Did Buckminster Fuller invent cryptocurrency? Nope!

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Earlier this year, I researched Buckminster Fuller on Twitter. During his lifetime, Fuller, the architectural designer, futurist and inventor best known for the geodesic dome, was one of the most famous men in the world, but he is not exactly a household name today, and when I searched for tweets about Fuller with 1,000 or more likes, I only found six. The most popular was an image from Fullers Dymaxion Map, which depicts the earth’s surface as an unfolded polyhedron. Two other inspirational quotes, including a catchy but probably apocryphal line shared by Andrew Yang: We are called to be the architects of the future, not its victims.

The last three tweets had a surprising element in common. One was by Michael Saylor, the co-founder of a business intelligence firm called MicroStrategy, who wrote, In 1981 Buckminster Fuller predicted a global monetary system based on uniform energy ratings to solve economic empowerment issues we faced then and now from fiat currency. #Bitcoin is the first true monetary network, based on crypto energy. The remaining two tweets also implied that Fuller somehow anticipated Bitcoin, and similar statements can be found elsewhere online.

These claims usually point to one of two sources. One is an interview Fuller conducted with Walter Cronkite on October 18, 1966, in which he spoke enthusiastically about a realistic, scientific accounting system of what wealth is. The other is a passage from Fullers’ 1981 book Critical Path which describes a global time-energy accounting system as part of his proposal for a global energy network: – monetary systems manipulable by the power system.

I happened to recently publish Inventor of the Future, Fuller’s first comprehensive biography, the writing of which required me to read all of his books and thousands of pages of his lectures, interviews, and articles. (And yes, the sentence I quote above is typical of Fuller, whose prose tends to strike readers as provocative or utterly inscrutable.) In my book, which came out in August, I don’t mention Bitcoin at all. , and I started wondering if I missed something important. Before long, however, I concluded that what Fuller was describing here had nothing to do with Bitcoin and very little to do with crypto in general. Yet the effort to relate it to these concepts is revealing in itself, especially for what it tells us about what Fuller still means to a certain type of techie.

Virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier once told me that Fuller was famous in his heyday, perhaps in the style of a figure like Elon Musk. When Fuller died in his 80s in 1983, he was an icon in Silicon Valley, where he influenced major players like Lanier, Alan Kay and even Steve Jobs, who once met him at the offices of Apple. in Cupertino. Fuller was convinced that social problems could be solved by technology, not politics, and he spoke enthusiastically of the ideal of the global designer, a visionary generalist like Fuller himself, who single-handedly popularized the term. of synergy, seemed to embody.

The ideas in Fuller’s work that seem to evoke cryptography go back even further than most of his admirers think. As early as the 1920s, Fuller called for a new temporal standard of wealth, which he defined in his 1938 book Nine Chains to the Moon as a unit of energy captured and saved over time. However, when we examine his arguments more closely, the parallels with crypto fall apart. In his proposed system, the prices of goods and services would be explicitly tied to the resources needed to produce them, and everyone in the world would be automatically compensated for both their labor and their share of renewable energy sources.

In other words, Fuller was not describing bitcoin, but a universal basic income, which was part of his larger goal of ending economic inequality. Although individuals are free to earn as much as they can, he expects most people to be able to support themselves by working only one month a year. The value of its real dollar was tied to the amount of energy available in the world, and it increased as technology became more efficient. It couldn’t be further from Bitcoin mining, which consumes resources on a mammoth scale and deliberately becomes harder over time to produce a currency backed by nothing but scarcity and demand.

The closer we look at Fuller, in fact, the more he seems to be opposed to everything crypto stands for. To discourage the speculative ups and downs that come with new financial instruments, he wanted each household to receive a fixed number of credits each year. He hated the notion of fortunes made by trading paper assets, as well as the concentration of wealth exemplified by the rise of today’s billionaire class. In theory he might have liked the idea of ​​blockchain, and maybe specific applications like a carbon coin to mitigate climate change, but I suspect he would be deeply critical of what has become of cryptocurrency.

Fuller’s prestige in crypto circles has less to do with his actual ideas than a reflection of his enduring mystique, which set the standard for tech prophets who followed. He was the prototype of the modern startup founder, whose personality is as important as the product itself. Sam Bankman-Fried, who founded embattled crypto exchange FTX, was once described by The New Yorker’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus as a savant techno-fakir, which could double as a description of Fuller in his heyday. If crypto enthusiasts are eager to claim Fuller as their predecessor, it’s because he was better at this type of branding than anyone else.

Instead of twisting what he actually believed, it would be far more productive for the crypto community to treat Fuller as a source of powerful metaphors, especially the concept of ephemeralization. Originally, this idea simply referred to doing more with less, but Fuller eventually saw it as a process that culminated in total abstraction: ephemerization tends toward an ultimate doing of everything with nothing at all. Venture capitalist Paul Graham explained it more recently as the growing trend of physical machines being replaced by what we would now call software. This sounds a lot like the transformative changes promised by crypto, which aims to replace outdated financial systems with blockchain-based transactions.

Fuller’s favorite example of ephemeralization was the geodesic dome. Since it was a hemisphere, it enclosed the largest possible space using the least amount of surface area, so it could be lighter and more portable than a conventional shelter. (Musk, a famous crypto fan, talked about using domes to house the first wave of Martian settlers.) In practice, however, the dome had serious limitations. He often fled; it was difficult to modify or extend; and its supposed effectiveness did not take into account the environmental cost of materials like plastic. In short, it was something like cryptocurrency, which has yet to succeed in its most basic function of providing a secure and stable medium of exchange and has caused serious ecological damage in the real world.

While neither Bitcoin nor the dome delivered on their first promise, both may inspire devotion for other reasons. As a cultural precursor to the personal computer, the dome was a futuristic structure that could be assembled in a garage using basic geometry, allowing hobbyists to engage in a kind of physical coding. Early dome users tended to be young, white, and privileged, but this eventually formed the basis of a larger movement that presented geodetic math classes as a coding boot camp as a gateway to a better life. .

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Cryptocurrency offers similar psychological benefits. For its converts, who are increasingly likely to come from historically marginalized backgrounds, it seems to open up a world of new ideas, as well as a chance to connect with like-minded believers. It also holds the promise of riches, which was never part of the dome’s sales pitch, but is central to the Silicon Valley mythos. What all of these crusades have in common are the enormous claims they make to each other, as well as the messianic figures that inevitably emerge to sell these ideas to the public.

The belief that a new technology can change the world may be necessary for it to gain traction, and for the personal computer this has proven to be true. For now, the real question is whether cryptocurrency will be more like the computer or the dome. In the meantime, instead of quoting him out of context, crypto evangelists should pay more attention to Fuller who believed that wealth was only meaningful in terms of how many human beings society could support. And in Nine Chains, he even argued that innovators who genuinely improve the lives of others have the right to use their wealth in acquiring the boat most capable of navigating the seven seas, or an airplane to fly. towards Mars.

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