Epistemology

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Man, if I could write run-on paragraphs like my man RBF, I’d be stoked.  If you haven’t read him before, enjoy…A timely excerpt from Grunch of Giants by R. Buckminster Fuller:

“Greater justice and economic improvement for the many is not always the result of social revolution. The Europeans’ guns overwhelming of the American Indian bow-and-arrow weapons was in most ways a retrogressive social revolution implemented by design-science revolution. It is always the design revolution that tips the social scales one way or the other. However, sum totally the combined design and social revolutions ultimately favor the many. Between 1900 and today, 60 percent of humans in the U.S.A. have attained a standard of living far in advance of those of the greatest potentates of 1900 while concurrently doubling the life-span of that fortunate 60 percent.

“Never before in all history have the inequities and the momentums of unthinking money-power been more glaringly evident to so vastly large a number of now literate, competent, and constructively thinking all-around-the-world humans. There’s a soon-to-occur critical-mass moment when the intuition of the responsibly inspired majority of humanity, in contradistinction to the angered Luddites and avenging Robin Hoods, faced with comprehensive functional discontinuity of nationally contained techno-economic system, will call for and accomplish a world-around reorientation of our planetary affairs. At this critical moment will occur a realization by the responsibly inspired majority that the adequate capacity of the invisible technology to sustainingly support all humanity depends on all the resources, physical and metaphysical, being always and only employed for all of world-around humanity as a completely integrated techno-economic system operating entirely on its daily income principally of Sun-emanating energy.”

Clay Shirky is onto another great big line of thought in this article where he suggests an accounting method for the historical cognitive expense of TV. He quantifies the expense in terms of person-hours of work, using an educated guess of the attention budget of Wikipedia as the basic unit: 100 million person-hours. In the 2000 Wikipedias of hours currently sunk in TV we can uncover a deep vein of potential social and economic activity.

This blog is dedicated to suggesting projects aimed at gradually recouping that human energy!