Buckminster Fuller And The Secret Magic Of Serendipity

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A couple of months ago I’d never heard of Buckminster Fuller, but seemingly all at once he started popping up in my reading everywhere. It’s partly because he’s the subject of a new exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art (with Robert Mapplethorpe polaroids going on in another gallery, damn!).

But it’s partly not.

It started with a great 2006 article by Fred Turner on the original cyber-beatnik-technoartists that had me engrossed. Stewart Brand Meets The Cybernetic Counterculture delves into the 1960s period of USCO and the Merry Pranksters. These were guys like Brand, Timothy Leary, Robert Rauschenberg, Allan Kaprow, Marshall McLuhan, John Cage, Ken Kesey and… well, Bucky.

They were sometimes loosely connected, drawing inspiration from each other or working in parallel paths, and sometimes working together, exploring a new intersection between art, technology and altered consciousness. It’s a fantastic story and it traces cyberculture from it’s beginnings in military/academic applications, through to art happenings and the Whole Earth Catalog, and on to digital culture that distributes computing power to the many, and the informational “global brain”.

“In McLuhan’s writing, and in the artistic practice of groups like USCO and, later, the psychedelic practices of groups like San Francisco’s Merry Pranksters, technologies produced by mass, industrial society offered the keys to transforming and thus to saving the adult world. No one promoted this doctrine more fervently than the technocratic polymath Buckminster Fuller. Architect, designer, and traveling speechmaker, Fuller became an inspiration to Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth network, and the New Communalist movement as a whole across the 1960s.”

My most interesting take-away about Bucky from the story was his vision of the Comprehensive Designer, who sounds a lot like today’s T-shaped Person:

“According to Fuller, the Comprehensive Designer would not be another specialist, but would instead stand outside the halls of industry and science, processing the information they produced, observing the technologies they developed, and translating both into tools for human happiness. Unlike specialists, the Comprehensive Designer would be aware of the system’s need for balance and the current deployment of its resources. He would then act as a “harvester of the potentials of the realm,” gathering up the products and techniques of industry and redistributing them in accord with the systemic patterns that only he and other comprehensivists could perceive. “

Then Noah Brier tipped me off to a sweet New Yorker profile of Buckminster Fuller that focussed on his Dymaxion inventions… most famously his 3-wheel car shaped like a blimp and his geodesic dome structure that was widely adopted but never really got over its technical construction problems.

The New Yorker article leaves you in no doubt that Bucky had blue-sky thinking, and I think it’s inspiring that in his later years he had a lot of success, as a speaker and consultant, and in getting commercial backing for his ideas.

“He also envisioned what he called Cloud Nines, communities that would dwell in extremely lightweight spheres, covered in a polyethylene skin. As the sun warmed the air inside, Fuller claimed, the sphere and all the buildings within it would rise into the air, like a balloon. “Many thousands of passengers could be housed aboard one-mile-diameter and larger cloud structures,” he wrote. In the late seventies, Fuller took up with Werner Erhard, the controversial founder of the equally controversial est movement, and the pair set off on a speaking tour across America. Fuller championed, and for many years adhered to, a dietary regimen that consisted exclusively of prunes, tea, steak, and Jell-O.”

Two articles I would have put down to coincidence, but then yesterday I picked up a book I’d put down a while ago, Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, and there he was again. In Stephenson’s future world, smart paper is created with two nano-thin layers of paper sandwiching “airless buckminsterfullerene shells” (or buckyballs as they’re affectionately known). The network of buckyballs is linked by buckytubes to form a parallel computer network.

And it’s then that I thought… this is odd.

Am I the only person who gets these serendipitous rushes of information or do other people get them too? Is the universe trying to tell me something? Should I start shopping for a dome to live in?

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Tags: Buckminster Fuller, coincidence, comprehensive designer, counterculture, cyberculture, dymaxion, Fred Turner, marshall mcluhan, Neal Stephenson, origins of the internet, serendipity, Stewart Brand, T Shaped Person, techno-artists, Whitney Museum of American Art