12 Fluid Geographies: Politics and the Revolution by Design

2Felicity D. Scott

3 World Thinking, Thinking World

4 In an ‘‘Intermedia’’ column published April 3,1970, in the Los Angeles Free Press, Gene Youngblood narrated a recent encounter with R. Buckminster Fuller. Entitled ‘‘Earth Nova,’’ the article was the first of a series appearing in this underground paper that the young critic would dedicate, enthusiastically, to promoting Fuller’s ‘‘revolution by design.’’ Youngblood had been awoken from ‘‘a dream of crystal ships’’ at 8:00 a.m. by Tom Turner, director of research for the World Game, and summoned to a World Game simulation demonstration about to take place at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, home of the World Resources Inventory. Ten minutes later TWA called to say tickets were waiting. Six hours later Youngblood found himself in St. Louis, Missouri, connecting with Fuller, who was arriving from Atlanta, and Michael Binelli, a geodesic dome building activist coming in from New York. The three then took off in a small plane on a rather treacherous journey to Carbondale, 150 miles away. As Youngblood recalled: ‘‘The red glow of the instrument panel bathed our faces eerily, and I realized we were flying totally blind, with visibility no farther than the tip of the wings.’’

5 Faced with a sense of imminent danger, Youngblood took solace in Fuller’s faith in technology. ‘‘I was thinking how appropriate it was to be with Bucky this way, trusting our lives to the very design integrity that he has spent a lifetime defending as humanity’s only hope for success.’’¹ Youngblood’s invocation of the trope of the pilot ‘‘flying blind’’ was not incidental to this story: not only had it served in Fuller’s Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity (1969) to indicate the inherent limitations of ‘‘physically conceptual models’’ to represent invisible energy forces,² but it was often used to demonstrate the mutual interrelationship between computerization and the deracinated human condition Fuller sought, that ‘‘world-around freedom of living’’ motivating his World Game. ‘‘Worldaround jet travelers now commit their fives to the computer’s reliability,’’ Fuller explained in justification of the World Game’s cybernetic infrastructure.³

6 The World Game was in many ways a continuation of Fuller’s long-standing project of redirecting ‘‘weaponry arts’’ for ‘‘livingry arts.’’⁴ The military model of a computerized, multiplayer logistical game—the War Game—had here been transposed into a game in which competing teams of players would ‘‘each develop their own theory of how to make the world work successfully for all of humanity.’’⁵ As Fuller recalled in ‘‘How It Came About (World Game),’’ the project was initially proposed to the United States Information Agency to serve as an exhibition at Expo 67 in Montreal. With the war in Vietnam very much on his mind, the project’s dedication to the question of ‘‘How to Make the World Work’’ through equitable distribution of global resources aimed to counteract what Fuller regarded as the likelihood of the rest of the world’s plummeting opinion of the nation.

7 Visitors to World Game, as conceived for Expo 67, would enter a massive, four-hundred-foot-diameter, five-eighths-sphere dome. Inside this dome was suspended a one-hundred-foot-diameter world globe that would periodically transform into an icosahedron before flattening out onto the floor in the manner of Fuller’s Dymaxion air-ocean world map, a limited distortion cartographic projection of the earth. The ‘‘great map,’’ Fuller explained, ‘‘would be wired throughout so that mini-bulbs, installed all over its surface, could be lighted by the computer at appropriate points to show various, accurately positioned, proportional data regarding world conditions, events and resources.’’⁶ Looking down from a high balcony onto this football field-sized, computer-driven Dymaxion data map, with information continuously streaming from massive data banks and satellites, ‘‘major world individuals and teams’’ chosen, as Fuller explained, for their ‘‘lack of bias as well as for their forward-looking competence,’’ would pursue ‘‘grand world strategies.’’⁷ They would develop competing scenarios in real time for distributing resources to a global humanity liberated from nation-based constraints, a humanity comprising nomadic ‘‘citizens of the world.’’

8 World Game was not realized at Expo 67, but the spectacular 250-foot diameter, three-quarters sphere, transparently clad geodesic dome Fuller designed for the occasion would help catapult him to the height of his worldwide fame in the late 1960s. His patented invention, the geodesic dome, had of course been adopted years earlier by the State Department as a pavilion typology to represent the country at world’s fairs and prior to that by the U.S. military in a limited fashion for use as rapid deployment structures. Yet although projects like the 1959 pavilion in Moscow had gained significant publicity, it was the enormous media coverage of the American Pavilion in Montreal that transformed his status from obscure and eccentric inventor to a household name in American ingenuity.⁸ And somewhat paradoxically—given the distinctly mainstream character of world’s fairs and their role in cold war propaganda, as well as his connections to the U.S. military—Fuller was also at this moment being embraced by the American counterculture and radical movements as something of a prophet for peace, equality, whole earth ideology, and transcendental well-being. Geodesic domes had, moreover, become an architecture of choice for the counterculture. Understood to be an ecologically sound technology for housing a post-revolutionary society, Fuller domes seemed to offer a means for escaping the commodified lifestyle and normative values of mainstream America.⁹

