Academic Contrarians

Part of Fuller's legacy results from his example proving attractive to others fighting some uphill battle of their own against a skeptical academia.  

These up hill fighters have tended to rally around King Bucky as someone who voiced the right criticisms, regarding overspecialization and so on.  Those looking askance from afar see what appears to be a roiling mob psychology, with a semi-incoherent center.  

An entourage of crazies follow their beloved pied piper out of town and over a cliff.  Was that an inadvertent social service, that Bucky performed, in serving as a lightning rod and gathering point for the most disaffected?  Was he a Vortex 1,  turning the center ring counterculture into a sideshow of docility?

I've seen some DC presidents I might interpret in this way.  Their technique is to use a magnetic ideology to sweep up a lot of people and deliver them, pre-packaged, to alternative spinmeisters, which might as well mean "down the drain".

Some think GWB committed a gaff when he cited "Iraq" instead of "Ukraine" as his example of an undemocratic war led by authoritarians.  He corrected himself of course.  He's used to getting laughed at. His message to the Iraqi people on the eve of the invasion:  "Don't burn the oil wells" (smirk), i.e. that's what we're coming for.  

An American people used to mocking their president appears tone deaf when the mocking goes the other way.

Some riding the Bucky coattails will offer spurious details about what Synergetics is really about.  "It's about never needing to use mathematical symbols" some will tell you, seeming to completely ignore all the radical signs, all the 2nd root symbols, that decorate the Synergetics pages.

However Fuller's dedication of the work itself, to H.S.M Coxeter, a practitioner of n-dimensional Euclidean geometry, suggests Fuller saw himself more as a metaphysician than a straight geometer.  His agenda was to leverage whatever it might take to make humanity successful.

Happy Birthday to Me

Storm (see post below) says she's not really leaving Portland, just that apartment on Hawthorne we all knew about. 

I exaggerate. Dr. D. knew where it was, as a true fan, who goes to her shows and tracks her career. He even hopped in his car to see if he could catch her last act, the final moving out scene, which she'd been streaming live on Facebook.  However, she was pretty much done before he got there.

I wandered around on Division with a friend, who took me out for Thai Food.  "Every time I try to cheer myself up" I told him, "I run into something even more bleak".  Surfing Youtube, the Shanghai lock down added yet more weight to these shoulders.  

I know Chinese feel the stress, and not just because of omicron.  The District seems hell bent on ramping up tensions.  Some talking heads babble about "weakening Russia in order to take on China".  So much crazy talk, from the perspective of an elder in my school (meaning me).  

An ideology is like a fatty lipid sphere, studded with talking points.  That's how they spread, by injecting those talking points.

Thank you Tara, a calling to offer your birthday wishes.  I answered Dick Tracy style from the Thai restaurant, talking on my Apple Watch.  There's no FaceTime on it yet.

Today is a work day.  I'm in the gig economy and have a gig.  Yesterday I had two gigs.

I told Maurice I'm in no mood to go on stage and take a bow anywhere, because that "Bucky was a failure" airbrush might just as well paint me.  The world seems interested in investing in the dreams of its most bellicose.  Realism is associated with jingoism.  

No, I don't think the Russians were eager for war.  Given my own Youtube channel features the old RT logo here and there, I'm easy to brand as not a NATO lover.  That means I'm likely fated to languish in obscurity when it comes to my own brand of positive futurism, given the climate. 

On the other hand, the Trucker Exchange Program is something we could work on for Chinese and African drivers.  It was never my intention to involve DC all that directly i.e. I wasn't especially trying to go "dot gov" with these plans.  

Turning truckers into citizen diplomats would just be seen as more competition.  Probably a lot of State Department types already resent how some of those Youtubers have been doing their job for them.

Talk of the Town

I suppose if I had to pick one story to top the charts, it'd be that Storm Large is leaving us.  She's a great avatar to have out there though, with Portland a big part of her past.

I've read her autobiography, which was making the rounds, but I haven't haunted the nightlife scene since I was going out with a Palestinian I knew through CUE, indirectly.  I was also tracking a signature talent seeking to break in to the Portland music scene and maybe then move to Canada, one Lindsey Walker, just search in these blogs if curious; you'll find a window on the Portland music scene, long ago (think One Laptop per Child era, remember the XO?).

Yes I've been known to read and sometimes chuckle along with Willamette Week and The Mercury.   Both are free and feature rapier sharp wit.  

I've not yet figured in either, not being that much of an entertainer, nor cartoonist.  I promoted Portland as ToonTown, that's for sure. 

I figured in the Oregonian twice but then I stopped being newsworthy.  The second time I was the prescient futurist going on about "hypertext kiosks" that would one day offer to sell you health plans.  I remember David Lansky showing me, when Providence later installed a few.  

Providence was my biggest client for awhile there.  Separation was difficult and I had to work with a consultant to get back in gear.

Storm Large is a performer and went to the semi-finals on Americans Have Talent or one of those.  I'm in touch with her local fan base to some degree.  Consider me a fan once removed, if that makes sense.  I'm happy for her light in this world.

CUE, or Center for Urban Education, was into training small nonprofits on PageMaker on the Mac, connected to LaserWriters, brand new tech at that time.  We were on SE 12th near the Jolly Roger. That was one of our core businesses, around which we had some government funded training services and other consulting.  

My work then was not that different from my work now, in terms of offering training in mundane computer skills, and also esoteric.

My Jordanian friend worked as adjunct faculty or some similar academic capacity. She was senior to me, given I'd jumped ship after my BA from Princeton and pursued other means of leaving a track record.  

My credentials as a futurist were not sufficient to catapult me into a life of fame and fortune.  Futurism is mostly deprecated these days.  It's just supposed to happen to us, without much planning or forethought on our part, seems to be the mood of our time, at least in some circles.

If you check back through these blogs, you'll find them laced with various plans, speculative in nature.  Asylum City.  EPCOT West.  Other memes.