Translated from: “Buckminster Fuller: A Technocrat for the Counterculture” by Fred Turner, author of "Digital Utopia."
In 1965, Buckminster Fuller was 70 years old. He was short, plump, and wore glasses. When he spoke in public, he often donned a three-piece suit, with the key of the Phi Beta Kappa Society hanging from his waist. Fuller looked like a wealthy magnate from the early 20th century. When he took the stage, he spoke for hours about technocracy, most of which was his own design. Industry! Technology! Space programs! Fuller jumped from one topic to another, weaving a cotton candy dream of the machine age between sentences adorned with his incredible and obscure vocabulary. New chemicals, new alloys, and new methods for measuring international industrial output—like the most visionary executives of the industrial age, Fuller urged his audience to imagine a beautiful world composed of machinery, management, and design.
However, despite Fuller’s evident loyalty to the ideals of the industrial world, he was also a hero to the young people of America’s counterculture. His two books—"Ideas and Integrities" (1963) and "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth" (1969)—became staples in the libraries of American hippies. His speeches attracted young people, and his geodesic domes became the preferred housing in many rural communities. In 1968, his works inspired the "Whole Earth Catalog," a publication long regarded as the bible of the back-to-the-land movement and a hallmark document of counterculture. For all those who roamed to establish new communities in the Colorado plains and New Mexico mountains, and for all those who dreamed of taking that step, Buckminster Fuller was a source of inspiration.
But why? What made this aging designer and engineer so appealing to a movement that ostensibly rejected industry, technology, and the advice of anyone over 30?
To answer these questions, it is necessary to liberate the American counterculture and Buckminster Fuller from the intricate myths that grew around them. Since the late 1960s, scholars and journalists have tended to interpret American counterculture through the lens set by its supporters at the time. From then until now, analysts have generally viewed counterculture as a collective departure from the technological and organizational forms of Cold War America. Similarly, to some extent, because Fuller had the ability to turn his life into a compelling replica, he has often been portrayed as an eccentric genius, a self-taught tinkerer who inherited the tradition of Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. However, despite their respective claims to the contrary, both Fuller and American counterculture were not entirely detached from the orbit of the military-industrial complex of their time. Rather, Fuller and his theory of "comprehensive design" provided many with a way to embrace the technologies, technocratic politics, and flexible, collaborative work styles of the Cold War military and industrial world while establishing their own alternative communities in the 1960s.
Between Nuclear Destruction and Consumer Prosperity#
To understand the counterculture's turn to technology and Fuller, we must first remember that Americans in the 1950s, especially children, lived under the looming threat of nuclear apocalypse. In 1967, social psychologist Kenneth Keniston interviewed a group of young men and women who had participated in a series of anti-Vietnam War activities. To uncover the roots of their radicalism, Keniston asked them to recall their earliest memories. One young woman described the moment when an encyclopedia salesman sold her mother Volume A of the Encyclopedia Britannica: "I remember reading an article and seeing a picture of an atomic bomb and a tank rolling over rubble. I think I became hysterical. I was screaming and screaming." This young woman was not alone. For those who were children during the height of the Cold War, the possibility of nuclear destruction was very real. In elementary school, they were taught to "duck and cover" under their desks if they happened to see a nuclear flash. They watched government-funded films in which children their age ran through devastated communities looking for local fallout shelters. Since the Soviet Union first tested an atomic bomb in 1949, Americans had been shrouded in a cloud of nuclear anxiety. Would the destruction caused by the Enola Gay in Hiroshima somehow affect American cities? Would New York one day be like Nagasaki?
By the late 1950s, many Americans began to worry that the atomic bomb had become a way of life. The national military agenda seemed to bind adults to a particularly constrained lifestyle that young Americans might be forced to adopt as they grew up. As Elaine Tyler May pointed out, the dominant social style of the postwar middle class could be described as "containment." Just as the military and government planners sought to "contain" communism, American men and women tried to control their emotions, maintain their marriages, and build secure, stable, and independent families. Just as Air Force personnel scanned the American borders for Soviet bombers, many Americans began to monitor the boundaries of their own lives.