9 On the one hand, it is not difficult to understand this attraction; Fuller raised issues that were on many people’s minds, and his ideas seemed to flow amorphously into concerns then being voiced by the nation’s youth. Appealing at once to a growing environmental consciousness and sense of apocalyptic doom, and their counterpart in an escalating survivalist ideology, he captivated his audience by posing questions such as: ‘‘Is our Spaceship Earth’s biosphere to be [an] omnihumanity-sustaining environment or an omnilethal one?’’¹⁰ But perhaps more important, he offered answers, cast in a suitably spacedout, seemingly metaphysically happening register. It was a reception that he assiduously cultivated both through extensive lecture tours and interviews in the underground press, as well as through strategic alliances with writers like Youngblood. Appearing in the LA Free Press alongside articles on Kent State, the war in Vietnam and its extension into Cambodia, radical ecology, Charles Manson, the Black Panthers, gay rights struggles, and the women’s movement, Youngblood’s series of World Game articles do, on the other hand, seem in retrospect distinctly out of place in this otherwise highly politicized context.¹¹ For driving Fuller’s one-world vision was, as I want to trace here, an avowed and programmatic rejection of politics.

10 Tomds Maldonado noted at the time that Fuller’s ‘‘technocratic utopianism’’ not only disarticulated the social from the technological but sought the eradication of the very domain of the political in human relations. ‘‘In our view,’’ he wrote, correcting this lapse, ‘‘the ‘Revolution by Design’ should be the result both of the technical imagination, and of what C. Wright Mills called the ‘sociological imagination’—both technical courage and social and political courage.’’¹² To Fuller’s thinking, however, politics, all too broadly defined, was the underlying cause of poverty, hunger, illness, inequality, immobility, and warfare, and its overcoming through his revolution by design (as demonstrated by World Game) was to launch humanity into a peaceful global condition. Without political parties or ideologies vying for control of state power, and without nation states vying for domination over world resources, warfare, Fuller argued, would simply become redundant. At stake, then, in revisiting this moment of Fuller’s reception is not so much the question of the appropriateness of this mutual identification of Fuller and the counterculture but its effects on the political contours of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

12.1 Free Press

11Youngblood had joined Fuller in the World Game crusade, situating his own work as part of the effort ‘‘to get World Game to the people of the world through the global intermedia network.’’ If Fuller himself was shortly to address the United Nations in New York with a World Game demonstration (one aiming, of course, to undermine the international politics on which the United Nations was premised), Youngblood situated his own writings, both for the mass media (he listed Look, Harper’s, Atlantic) and the underground press as part of this necessary ‘‘information process.’’¹³ What Youngblood termed the ‘‘videosphere’’ or global television was central to World Game’s desired project of sponsoring ‘‘a global climate of outrage against the nation state system.’’¹⁴ Lecturing to architecture students at the University of Southern California on the occasion of the First Earth Day (April 22,1970), he made this connection explicit:

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14Since, with the videosphere, you have the ability to address the entire world with information, and since the media networks are inherently information-hungry, news hungry, [they] can’t stand it if they don’t have something new to say on the Six O’clock News each day—obviously World Game is going to be irresistible to them. When you prove scientifically that the existence of sovereign nation states is responsible for the destruction of the planet, this is going to be like catnip to the news media. They’re like junkies. They need media fodder to sustain themselves. And they have no integrity.¹⁵

15 The process would thus be virtually automatic, driven by the inherent logic of the media networks themselves.

16 During the flight to Carbondale Fuller proclaimed, as he had done repeatedly over the previous half-decade: ‘‘Something very important is happening around the world…I can sense it. Young people really are beginning to understand what’s going on.’’ The two young men assured him that his hope was not misplaced: ‘‘Everywhere we go they want to know about Fuller, and about World Game.’’ But something else was clearly on Fuller’s mind. Youngblood went on to recount that in Oxford, only a week earlier, Fuller ‘‘had encountered his first anti-Fuller propaganda: a poster depicting the top of his head as a Geodesic dome with marines perched in it.’’ Youngblood stepped in to defend Fuller: ‘‘Obviously,’’ he retorted, ‘‘a petty reference to military use of Geodesic structures,’’ adding, parenthetically: ‘‘The fact that in 1954 the Marines, who ought to know, pronounced air-deliverable domes ‘the first basic improvement in mobile environment controls in 2600 years’ seemed to be of little interest to the anti-Fuller faction.’’ If those present had appeared shocked by the blasphemous image, Fuller insisted that he hadn’t been, responding with the remark that ‘‘Marines eat rice too, you know.’’¹⁶

