The approach to Synergetics I'm recommending within Cascadia traces local history and so counts as "place based".
We follow Ken Kesey (Cuckoo's Nest...) and his Merry Pranksters, aboard bus Further (in several versions) back from the hippie-psychedelic generation (Grateful Dead) to the Beat generation (Kerouac, On the Road), with Neal Cassady a bridging figure.
The criss-crossings of North America by car and bus by wandering youth helps knit together the recent history, along with the relocation of the film industry from New Jersey to Hollywood. Ralph Bakshi's American Pop would fit in here.
Yes, Ken and Jack had a meetup, if muted. Ken had returned to New York in time for the New York World's Fair (Robert Moses, urban renewal...). Wavy Gravy. Woodstock. Burning Man.
So where does Bucky fit in? Whole Earth Catalog, J. Baldwin... pillow domes in Cornwall (Eden Project). The industry industry missed. Resistant architects, their designs for the rich. Privatization. Reaganomics. Grunch of Giants.
Bucky the Bohemian (not Beat), was not party to the lavish excesses of the Roaring 20s, but was a maverick and rebellious in his own way. Disappointed by Harvard.
He eventually reinvents himself and invents futurism, buys Shelter. He joins the Board of Economic Warfare and his prototype later pops up in the Pentagon's garden, along with his newfangled DEW line radomes. Fortune Magazine. Kabul dome.
Eisenhower, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson... rural electrification. Spreading networks.
So we bring in the Cold War and Russophobia. John Birchers, McCarthyism, Lee Harvey Oswald and James Angleton. Kennedy assassination. LSD. Mary Meyer. Colonel Fletcher Prouty. Oliver Stone. Richard Nixon. Nikita Khrushchev. Moscow Dome. Kitchen Debates. Montreal dome, 67.
We already have The Pound Era by Hugh Kenner to help anchor Bucky as a literary figure, but how do we anchor Synergetics? We come across it, like the ruins of a temple, deep in a jungle book forest. What are these alien hieroglyphs? What's all this cryptic stuff about a tetrahedron? Martian Math. Ties to virology and crystallography.
Operation Duckrabbit (Wittgenstein). New language games for motherboard Earth. World Game. est. The Hunger Project. Positive futurism vs the doomer boomers. Economics vs GST.
