasm from the virtual into the physical. A virtual physical reality While technology has already been used extensively in the fields of dentistry, medicine, automobiles and aviation, it’s now entering our homes for the first time. Famed designer, inventor and futurist R. Buckminster Fuller spoke of a future where technology would advance to a point where we could do ‘more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing’. Fuller spoke of this phenomenon in 1938 and coined the term ‘ephermalization’ to describe it. Fuller’s vision was that ephermalization would result in ever-increasing standards of living for an ever-growing population despite finite resources.


The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number by Mario Livio

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, Benoit Mandelbrot, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, classic study, cosmological constant, Elliott wave, Eratosthenes, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, mandelbrot fractal, music of the spheres, Nash equilibrium, power law, Ralph Nelson Elliott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method

Second, given that we define “beauty,” as, for example, in Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, “the quality which makes an object seem pleasing or satisfying in a certain way,” this raises the question: Is there an aesthetic component to mathematics? And if so, what is the essence of this component? This is a serious question because, as the American architect, mathematician, and engineer Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) once put it: “When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only of how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.” Finally, the most intriguing question is: What is it that makes mathematics so powerful and ubiquitous?


pages: 312 words: 84,421

This Chair Rocks: A Manifiesto Against Ageism by Ashton Applewhite

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Atul Gawande, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Downton Abbey, fixed income, follow your passion, ghettoisation, Google Hangouts, hiring and firing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Naomi Klein, obamacare, old age dependency ratio, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, stem cell, the built environment, urban decay, urban planning, white picket fence, women in the workforce

It’s not an either/or proposition; people who use social networking sites like Facebook also have more active social lives offline. Inexpensive video technology and storage sites like YouTube give people a new way to tell their story and get feedback, and not just from the grandchildren. My father worked with Buckminster Fuller and enjoyed tracking the work of his acolytes online. It deeply engaged him and ensured a steady trickle of geeky visitors dropping in to talk about the remarkable inventor. Ruth, my partner’s mom, and a bookseller, Skypes prospective customers on her iPad to show them her wares, making her unusually wired for a nonagenarian.


pages: 361 words: 86,921

The End of Medicine: How Silicon Valley (And Naked Mice) Will Reboot Your Doctor by Andy Kessler

airport security, Andy Kessler, Bear Stearns, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Dean Kamen, digital divide, El Camino Real, employer provided health coverage, full employment, George Gilder, global rebalancing, Law of Accelerating Returns, low earth orbit, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, Network effects, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jurvetson, vertical integration

The structure reminded Smalley of geodesic domes—the ones that were always on the cover of Popular Science magazine as the futuristic structure we might all someday be living in, except we couldn’t hang picture frames on the walls. Anyway, he called them Buckminsterfullerene balls, after, well, Buckminster Fuller, who came up with geodesic domes. The rest of the world called them buckyballs. Much better name. Buckyballs were strong and could carry electricity and because they were round, were kind of slippery. Kroto, Smalley and Curl split the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. But in 1991, researchers at NEC in Japan had opened up the fullerene structure.


User Friendly by Cliff Kuang, Robert Fabricant

A Pattern Language, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bill Atkinson, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive load, computer age, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, data science, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fake news, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, Google Glasses, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Dyson, John Markoff, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Norbert Wiener, Paradox of Choice, planned obsolescence, QWERTY keyboard, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skinner box, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tacit knowledge, Tesla Model S, three-martini lunch, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush, women in the workforce

But when I first visited, in the summer of 2017, about a year and a half into the decade-long project, the perfunctory lobby offered a hint of the constant construction and reconstruction that’s been going on. There was a steel door leading to the inner sanctum, and sprays of dust emanating from all around the door jamb, as if something had just exploded on the other side. Through the door, there was a reception desk and a painted message on the wall, seven feet tall, from Buckminster Fuller: “The best way to anticipate the future is to design it.” (Fuller, forefather of design thinking, had been a formative influence on the Stanford professor John Arnold.) It was dark, and the rooms beyond weren’t rooms but rather curtained-off sound-stages. There was a sundeck, a hallway, an elevator, a stateroom (the cruise-ship word for a hotel room), a casino, a bar—all the pieces of a real-life cruise experience.


pages: 669 words: 210,153

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Chris is one of the people who generously mentored me in the startup investing game. The other majors include Naval Ravikant (page 546), Kevin Rose (page 340), and Mike Maples, who got me started (see the Real-World MBA on page 250). Chris mentioned several books when he appeared on my podcast, including I Seem to Be a Verb by Buckminster Fuller. 48 hours later, used copies were selling for $999 on Amazon. Are You Playing Offense or Defense? Despite the fact that people refer to Chris as a “Silicon Valley investor,” he hasn’t lived in San Francisco since 2007. Instead, he bought a cabin in rural Truckee, Tahoe’s less-expensive neighbor, and moved to prime skiing and hiking country.

MacDonald), At Home: A Short History of Private Life; The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America (Bill Bryson), A Curious Discovery: An Entrepreneur’s Story (John Hendricks) Rubin, Rick: Tao Te Ching (Lao Tzu, translation by Stephen Mitchell), Wherever You Go, There You Are (Jon Kabat-Zinn) Sacca, Chris: Not Fade Away: A Short Life Well Lived (Laurence Shames and Peter Barton), The Essential Scratch & Sniff Guide to Becoming a Whiskey Know-It-All; The Essential Scratch & Sniff Guide to Becoming a Wine Expert (Richard Betts), How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia: A Novel (Mohsin Hamid), I Seem to Be a Verb (R. Buckminster Fuller) Schwarzenegger, Arnold: The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (Boris Johnson), Free to Choose (Milton Friedman), California (Kevin Starr) Sethi, Ramit: Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion (Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson), The Social Animal (Elliot Aronson), Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got (Jay Abraham), Mindless Eating (Brian Wansink), The Robert Collier Letter Book (Robert Collier), Never Eat Alone, Expanded and Updated: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time (Keith Ferrazzi), What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School (Mark H.


pages: 509 words: 132,327

Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History by Thomas Rid

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Claude Shannon: information theory, conceptual framework, connected car, domain-specific language, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Extropian, full employment, game design, global village, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kubernetes, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pattern recognition, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snow Crash, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, The Hackers Conference, Timothy McVeigh, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, Zimmermann PGP

One afternoon, probably in March 1966 in the hills of San Francisco, Brand dropped a bit of LSD and went up on a roof overlooking the city. It was a form of escape. He sat in a blanket, shivering in the cold spring air, overlooking the hills, lost in enhanced thought: And so I’m watching the buildings, looking out at San Francisco, thinking of Buckminster Fuller’s notion that people think of the earth’s resources as unlimited because they think of the earth as flat. I’m looking at San Francisco from 300 feet and 200 micrograms up and thinking that I can see from here that the earth is curved. I had the idea that the higher you go the more you can see earth as round.29 Yet no photograph of the whole Earth was publicly available at the time, Brand thought, despite nearly ten years of US space exploration in a Cold War arms race that extended even beyond the planet.


pages: 538 words: 141,822

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Earth, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, invention of radio, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, lolcat, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Sinatra Doctrine, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, Steve Jobs, Streisand effect, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

Boorstin wrote these words when many political scientists and policymakers were still awaiting the triumph of “teledemocracy,” in which citizens would use television to not only observe but also directly participate in politics. (The hope that new technology could enable more public participation in politics predates television; back in 1940 Buckminster Fuller, the controversial American inventor and architect, was already lauding the virtues of “telephone democracy,” which could enable “voting by telephone on all prominent questions before Congress.”) In hindsight, the science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury was closer to the truth in 1953 than Boorstin ever was in 1978.


pages: 322 words: 88,197

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alfred Russel Wallace, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Book of Ingenious Devices, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, colonial exploitation, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, game design, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, HyperCard, invention of air conditioning, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Minecraft, moral panic, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, Necker cube, New Urbanism, Oculus Rift, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pets.com, placebo effect, pneumatic tube, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, SimCity, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, talking drums, the built environment, The Great Good Place, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, working poor, Wunderkammern