17 The poster was most likely the ‘‘UN Official Program,’’ ‘‘Welcome to the Buckminster Fuller Show,’’ produced in 1968 by Arse in London;¹⁷ if not this artifact, then it would have been something similar.¹⁸ Fuller’s quip—that ‘‘Marines eat rice too’’—was not simply a universalizing pun (in somewhat poor taste) involving a prime staple of the Southeast Asian diet while war raged in Vietnam. Rather, it performed precisely the displacement at the center of his revolution by design: a shift from questions of politics to those of world resources. Fuller repeatedly insisted that were it not for politics, the utopian prospects harbored in ‘‘doing-more-with-less’’ might become reality: ‘‘Total success for all, can be realized only through a design-science revolution of university aged youth. This revolution is trying to articulate itself everywhere, but it gets bogged down by political exploiters.’’¹⁹ The residual role afforded to politics was that of ‘‘a secondary service—a stewardess function—of polite supervision of the passengers’ ‘adjusting of their seatbelts’ for the great world ‘takeoff’ for physical success of all mankind.’’²⁰

18 Youngblood’s retort was hardly unexpected. Not only had he firmly aligned himself with Fuller’s philosophy—even inviting him to contribute the introduction to his own book, Expanded Cinema, of 1970—but he often ventriloquized these key aspects of Fuller’s thought: the importance of youth and the rejection of politics (both with respect to the political life of sovereign nation-states and revolutionary struggles).²¹ In Youngblood’s words:

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21Although we claim to be the seeds of a new human consciousness, still we looked to the past, seeking an answer in politics. Students for a Democratic Society drew Marx’s conclusions on the wall, forgetting that their politics could lead to democratic suicide. As we emerge into the planetary society of the future, the geopolitics of the past are the most dangerously constraining myths of our present. But we wanted to repeat history. We wanted another French Revolution, we wanted another Russian Revolution, we wanted another revolution of the sort that produced the America we now reject.²²

22 Dismissing revolutionary ideals, Youngblood, too, had come to believe that evolution through technology would replace revolutionary politics as a mechanism of social change. ‘‘The current popularity of revolution,’’ he noted, marking his distance from ‘‘clenched fists, or the Rolling Stones or the SDS,’’ ‘‘is a revolutionary posture not a liberal one.’’ Rehearsing the ideology of the new, he announced: ‘‘Evolution never repeats history; evolution is always at the frontier.’’²³ Fuller had clearly found in Youngblood a reliable agent operating from within the counterculture, one dedicated to continuing his design-science message into the 1970s.

23 Coupled with this rejection of politics were, as already indicated, geopolitical claims that were equally founded on a generational argument, as well as on a slippage between political revolutions and those in the technological domain. To the agricultural, scientific, and industrial revolution Youngblood proposed ‘‘to add a fourth fundamental transformation in the behavior of man on Earth: the ECOLOGICAL REVOLUTION that began to accelerate visibly when World War I released a new wave of technology into the environment.’’²⁴ And it was precisely in emerging information technology that he believed a key was to be found. ‘‘The first dissident students at Berkeley,’’ Youngblood proclaimed, echoing Fuller, ‘‘were born the year commercial television began.’’²⁵ What this meant, for both, was that this first ‘‘TV generation’’ were ‘‘native’’ to a new technological milieu—they participated in a global intermedia ecology operating within that videosphere and its interconnected ‘‘electronic information network.’’ Out of this had seemingly emerged a new consciousness: ‘‘For the first time in history we can perceive Earth as a closed system, and thus can begin to use our life support system properly.’’²⁶ Central to the argument was not only that this global connectivity had led to a new ‘‘Whole Earth Consciousness’’ but that it had a political (or antipolitical) correlate: ‘‘youth of humanity all around our planet are intuitively revolting from all sovereignties and political ideologies,’’ Youngblood went on to declare.²⁷ Fuller had made a similar remark when commenting on the student riots at UC Berkeley in the winter of 1964–65. The students, he argued, ‘‘were not interested in their state. They felt no loyalty to their nation…Their idealism had lost its debilitating bias. They felt it to be immoral to be chauvinistic and patriotic. The young people were and are only interested in the whole world and in the welfare of all humanity.’’²⁸

24 World Game sought precisely this ‘‘immediate dissolution of all sovereign nation state boundaries.’’²⁹ And it seemed that if the project could only harness the energy of discontented youth—whom he regarded as having an elective affinity with its ambition through their ‘‘Whole Earth Consciousness’’—if it could actively provide a platform to develop this ‘‘intuition,’’ then the revolution by design might succeed. And it could do so without state funding. Youngblood again:

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27If every person who considered himself a citizen of the world, or a citizen of Woodstock Nation, would contribute one dollar, that would be a start. I’m trying to make you see that individuals and autonomous groups all around the world, apolitically, transcendental to politics, just using the technology that warmaking politicians gave us—we can achieve the downfall of the sovereign nation state technocracy and the birth of Whole Earth Unity.³⁰

