Jonathon Keats Quotes
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To me, the reason to write about [Buckminster] Fuller is because I think that he has ideas that are incredibly pertinent.
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You have the insanity that is geo-engineering which is a case in which you say the planet is heating up. Let's spray some aerosol and cool it down.
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I studied philosophy in school, became disgruntled by the fact that it was a way to have a very interesting conversation with very few people about very few things in very narrow terms and yet still believed (and still believe today) that there was something that I was getting myself involved in when I said I wanted to study philosophy.
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Writing a book about [Buckminster Fuller] in the sense of deciding how much to - how much biographically to gloss over and how much I can leave out is relatively easy as it is because the true believers already know everything. They know a lot of things that are not true and they know a lot of things that I thought were (and seems there's very good evidence not to believe) and therefore, my starting point was I think to tell his myth because that's what grabbed me.
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[Buckminster] Fuller said that everything at the time was basically a horse and buggy in the form of an automobile and it had that boxiness and basically aeronautics hadn't been invented.
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That is to say that despair does not seem to be in any way potentially to be productive.
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What I think is really interesting is to look at the culture of disruption and of world-changing in terms of what [Buckminster] Fuller was doing and to draw the contrast more than the similarity.
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Just enough of that to be able to give the reader a sense of skepticism that all - it seemed like all that was necessary. I don't really care. But what I do care about is what was happening within the realm of automobiles at the time that [Buckminster Fuller] invented his Dymaxion car because that is really relevant.
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I became really absorbed but again I was at that point - and I still remain today - an outsider who has no interest in becoming an insider, let alone in what that insider perspective on [Buckminster Fuller] has come to be and come to represent.
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There were other auto manufacturers that were confabulating as much as [Buckminster Fuller] was, making claims about how cars resembled this or that aspect of nature.
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Let's not be optimistic in the irreversibly irresponsible way that tends to happen with the crazies of geo-engineering. But let's talk about what sorts of changes we can make.
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That first of all feeds into what I do and secondly, it is emblematic of what I hope to achieve through what I do. That is to say all those conversations that are a result of it are the sorts of conversations that I think are the ultimate, most valuable by-product of what I'm doing.
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All sorts of problems and the interconnectedness between them that [Buckminster Fuller] was able to perceive sometimes rightly, often wrongly, always interestingly and also the fact that he was looking at solutions often that were not feasible in his own time but potentially could be applied today.
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I think what we need to do is we need to seek some other way in which to do what is potentially good work by Google. Google has made the world a better place in some ways.
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I think it was impossible not to come upon a lot of confabulation simply because any good scholarship that has been done since [Buckminster Fuller] death has really delved in that.
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Just getting totally absorbed in that and therefore when I came back around to [Buckminster Fuller] and found that much of it was made up, I realized that nevertheless, it really was crucial, crucial for how he understood himself, I believe, and certainly crucial for how anyone else ever engaged in his ideas and therefore as a starting point, how can we engage in his ideas today, but with a remove of knowing that it is a myth and being able to navigate it in that sort of level, at that level of reading him as a story.
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Once you start backing into all of that, then you see this incredibly intricate, totally wrong-headed way to do things, but nevertheless has a lot of merit to it for the fact that [Buckminster Fuller] is recognizing much larger patterns, seeking much larger patterns and seeking much larger ways of trying to solve for the problem of unhygienic conditions in slums. They really were unhygienic. Whether his family was living in the slum is debatable but they were unhygienic. That needed to be addressed. He was attempting to address it.
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I work on everything all at once, which is maybe the worst way to go about it. But I think that actually it works really well in terms of the serendipitous connections between all of these many different projects and these many different realms.
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I think that what we need to do is we need to think about what scale makes sense for dealing with our need to live within a habitable zone and to do so without using air conditioning and heating in the way that is so incredibly expensive to the environment.
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First of all, [Buckminster Fuller's] identification of the problems that are all that much more pertinent, all that much more pressing in the world today than in his own lifetime from sustainability in terms of the environment to income inequality.
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I don't have a cell phone. I am not a Luddite.
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I would argue that search has made the world a better place. It has done so for reasons that arbitrarily could completely change that - not arbitrarily at all but to completely change how that plays out based upon the needs of profitability. So it's totally unreliable and it has many layers nested underneath that of many ulterior motives nested underneath it.
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I invented a camera that has an exposure time of one hundred years and the camera works in the simplest possible terms, because anything more complicated is more likely to break down in one way or another. It's a pinhole camera that lets in very low light and instead of exposing film, which is going to spoil within a matter of days or weeks, I'm using ordinary black paper.
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I was interested first of all in trying to capture this myth that was always changing and to create some sort of a master story, some version of the myth that resonated with me, since I could have taken more or less any detail that I wanted or the opposite and try to put that down on the page in a way that I could express from that outset for myself and for our readers what it was that was so magical about [Buckminster] Fuller's way of putting together the world.
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It isn't a matter of hope. It's a matter of - between the options of trying nothing and trying something, let's try something but let's also be very thoughtful about what that something is.
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I don't think that I am hopeful because I have some data that you don't, that I am going to share with you and going to convince you on that basis.
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My work is very eclectic. I write books that range from writing fiction, writing fable where I am very directly trying to imagine alternate worlds, to writing about [Buckminster] Fuller who was the ultimate world man creating all sorts of alternate worlds and believing that they were imminent to my own work of - for instance, a project that I've been working on for some year and a half, two years now that continues to evolve has been what I call Deep Time Photography.
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I think that [Buckminster] Fuller certainly would have found a way in which to be funded by Google in a way that he was funded by the Marine Corps and everybody else. He would have remained obstinately his own creature.
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I think that as a society as well, we need to be smart about what technologies we take up and how construe progress.
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Serendipity looks a lot like creativity, at least at a distance, and if I can tap into these ways in which one thing resembles another.
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