In the workplace, containment was also the order of the day. Especially for leftist critics, society seemed increasingly dominated by pyramid-like organizations run by ideologically conservative, psychologically fragmented individuals. Sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote in 1956, "Because the means of information and power are centralized, some people occupy positions in American society from which they can look down... Their decisions greatly affect the daily lives of ordinary men and women." Mills argued that under the control of these "power elites," ordinary Americans found themselves trapped in corridors and offices, unable to imagine, let alone control, their entire work or lives. The ordinary populace lacked "the structure of thought—rational and irrational, in which their environment is a subordinate part," he explained. To some extent, the same was true for the elites. For critics like Mills, the masters of bureaucracy and their minions suffered from a reduction in emotional life and a cautious separation of psychological functions. Mills wrote that after World War II, rationalization began to produce "a 'rational' man without reason, who becomes increasingly self-justifying and increasingly anxious." Mills described this person as a "Cheerful Robot."
However, beyond the dual threats of the atomic bomb and the stultifying mechanical adulthood, young Americans in the 1960s enjoyed unprecedented prosperity, which brought with it a wealth of consumer goods. To some extent, these goods were also part of America's Cold War military toolbox. For example, in 1959, Vice President Richard Nixon faced Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in a model kitchen at the American Exhibition in Moscow. Nixon proudly told the scowling Khrushchev, "America has 44 million families... 31 million families own their own homes and land. 44 million families own 56 million cars, 50 million televisions, and 143 million radios. Each year, on average, each family buys nine articles of clothing and suits and 14 pairs of shoes."
However, for children of the 1950s, cars, televisions, and radios also provided an escape from the shadows of the Cold War. Teenagers found themselves surrounded by appliances, cars, educational and job opportunities that their parents, who grew up during the Great Depression, could hardly imagine. As many commentators noted at the time, this prosperity turned adolescence into a genuine transitional period, caught between the freedom of childhood and the demands of employment and family in adulthood. Especially for an increasing number of middle-class and upper-class young people, adolescence became a time for personal exploration.
By the late 1960s, young Americans faced a dilemma. On one hand, the world of military and industrial bureaucrats and the associated technologies threatened their lives, either by destroying the earth in a nuclear holocaust or by demanding that young men and women turn themselves into "Cheerful Robots" in adulthood. On the other hand, the same bureaucracies brought various technology-supported pleasures into their lives, including music, television, and travel. Moreover, due to the power of postwar industry, college graduates in the 1960s had no trouble finding jobs. But could these jobs provide the same satisfaction as their teenage years? Many were skeptical. "There are patterns of marriage and adult life, but... it doesn't work," recalled the young woman who discovered the atomic bomb in the encyclopedia. "There is a huge contradiction between careers and middle-class life that we can't really resolve. How do you become an adult in this world?"
Comprehensive Design as a Way of Life#
It was with this question in mind that many turned to Buckminster Fuller. If the politicians and CEOs of mainstream American society were aloof and emotionally conservative, Fuller was witty and focused. Like his young audience, he exhibited a highly individualistic way of thinking and a deep concern for the fate of the species. But it was not just Fuller’s personality that attracted audiences. Rather, it was his provision of solutions to the contradictions faced by young people in the 1960s. As he moved from one university to another, collaborating with students, giving lectures, and designing new technologies, Fuller exemplified a way of making a living alongside academia and industry without having to become any form of bureaucrat. Moreover, his rhetoric and technical theories seemed to merge the most microscopic aspects of everyday life with the most macroscopic forces shaping human existence. For Fuller, design might not just be a phase of industrial production during the Cold War; it could be a way of life that saves the world.
In 1949, he published an article that was later expanded and reissued in "Ideas and Integrities," a book widely circulated in counterculture, where Fuller codified this vision into his professional goals and transcended those goals to become a new professional category: the "comprehensive designer." In "Ideas and Integrities," Fuller explicitly pointed out that the roots of his perspective lay in his personal experiences. He wrote that during World War I, he witnessed his four-year-old daughter, Alexandra, die of polio, which he believed was partly due to the poor construction of their house. At the time, he was a contractor for the Navy. As a former junior officer, he saw how extraordinary industrial resources could be mobilized to solve military problems through proper coordination. In his view, his daughter died directly from a disease but indirectly from the failure to allocate the world's resources rationally. This belief intensified during World War II and the early Cold War, when Fuller again saw the comprehensiveness of industrial production and the inequalities in resource allocation. To Fuller, the natural world was governed by a series of laws that maintained harmonious balance. However, according to his experience, mid-20th-century society was one where the material wealth created according to these laws was not evenly distributed, leading to the deaths of children. Politicians, generals, and business leaders—when it came to resources, everyone prioritized the needs of their own organizations. He believed that what humanity needed was an individual capable of recognizing the universal patterns inherent in nature, designing new technologies based on those patterns and existing industrial resources, and ensuring that these new technologies were applied to everyday life.