12.2 War as Extension of Politics

29For Fuller what was at stake in the production of a universal humanity freed of the vicissitudes of time and place into a Dymaxion air-ocean world was thus not only a continuation of the Enlightenment narrative of man’s liberation from the forces of nature through technology. When he argued that the ‘‘objective of the [World G]ame would be to explore for ways to make it possible for anybody and everybody in the human family to enjoy the total earth without any human interfering with any other human and without any human gaining advantage at the expense of another,’’ he was arguing for the elimination of politics.³¹ His 1967 manifesto for World Game, anthologized in Utopia or Oblivion, was framed through the antithesis of technology and politics. Referring at once to political theories, ideologies, organizations, and ‘‘concepts of political functions,’’ all had to Fuller’s mind become ‘‘obsolete’’ in the last decade. ‘‘All of them,’’ he indicated, pointing to a notion of enmity, ‘‘were developed on the you-or-me basis.’’³² (We might recall here Carl Schmitt’s famous identification of the political in the friend/enemy distinction.)³³ That by raising the question of enmity Fuller was pointing to relations between politics and war was soon clarified. ‘‘If a team resorts to political pressures to accelerate their advantages,’’ he wrote, ‘‘they are apt to be in trouble. When you get into politics you are very liable to get into war.’’ To which he added, in a Clausewitzian turn of phrase, ‘‘War is the ultimate tool of politics.’’³⁴ War, von Clausewitz famously theorized, was a continuation of politics by other means; war was an ‘‘instrument of policy.’’³⁵

30 Recall that for Fuller the war in Vietnam was an ‘‘experimental’’ war of ideologies, an attempt by the two superpowers—the United States and the Soviet Union—to wage war vicariously in a nuclear age without the threat of Armageddon.³⁶ What he called World War III served as the end point of a narrative traced from Thomas Malthus to Charles Darwin to Karl Marx, all of whom, to his mind, had remained trapped in the belief that there were not enough resources to go around, that only the fittest would survive. This belief, he argued, was the cause of an extreme mode of enmity premised on the total destruction, or absolute subjugation, of the enemy. It was, moreover, the reason that technological advancements had been developed for weaponry rather than livingry. World Game, although founded on a military game, was supposed to invert the very logic that led to absolute war. Fuller explained:

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33In playing the game I propose that we set up a different system of games from that of Dr. John Von Neuman whose ‘‘Theory of Games’’ was always predicated upon one side losing 100 percent. His game theory is called ‘‘Drop Dead.’’ In our World Game we propose to explore and test by assimilated adoption various schemes of ‘‘How to Make the World Work.’’ To win the World Game everybody must be made physically successful. Everybody must win.³⁷

34 Indeed, to resort to war, to ‘‘use the war-waging equipment with which all national political systems maintain their sovereign power,’’ was to lose the game, to be disqualified.³⁸ The cold war arms race had, in any case, as Fuller acknowledged, altered the very terms of this equation. Relations between war and politics had to be rethought on account of new technologies. It was no longer that wars would end either through negotiating modified organizations of borders or territory or through one side fully dominating the other, since the situation had, in Fuller’s words, ‘‘mushroomed to the point now where everyone is a loser in war with nuclear bombs.’’³⁹

35 What, we might ask in retrospect, was wrong with this picture, with its noble ideals of a global humanity living free from want and illness, in a state of peace, equality, and harmony? Certainly the violent history of imperial conquests, characterized by the political domination and subjugation of other populations, and the exploitation of their resources, can be rightfully regarded as a legacy of the expansionist ideology of sovereign nation-states. And the increasing brutality of interstate warfare during the twentieth century, a condition fostered in part by technological ‘‘advancement,’’ must haunt any assessment of relations between war and politics during this period, whether we are considering just or unjust wars. Furthermore, there was and remains a distinct urgency to the search for peaceful solutions to global conflicts, not least on account of the endgame implicit in the escalation of nuclear weapons. Finally, although far from completing any list of the violence accompanying warfare, we might point to the suspension of democratic processes and rights—products of the state’s so-called monopoly on violence and its sovereign capacity to declare ‘‘states of emergency.’’⁴⁰ Indeed, it was precisely such political tools that had been deployed during this period not only in the name of peace or civility among states but as weapons turned against contestatory citizens (notably civil rights demonstrators and antiwar protestors). This was a period in American history thought by some to constitute nothing less than another civil war, one in which ‘‘law and order’’ were maintained through the increasing militarization of everyday life. On November 4, 1968, The Nation offered an editorial entitled ‘‘Clausewitz Updated,’’ which addressed this transposition. ‘‘Everyone who can read is reminded a dozen times a year,’’ the editorial began, ‘‘that war is the extension of policy by other means. This dictum,’’ it continued, ‘‘needs to be domesticated: A nation that maintains warlike, aggressive counter-revolutionary policies abroad is a nation that will eventually pursue these same objectives at home. Thus domestic politics becomes the extension of war by other means.’’⁴¹

