So many years later, and y'know, the jury is still scratching their heads over the man who called himself Guinea Pig B and guided his transformation through a simple self-query, "If the fate of humanity depended on what I did, what would I do?"

Some still call him an expert midway barker and a master of self-promotion, they call him 'amateur', 'naive', 'dreamer', 'hoaxster' and 'charlatan' even, but there's one thing about the man Time called "America's Friendly Genius": For a nearly-blind man, he saw the world with incredible clarity, not only for what it was, but for what it could, for what could be done, starting now, and given only the small efforts of nearly-blind, nearly peniless, nearly alone and unknown personal failures such as himself.

And what Bucky saw, all that he saw, all that he saw and spec'ed out in obsessive functional detail, it still amazes:

"His vision is difficult to approximate and present, much less encompass in an exhibition,"
[ Core77: A Pair of Flying Slippers ]

I totally agree. Bucky was obsessed with efficiency, with optimum paths with no fluff, no waste, no extras at all, a world of entirely only the minimum utilitarian necessities and yet, to say what he needed to say took a stack of books, lectures that famously ran for tens of hours without a single superfluous academicism, and whole catalogs of notes, drawings and models. For the impatient, here's a podcast on Bucky Fuller from the New York Academy of Sciences, "the story of one of the greatest innovators of the 20th century"

And don't be thinking this was all about engineering and architecture; for Bucky Fuller, there were no such distinctions, there was only the principle that knowledge is only and always additive and the operative definition of Universe as the sum total of our collective experiences, experience which, for Bucky, included a posting at the same role once occupied by Malthus, ie as the person charged with compiling the definitive list of all resources which the world's most powerful Navy might commandeer at a moment's whim, and it was in the process of that dreary accounting task where Bucky discovered that Malthus wore an Emperor's Robe, that there was no 'scarcity', no "limits to growth" and no need to fence in our future. Bucky found plenty for everyone if only we could realize the vastly superior wealth potential of working together, a principle later codified as the Nash Equalibrium. Bucky also progressively swept out his personal sensory apparatus to uncover the great Grunch of Giants

If you thought this week's 'news' from Greenspan and others is any revelation, you need to slip past the techno-utopia and new-age veneer and read a little of the memoirs and encounters of this one small little nearly-blind harmless accountant man who, simply by being of the most service to the most people found himself privy to the entire twentieth century.