More Grid Talk

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Using a Dymaxion Projection for accuracy and a pole centric north, early World Game teams focused on the integration of the world's electrical grids, both as a time line of historic milestones and as a projected future reality.

The newspaper article I dug out yesterday, from 1987, indicates some top teams went for the Bering Strait linkup, but this never reached the level of much public debate. I also found a debating team in Georgetown that took it up.

For the most part though, talk of electrical grids is kept off the radar, in favor of Neo-Victorian chatter about oil pipelines and natural gas. By 2008, we had some "bridge to nowhere" to yak about, or could chant "drill baby drill" -- a rather limited political discourse with a low reality quotient.

Relations with Russia, in the meantime, focused on maneuvers in Georgia, a campaign topic on which both major candidates took similar positions, and then later on the transit center in Kyrgyzstan. We heard some talk of a reboot or reset, with a shared commitment to keeping nuclear technology out of the wrong hands.

After those initial World Game events, Fuller turned to Critical Path and Grunch of Giants, both laced with some speculative cosmology. Their author was a meta-physician after all, although other monikers have been applied such as "enlightened", "crackpot" or even "kook".

I've tended to pigeon-hole the guy as an American Transcendentalist just to suggest where to focus some journalism: Margaret Fuller Osoli was his great aunt and one of the pivotal figures in that lineage. I also follow spook Applewhite's lead in connecting him to the American Gothics, especially Edgar Allen Poe and the latter's Eureka and see Paul Laffoley's work, laced with gargoyle imagery, as expanding beautifully in this direction, perpetuating an age-old alliance Bucky often availed of, twixt designers and artists.

The focus on the global electrical and telecommunications networks continued through these subsequent writings, with the suggestion that admitting the insolvency of LAWCAP's bookkeeping system would be less of a loss to humanity than allowing some pseudo-USA to careen towards oblivion with some misdirected weaponry build up. He received a Medal of Freedom from president Ronald Reagan at this point (1983).

The rhetoric hasn't changed much since those years, amongst Fuller's die-hard fans, scattered throughout our "global university" (aka Spaceship Earth). The school of thought remains esoteric and off the radar in most circles, though it has a respectable footprint on the Internet. My own writings form a part of this circuitry.