36 Significant here is not just the problematic loss of distinctions between interstate wars and civil or guerilla warfare, or even political struggles taking place within the civil domain of a democratic society, with respect to the state’s use of violence. Also important is that Fuller was equally prepared to collapse these domains. Rather than questioning the state’s use of violence against its own citizens, he chose to equate all political life with the prospect of war. Politics, whether internal to the state, in the international arena, or even in extra-parliamentary form, was simply reduced to the cause of warfare. Talking in San Francisco in 1967 he demonstrated this slippage:

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39So what I want the young world to realize is that actually we’re right in screaming that we ought not to have war, and that they’d like not to have war[;] the way you’re going to get it is by design revolution where you do more with less.. .. There’s a design revolution ahead instead of a bloody and political revolution. If you go out playing politics, it’s going to end in guns because politics always consumes one side or the other.⁴²

40 Furthermore, there was no scope in this picture for peace to emerge through democratic political or juridical processes (a key role of international institutions), but only on account of their abandonment. In Utopia or Oblivion Fuller invoked such a shift: ‘‘Finding their own political demonstrations for peace or their outright revolutions leading only toward further war,’’ he recounted, ‘‘a few pioneers amongst the world students have joined up objectively with the heretofore only subjectively experienced do-more-with-less design-science revolution.’’⁴³ Here, perhaps, was Fuller’s own peculiar updating of Clausewitz. Technology was not offered as a tool or extension for a politics seeking peaceful solutions but had rather come to stand in as its replacement. But contemporary technology, as Fuller himself knew all too well, was itself a key instrument of modern warfare.

41 Beyond Fuller’s outright rejection of politics, which he saw as the source of war, was a more subtle elision operating in his notion of a global or universalized humanity. For this notion of humanity (and of a world without conflict) is perhaps less efficacious as a tool in the service of peace than it is an image of forced consensus, of a global police state free from any moment of dissensus.⁴⁴ We might return briefly to Schmitt, who noted that humanity was not ‘‘a political concept, and no political entity or society and no status corresponds to it.’’⁴⁵ If on the one hand this might have seemed to imply the overcoming of war (in the argument that ‘‘humanity as such cannot wage war because it has no enemy, at least not on this planet’’), on the other hand, as Schmitt expounded, ‘‘the concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion, and in its ethical-humanitarian form it is a specific vehicle of economic imperialism.’’⁴⁶ Informing the universalizing logic of Fuller’s one air-ocean world, as in his infinitely repeatable dwelling units—from the 4D dwellings of the late 1920s to their post-World War II counterpart, geodesic domes—was a conception of a way of life that was unified, homogenous, and dictated by the forces of technological advancement. This would, of course, serve all too well in the service of capitalist ‘‘de-’’ and ‘‘re-territorialzation.’’⁴⁷

42 World Game was a logical extension of this universalizing epistemology to a postindustrial era of global networks and post-Fordist capitalism. And even at a historical moment characterized by growing discontent, what Herbert Marcuse famously termed the ‘‘Great Refusal,’’⁴⁸ it did not seek politicized lines of flight or attempt to forge prospects for heterogeneity within milieu. Not only was there no pursuit of differentiated and alternative modes of Efe in this model of liberation, but there was no space for a political subject, or for political participation, or even for forming political communities. Difference would be nonexistent. Fuller’s was a model of liberalism that, in its claims to overcoming hierarchies operating within the politics of sovereign nation-states, assumed that nothing would step in to fill the vacuum of power. Least of all did he foresee that passage toward a global form of sovereignty that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have theorized as Empire, one very much mediated through those invisible global networks of control to which he would cede humanity’s fate.⁴⁹ And this condition, far from offering a paradigm of peace, would be premised on a perpetual state of war. As Hardt and Negri explained in turn, ‘‘To the extent that the sovereign authority of nation-states, even the most dominant nation-states, is declining and there is instead emerging a new supranational form of sovereignty, a global Empire, the conditions and nature of war and political violence are necessarily changing. War is becoming a general phenomenon, global and interminable.’’⁵⁰

12.3 Domes

44Youngblood’s embrace of World Game was, of course, only one among many legacies of FuUer’s thinking within the counterculture, prominent among which, as mentioned earlier, was the adoption of the geodesic dome. I want to look briefly at this phenomenon before concluding, for it offers further insight into the politics of (re)deploying military technology. In his Earth Day lecture at USC, Youngblood took care to distinguish World Game’s utopian project of ‘‘inventing alternative futures’’ from the use of domes as a technology of dropping out, ‘‘You already have the beginning of these experimental lifestyle cities today in the drop-out communes and dome communities,’’ he noted of the search for new urbanisms. Yet, as he continued, carefully noting the intended inversion, ‘‘Primarily they’re filled with cultural freak-outs, casualties of the urban technology. So World Game will turn them into counter-cultural drop-ins.’’⁵¹