(Just imagine the impact on climate change if we’d had thirty years of using our automobiles only for weekend pleasure trips.) But, of course, that alternate past didn’t happen. Instead, the mall triggered decades of suburban ascendancy, and the Walt Disney Corporation turned EPCOT into yet another theme park, with its bizarre and sad hybrid of Buckminster Fuller futurism and It’s-a-Small-World globalism. Why weren’t progress cities built? The easiest way to dismiss the Gruen/EPCOT vision is to focus on the centrality of the mall itself. Now that mall culture is in decline—in the United States and Europe at least—we understand that the overly programmed nature of the mall environment ended up being its fatal flaw.


pages: 302 words: 95,965

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs by Tim Draper

3D printing, Airbnb, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, business climate, carried interest, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, frictionless, frictionless market, growth hacking, high net worth, hiring and firing, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Eisenhower Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody's going to know whether you did it or not. Oprah Winfrey Have the courage to say no. Have the courage to face the truth. Do the right thing because it is right. These are the magic keys to living your life with integrity. W. Clement Stone Integrity is the essence of everything successful. R. Buckminster Fuller The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks. Douglas Adams Nothing more completely baffles one who is full of trick and duplicity, than straightforward and simple integrity in another. Charles Caleb Colton Keeping your word can be extraordinarily painful, especially when people's interests and motivations change.


pages: 294 words: 96,661

The Fourth Age: Smart Robots, Conscious Computers, and the Future of Humanity by Byron Reese

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, basic income, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cognitive bias, computer age, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, dark matter, DeepMind, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, estate planning, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, flying shuttle, full employment, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Hargreaves, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, lateral thinking, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Lou Jepsen, Moravec's paradox, Nick Bostrom, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, OpenAI, pattern recognition, profit motive, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Timothy McVeigh, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

He did not reject property ownership itself; rather, he argued that we should create “a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of Fifteen Pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property.” The idea of a UBI never fell entirely out of favor. Buckminster Fuller came out in favor of it quite forcefully: We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. . . . We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinism theory, he must justify his right to exist.


pages: 321 words: 89,109

The New Gold Rush: The Riches of Space Beckon! by Joseph N. Pelton

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, Carrington event, Colonization of Mars, Dennis Tito, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, global pandemic, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, gravity well, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, life extension, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megastructure, new economy, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Planet Labs, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Ray Kurzweil, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tunguska event, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, X Prize

It was Ray Kurzwiel, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) guru, who popularized the term Singularity. Dr. Peter Diamandis, who in cooperation with others founded the International Space University and then went on to found the Singularity University and also breathed life into the wonderful X-Prize initiative, simply calls it “abundance.” And before him R. Buckminster Fuller called it “transcendence.” No matter what you call it, the idea is to go ahead and think outside the box. Indeed the trick is to think outside the limits of the 6 sextillion-ton spaceship we call Planet Earth. Fuller, Kurzweil, Diamandis and other space enthusiasts, including the authors, are trying to convince our economic and political leaders that the trick is to think outside constraints of the current world economic systems and the resources we have trapped within the orb we call Earth.


pages: 384 words: 89,250

Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America by Giles Slade

Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, American ideology, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, creative destruction, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, global village, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, invention of radio, Jeff Hawkins, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, PalmPilot, planned obsolescence, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, the market place, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, white picket fence, women in the workforce

In the span of a few years, his mad-hatter effusions drew followers to him from a wide array of disciplines and professions. As the recipient of a prestigious Albert Schweitzer fellowship at New York’s Fordham University, he entered the American mainstream, where he alienated, befriended, or otherwise unsettled an impressive assortment of American cultural leaders, from Woody Allen, John Cage, Joseph Campbell, Buckminster Fuller, Abbie Hoffman, and William Jovanovich to Alan Kay, Stanley Kubrick, Timothy Leary, Victor Papanek, Ezra Pound, Carl Sagan, Tom Wolfe, and Andy Warhol. By mid-century, McLuhan had become a recognized critic of advertising, like Vance Packard before him. McLuhan also had a ready explanation for Packard’s popularity in criticizing the excesses of advertising.


pages: 313 words: 92,907

Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are Thekeys to Sustainability by David Owen

A Pattern Language, active transport: walking or cycling, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, congestion charging, congestion pricing, delayed gratification, distributed generation, drive until you qualify, East Village, Easter island, electricity market, food miles, Ford Model T, garden city movement, hydrogen economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, linear programming, McMansion, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, Murano, Venice glass, Negawatt, New Urbanism, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, peak oil, placebo effect, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, unemployed young men, urban planning, urban sprawl, walkable city, zero-sum game

Stores, schools, factories, and other nonresidential uses would be concentrated, mall-style, in the central core. Individual heating and air-conditioning units would be unnecessary because the city itself would be climate-controlled. The domed roof would be made of triangular glass panels and would owe a design debt to R. Buckminster Fuller. “Most houses in Compact City would have two floors in order to conserve base area,” the authors wrote, with the self-assurance of professionally logical men who are certain they have thought of everything (Dantzig was an inventor of linear programming). “Design of both the interior and exterior of these houses would vary according to the preferences of the residents.


pages: 339 words: 94,769

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI by John Brockman

AI winter, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, Buckminster Fuller, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, finite state, friendly AI, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, information retrieval, invention of writing, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Hawkins, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, Loebner Prize, machine translation, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Picturephone, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological determinism, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telemarketer, telerobotics, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, theory of mind, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, you are the product, zero-sum game

While Lois and the team did the heavy lifting on the final mechanicals for WEC, Stewart and I sat together in a corner for two days, reading, underlining, and annotating the same paperback copy of Cybernetics that Cage had handed to me the year before, and debating Wiener’s ideas. Inspired by this set of ideas, I began to develop a theme, a mantra of sorts, that has informed my endeavors since: “new technologies = new perceptions.” Inspired by communications theorist Marshall McLuhan, architect-designer Buckminster Fuller, futurist John McHale, and cultural anthropologists Edward T. “Ned” Hall and Edmund Carpenter, I started reading avidly in the fields of information theory, cybernetics, and systems theory. McLuhan suggested I read biologist J. Z. Young’s Doubt and Certainty in Science, in which he said that we create tools and we mold ourselves through our use of them.


pages: 384 words: 93,754

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism by John Elkington

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, anti-fragile, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, deglobalization, degrowth, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Future Shock, Gail Bradbrook, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, impact investing, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, John Elkington, Jony Ive, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, microplastics / micro fibres, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Planet Labs, planetary scale, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog

LOSING CONTROL So how can we ensure that the coming transformations push us in the right direction, rather than pulling us down into exponential vortexes with increasingly Black Swan characteristics? Someone who had a profound influence on my thinking in this area, and with whom I had an impromptu breakfast in Reykjavik back in 1977, was R. Buckminster Fuller. “Bucky,” as his many fans called him, noted that the key thing about our planet, which he may have been the first to dub “Spaceship Earth,” is that we took over the controls only to find there was no operating manual. As a result, we often find out that things we have been doing to improve our lives are destroying the health—and even the futures—of other people and other species.


pages: 282 words: 93,783

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World by David Sax

Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Cal Newport, call centre, clean water, cognitive load, commoditize, contact tracing, contact tracing app, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Minecraft, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, retail therapy, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, urban planning, walkable city, Y2K, zero-sum game

The smart city promised that our destiny lay in digitizing the city’s infrastructure, but the pandemic revealed a deeper truth about the analog heart of city life. The origins of the smart city date back to the 1930s and the rise of both automobiles and modernist design, when legendary architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier presented their sweeping visions for the future. Wright’s Broadacre City, Corbusier’s Radiant City, and, later, Buckminster Fuller’s insane plans to cover whole swaths of cities with giant glass structures were marvels of futurist technological utopianism. Each reflected the aesthetics of its creator, but they shared similar traits, including clusters of identical skyscrapers, broad boulevards and motorways, flying machines and pods, manicured lawns, and ample parking.


Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth by Steve Pavlina

Buckminster Fuller, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, financial independence, placebo effect, side project, unbiased observer

Contents Introduction "When I'm working on a problem, about beauty. I never think I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong." — R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER 1 • Do y o u remember the exact m o m e n t you first became interested in personal development? I certainly do. It happened in January 1991 while I was sitting in a jail cell. I'd just been arrested for felony grand theft. This wasn't my first run-in with the law, so I knew was in trouble. I was 19 years old. I began stealing shortly after moving to Berkeley, California, during my first semester at UC Berkeley.


pages: 360 words: 100,991

Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence by Richard Yonck

3D printing, AI winter, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, backpropagation, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deep learning, DeepMind, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Fairchild Semiconductor, friendly AI, Geoffrey Hinton, ghettoisation, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of writing, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Loebner Prize, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, old age dependency ratio, pattern recognition, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Skype, social intelligence, SoftBank, software as a service, SQL injection, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing test, twin studies, Two Sigma, undersea cable, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Review, working-age population, zero day

In contrast, technological evolution follows a much more exponential pattern of growth, due at least in part to the positive feedback loops generated by prior advances. 3. A considerable volume of writing and research supports the concept of accelerating technological change, including the works of technologists Stanislaw Ulam, R. Buckminster Fuller, Ray Kurzweil, Vernor Vinge, and Kevin Kelly. 4. The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design. Laurel, B., Editor. Addison-Wesley. 1990. Chapter 1 1. “Emergence of Individuality in Genetically Identical Mice.” Julia Freund, Andreas M. Brandmaier, Lars Lewejohann, et al. Science, Vol. 340, No. 6133 (May 10, 2013), pp. 756–759, doi:10.1126/science.1235294. 2.


pages: 309 words: 101,190

Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins, Lalla Ward

Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, computer age, Drosophila, Fellow of the Royal Society, industrial robot, invention of radio, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, phenotype, Robert X Cringely, stem cell, the long tail, trade route

They too illustrate beautiful symmetries of various orders, equivalent to kaleidoscopes with two, three, four, five, six and more mirrors. They have tiny skeletons made of chalk with a beauty and elegance that has kaleidoscopic embryology written all over it. The kaleidoscopic masterpiece in Figure 7.6 might have been designed by the visionary architect Buckminster Fuller (whom I was once privileged to hear, in his nineties, lecturing for a mesmerizing three hours without respite). Like his geodesic domes it relies for its strength on the structurally robust geometric form of the triangle. It is clearly the product of a kaleidoscopic embryology of a high order.


pages: 334 words: 103,508

Icehenge by Kim Stanley Robinson

Buckminster Fuller, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, double helix, Easter island, gravity well, Kim Stanley Robinson

In the tapestry gallery, among the complicated wall hangings, there was a bulletin screen filled with messages and games and jokes. I stopped before it, and a sentence struck my eye. “Only under the stresses of total social emergencies do the effectively adequate alternative technical strategies synergetically emerge.” Jeez, I thought, what prose artist penned that? I looked down — the ascription was to one Buckminster Fuller. The quote continued: “Here we witness mind over matter and humanity’s escape from the limitations of his identity with some circumscribed geographical locality.” That was for sure. Part of the bulletin screen was reserved for suggestions for the name of the starship. Anyone could pick his color and typeface, and tap a name onto the space on the screen.


pages: 469 words: 97,582

QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance by Lloyd, John, Mitchinson, John

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, Ada Lovelace, Apple Newton, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, disinformation, double helix, Etonian, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, Isaac Newton, Lao Tzu, Louis Pasteur, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, Stephen Fry, the built environment, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, traveling salesman, US Airways Flight 1549

It’s long been known that one form of pure carbon (graphite) can be turned into another (diamond) by heat and pressure. But the Bayreuth team used neither. They used a third form of pure carbon, fullerite, also known as buckminsterfullerene or ‘buckyballs’. Its sixty carbon atoms form a molecule shaped like a soccer ball, or like one of the geodesic domes invented by the American architect Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983). The carbon atoms in diamond are arranged in cubes stacked in pyramids; the new substance is made of tiny, interlocking rods. These are called ‘nanorods’ because they are so small – nanos is Greek for ‘dwarf’. Each is 1 micron (one millionth of a metre) long and 20 nanometres (20 billionths of a metre) wide – about 1/50,000th of the width of a human hair.


pages: 307 words: 97,677

The Evolution of Useful Things by Henry Petroski

Buckminster Fuller, card file, human-factors engineering, industrial robot, Menlo Park, Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traveling salesman

Such relative advantages and disadvantages among artifacts lead to diversity rather than extinction. (photo credit 13.4) Streamlining American automobiles began with some subtle changes introduced in the 1920s, but the solidly established squarish Fords set the aesthetic standard. Radical streamlining, such as introduced by Buckminster Fuller in his Dymaxion car exhibited in 1935 at the Chicago World’s Fair, was clearly “futuristic,” and hence not taken as seriously as cars of the present. The sensibly streamlined 1934 Chrysler Airflow rounded and tapered the boxy profile, fenders, and windows of contemporary designs, but it was not a commercial success.


pages: 460 words: 107,712

A Devil's Chaplain: Selected Writings by Richard Dawkins

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Desert Island Discs, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, gravity well, Gregor Mendel, Necker cube, out of africa, Peoples Temple, phenotype, placebo effect, random walk, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

Mirabile dictu, exactly this pattern has been discovered among carbon atoms. The team responsible, including Sir Harry Kroto of Sussex University, won the 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Called Buckminsterfullerene, it is an elegant sphere of 60 carbon atoms, linked up as 20 hexagons interspersed with 12 pentagons. The name honours the visionary American architect Buckminster Fuller (whom I was privileged to meet when he was a very old man2) and the spheres are affectionately known as buckyballs. They can combine together to make larger crystals. Like graphite sheets, buckyballs make good lubricants, probably because of their spherical shape: they presumably work like tiny ball bearings.


pages: 465 words: 109,653

Free Ride by Robert Levine

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Anne Wojcicki, book scanning, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, commoditize, company town, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Firefox, future of journalism, Googley, Hacker Ethic, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Justin.tv, Kevin Kelly, linear programming, Marc Andreessen, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, offshore financial centre, pets.com, publish or perish, race to the bottom, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

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. Brand’s own information wanted to be expensive, and he made a small fortune in the publishing business. A bohemian intellectual who befriended both Buckminster Fuller and Ken Kesey, Brand appeared as a character in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and campaigned for NASA to release a picture of Earth from space. As living off the land became part of the post-hippie zeitgeist, he created the Whole Earth Catalog, an influential compendium of advice that Steve Jobs once referred to as “sort of like Google in paperback form.”19 He started out peddling an early version from the back of his truck and went on to sell more than a million copies of a later edition.


Kanban in Action by Marcus Hammarberg, Joakim Sunden

Buckminster Fuller, business logic, call centre, continuous integration, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, index card, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Lean Startup, performance metric, place-making, systems thinking, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, Two Sigma

It consists of three katas, or routines, if you like, that build on the scientific method. The nice part about using the scientific method is that no result is bad; it’s only a result. You’ll use the outcome to learn and to improve your next hypothesis. There is no such thing as a failed experiment, only experiments with unexpected outcomes. R. Buckminster Fuller The next secret to why Kanban Kata works is that it takes small steps. You’re trying to improve from your current condition toward an improved target condition. The road toward the target is unknown, and the best way to navigate it is in small steps. These steps are the experiments that you’re conducting based on your hypothesis.


pages: 341 words: 116,854

The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square by James Traub

Anton Chekhov, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, fear of failure, gentrification, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Lewis Mumford, light touch regulation, megastructure, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, plutocrats, price mechanism, rent control, Robert Durst, Ronald Reagan, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal

Unlike Alexander Parker’s pastoralized plaza, Cityscape offered an extremely inventive and even playful rendition of 42nd Street’s character, adapting its identity as a rialto of popular entertainment to a new culture and new technology. Weinstein hired the artists and designers who had created the celebrated Czech pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal, including Milos For-man, as well as the design firm of Chermayeff & Geismar, which was responsible for the American pavilion—the one with Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome—and the accompanying exhibit at Osaka in 1970. Cityscape was not a preservation project: its premise was that 42nd Street needed to be projected forward rather than backward. The design firm produced a cutaway aerial view of the project which today has about it a Flash Gordon sense of the fantastical.


