I think that in the first place, why we can get excited about [Buckminster ] Fuller, why it's plausible that people might - why my publisher would publish this book [You belong to the universe] about it long after he's dead and irrelevant by many standards has to do with the fact that he was in a sense coming up with this job for himself that is the job that we now refer to when we speak about world change.

Jonathon Keats

Categorized in : Thinking Book Jobs

...there's no reason why scholarship can't be as seriously playful as bubble-blowing.

Jonathon Keats

no-reason scholarship reason-why

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.

Jonathon Keats

layers play world

We are not evolved really very well to be able to understand or to be able to work with and grapple with technologies that we have.

Jonathon Keats

wells able technology

I don't have a cell phone. I am not a Luddite.

Jonathon Keats

cell-phone phones cells

I don't know whether what I do is art. But making things out in the world and having as many conversations as possible.

Jonathon Keats

conversation world art

I select my technology based on what I need and I also don't take up what I don't feel that I need.

Jonathon Keats

select technology needs

I think that as a society as well, we need to be smart about what technologies we take up and how construe progress.

Jonathon Keats

smart technology thinking

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.

Jonathon Keats

philosophy believe school

Where Google and [Buckminster] Fuller overlap are in the potential for putting together disparate technologies in ways that can lead to something that might be a larger solution to a larger problem.

Jonathon Keats

google technology together

I call myself an experimental philosopher which is as ambiguous a term as comprehensive anticipatory design scientist.

Jonathon Keats

philosopher scientist design

We clearly recognize the need for something that is what [Buckminster Fuller] represents and therefore it becomes really useful and really interesting to look at the ways in which world changing today totally misses everything that was valuable.

Jonathon Keats

missing today interesting

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.

Jonathon Keats

buckminster-fuller interesting thinking

Take the self-driving car and the smartphone and put those together and think about how to manage a smart grid because suddenly you have all of this data coming from those two mechanisms that allow for a much higher level of allocating energy much more efficiently.

Jonathon Keats

data smart thinking

[Buckminster] Fuller was an independent operator coming up with these madcap ways of combining things with absolutely no strings attached and the fact that world changing now is happening within the corporation by and large, and that disruption is ironically what corporations do.

Jonathon Keats

strings-attached corporations independent

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.

Jonathon Keats

google way thinking

What we need to do is we need to say, how can - how can we operate independently in terms of putting together these various technologies in order to be able to make the world a better place?

Jonathon Keats

technology together order

I didn't grow up with [Buckminster Fuller]. I never met him. I was once close to meeting him as a child at a ski resort one summer. He died in 1983. Only in 1999 or so, 2000, when I was working as an editor at San Francisco Magazine, did I really come back around to that name because Stanford University had just acquired the archive.

Jonathon Keats

growing-up summer children

I set my life since then attempting to figure out how to do that, basically how to have a sort of public discourse in which anything and everything are open to conversation and in which the thought experiment is a means by which to posit all manner of different realities, potential futures.

Jonathon Keats

anything-and-everything mean reality

I don't really know what that job [experimental philosopher] entails.

Jonathon Keats

philosopher knows jobs

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.

Jonathon Keats

google marine thinking