45 The dome-building movement emerged in May 1965 with the founding of Drop City near Trinidad, Colorado. The relation between Fuller and the Droppers was a sympathetic and seemingly mutually-reinforcing one. By their own account, Fuller had both inspired and encouraged their interest in deploying geodesic domes as alternative living spaces while lecturing in Boulder the previous April. This was precisely the moment when, following the protests at Berkeley at the end of 1964, Fuller began to recognize in the desires of this revolutionary movement a potential momentum for his own revolution by design. With America’s youth culture on his mind, it was hardly surprising that Fuller took an interest in the use of his invention (until then deployed primarily as a weapon in the cold war) for such an alternative purpose.

46 Constructed through recycling waste—used two-by-fours, tarpaper, scavenged railroad ties, factory-reject plywood, bottle tops, junk cars—the Drop City domes arose literally, in the Droppers’ own words, from the ‘‘garbage of America.’’⁵² ‘‘Creative scrounging’’ was not, of course, part of Fuller’s ambitions to harness and redirect the military-industrial apparatus to other ends. Yet he was happy to be identified with Drop City, awarding the commune the 1966 ‘‘Dymaxion Award for poetically economic structural accomplishments.’’ The Droppers sent a communal note of thanks, reiterating their indebtedness: ‘‘We think it is the greatest thing that’s ever happened to us. As we have told you, a speech you made several years ago was partly responsible for the conception of Drop City. Your award renews that inspiration.’’⁵³ John McHale, then executive director of the World Resources Inventory, revealed that there had been something of a case of mistaken identity. In a letter to the Droppers he wrote: ‘‘Professor Fuller has further suggested that you might consider the future possibilities of such ‘shelter production’ as your own local industry to help maintain the city.’’⁵⁴ The entrepreneurial nature of the proposal harbors a significant misrecognition of what was at stake in founding Drop City. The Droppers’ exodus from extant economic structures was self-consciously political: it was an experiment in communal living outside the military-industrial ‘‘system’’ so central to Fuller’s project. ‘‘People who give us money to make things,’’ one Dropper noted, ‘‘prevent their money from being used to destroy things.’’⁵⁵ Survival would not be brought about through profitable work but through being dedicated to refusing to work within that system. As reported in Avatar, ‘‘we have attempted to create in Drop City a total living environment, outside the structure of society.’’ Its ‘‘tribal unit’’ had ‘‘no formal structure, no written laws.’’ ‘‘Each Dropper is free. Each does what he wants. No rules, no duties, no obligations. Anarchy…Droppers are not asked to do anything.’’⁵⁶ When work was undertaken, for instance in the construction of the domes, it was not in the service of even a sustain ability level profit but the expression of a positive desire. ‘‘We play at working…We are based on the pleasure principle.’’ The inhabitants of this ‘‘geodesic gypsy city’’ were far from Fuller’s ideal nomadic subjects building lightweight shelters with which to meet the coming apocalypse.

47 Geodesic domes were not, however, the only aspect of Fuller’s work that appealed to the Droppers: they also fell prey to his universalizing vision. ‘‘We hope to buy more land, build more Drop Cities all over the world, universe.’’⁵⁷ By August 1967 they could announce that ‘‘Already Drop City South is firmly established near Albuquerque, N.M.,’’⁵⁸ soon followed by New Buffalo in Arroyo Hondo. ‘‘Soon domed cities will spread across the world, anywhere land is cheap—on the deserts, in the swamps, on mountains, tundras, ice caps,’’ Peter Rabbit confidently proclaimed. ‘‘The tribes are moving, building completely free and open way-stations, each a warm and beautiful conscious environment. We are winning.’’⁵⁹ Such optimism would soon subside. Peter Rabbit, by his own confession, ‘‘brought down the hordes on Drop City’’ by inciting the mass media, catalyzing the commune’s demise. News of Drop City and its photogenic geodesic domes spread quickly. Articles appeared in Arts Magazine, Aspen, Architectural Forum, the New Yorker, and elsewhere. The press might have been good for expanding Fuller’s reputation within the counterculture, but it would not prove to be so for the integrity of the commune. By 1968 most of the original members had fled.

