Crash on the Levee: Howard Fishman and Band

Howard Fishman and Band perform this Basement Tapes classic from Bob Dylan and The Band at Housing Works in NYC in 2008

"2025, If.." : Buckminster Fuller in 1975 and the Whole Earth

Among many other factors gleaned during the pre- and post-Internet years, my education continued and my thinking was enhanced by the work of Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth project. The Whole Earth Catalog in its various forms, CoEvolution Quarterly, Whole Earth Review, and its off-shoots and projects, combined what ostensibly was potentially most intellectual and thoughtful, less  rigidly ideological, and creative and pragmatic about the arc that extended from the Beats and Bohemians to the 1960s and the New Age of the 1970s and beyond that emerged and is so intertwined with information, technology, nature and sheer creativity. While I have continued my own critique -- as, for instance, technologist-philosopher Jaron Lanier has, who was heralded in the pages of the Whole Earth media over the years but who (in his recent book, You Are Not A Gadget)  has now challenged Mr. Brand's assertion that "information wants to be free" -- nevertheless, I still find the contents and structure of the Whole Earth project and ongoing source of inspiration and provocation.

Buckminster Fuller, himself a technologist-philosopher, his ideas and his writings, appeared many times in the Whole Earth's pages. Here is an excerpt of an article written in late 1974, where Fuller contemplates a world half a century in his future and what it might take humankind to get there:

"As of the closing of 1974, muscle and power are in complete dominance over world affairs. The world pays two pugilists three million dollars to pummel one anothers' brain boxes for a dozen minutes in front of the T.V. cameras. The winner is officially adulated by the United States Congress. He's a good human being so that's great but no T.V. shows are celebrating far greater metaphysical battle heros and heroines in their silent commitment to love, truth and everyday self sacrifice for others.


"For the last two decades the world powers have been spending 200 billion annually for armaments and only negligible amounts to assuage poverty. The most powerfully armed control the world's wealth. Power and muscle clearly continue in the world's saddle.

"Whether human beings will be on our planet in the 21st century depends on whether mind has reversed this condition and has come into complete control over muscle and physical power in general and as a consequence of which the world will at last be operational by humans for all humans. "

"Humans will be alive aboard our planet Earth in the 21st century only if the struggle for existence has been completely disposed of by providing abundant life support and accomodation for all humans. Only under these conditions can all humans function as the competent local-universe problem solvers. That is what humans were invented for. Only if Abraham Lincoln's "right" has come into complete ascendancy over "might" will humanity remain alive on board our planet in the 21st century and if so will be here for untold milleniums to come. Humanity is now going through its final examination as to whether it can qualify for its universe function and thereby qualify for continuance on board the planet."

View electronic edition of the Spring 1975 issue of Coevolution Quarterly where the article appeared here