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Saturday, October 18, 2003

Bucky, Kelly, and the World Wide Web

“[R. Buckminster] Fuller’s Dymaxion House of 1929 was equipped with a ’Go-Ahead With Life Room’ including technology which could provide access to information and education in an individual manner and effortless way. This was the room in every house where ’children may develop self-education on a selective basis through built-in radio-television, maps globes, revolving bookshelves, drawing boards, typewriters, etc., that they may go together as real individuals, not crowd nonentities.’ In his book, BuckyWorks, J. Baldwin emphasized that this room ’is nothing less than a personal multi-media center!’

Through the rapid ephemeralization of information in the later decades of the last century, the World Wide Web now represents a body of electronic materials that continues to grow by approximately seven million pages a day into a single dynamic body of self organized consensus self-reflexivity. (...)

In one of Fuller’s earliest writings in the 1928 “Lightful Housing” manuscript, he was already predicting that technology would soon allow us to communicate through a decentralized global network. This network could effortlessly contain and make available the thoughts, ideas and spontaneous discoveries of numerous individuals worldwide by making one copy of such material available to multitudes quickly with ease, combining the written and spoken word with moving images.”
– Bonnie DeVarco, Education Innovation

“A recurring vision swirls in the shared mind of the Net, a vision that nearly every member glimpses, if only momentarily: of wiring human and artificial minds into one planetary soul. (...)
The tiny bees in a hive are more or less unaware of their colony, but as we wire ourselves up into a hivish network, many things will emerge that we, as mere neurons in the network, don’t expect, don’t understand, can’t control, or don’t even perceive. That’s the price for any emergent hive mind.”
– Kevin Kelly in Out of Control, quoted by Bonnie DeVarco, Invisible Architecture: The NanoWorld of Buckminster Fuller, 1997

[Image from Public Domain Dymaxion Map animation by Chris Rywalt.]

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