48 Fuller’s patent for the geodesic dome and his arguments for its role in the stewardship of Spaceship Earth, would in turn be central to counter-cultural publications such as Steve Baer’s Dome Cookbook of 1968—the first manual for the do-it-yourself dome builder—and Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, initiated the same year.⁶⁰ These were soon followed by Lloyd Kahn’s two Domebooks, which appeared in 1970 and 1971. Kahn’s vision was closer to Fuller’s own and avowedly indebted to it. ‘‘Shelter production’’ was its driving force, his ambition being to make dome-building technology available to ‘‘young people’’ through establishing a system of open access to dome-building information. As recounted in a letter of April 1969, Kahn had been heading toward ‘‘a career of building big timbered homes on the California Coast’’ but after hearing Fuller talk at the Esalen Institute promptly quit his job, ‘‘the Design Science Revolution foremost in mind.’’⁶¹ He soon founded Pacific Domes and, along with Jay and Kathleen Baldwin and others, took part in the construction of ten domes at the Pacific High School in the Santa Cruz hills. Next came an ‘‘information booklet,’’ initially titled ‘‘Domerise’’ but published in 1970 as Domebook 1. It included detailed diagrams, photographs, instructions, and helpful hints on techniques and materials for the would-be dome builder, typically cast through stories of dome construction. These served as ‘‘prototypes for future industrial production of low-cost housing.’’⁶² Related to this was a proposal to develop therapeutic workshops, Kahn’s avowed response to ‘‘the massive and growing student unrest’’: ‘‘Many young people these days either rebel or drift aimlessly because they cannot find meaningful outlets for their youthful energy,’’ he wrote to Fuller. ‘‘With the proper skills, a student could after graduation go into the country, build a light dome, plant a garden.’’ Finally was a proposal to gain corporate sponsorship for experimental dome-building communities. Identifying possible candidates as Alcoa and Union Carbide, he explained that the ‘‘basis for company approval’’ would be ‘‘that individuals will innovate where large organization cannot (as in your comparison of the Dymaxion car vs. Chrysler).’’⁶³ In exchange for a place to live and test domebuilding strategies, the companies would gain publicity and information on the use of its products.

49 That Fuller was pleased with this development was evident not only in his commissioning Baldwin to erect a pillow dome on Bear Island (like the one produced at Pacific High) but also in the response from Fuller’s office in Carbondale. Writing to Kahn to propose a 5 percent royalty on net income from Domebook sales, Fuller’s assistant, Dale Klaus, noted that ‘‘times are good and things are popping and you are, in some part, responsible for this.’’⁶⁴ The office would regularly direct inquiries to the office regarding geodesic domes to the Domebooks. Moreover, along with the Whole Earth Catalog, the Domebook, Klaus noted, had become a useful tool in sponsoring the World Game ‘‘attitude.’’⁶⁵

50 Published in May 1971, Domebook 2 was more than double the size of the first volume. But already Kahn, now acting as sole editor, was starting to be haunted by doubts: ‘‘There’s a danger in the hype, overromanticizing domes,’’ he warned readers.⁶⁶ A number of people had written questioning the integrity of the use of ‘‘space-age’’ materials, a ‘‘fall out from the space program’’ initially regarded as a very precondition for the emergence of the movement. If plastics, along with ‘‘Silicone caulks, polyurethane foam, clear ultra-violet resistant flexible vinyl,’’ had initially been enthusiastically embraced, since trees were ‘‘critically needed for photosynthesis,’’ the anxiety of deforestation was soon replaced both by the recognition that timber, unlike petroleum, was a renewable resource and that, beyond this, plastics were toxic. ‘‘The plasticizer molecules migrate, airborne into the dome,’’ it was explained. ‘‘If you’re thinking of building a plastic dome give it the acid test; get stoned, look hard, breathe deeply, feel the stuff.’’⁶⁷ Plastic, moreover, came to be recognized as part of a larger cycle of exploitation, one decidedly against the countercultural ethos. ‘‘Plastics are super products of western oil man sucking the earth dry of petroleum. Hucksters delude the American public into demanding products from oil: big hungry cars / plastic pin curlers I plastic wrapped food.’’⁶⁸

51 By the time the third Domebook appeared, in 1973, subsumed within a larger volume entitled Shelter, those doubts had become something closer to a polemic against the construction of domes. Kahn’s enthusiasm for Fuller’s vision had, within the short span of a few years, come to a crushing halt. In a remarkable act of retrospection and atonement, Shelter offered a revised history. ‘‘We made an error in Domebook 2 in stating that Buckminster Fuller was the inventor of the geodesic dome,’’ he explained. ‘‘Fuller’s contribution, rather than origination of the great circle principle, or its earliest structural utilization, is rather application of the word geodesic to this type of polyhedral building framework, and its popularization and commercialization in the United States.’’⁶ Geodesics were now situated as the fifth and most recent type of dome, ancestors to which, according to this mythical tale, included the woven dome, an ur-dome of woven branches covered with thatch, leaves, or animal skins that for ideological or symbolic reasons had given rise to the wooden dome, the masonry dome, and then the Imperial Roman concrete dome. History was corrected not only in an introductory note but with an article, entitled ‘‘The Wonder of Jena,’’ on Dr. Walter Bauersfeld’s (unpatented) planetarium dome, built on the roof of the Carl Zeiss optical works in Jena, Germany, in 1922. Thirty years later, it was explained, Fuller had patented the ‘‘same subdivided icosahedron principle (in 1954)’’ and named the structures geodesic domes. To this was added ‘‘Smart but not Wise,’’ Kahn’s extended epistolary remarks on dome-building from 1971. Here he reiterated the critique of plastic offered by readers of the first Domebook: ‘‘In addition to the practical and aesthetic disadvantages…I’ve found in plastics there is the idea that one is dealing with Dow, and the oil industry—that is the people Nixon works for.’’⁷⁰