pages: 422 words: 113,525

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, back-to-the-land, biofilm, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, business process, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dark matter, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, digital divide, Easter island, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, megaproject, microbiome, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, out of africa, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, rewilding, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, We are as Gods, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, William Langewiesche, working-age population, Y2K

Every interview with a public figure should include the question “What have you been wrong about, and how did that change your views?” The answer will tell us if the person is intellectually honest or a tale spinner with delusions of infallibility. Let me quickly furnish a partial list of things I’ve been wrong about in public. In the 1960s, I pushed communes as a path to the future, Buckminster Fuller domes as habitable, and cocaine as harmless. In the 1970s, I was sure the 1973 oil crisis would lead to police in the streets of the United States, that nuclear power was bad, and that small was always beautiful, villages especially. I was totally wrong about the Y2K bug in 2000. In 2003 I was so sure that a Democrat would win the 2004 presidential election that I made a public bet about it.


pages: 385 words: 118,314

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis by Leo Hollis

Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Shoup, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Enrique Peñalosa, export processing zone, Firefox, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, place-making, power law, Quicken Loans, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Perhaps we should start again and build our cities from scratch? Masdar City is currently being built by the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company, designed by the leading architect Norman Foster, in the desert. Foster’s career has always been about pushing the boundaries of architecture, having as a young man been deeply influenced by the American designer Buckminster Fuller, whose geodesic dome (famously designed on a massive scale as a protection for the city) was a shining example of ‘doing more with less’. With iconic commissions such as the HSBC Bank in Hong Kong, the Gherkin (30 St Mary Axe) in London, and the truly impressive Beijing Airport, Foster has been at the forefront of finding a technical solution to questions of sustainability, investing in new materials, working on designs that reduce energy use, and always remaining visually innovative.


Wireless by Charles Stross

air gap, anthropic principle, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Buckminster Fuller, Cepheid variable, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, cosmic microwave background, Easter island, epigenetics, finite state, Georg Cantor, gravity well, hive mind, hydroponic farming, jitney, Khyber Pass, Late Heavy Bombardment, launch on warning, lifelogging, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neil Armstrong, peak oil, phenotype, Pluto: dwarf planet, security theater, sensible shoes, Turing machine, undersea cable

We don’t know how to create them or close them; all we can do is send people through, or pile bricks in the opening.” He nearly bites his tongue, because there are more than three worlds out there, and he’s been to at least one of them: the bolt-hole on XK-Masada, built by the NRO from their secret budget. He’s seen the mile-high dome Buckminster Fuller spent his last decade designing for them, the rings of Patriot air-defense missiles. A squadron of black diamond-shaped fighters from the Skunk Works, said to be invisible to radar, patrols the empty skies of XK-Masada. Hydroponic farms and empty barracks and apartment blocks await the senators and congressmen and their families and thousands of support personnel.


pages: 404 words: 113,514

Atrocity Archives by Stross, Charles

airport security, anthropic principle, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, defense in depth, disinformation, disintermediation, experimental subject, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, hypertext link, Khyber Pass, luminiferous ether, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, NP-complete, PalmPilot, pneumatic tube, Snow Crash, Strategic Defense Initiative, the medium is the message, Y2K, yield curve

More dead tree stumps; the ground beneath me, the crunching--now I can see that it's grass, freeze-dried and mummified beneath a layer of carbon dioxide frost. Hills or low mounds of some kind rise in the near distance, and then- "Disneyland?" I hear myself saying. Alan laughs quietly. "Not Disneyland. Think Mad King Ludwig's last commission, as executed by Buckminster Fuller." Cheesecake crenellations, battlements with machicolations, moat and drawbridge and turrets. Spiky pointed roofs on the towers--like the police stations in West Belfast, designed to deflect incoming mortar fire. Arrow slots filled with mirror glass half a metre thick. Radomes and antenna masts in the courtyard where you'd expect armoured knights to mount up.


pages: 402 words: 126,835

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era by Ellen Ruppel Shell

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, big-box store, blue-collar work, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, company town, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, follow your passion, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, game design, gamification, gentrification, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, human-factors engineering, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, precariat, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban renewal, Wayback Machine, WeWork, white picket fence, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game

Indeed, despite their staggering market caps, no American Internet information provider has come close to providing the 443,000 American jobs (many of them union jobs) directly supported by Kroger, the nation’s largest supermarket chain. In 2017 Apple, the nation’s most profitable company, had only 77,000 direct US employees. There’s a fancy word for this phenomenon: ephemeralization, coined by Buckminster Fuller in the 1930s to describe the concept of “doing more with less.” Throughout human history, doing more with less resulted in efficiencies that helped make our world a better place. But arguably, we have reached a limit. By building more human-like capabilities into our machines, we seem to have reduced the need for humans in most positions along the value chain in a growing number of industries.


pages: 385 words: 123,168

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber

1960s counterculture, active measures, antiwork, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Black Lives Matter, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, call centre, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, data science, David Graeber, do what you love, Donald Trump, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, full employment, functional programming, global supply chain, High speed trading, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, independent contractor, informal economy, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, knowledge worker, moral panic, Post-Keynesian economics, post-work, precariat, Rutger Bregman, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software as a service, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, unpaid internship, wage slave, wages for housework, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, éminence grise

how, over the course of the twentieth century, work came to be increasingly valued primarily as a form of discipline and self-sacrifice We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everyone has to be employed at some sort of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. —Buckminster Fuller However this may be, the “Gospel of Wealth” counteroffensive has been successful, and the captains of industry, first in America, then increasingly everywhere, have been able to convince the public that they, and not those they employ, are the real creators of prosperity. Their very success, however, created an inevitable problem.


pages: 436 words: 124,373

Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds

back-to-the-land, Buckminster Fuller, hive mind, information retrieval, Kickstarter, risk/return, stem cell, time dilation, trade route

She ordered another mocha and downed it replying. "Use your imagination. Only the Demarchy knows how to synthesise it." "It's also useless as a weapon." "Depends. There's an application you should know about." "What?" "Keeping this city afloat - and I'm not talking about economic solvency. Do you know about Buckminster Fuller? He lived about four hundred years ago; believed absolute democracy could be achieved through technological means." "The fool." "Maybe. But Fuller also invented the geodesic lattice which determines the structure of the buckyball; the closed allotrope of tubular fullerene. The city owes him on two counts."


Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City by Richard Sennett

Anthropocene, Big Tech, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, open borders, place-making, plutocrats, post-truth, Richard Florida, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Yochai Benkler

The structural principles for floating shells came from the Russian engineer Vladimir Shukhov, who made a huge, self-supporting curved-roof shed in Vyksa in 1897; freed of any interior supports, it could be put to any use. The geodesic dome is Vyksa’s heir, the domes being constructed by a lattice of interlocking triangles covered by a protective skin. Buckminster Fuller thought such a dome, both super-light and super-strong, could be magnified almost to infinity; in his zanier moments he hoped to cover entire cities with geodesic domes. More modest in size, but still huge, geodesic domes like the Fukuoka Dome in Japan permit a variety of uses – as does the Millennium Dome (though not strictly geodesic) which Richard Rogers created in London in 1999.


pages: 509 words: 137,315

Islands in the Net by Bruce Sterling

back-to-the-land, belling the cat, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, disinformation, industrial robot, Malacca Straits, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, South China Sea, VTOL, wage slave

He vanished with the baby and brought her back freshly changed, with her bottle. Laura sighed. “You had a good time, David, didn’t you?” “You wouldn’t believe what they have out there,” David said, sprawling onto the couch with the baby in his lap. “I met another one of the Andreis. I mean his name’s not Andrei, but he acted just like him. Korean guy. Big Buckminster Fuller fan. They’re making massive arcologies out of nothing! For nothing! Concretized sand and seastone. They sink these iron grates into the ocean, run some voltage through, and get this: solids begin to accrete … calcium carbonate, right? Like seashells! They’re growing buildings offshore. Out of this ‘seastone.’


