Assignment 10
In this chapter, “Stewart Brand Meets the Cybernetic Counterculture” Turner tells us about all the former counterculture groups that helped to create, shape, and define the views of the New Communalists. Through this chapter we get a better understanding of how their views towards the problems of the rise of technology came into play and how each group responded towards this new information technology that seemed to have created an imbalance in the world at the time.
The Comprehensive Designer named by Buckminster Fuller, was a person who “would not be another specialist, but would instead stand outside the halls of industry and science, processing the information they produced, observing the technologies they developed, and translating both into tools for human happiness” (56). Fuller believed that what society at the time needed was a person who would do what they can for the greater good. Someone who would develop new technologies, someone who had all the resources created by the industry and would distribute this with everyone when the time called for it. This kind of person would realize the struggle of balance in the world and would be able to fix it by giving the people what they needed. Turner states “Being able to see the whole picture would allow the Comprehensive Designer to realign both his individual psyche and the deployment of political power with the laws of nature” (56).
I think Fuller’s vision was appealing to Brand because it showed that technology and the information we got from it wouldn’t necessarily destroy the human race. It could make it better if we used it a certain way, as described by Fuller’s Comprehensive Designer. Also Fuller’s vision showed equality, not one person or one thing was bigger than the other. There was no hierarchy in his system, which for Brand and people of the New Communalists group was inspiring. Through Fuller’s beliefs that technology could work towards the greater good of society might’ve been what gave Brand his ideas that he incorporated into the USCO. This information technology could be ways to connect the people instead of tear them apart.
