Fuller's critics may object that he no more invented the idea of a globe than Copernicus discovered the sun, and this is true.
What he invented he named the Geoscope and once you have a word to your name, it's yours to aim and fire, so to speak, meaning it's up to you to impart spin and trajectory.
In Bucky's case, this meant another overture to the United Nations, as his crowning achievement in the geoscope department would have been the one in the East River. In his oeuvre Critical Path, in conjunction with Kiyoshi, Fuller was celebrating the UN even as he claimed to chronicle the twilight of the world's power structures. Erhard's group was celebrating the UN around the same time.
If you wonder about where the Foster Gamble camp inserts a bifurcation, distancing itself from the Fuller School, it's in its choice of conspiracy theories that cast the United Nations as a bad egg. Bucky is less interested in goodies versus baddies, first of all, nor is he against the spread of rights to humans, versus to pseudo-humans (the bots, the corporations).
The Geoscope would not have meant what it did had the same inventor not come up with a certain world map, deemed by analysts to be unique, less for its mathematics (it achieved the same low distortions as the best of them) than for its deployment of the sinuses to echo new Cold War themes, and also the themes of commercial jet travel.
In both cases, the polar route, and in particular the north polar route, had become center stage. As development moves to that arctic circle, the same configuration of the continents is likely to suggest itself.
However, missing from the above analysis is the more obvious distinction: the Dymaxion Map was not about the political anatomy of the world as dreamed up by skilled imagineers (a term from Disney).
The Fuller Projection was not especially friendly to the nation-state jigsaw puzzle in other words, a way of keeping it less dated, more timeless.
Maps go out of date as nations come and go. Not so the Dymaxion.
Those of us who do care about the mathematics are more interested in the tiling algorithms, and how these design and serve hexagons and pentagons from any stash of global data. Or do they serve other polygons, perhaps trapezoids. The latitude-longitude grid lines define a trapezoidal framework. Those could be useful too.
Showing several hexagons around the Texas-Mexico border, when doing weather for example, would help burn in the major towns and roads, mountains and rivers. Weather reporting is a daily geography lesson. As truckers become accustomed to a driving region, they come to know its highways and byways.
This is what truckers come to know: their GPS systems. The first thing any truck simulator should provide is one of those hexagonal tile displays with global data. How do we know it's hexagonal? I'm talking about commercial branding. I'm talking about World Game now.