pages: 469 words: 142,230

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World by Oliver Morton

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, decarbonisation, demographic transition, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Haber-Bosch Process, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kintsugi, late capitalism, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, public intellectual, renewable energy transition, rewilding, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tech billionaire, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas Malthus, Virgin Galactic

The increase he found over the years and decades that followed became perhaps the single most important piece of evidence for anthropogenic global warming. Others made the systems-thinking link from capsule to planet through imagination, rather than hardware. They pictured their homeworld as a sealed ‘Spaceship Earth’ equivalent to the capsules from which it was seen. The visionary thinker R. Buckminster Fuller probably invented the idea and certainly promulgated it. ‘Spaceship Earth’ became a rallying call, a way of expressing humanity’s common interest, a way of understanding the global environment as a system of sustenance. Computer models of natural and industrial flows of energy and material were employed to take inventory on its cargo and determine its ‘carrying capacity’ – a term originally used for the number of people who could be put on to a steamship, but since given new meaning as the amount of life an ecosystem could support.


pages: 436 words: 141,321

Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness by Frederic Laloux, Ken Wilber

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, different worldview, driverless car, Easter island, failed state, fulfillment center, future of work, hiring and firing, holacracy, index card, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kenneth Rogoff, meta-analysis, ocean acidification, pattern recognition, post-industrial society, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, radical decentralization, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, the market place, the scientific method, Tony Hsieh, warehouse automation, zero-sum game

May it help many readers gather inspiration to create businesses, schools, hospitals, or nonprofits inspired by this emerging new wave of consciousness that is starting to transform the world. Ken Wilber Denver, Colorado Fall 2013 Introduction THE EMERGENCE OF A NEW ORGANIZATIONAL MODEL You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. Richard Buckminster Fuller Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher and scientist, proclaimed in a treatise written in 350 BC that women have fewer teeth than men.1 Today we know this is nonsense. But for almost 2,000 years, it was accepted wisdom in the Western World. Then one day, someone had the most revolutionary of ideas: let’s count!


pages: 433 words: 127,171

The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future by Gretchen Bakke

addicted to oil, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, demand response, dematerialisation, distributed generation, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Internet of things, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Negawatt, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off grid, off-the-grid, post-oil, profit motive, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, the built environment, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, washing machines reduced drudgery, Whole Earth Catalog

decentralized power options: Carter also did a great deal to strengthen America’s reliance on fossil fuels, by encouraging more coal use and the exploitation of domestic oil. His problem was energy security and he was very catholic in his approach to solving it. Williams (1997), 325. commitment to fundamental change: This process might have been inevitable, for as Buckminster Fuller famously pointed out, “All the technical curves rise in tonnage and volumetric size to reach a giant peak after which miniaturization sets in. After that a more economic art takes over which also goes through the same cycle of doing progressively more with less.” Critical Path (1981). the project and opted out: Hirsh (1999), 82.


pages: 409 words: 138,088

Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth by Andrew Smith

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, Dr. Strangelove, full employment, game design, Gene Kranz, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, overview effect, pensions crisis, Ronald Reagan

I realize that I’ve been holding my breath for some time: we both exhale and sit in silence for a moment, like a pair of strangers who’ve just had reckless sex and now don’t know what to say to each other. Later research reveals “buckyballs” to be a recently discovered form of molecule, named after the brilliant thinker/ inventor/engineer/cosmologist Buckminster Fuller. And if I can’t quite remember what the question was by this point, I have managed to grasp that I’m being asked to contemplate the near-certain extinction of my species through something other than boredom or stupidity, possibly in my own lifetime, or even next Tuesday. And now my mind reels back to the previous evening and a fund-raising dinner for Buzz Aldrin’s National Space Society.


pages: 224 words: 91,918

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

Asilomar, Bonfire of the Vanities, Buckminster Fuller, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, Menlo Park, Ronald Reagan, stakhanovite, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen

The sounds roiling around in the globe like a typhoon. Movies and tapes of the past, tapes and video tapes, broadcasts and pictures of the present, tapes and humanoid sounds of the future—but all brought together now—here and now— Kairos—into the dilated cerebral cortex ... The geodesic dome, of course, was Buckminster Fuller's inspiration. The light projections were chiefly Gerd Stern's, Gerd Stern of the USCO group, although Roy Seburn had already done a lot with them and Page Browning showed a talent that surprised everybody. But the magic dome, the new planet, was Kesey and the Pranksters. The idea went beyond what would later be known as mixed-media entertainment, now a standard practice in "psychedelic discotheques" and so forth.


City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age by P. D. Smith

active transport: walking or cycling, Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, Anthropocene, augmented reality, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, congestion charging, congestion pricing, cosmological principle, crack epidemic, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, edge city, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, en.wikipedia.org, Enrique Peñalosa, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, Kickstarter, Kowloon Walled City, Lewis Mumford, Masdar, megacity, megastructure, multicultural london english, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, peak oil, pneumatic tube, RFID, smart cities, starchitect, telepresence, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, the High Line, Thomas Malthus, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

If, as scientists predict, the glaciers melt and sea levels rise dramatically, then ship-cities such as Armada in China Miéville’s The Scar, or cities built out across water, as in architect Kenzo Tange’s elegant ‘Plan for Tokyo’ (1960) which extended the Japanese capital out into the bay, might become reality. Transparent domes protecting cities are another idea popular with science fiction authors. In 1968, American futurist Buckminster Fuller actually proposed covering part of New York City in a vast air-conditioned geodesic dome. And who knows – in an age of climate change, such a scheme might indeed be necessary to protect downtowns from violent storms or stifling heat. Other urban futures include walking cities and plug-in cities, such as those proposed in the 1960s by the wonderfully inventive British architectural group Archigram, mobile or nomadic cities as described in Christopher Priest’s novel Inverted World, underwater cities, inflatable cities, cities on stilts (for example, architect Arata Isozaki’s ‘City in the Air’, from 1960), and temporary cities such as Black Rock City.


pages: 483 words: 143,123

The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters by Gregory Zuckerman

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, Bakken shale, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, corporate raider, credit crunch, energy security, Exxon Valdez, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, man camp, margin call, Maui Hawaii, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Peter Thiel, reshoring, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Timothy McVeigh, urban decay

He managed his company with an informality and dedication that inspired employees. “George avoided all publicity,” says Clark, the senior executive. “He was just work, tennis, work, tennis, work, tennis.”7 Mitchell evolved into an unusual energy baron. A few years earlier, he had met R. Buckminster Fuller, a futurist and an early environmental activist. Fuller believed human sustainability was in jeopardy and that societies needed to turn to renewable energy sources, including solar and wind power. Mitchell became convinced of the need to pursue alternative energy options in addition to fossil fuels.


pages: 789 words: 207,744

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning by Jeremy Lent

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, demographic transition, different worldview, Doomsday Book, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Metcalfe's law, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, scientific management, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, ultimatum game, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, wikimedia commons

At our current rate of energy usage, it has been calculated that our world is going through about fourteen thousand years’ worth of that fossilized sunshine from the Carboniferous age every day.38 We are so used to enjoying the benefits of oil's stored energy that it is difficult to comprehend precisely how much it is doing for us. A single barrel of oil holds as much energy as one man could produce in heavy manual labor over roughly ten years. Buckminster Fuller proposed a brilliant way to visualize the power of oil with the notion of “energy slaves”—the human equivalent of oil's energy. It would take one energy slave pedaling hard on a bicycle to keep a hundred-watt light bulb going. An average American, who consumes about twenty-four barrels of oil per year, would require about two hundred energy slaves to sustain her lifestyle, while the entire world population, using far less energy on average than Americans, would require a mind-boggling sixty-six billion energy slaves to produce the work currently provided by oil.


pages: 519 words: 142,646

Track Changes by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum

active measures, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, commoditize, computer age, Computer Lib, corporate governance, David Brooks, dematerialisation, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, Dynabook, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, forensic accounting, future of work, Future Shock, Google Earth, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Haight Ashbury, HyperCard, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, machine readable, machine translation, mail merge, Marshall McLuhan, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, popular electronics, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social web, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, text mining, thinkpad, Turing complete, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, Year of Magical Thinking