He explained that this person would be a "comprehensive designer." According to Fuller, a comprehensive designer is not another expert but stands outside the halls of industry and science, processing the information they produce, observing the technologies they develop, and transforming them into tools for human well-being. Unlike experts, comprehensive designers understand the need for systemic balance and the current deployment of its resources. Then, they would play the role of "harvester of the potential of this field," collecting industrial products and technologies and redistributing them according to a systemic pattern that only they and other comprehensivists could understand. To accomplish this work, designers need access to all the information generated within the burgeoning military bureaucracy of America while remaining unaffected by it. They need to become a new amalgamation of "artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist, and evolutionary strategist." Constantly delving into demographic surveys, resource analyses, and technical reports from states and industries, but this comprehensive designer never allows themselves to become a full-time employee of any of the aforementioned companies; they ultimately see what bureaucrats cannot: the big picture.
This vision would enable them to realign their personal psychology and deploy political power using natural laws. If, as many began to suspect in the 1960s, bureaucrats were psychologically disintegrated by the demands of work, then the comprehensive designer would become whole again. They are neither engineer nor artist but always both, achieving psychological integration even when dealing with the products of technological domination. Similarly, while bureaucrats wield their power through parties and militaries, in Fuller’s view, they fail to allocate the world’s resources properly; the comprehensive designer would systematically wield power. That is to say, they would analyze the data they collected and attempt to envision the needs of the world now and in the future. Then, they would design technologies capable of meeting those needs. These technologies would reshape the environments in which people work, thereby restructuring society itself. The resource allocation of this new society would not conform to the demands of politicians but to the natural laws that have kept the world’s natural systems in balance. Fuller suggested that competitive politics would become irrelevant. What would change the world is "Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science."
With the idea of comprehensive design, Fuller offered readers a way to embrace the pleasures and powers brought by Cold War industrial products while avoiding becoming puppets of bureaucracy. Moreover, Fuller hinted that the remaking of individual lives and their repositioning around the principles of comprehensive design could not only save individuals but also save the species. As he stated in "Ideas and Integrities," "If humanity is to continue as a successful pattern-duplicating function in cosmic evolution, it will be because in the coming decades, artists and scientists will spontaneously assume primary design responsibilities and successfully transform tools that enhance human capabilities from 'killingry' to 'advanced livingry'—sufficient to meet the needs of all humanity." Fuller believed that the comprehensive designer not only did not need to wear a gray flannel suit to work—they actually needed to become immigrants of artists and intellectuals. For a generation that feared becoming adults in corporations, Buckminster Fuller offered a very intriguing option, but it was not merely play. It was a way to safeguard the future of humanity.
Although Fuller claimed to have coined the term in response to his unique biographical conditions—an assertion that reinforced the notion that his own life should serve as a model for his readers—his vision of the comprehensive designer carried the knowledge frameworks and social ideals at the core of military research culture. Most importantly was Fuller’s concept of the world as an information system. In his numerous autobiographical works, Fuller traced the origins of his idea of the world as a system to his aunt Margaret Fuller’s relationship with the transcendentalists, particularly his time on a ship—he considered it a closed system—when he was a naval officer. But his writings also bore the imprint of Cold War military-industrial information theory. For Fuller, as for information theorists during World War II and system analysts in the decades that followed, the material world consists of information patterns that manifest themselves. These patterns can be modeled and manipulated by information technologies, especially computers. In turn, computers can also serve as models for humanity. After all, while Fuller’s comprehensive designer promised to integrate psychologically like an expert, this integration depended on the designer's ability to process vast amounts of information, thereby perceiving social and technological patterns. Fuller’s comprehensive designer, at least from a functional perspective, is an information processor, and likewise, a descendant of Cold War psychology and systems theory, just as Fuller’s own imagination is a child.
