A common refrain, among those familiar with the Fuller corpus, is that his reputation for being a good prognosticator was overblown, as he kept saying that it’d only take ten years, of his Design Science Revolution, and we’d all be living like billionaires.
Obviously, that never happened, right?
Many decades have gone by and we still live in a dump of our own making.
True enough: the DSR never happened, nor did Fuller ever promise it would.
It’s not like humanity ever woke up to its option and whole-heartedly and self-consciously went for it, like some did around putting a man on the moon. Fuller did invoke the Apollo Project in Critical Path, as what a design science revolution would look like, but with Spaceship Earth at its center rather than its satellite (or Mars).
But again, we never woke up to that degree and continued committing resources towards Armageddon.
In my narrative, the Open Source Revolution (OSR) was in alignment with a DSR, in terms of both philosophy and methodology. Thanks to engineers willing to step into the role of lawyers, to codify copyleft and Creative Commons, living standards did improve.
Even the original PC revolution may be attributed to people remaining free and open about their work, dodging the suffocating practices of intellectual property lawyers. The next revolution was sparked by the GNU community enabling Linux, when “dodging” was replaced with outright resistance.
How about the billions of billionaires? How could that ever happen?
A closer reading of Fuller reveals what he meant: the King of England in 1492 never had an iPhone or anesthetics, let alone cardiologists of today’s caliber. Money couldn’t buy what did not yet exist.
Fuller is measuring by an absolute scale, not a relative one.
Every sailor on a first class navy ship is in a sense a billionaire relative to sailors crewing wooden warships in the 1400s. Submarines improved a lot too.
A middle class lifestyle today, one involving jet travel, healthcare, telecommunications, potentially far exceeds in quality that of a noble or lord just a few generations back.
Which isn’t to say one can’t be miserable regardless of one’s physical circumstances. Fuller is accused of going for a “tech fix” for everything, whereas our issues are deeply spiritual. “Solve too many problems and we’d all die of boredom” — one hears that point of view expressed.
Would that boredom could be our major problem; we’d learn what’s most interesting to think and do. Solving problems does not stop the flow of novel problems. Life will always remain problematic, is my prediction, regardless of how many goals we achieve. But is that really a problem?
Today, we’re all impoverished by living on a ghetto planet that still experiences hellishly high opportunity costs, per our oft-cited GST diagram of the situation.
Everyone’s life would be better if it wasn’t against a backdrop of mass starvation, mass bombardment, mass disease.
Poverty impoverishes us collectively, gated communities and limos with darkened windows notwithstanding. That’s why the myth of “richest country in the world” rings hollow, as the inequalities, the disparities, characterize our collective identity. Let’s just say there’s ample room for improvement.