People had not even heard of this stuff yet. It was a big deal for all of us. Alan talked for close to four hours about computers, education, music, early childhood, theatre, storytelling, science, psychology, learning, artificial intelligence, programming, science fiction, biology, humanism, evolution, Bach, Buckminster Fuller, philosophy, neurology, aesthetics, and the future, the future, and the future. Steven and I had our minds blown.38 MacBird had already been thinking that the film would hinge upon the contrast between the world inside and outside of the computer; the three developed a rapport, and she and Lisberger hired Kay as their technical consultant.


pages: 528 words: 146,459

Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly, William Aspray, Nathan L. Ensmenger, Jeffrey R. Yost

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, Byte Shop, card file, cashless society, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, deskilling, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Jenner, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, garden city movement, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, Herman Kahn, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, natural language processing, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pirate software, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, Turing machine, Twitter Arab Spring, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, young professional

Stewart Brand, Stanford University biology graduate turned publishing entrepreneur, became a leading voice for the New Communalists through creating The Whole Earth Catalog. Deeply influenced by cybernetics visionary Norbert Wiener, electronics media theorist Marshall McLuhan, and architect and designer Buckminster Fuller, Brand pressed NASA to publicly release a satellite photo of the Earth in 1966. Two years later the photo adorned the cover of the first edition of The Whole Earth Catalog. Publishing regularly between 1968 and 1971, Brand’s catalog identified and promoted key products or tools for communal living and, in doing so, sought to help “transform the individual into a capable, creative person.”


pages: 497 words: 146,551

Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals by Robert M. Pirsig

Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, feminist movement, gentrification, index card, John von Neumann, luminiferous ether, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trade route

In one dusty attic, he found a bulky manuscript called The Tribes and the States in which Sidis argues persuasively that the New England political system was profoundly influenced by the democratic federation of the Penacook Indians. At this sentence, a kind of shock passed through Phædrus, but the article went on. When Mahony sent Sidis’s book The Animate and Inanimate to another eccentric genius, Buckminster Fuller, Fuller found it a fine cosmological piece that astoundingly predicted the existence of black holes — in 1925! Mahony has unearthed a science fiction novel, economic and political writings, and eighty-nine weekly newspaper columns about Boston that Sidis wrote under a pen name. The amazing thing is that we may only have tapped the surface of what Sidis produced, says Mahony.


pages: 391 words: 22,799

To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise by Bethany Moreton

affirmative action, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, collective bargaining, company town, corporate personhood, creative destruction, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, estate planning, eternal september, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, invisible hand, liberation theology, longitudinal study, market fundamentalism, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, price anchoring, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Nader, RFID, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, walkable city, Washington Consensus, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , Works Progress Administration

President Jack Shewmaker, a major force in pushing the digital revolution in Bentonville, even attended the same church as Holder.33 These creative collusions between business, technology, and belief shed new light on the supposed “paradox” of Wal-Mart: how the hightech rednecks mastered cybernetics and corporate culture without losing Christ or country music. Despite its gleam of pure sciÂ�enÂ�tific rationality, developing and deploying high technology has been in part a 132 MAKING CHRISTIAN BUSIN E S S M EN spiritual exercise from the beginning, no matter the political context. The countercultural devotees of Buckminster Fuller, Ken Kesey, and the Whole Earth Catalog brought their dreams of antiauthoritarian, transcendent elitism into the cyber revolution in California. Blending their privileged vision as “comprehensive designers” with the decentralized technologies they developed, this loose fraternity marked an entire wing of the postindustrial economy with their conviction that their new tools made them “as gods.”


pages: 915 words: 232,883

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, Albert Einstein, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, big-box store, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, death of newspapers, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, fixed income, game design, General Magic , Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, profit maximization, publish or perish, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, The Home Computer Revolution, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, vertical integration, Wall-E, Whole Earth Catalog

Brand wrote on the first page of the first edition, “A realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog.” Buckminster Fuller followed with a poem that began: “I see God in the instruments and mechanisms that work reliably.” Jobs became a Whole Earth fan. He was particularly taken by the final issue, which came out in 1971, when he was still in high school, and he brought it with him to college and then to the All One Farm.


pages: 836 words: 158,284

The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman by Timothy Ferriss

23andMe, airport security, Albert Einstein, Black Swan, Buckminster Fuller, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, Dean Kamen, game design, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, index card, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, language acquisition, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, messenger bag, microbiome, microdosing, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, placebo effect, Productivity paradox, publish or perish, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, William of Occam

Fun watching if you enjoy YouTube videos of folks face-planting off of Swiss balls, etc. Biopuncture: Common Questions and Answers (www.chiromedicalgroup.com/biopuncture) Overview of Biotensegrity (www.fourhourbody.com/biotensegrity) This explains the fascinating functions of fascia. Steven Levin, an orthopedic surgeon, explains how the principles of tensegrity seen in R. Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes apply in the human body, with bones acting as the compressive elements and the soft tissues as the tension elements. If you are at all geek-inclined, read “The Importance of Soft Tissues for Structural Support of the Body.” It’s outstanding. Egoscue (www.egoscue.com) Egoscue is a postural therapy program with 24 clinic locations worldwide.


pages: 606 words: 157,120

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Automated Insights, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, future of journalism, game design, gamification, Gary Taubes, Google Glasses, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, lifelogging, lolcat, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, Narrative Science, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, pets.com, placebo effect, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart meter, social graph, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler

An argument against rationalists who refused to acknowledge the importance of practices and traditions, rather than a celebration of cookery books, it’s a surprisingly upbeat moment in Oakeshott’s thought. However, one can only wonder if Oakeshott would need to revise his judgment today, now that cooking books have been replaced with the kinds of sophisticated gadgetry that would have Buckminster Fuller, the archsolutionist who never stopped fantasizing about the perfect kitchen, brimming with envy. Paradoxically, as technologies get smarter, the maneuvering space for interpretation—what Oakeshott thought would bring cooks in touch with the world of practices and traditions—begins to shrink and potentially disappear entirely.


pages: 1,048 words: 187,324

Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, Ella Morton

anti-communist, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, centre right, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, cosmic microwave background, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Day of the Dead, double helix, East Village, Easter island, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, horn antenna, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index card, intentional community, Jacques de Vaucanson, Kowloon Walled City, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, phenotype, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Tunguska event, urban sprawl, Vesna Vulović, white picket fence, wikimedia commons, working poor

The spillway is best seen during the rainy season when the lake is full. 38.512201 122.104748 Lake Berryessa’s massive overflow drain is known affectionately as the “glory hole.” Also in California Winchester Mystery House San Jose · The former home of Sarah Winchester, heir to the Winchester gun fortune, contains doors to nowhere, stairs that stop suddenly, and secret passages. Dymaxion Chronofile Stanford · From journals to blueprints to dry-cleaning bills, Buckminster Fuller documented his life in staggering detail. The full archive is stored at Stanford University Library. Methuselah Tree White Mountains · Germinated circa 2833 BCE, this gnarled bristlecone pine is one of the oldest trees in the world. OREGON Arborsmith Studios WILLIAMS Arborsculpture is the craft of shaping living trees into works of art and architecture.


pages: 611 words: 188,732

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Byte Shop, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computer Lib, disintermediation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, fake news, frictionless, General Magic , glass ceiling, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, popular electronics, quantum entanglement, random walk, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, The Hackers Conference, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, tulip mania, V2 rocket, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

That was the year Jobs finagled a return to the company which he had founded two decades before but had never actually controlled. This time he would be firmly in charge. The first thing that the older and wiser Jobs did was launch an advertising campaign, “Think Different,” which flattered the Apple faithful with comparisons to Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, Pablo Picasso, and the like. Then he launched a new computer, the iMac, which piggybacked on the vogue for all things internet. The third launch was a clever new product aimed at the Napster generation. The iPod was a way to put an MP3 in your pocket. Apple’s update of Sony’s venerable Walkman idea proved to be a game changer, a completely new direction for the company.