Even Fuller’s seemingly unique working style resonated with the collaborative spirit of World War II research. Fuller later told his counterculture admirers that the comprehensive designer could only generate his comprehensive perspective by stepping out of the industrial and military institutions that had long trapped experts. He explained that only independent individuals "can find the time to think in a comprehensive and appropriate way." Fuller believed that by browsing professional perspectives, moving from one institution to another, the comprehensive designer could gather enough information to see the entire "system." Fuller himself lived in this spirit: for much of his career, he mingled in a series of universities and colleges, designing projects, collaborating with students and faculty—and always claimed that anything produced from these collaborations was his right. By the early 1960s, Fuller traveled more than two-thirds of the year. In his writings, Fuller presented his travels as a model of the proper behavior of a comprehensive designer, suggesting that such a life was genuinely new. However, looking back at the Los Alamos Laboratory or the MIT Rad Lab during World War II reminds Fuller’s audience that interdisciplinary migration and multi-institutional collaboration were key features of military research. In fact, they were the social processes through which cybernetics and systems theory emerged as universal discourses. Even as Fuller claimed to be a unique intellectual, even as his audiences hailed his thoughts and lifestyle as precursors to the future, Fuller’s loyalty to the perspective of systems theory, his belief that information is the basis of experience, and his collaborative style were intricately linked to the military-industrial complex that the youth movement of the 1960s claimed to overthrow.
Comprehensive Design and Political Consciousness#
Yet, strangely, it was these very connections that made Fuller so appealing to so many at the time. Today, Americans often view the youth movements of the 1960s as a massive assault on the institutions and cultural styles of Cold War America. However, despite their shared disdain for the atomic bomb and suburbia, members of these movements often took two distinctly different stances toward social change. In the early 1960s, with the Southern civil rights movement and the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, students began organizing a political movement later known as the "New Left." For these activists, the key to social change lay in political action. Thus, its members formed new parties (such as the Students for a Democratic Society, SDS), held conventions, issued declarations, and marched against the Vietnam War. If some within the New Left began to experience forms of solidarity, as they helped build the world outside the movement, they did so as a byproduct of their own organization. Within the New Left, the end of genuine community and alienation was often seen as a result of political activity rather than a form of politics itself.
In what I call the new communism of counterculture, the situation was quite the opposite. If the New Left grew out of social struggles during the Cold War, the initial sprouts of new communitarianism emerged from the bohemian arts of Manhattan and San Francisco during the Cold War, in the rhythms of wandering, and finally, in the early 1960s, among mystics and addicts in the San Francisco Bay Area. For the new communists, the key to social change was not politics but ideas. In 1969, Theodore Roszak’s work popularized the term "counterculture." In the book, he represented the views of many new communists, arguing that the core issue behind the bureaucratic rationalization of the Cold War was not political structure but the "myth of objective consciousness." This state of mind, Roszak wrote, appeared among the experts who dominated rationalized organizations, favoring alienation, hierarchy, and a mechanistic view of social life. Its symbols were clocks and computers, and its pinnacle was "the scientific worldview and a deeply rooted commitment to self-centered and brain-consciousness patterns." In response to this model, Roszak and others proposed a return to transcendence, while transforming the individual self and its relationship with others:
The primary task of our counterculture is to declare a new realm so vast and wondrous that at such a glorious moment, the excessive demands of the technical expert must retreat to a secondary and marginal position in people's lives. To create and disseminate such a consciousness, one must be willing to open oneself to the imaginative imagination on its own terms.