12.4 Utopia or Oblivion?

53When Utopia or Oblivion appeared in December 1969, it quickly enjoyed a wide circulation among a counterculture primed through Fuller’s earlier publications and lectures, as well as through the Whole Earth Catalog. Bringing together writings and lectures dating from the previous half-decade, many continuing polemics from the 1920s, the volume was exemplary of Fuller’s proselytizing for embracing the immanent development of technology, and it reiterated his long-standing claims that revolution might take place through unfettered technological advancement. Efficiency would simply trump politics in the fight for global survival. As indicated in the title, Fuller’s message was cast not only through a utopian hope for humanity’s prospects but through raising the specter of apocalypse. Youngblood’s dedication to World Game was caught precisely between these very poles: on the one hand it was motivated by the sense of optimism Fuller inspired: ‘‘There are a lot of young people like me who were pretty uptight and didn’t know what to do with their lives, who have now committed themselves to World Game,’’ he explained. ‘‘It’s really the only possible alternative for positive revolutionary action…I can’t think of anything more important to do with my time. I don’t look back. And all I see ahead is hope.’’⁷¹ But that hope remained bound to its dystopian counterpart. ‘‘The young lives of midcentury America find themselves perched on the fulcrum of a cosmic balancing act,’’ he lamented, echoing Fuller, ‘‘with Utopia on the one hand and oblivion on the other.’’⁷² This, he suggested, was ‘‘the last either/or in history.’’⁷³

54 World Game seemed to offer a panacea, or at least a way to break this dialectic. Presented was a model of technology liberated from the ‘‘bias’’ of politics, a fluid world without nation-states, and the prospects of a globally ‘‘successful’’ humanity free from war. It is not difficult to see why this model of ‘‘how to make the world work’’ appealed to a generation raised on the threat of nuclear holocaust and radicalized by the war in Vietnam. But it seems less clear, in retrospect (the escalating disenchantment of the moment notwithstanding), why a generation politicized by those historical circumstances could have so quickly jettisoned the domain of the political, precisely the domain through which the civil rights struggles and antiwar movements had launched their contestations—jettisoned, moreover, at the expense of prospects for a positively cast, politically transformative notion of a better future.

55 Fuller’s millenarianism also coursed through the culture of dome builders, themselves falling prey to an escalating rhetoric of insecurity. Working on the premise that only those who had found self-sufficient or autonomous ways of living would survive, dome building came to offer for some a means of testing not only new urban forms for a post-revolutionary society but strategies for surviving a massive environmental, and perhaps nuclear, catastrophe. That dome building was a product of the very system raising that apocalyptic threat had by 1971 become unacceptable even to those like Kahn who had done so much to promote it. His own trajectory would steer him away from what he called ‘‘white man technological prowess’’—not, however, toward a form of political engagement with the military-industrial apparatus but, rather, headlong toward an increasingly paranoid survivalist mentality and a thoroughgoing rejection of technology (even to the prophecy of an inescapable return to handicraft).

56 The internal exodus of the counterculture from mainstream American society and politics had not, of course, come about through an intuitive embrace of technology without political conviction, as Fuller’s narrative would have it. Ideals of justice forged within movements to create a ‘‘new America’’ did not emerge without contestation. But the search for a space for political engagement seems to have given way to a faith in technology that all but foreclosed prospects for forging politicized lines of flight. Faced with an environment increasingly taking on the logic of total war, in which weaponry was regularly retooled for livingry, responses to such accelerating technological development thus remained trapped within a dialectic of the uncritical embrace or paranoid rejection of technology. Without a model of political engagement, the embrace of Fuller’s scenario of a ‘‘world-embracing and universe-ramifying evolution of industrialization’’⁷⁴ yielded not only to the forces of technocracy but to the extant economic and political powers for whom such development served all too well, not as a means of equitably distributing world resources but in the pursuit of untrammeled profit. That is to say: far from effectively redirecting socioeconomic norms, such naturalization of technology as an evolutionary force implicitly supported, and continues to support, the very logic driving the expanding military-industrial complex and its capacity to produce ever more extensively networked forms of global power