pages: 1,007 words: 181,911

The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life by Timothy Ferriss

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Blue Bottle Coffee, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, deliberate practice, digital nomad, en.wikipedia.org, Golden Gate Park, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Loma Prieta earthquake, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, microbiome, off-the-grid, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Pepsi Challenge, Pepto Bismol, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, Skype, spaced repetition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, the High Line, Y Combinator

Serve. Suggested Garnishes Sweet tomatoes and arugula Sautéed mushrooms Truffles/truffle oil (as always) Grant’s Principles #3 TECHNOLOGY “ANTI-GRIDDLE” PEPPERMINT CHOCOLATE POPS - * * * “I just invent, then wait until man comes around to needing what I’ve invented.” —R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER, ARCHITECT AND INVENTOR * * * These simple pops are a classic dark chocolate ganache,11 flash-frozen using dry ice. Imagine an elegant version of Girl Scout Thin Mint cookies, the crack cocaine of sweets. SHORTHAND Mix ½c simmered cream, 4oz chopped dark chocolate, pinch salt, ½t peppermint extract till melted ganache.


pages: 593 words: 189,857

Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises by Timothy F. Geithner

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Buckminster Fuller, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Brooks, Doomsday Book, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, implied volatility, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, negative equity, Northern Rock, obamacare, paradox of thrift, pets.com, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Saturday Night Live, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stock buybacks, tail risk, The Great Moderation, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tobin tax, too big to fail, working poor

He devoted his professional life to global development, not a typically conservative cause, and he voted for President Obama in 2008. But he supported Mitt Romney in 2012, even though I was still working for the President. My mother is from a New England family dating back to the Mayflower, with relatives including the architect Buckminster Fuller, the journalist Margaret Fuller, and the novelist John Marquand. Her father, Charles F. Moore, Jr., was, among other things, a newspaperman, vice president of Ford Motor Company, and an adviser to President Eisenhower. Later in life, he served as a town selectman in Orleans, the small town on the Cape where my parents now live.


pages: 579 words: 183,063

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World by Timothy Ferriss

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bayesian statistics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, fear of failure, Gary Taubes, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, global macro, Google Hangouts, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, helicopter parent, high net worth, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, index fund, information security, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Mr. Money Mustache, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nick Bostrom, non-fiction novel, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, sunk-cost fallacy, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

If you were to Google who the top stars are, undoubtedly most stars, particularly the male actors, would have been born into the movie business. It takes time, but if you are consistently good at what you do, at least you get to call your success your own. What is one of the best or most worthwhile investments you’ve ever made? My father encouraged me to take a course called “Money and You,” devised around the ideas of Buckminster Fuller. I attended the four-day course in Kuala Lumpur. The first two days focused on money and the next two on “you.” It was very balanced, taught me to look at money differently, and imbued me with a sense of enterprise at a young age. It cost me $500. What is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love?


The Big Score by Michael S. Malone

Apple II, Bob Noyce, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, creative destruction, Donner party, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial independence, game design, Isaac Newton, job-hopping, lone genius, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, packet switching, plutocrats, RAND corporation, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, Teledyne, The Home Computer Revolution, transcontinental railway, Turing machine, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yom Kippur War

Like doomed species of animals displayed in zoos, they were less remnants of another time than curiosities of the modern age. Mission Santa Clara might look the same, but it would never again see masses attended by devout old Indians and Mexicans. Now, electrical engineering students would come to hear speeches by Buckminster Fuller or listen to guitarists leading “folk masses.” The modern Silicon Valley was a Klondike boomtown adjusted to match the new world of the baby boom and the philosophies of William Levitt. No one really planned to stay in California, except those who had come out to retire or die. For the rest, Silicon Valley was the place you went to make a killing, to take care of business.


pages: 913 words: 265,787

How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apple Newton, backpropagation, Buckminster Fuller, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, experimental subject, feminist movement, four colour theorem, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Gregor Mendel, hedonic treadmill, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, income per capita, information retrieval, invention of agriculture, invention of the wheel, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, lake wobegon effect, language acquisition, lateral thinking, Linda problem, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Necker cube, out of africa, Parents Music Resource Center, pattern recognition, phenotype, Plato's cave, plutocrats, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Saturday Night Live, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sexual politics, social intelligence, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, Tipper Gore, Turing machine, urban decay, Yogi Berra

My “normal” mental equipment leaves me chronically dumbfounded at the fact that a microdot and a spoonful of semen can bring about a site of thinking and feeling and that a blood clot or a metal slug can end it. It gives me the delusion that London and chairs and vegetables are on the inventory of the world’s objects. Even the objects themselves are a kind of delusion. Buckminster Fuller once wrote: “Everything you’ve learned … as ‘obvious’ becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There’s not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.”


pages: 669 words: 195,743

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, conceptual framework, coronavirus, dark matter, digital map, double helix, experimental subject, facts on the ground, Fellow of the Royal Society, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Google Earth, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, South China Sea, the long tail, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

The capsid also defines the exterior shape of a virus. Virions of Ebola and Marburg, for instance, are long filaments, which is why they’ve been placed in a group known as filoviruses. Other viruses have particles that are spherical, or ovoid, or helical, or icosahedral (twenty-sided, like a soccer ball designed by Buckminster Fuller). HIV-1 particles are globular. Rabies virions are shaped like bullets. A plate of Ebola virions mixed with Hendra virions would resemble capellini in a light sauce of capers. Many viruses are wrapped with an additional layer, known as an envelope, comprising not only protein but also lipid molecules drawn from the host cell—in some cases, pulled from the wall of the cell when the virion made its exit.


The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

“When you enter our buildings, we want you to feel how much left there is to be done in our mission to connect the world.”7 Even stripped-down Amazon couldn’t resist adding a grand architectural flourish to the generally undistinguished set of buildings that made up its headquarters in central Seattle, building a striking pair of “biospheres” housing indoor gardens for Amazonians to enjoy. On the other side of Lake Washington, Microsoft tried to keep up with its crosstown rival’s riff on Buckminster Fuller by building treehouses for employees’ midday retreats. But the most stunning monument of them all was Apple’s massive new Cupertino headquarters, a sleek ring of glass and steel housing twelve thousand employees. “Apple Park” had been one of Steve Jobs’s last ideas before he died. In homage to their founder and the Valley that once was, Apple planted an apricot orchard in the building’s shadow.8 THE NEW MONEY MEN The Silicon Valley money machine seemed unstoppable.


Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age by Lizabeth Cohen

activist lawyer, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, benefit corporation, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, charter city, deindustrialization, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, ghettoisation, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, land reform, Lewis Mumford, megastructure, new economy, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, rent control, Robert Gordon, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Vilfredo Pareto, walkable city, War on Poverty, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

Complaints remained, but the UDC tried to balance the often-competing demands of architects, tenants, budget watchers, and the Feds. The UDC’s prototypes frequently used new technology to make housing construction easier, quicker, and cheaper. Applying the methods of mass production to creating “industrial housing” had long been a dream of prominent modernists including Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Jean Prouvé, R. Buckminster Fuller, Charles and Ray Eames, Moshe Safdie, and Paul Rudolph. But supply and demand for the concept had been weak in the United States, except for occasional bursts like the short-lived Lustron homes experiment immediately after World War II.170 Logue nonetheless remained intrigued, particularly in efforts to shift prefab production from single-family houses to multi-family dwellings.


pages: 745 words: 207,187

Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Avis Lang

active measures, Admiral Zheng, airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Carrington event, Charles Lindbergh, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dava Sobel, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, dual-use technology, Eddington experiment, Edward Snowden, energy security, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, global value chain, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Karl Jansky, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Late Heavy Bombardment, Laura Poitras, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, low earth orbit, mandelbrot fractal, Maui Hawaii, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, operation paperclip, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precision agriculture, prediction markets, profit motive, Project Plowshare, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, skunkworks, South China Sea, space junk, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, the long tail, time dilation, trade route, War on Poverty, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