By the mid-1960s, this new consciousness became the foundation for the largest wave of communalization in American history. Historians and sociologists estimate that Americans established over 600 communes in the two centuries before 1965. Between 1965 and 1972, journalists and sociologists estimated that about 2,000 to 6,000 communes were established, most of which appeared between 1967 and 1970. Almost all of these communities were founded by young, white, middle-class, and upper-class individuals, with few exceptions, and they had little connection to the New Left. Instead, the communes of the late 1960s aimed to organize themselves around a pursuit of a shared consciousness and, on that basis, establish a hierarchical social structure that could eliminate the need for traditional politics. One of the earliest communities, Drop City, blossomed in 1965 among a group of geodesic domes on the Colorado plains. As co-founder Peter Douthit, better known as "Peter Rabbit," explained at the time, "Drop City has no political structure. Things just work out; cosmic forces merge with people in a strange and complex intuitive interaction... When things are done in a slow, intuitive way perceived by the tribe." In Drop City, people could come and go freely, pursuing whatever interested them. They believed that this freedom would lead to a greater state of collective harmony, harmonizing with each other and with the invisible forces of the universe. "We dance a joyful dance, we listen to the eternal rhythm, our feet move toward unity... life-love-joy-energy is one," Douthit wrote. "We are one."
For the Droppers, like thousands of other young communities, consciousness formed a basis for a new type of sociality—holistic, collaborative, and anti-bureaucratic. Small-scale technologies, in turn, opened the door to consciousness, thereby opening the door to this new social world. Psychedelics, water pipes, sound equipment, books like the "I Ching," Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, and especially the works of Buckminster Fuller—these items served as tools for reshaping the self. They also acted as bridges between the industrial world left behind by the new communists and the post-industrial future they hoped to establish. For example, Fuller patented the geodesic dome in 1951; between 1954 and 1957, the U.S. military built a 3,000-mile-long early warning line in Canada, installing hundreds of such domes along it. During the same period, Fuller’s domes were showcased at trade fairs and exhibitions around the world as evidence of American technological innovation. However, although they were once symbols of American military power, in Drop City, they also became symbols of American transformation. For instance, the colorful panels of Drop City’s geodesic domes were made from the roofs of discarded cars. The commune's long-haired founders spent days using hand axes and power saws to cut the roofs off old cars, then bolted them to wooden frames. In the process, they transformed an industrial product into a site of handmade and collective labor. The houses they built, in turn, became symbols of a new way of thinking. As one Drop City resident said, "The dome has a cosmic guidance. All these triangular parts come together to form a dome, a self-supporting thing. Just like a community."
In this sense, the builders of Drop City domes had become comprehensive designers. As they sawed off the roofs of old cars and bolted them into complex geometric patterns, the back-to-the-land movement's communities embraced the intellectual and material outputs of American industry, as well as the collaborative, free-working style of military research. At the same time, they separated themselves from the atomic bomb and the bureaucratic professional culture they imagined produced it. In doing so, they rejected their parents' world and ultimately found a way to establish their own place within it.
New communists also set a Fuller-esque example for a generation of young Americans. In 1968, multimedia artist and entrepreneur Stewart Brand and his wife Louise published a 61-page guide—"Whole Earth Catalog"—introducing books, mechanical devices, and outdoor equipment they hoped would assist those returning to the land. Over the next four years, the catalog would grow to over 400 pages, sell more than a million copies, and win a National Book Award. For some living on the land and many not, the catalog became an entry point into comprehensive design. As Brand stated in the introduction to the catalog's first section, "Understanding the Whole System," "It was Buckminster Fuller’s insights that inspired this catalog." The size of the "Whole Earth Catalog" lay between a pamphlet and a fashion magazine, and like Fuller’s own works, it offered readers a technical perspective through which they could escape the industrial bureaucracy while relying on its products to live cooperatively. Consider the catalog's opening statement. On the inside cover of each edition, Stewart Brand defined the catalog's "purpose":
We are gods, perhaps truly omnipotent. So far, the problems caused by the unreachable power systems (government, large corporations, educational systems, and churches) have largely offset the benefits they bring. Corresponding to this dilemma is a rising power that belongs to individuals—a personal power to achieve self-education, gain enlightenment, shape one’s environment, and share one’s adventures with those interested. The "Whole Earth Catalog" seeks to find and promote tools that facilitate this process.
Brand’s definition clearly articulated a countercultural critique of hierarchy, establishing institutions that emotionally and geographically distanced themselves from civic life, which was, overall, destructive. At the same time, he suggested that he and his readers were like gods in at least two ways, one local and the other global, both familiar to Fuller’s "Ideas and Integrities." On the local level, each reader, like a god, had the ability to live as they wished, as long as they could find the right tools. For Brand and Fuller, the universe’s system is complete—it is not something we can piece together but something that exists independently. On the local level, our work is to direct its energies and resources toward our own purposes. To remain consistent with the countercultural critique of bureaucracy, we must pursue our own personal transformations and, in turn, change the world.
