Author Archives: Sjef

Breaking Bucky – An Introduction

Written by . Posted on February 25, 2013. Filed under Breaking Bucky. No comments.

“From this point on I, you’re warned that most of the things I’m saying are not… I don’t get out of the books. I’ve had to do it mostly by exploring and experiment.” -Buckminster Fuller: San Quentin Prison, 31 Jan 1959

It may just be an artefact of my personal filter bubble, but lately it seems R. Buckminster Fuller is back in the news a lot. There’s a ‘live’ documentary, an exhibition in SFMoMA, a new round of the Buckminster Fuller Challenge is gearing up and so forth. I’ve been a fan since I first read a compilation of his essays about 5 years ago, and this project has been sloshing around in the back of my mind ever since. Time to put it out.

 …everything Fuller was talking about 40 years ago is completely in the air now. It’s striking. The world really has caught up with him. - Sam Green

People say Bucky was so far ahead of his time that many of his ideas are most relevant today. I would agree to a certain extent, but while Bucky held in his mind a grand, detailed, comprehensive plan of the universe, he was just a guy. A guy born in the 19th century whose ideas were largely shaped by the first world war. He says he never prepared for any of the talks he did and unfortunately, it shows. Just off the top of my head, here’s a few of the issues one might have with old Buckminster Fuller:

  • The great detailed mental map of the world and it’s systems that he apparently possessed did not translate well into speech, much less to paper. While able to hold the attention of any crowd in his better days, Bucky’s prose is hard to parse at the best of times. Between a few gems of succinct expression his writing is generally long-winded and often borderline incomprehensible. The overuse of self-created neologisms and over-hyphenation doesn’t help either.
  • Many of his ideas have been scientifically proven wrong. This tends to happen when you just make shit up as you go along. Now I’m sure Bucky would be the first to admit his error & adjust his mental model to fit new facts when faced with them, but he’s not around to do so, his bad ideas taint the good and leave his work as a whole vulnerable to quick ridicule.
  • He focused on saving the world through invention, technologies and artifacts, believing that social & political problems would simply solve themselves as a consequence of the new world being built around them. This error in thinking is common among technologists, if it was true we’d have fixed the world a while ago by now.
  • His interpretation of and use of language around the concepts of god & the universe leave the door wide open for his ideas to be conflated with metaphysical hokum, providing fertile ground for sacred geometry conspiracy cultists, free energy crackpots, ‘resource based economy’ dimwittery and many other such (most often well meant) misdirections of people’s time and energy.

Despite all that I do still believe there is much of great value to be distilled from Bucky’s work, and in particular breaking down his ideas into sentences normal humans can actually understand. The world he envisioned in which humanity realises its true wealth and redesigns its environment in order to work towards its maximum potential is still a possible one, we can at least start on the path towards it at any rate, and in many respects we already have.

The Breaking Bucky series of posts will not be about pointing and laughing at the ideas of a dead 20th century thinker. Not exclusively anyway. What I hope to do with this instead is hold various parts of Bucky’s ideas up against the light of the 21st century and see what still holds up. What has already been implemented in the world, what has already found even distribution, what still requires distribution, and what ideas have simply become quaint paleofutures.

Announcing projects before you’ve done them is generally a stupid idea, but here you have it. This is the thing I intend to write about for the time being. Fortunately as Bucky considered himself a comprehensivist there’s enough of his rambling out there to cover most areas of subject matter that interest me, hopefully it proves fertile ground and Breaking Bucky part 1 is out soon…

Hello 2013

Written by . Posted on January 3, 2013. Filed under Bla. No comments.

Yeah. The year of ‘post-national tech-nomadism’ (aka not having a fucking house) is over, I’m alive so I guess that worked. Now I have a good story about living with a Texan drug dealer and his 2.5 meter python and I’ve culled my possessions down to a sensible minimum. Here’s all my stuff from the biggest move I made last year:

This year I have a place to live for longer than 3 months again, I’ll be making smoothies & climbing. That’s the plan for the new year mostly.

As 2012 was a year in flux, 2013 is a year to build. Sure, it’ll be building on quicksand with bamboo and a tarp on a platform of lashed-together oil drums, but when the floods come at least this metaphorical shit will float.

#1 Lesson learned in 2012? Never take your shoes off in an advertising agency. Remember that.

 

Things & Stuff

Written by . Posted on November 8, 2012. Filed under Bla. No comments.

Once again nothing has happened here. I have 4000 words of unfinished essay on the so-called death of Science Fiction laying about, but I’m already sick of the subject and why bother arguing with a bunch of old people anyway.

Here are some new pages I made about some things I’ve done with pictures instead:

The National Geographic Posters
The Balance of Military Power
The TIME LIFE Posters
TANGRAMMAR

 

400 Words on Education – The B Side

Written by . Posted on July 12, 2012. Filed under Bla. Comments Off.

This is the flip side to the piece I recently wrote for TEDxAmsterdamED. TEDx communication guidelines stipulate no politics and a positive approach. So here’s the other half of what I had to say about the current state of education.

“Schools are full of things that our descendants will look back on and laugh out loud at” - Stephen Heppel

Education is in deep shit. Funding is being cut & the next generation sold into debt slavery. Institutions resist change or clamp onto technological fads that quickly obsolesce. Many teachers can’t or don’t keep up with their own subject matter and those who are pushing for reform are frustrated by committees of the conservative and/or ignorant, incapable of dealing with what the world around them has become.

65% of today’s teens will end up in careers that haven’t even been invented yet. Over half of today’s graduates are un- or underemployed. The educational system has been standardized down to thoughtless mediocrity so badly that a college degree is already considered a useless qualification in many fields central to the modern IT and creative economies. Weak institutions are going to die, and they should.

So then what can save us? In order to adapt to this new age let us teach the children 21st century skills! Oh wait, problem. Witness the flagship image of that particular program, the ’Learning skills bicycle’:

Dear educators, what in the everlasting fuck is this? I actually got dumber just looking at this atrocity. I never liked the use of the saying “Those who can, do. Those who can’t teach” as it disrespects real teachers and wasn’t originally intended to disparage the act of teaching, but the comedic addendum “those who can’t teach, teach teaching” now appears horrifically true. Get your shit together.

The great shifts that are happening in education? They mean that most mediocre and worse teachers are going to lose their jobs, and personally I won’t be sad to see any of the paycheck-collecting time wasters go. Use the amazing educational resources available to retrain for a career you don’t suck at. I just hope you voted for strong social programs so your government doesn’t just let you starve while you’re working on that.

Despite the above I’m still plenty optimistic about the future of education. Teachers gonna teach, the coming generations will turn out just fine. Change is the new normal, and they won’t be the ones having issues with it. Good luck out there, and remember never to let schooling get in the way of your education.