Interplanetary space is the next arena where the soft power of technological bravado, augmented by the lure of unlimited resources, urges us to take flight. 9 A TIME TO HEAL On July 21, 1969—the day the New York Times banner headline read “MEN WALK ON MOON: ASTRONAUTS LAND ON PLAIN; COLLECT ROCKS, PLANT FLAG”—the paper also provided space for reactions from several dozen notable individuals: the Dalai Lama, R. Buckminster Fuller, Jesse Jackson, Charles Lindbergh, Arthur Miller, Pablo Picasso. Some were enthusiastic, some were ambivalent, Picasso was completely uninterested. The admired historian of cities and technology Lewis Mumford was disgusted. Five years earlier, Mumford had received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.


pages: 708 words: 223,211

The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture by Brian Dear

air traffic controllers' union, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple Newton, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fairchild Semiconductor, finite state, Future Shock, game design, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, lateral thinking, linear programming, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Palm Treo, Plato's cave, pre–internet, publish or perish, Ralph Nader, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the medium is the message, The Soul of a New Machine, three-martini lunch, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog

He had a general rule that editorials needed to be on topics so ridiculous that no one could possibly believe they were real. “That was my rule,” he says. One editorial advocated for getting rid of the earth’s ozone layer, “because it was just too damn fragile.” That spawned a series of replies, including one suggesting enclosing the earth in a dome and that they should hire R. Buckminster Fuller to design it. Another editorial, written when the gun control debate was raging in the national media, was based on a homicide study that had been done in Europe. “We came across a survey showing that 55 percent of murders committed by German women were done with frying pans. In the United States it was the telephone.


The Rough Guide to New York City by Martin Dunford

Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Sedaris, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, market bubble, Michael Milken, Multics, Norman Mailer, paper trading, post-work, rent stabilization, retail therapy, Saturday Night Live, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Yogi Berra, young professional

Parking ($10) is not available during the US Open. The adjacent Queens Zoo, 53-51 111th St (April–Oct Mon–Fri 10am– 5pm, Sat & Sun 10am–5.30pm; Nov–March daily 10am–4.30pm; $6, ages 3–12 $2, seniors $2.25; T 718/271-1500, W www.queenszoo.org), is not nearly as spectacular as those in Central Park and the Bronx, although it has transformed Buckminster Fuller’s 1964 geodesic dome into a dizzying aviary, and some beautiful big animals, including bison, Shetland cattle, and elk, roam the grounds. East of the zoo, the Unisphere is a 140-foot-high, stainless-steel globe that weighs 380 tons – probably the main reason why it was never moved after the 1964 fair.


pages: 1,233 words: 239,800

Public Places, Urban Spaces: The Dimensions of Urban Design by Matthew Carmona, Tim Heath, Steve Tiesdell, Taner Oc

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Arthur Eddington, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, City Beautiful movement, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, East Village, edge city, food miles, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, game design, garden city movement, gentrification, global supply chain, Guggenheim Bilbao, income inequality, invisible hand, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, land bank, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, Masdar, Maslow's hierarchy, megaproject, megastructure, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, post-oil, precautionary principle, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Richard Florida, Seaside, Florida, starchitect, streetcar suburb, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the market place, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, zero-sum game

A fourth criteria of ‘economy’ should also be added, not merely in a narrow financial sense of respecting budget constraints, but also in the wider sense of minimising environmental costs. These (and other desirable) criteria cannot be put into a hierarchy of importance: good design must achieve them all simultaneously. Designers are often accused of concentrating too much on visual appearance. In some cases this may be true – though Richard Buckminster Fuller gave a much better explanation of the role of beauty in the design process:‘When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.’ Design involves more than just aesthetics and superficial styling: what matters in the design of a car, for example, is not just the styling of the external shell, but also the power, performance, reliability and fuel economy of its engine; its internal comfort and the ergonomic design of the driver’s seating position; its weather resistance and longevity; its security system; etc.


The Rough Guide to New York City by Rough Guides

3D printing, Airbnb, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, Bonfire of the Vanities, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crack epidemic, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, greed is good, haute couture, haute cuisine, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Lyft, machine readable, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, paper trading, Ponzi scheme, post-work, pre–internet, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Scaled Composites, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, young professional

Queens Zoo 53-51 111th St • April–Oct Mon–Fri 10am–5pm, Sat & Sun 10am–5.30pm; Nov–March daily 10am–4.30pm • $8, ages 3–12 $5 • 718 271 1500, queenszoo.com • Subway #7 to 111th Adjacent to the New York Hall of Science, the Queens Zoo is not nearly as spectacular as those in Central Park and the Bronx, although it has transformed Buckminster Fuller’s 1964 geodesic dome into a dizzying aviary, and some beautiful animals both big (bison, Shetland cattle) and small (coyote pups, pudú deer) roam the grounds. Unisphere and New York Pavilion East of the Queens Zoo, the Unisphere is a 140ft-high, stainless-steel globe that weighs 450 tonnes – probably the main reason why it was never moved after the 1964 fair.


pages: 1,758 words: 342,766

Code Complete (Developer Best Practices) by Steve McConnell

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, call centre, classic study, continuous integration, data acquisition, database schema, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, fault tolerance, General Magic , global macro, Grace Hopper, haute cuisine, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, inventory management, iterative process, Larry Wall, loose coupling, Menlo Park, no silver bullet, off-by-one error, Perl 6, place-making, premature optimization, revision control, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, seminal paper, slashdot, sorting algorithm, SQL injection, statistical model, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing machine, web application

Some characteristics of design quality are also characteristics of a good program: reliability, performance, and so on. Others are internal characteristics of the design. When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong. — R. Buckminster Fuller Here's a list of internal design characteristics: Cross-Reference These characteristics are related to general software-quality attributes. For details on general attributes, see Characteristics of Software Quality. Minimal complexity. The primary goal of design should be to minimize complexity for all the reasons just described.


pages: 1,280 words: 384,105

The Best of Best New SF by Gardner R. Dozois

back-to-the-land, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, Columbine, congestion charging, dark matter, Doomsday Book, double helix, Extropian, flag carrier, Future Shock, gravity well, hydroponic farming, Kim Stanley Robinson, language acquisition, lateral thinking, Mason jar, military-industrial complex, offshore financial centre, out of africa, pattern recognition, phenotype, pneumatic tube, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, three-masted sailing ship, Turing machine, Turing test, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, zero-sum game

“You don’t understand me, Edward. Look at the images again. I’m not damaged.” “Look, there’s thickening here” – I indicated the ankles – “and your ribs – that crazy zigzag pattern of interlocks. Broken sometime, obviously. And – ” “Look at my spine,” he said. I rotated the image in the video frame. Buckminster Fuller, I thought. It was fantastic. A cage of triangular projections, all interlocking in ways I couldn’t begin to follow, much less understand. I reached around and tried to feel his spine with my fingers. He lifted his arms and looked off at the ceiling. “I can’t find it,” I said. “It’s all smooth back there.”


pages: 1,293 words: 357,735

The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance by Laurie Garrett

Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, biofilm, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, contact tracing, correlation does not imply causation, discovery of penicillin, disinformation, double helix, Edward Jenner, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, germ theory of disease, global macro, global pandemic, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, indoor plumbing, invention of air conditioning, it's over 9,000, John Snow's cholera map, land reform, Live Aid, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, phenotype, price mechanism, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, San Francisco homelessness, seminal paper, South China Sea, the scientific method, trade route, transfer pricing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Zimmermann PGP

This information, in conjunction with that obtained by electron microscope examination of … particles, might be enough for us to make a preliminary identification.12 Scientists could “see” viruses with the aid of microscopes powerful enough to magnify up to visual level objects that were nearly a million times smaller than a dime. With that power of magnification they could detect clear differences in the appearance of various species of viruses, from the chaotic-looking mumps virus that visually resembles a bowl full of spaghetti to the absolutely symmetrical polio virus that looked as if it were a Buckminster Fuller-designed sphere composed of alternating triangles. Researchers also understood that viruses had a variety of different types of proteins protruding from their capsules, most of which were used by the tiny microbes to lock on to cells and gain entry for invasion. Some of the most sophisticated viruses, such as influenza, sugarcoated those proteins so that the human immune system might fail to notice the disguised invaders.


pages: 500 words: 156,079