However, these transformations depend on our understanding of the world as a system of invisible forces. On a global level, just like Fuller’s comprehensive designer or Cold War system analysts, Brand’s readers enjoyed god-like powers, able to survey the entire earth beneath their feet. Many editions of the "Whole Earth Catalog" featured a photograph of the Earth as seen from space. Just by picking up the catalog, readers became some sort of fantasists. However, this vision was made possible by NASA’s cameras and, more generally, by the fact that readers were the most technologically advanced generation on Earth. In the "Whole Earth Catalog," the same technological bureaucrats who created the white-collar world and the Vietnam War empowered those who refused to accept either right to see the world in which they lived as a whole.
In this sense, the catalog indicated that readers could become comprehensive designers while reading. As they opened the catalog, their eyes could scan the products of the entire planet: books, cone tents, hand saws, radios, motorcycles—everything you could think of. Just by flipping through the catalog, readers could imagine themselves as masters of the information world, designers of their own lives. The services provided by the catalog, in turn, acted as tools through which readers could apply the principles of comprehensive design in their daily lives. In the catalog, just like in rural communes, backpacks or tents were not merely a way to escape into the forest. They offered readers an opportunity to join an invisible nomadic community, acting in accordance with ancient natural energies, becoming a more "whole" person. That is to say, these products would help readers enter an environment where they might be able to discover globally and act locally, personally, according to natural laws. Thus, the small-scale technologies, backpacks, and tents in the catalog, certainly including the geodesic domes—the main content of the catalog and many communities—were less tools for action than visual tools. They provided readers with a way to transform the products of high-tech industries into a way of viewing the whole world. Armed with this vision, these comprehensive designers could create their own new public worlds and, through their personal and collective examples, save the entire world from the dangers of bureaucratic industry.
Conclusion#
For the young people of the 1960s, the logic of comprehensive design contained a dazzling array of analogies that placed their own lives at the center of the universe. Personal lives, new communities, the whole world—just as glimpsed in the "Whole Earth Catalog," or living on a public farm, each was a symbol of the others, all forming an indivisible whole. With the right tools, young Americans could look globally, perceive the hidden patterns, and act in their own interests—presumably also in the best interests of the world. If the Cold War bureaucrat curled up in his office, catching only glimpses of the most incomplete parts of human endeavor, then the comprehensive designers of the back-to-the-land movement placed themselves on the margins of American society, seeking to view problems from a broader perspective. They discarded the bureaucratic edifice of technocracy, carrying many of its technological products to a new endpoint: the transformation of personal consciousness and the establishment of a new society. Meanwhile, they could also escape the adult dilemmas that plagued their generation. After all, what could be more important or interesting than establishing a new society?
Buckminster Fuller’s own life seemed to prove this point. As they read his books and flocked to hear his lectures, many middle-class young people hoped to harness the economic power of American industry to build independent, flexible lives and enjoy such lives as he did when they grew up. However, to some extent, they attempted to build these lives on the basis of communes, most of which failed. By the mid-1970s, nearly all the communes established in the previous decade had disappeared. Although the vision of community based on shared consciousness was theoretically compelling, it shattered in the face of the material realities of rural agriculture and the complexities of collective living.
For the young people of the late 1960s, Buckminster Fuller’s vision of comprehensive design seemed to offer an escape from the need to enter institutions, face other individuals, and struggle for the allocation of resources and appropriate organization of life. In the years to come, Fuller’s hope for individuals with vast databases of information and the ability to observe—manage—the entire world would drive the rise of personal computers and the introduction of the internet. However, even as the theory of comprehensive design lingered in the cultural atmosphere, the hope for social life built on interpersonal harmony, free enterprise, and the absence of bureaucracy followed suit, as did the failures of communes. In 1973, the founders of Drop City sold the land of the commune, and their geodesic domes collapsed in the relentless Colorado winds. As far as they knew, mere tools could not sustain a community, nor could a serious focus on design replace the essence of politics and everyday work.