Top 63 Quotes & Sayings by Jonathon Keats

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

You have the insanity that is geo-engineering which is a case in which you say the planet is heating up. Let's spray some aerosol and cool it down.

I think that surprisingly few people right now know much about [Buckminster] Fuller beyond the few really iconic points. He invented the geodesic dome and he coined the term "spaceship earth" and that's pretty much the extent of what people who even have heard of him know. And I'm struck by how many people have not heard of him at all.

I think that I feel that I have no choice but to operate under the illusion, which may be a delusion, that we can somehow get past the destruction that we have brought and that we are causing today.

The city is better because the city has an economy of needs and once you're talking about a city, maybe you can start talking about how you manage the climate of that city as a whole. Not by putting a dome over it but by more passive means that can potentially be put together in creative ways.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I became really absorbed but again I was at that point - and I still remain today - an outsider who has no interest in becoming an insider, let alone in what that insider perspective on [Buckminster Fuller] has come to be and come to represent.

Let's not be optimistic in the irreversibly irresponsible way that tends to happen with the crazies of geo-engineering. But let's talk about what sorts of changes we can make.

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

[Buckminster] Fuller's idea of progress is a very 1950s organization man out of the military sort of idea of progress. So as a result, you have something like: we've got bad weather in New York City; let's put a dome over it. And so I don't want to put a dome over Manhattan and I hope that nobody who ends up reading the book wants to do so as a result.

I do not think that technology is our salvation.

The interesting thing writing about [Buckminster] Fuller is really to attempt to resurrect all of that and to do so for a new generation that has not grown up with him.

Architects in urban planning are talking about this but they're not talking about it yet I don't think at that level that [Buckminster] Fuller is talking about when he talked about putting a dome over Manhattan, which is to say an attempt at integrating all of these different technologies in a way that makes for a city that, without having an actual dome, thermodynamically manages the heat flow for that urban environment and therefore makes it so that it is a highly efficient machine for a living or a dwelling machine as he would have preferred in terms of thermodynamically optimizing it.

There were other auto manufacturers that were confabulating as much as [Buckminster Fuller] was, making claims about how cars resembled this or that aspect of nature.

Writing a book about [Buckminster Fuller] in the sense of deciding how much to - how much biographically to gloss over and how much I can leave out is relatively easy as it is because the true believers already know everything. They know a lot of things that are not true and they know a lot of things that I thought were (and seems there's very good evidence not to believe) and therefore, my starting point was I think to tell his myth because that's what grabbed me.

[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.

I was interested first of all in trying to capture this myth that was always changing and to create some sort of a master story, some version of the myth that resonated with me, since I could have taken more or less any detail that I wanted or the opposite and try to put that down on the page in a way that I could express from that outset for myself and for our readers what it was that was so magical about [Buckminster] Fuller's way of putting together the world.

I work on everything all at once, which is maybe the worst way to go about it. But I think that actually it works really well in terms of the serendipitous connections between all of these many different projects and these many different realms.

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.

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

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.

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

My work is very eclectic. I write books that range from writing fiction, writing fable where I am very directly trying to imagine alternate worlds, to writing about [Buckminster] Fuller who was the ultimate world man creating all sorts of alternate worlds and believing that they were imminent to my own work of - for instance, a project that I've been working on for some year and a half, two years now that continues to evolve has been what I call Deep Time Photography.

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

I was totally taken in and totally taken by that myth starting in 1999, rather carelessly writing about this archive and starting to read [Buckminster Fuller] self-representation, misrepresentation, whatever you want to call it.

Just getting totally absorbed in that and therefore when I came back around to [Buckminster Fuller] and found that much of it was made up, I realized that nevertheless, it really was crucial, crucial for how he understood himself, I believe, and certainly crucial for how anyone else ever engaged in his ideas and therefore as a starting point, how can we engage in his ideas today, but with a remove of knowing that it is a myth and being able to navigate it in that sort of level, at that level of reading him as a story.

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.

We're back around to [Buckminster] Fuller again. Back around to the recognition of patterns, which may be true or may not be. But nevertheless, have enough of a semblance that they're worth exploring. That, to me, is where my work begins.

It's essential for me to be working on a nonfiction sort of research project simultaneous with multiple projects that are in different realms of art practice or not.

[Buckminster Fuller] started talking about it far enough afterwards, an audience that was far enough from when they - when the air flow and the Zephyr and these cars in the time period that were made by mainstream automakers. It was far enough in the future, far enough after that point that nobody really bothered to fact-check.

Since I live part of the year in Italy, I live in a society in which I'm the optimistic American relative to the people who I'm around there. And that has actually brought to my attention the fact that I do have some sort of optimism and has made me think about it enough that I can attempt an answer.

That first of all feeds into what I do and secondly, it is emblematic of what I hope to achieve through what I do. That is to say all those conversations that are a result of it are the sorts of conversations that I think are the ultimate, most valuable by-product of what I'm doing.

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.

Serendipity looks a lot like creativity, at least at a distance, and if I can tap into these ways in which one thing resembles another.

That is to say that despair does not seem to be in any way potentially to be productive.

First of all, [Buckminster Fuller's] identification of the problems that are all that much more pertinent, all that much more pressing in the world today than in his own lifetime from sustainability in terms of the environment to income inequality.

At this point in history, the desperate need for building a sustainable society and for managing energy usage makes for a really - of vast importance that we need to place on where we live and how we live in those places.

I would certainly never want to inflict anything on the world exactly as [Buckminster Fuller] envisioned it because there is a technocratic worldview that I find horrific.

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.

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?

I invented a camera that has an exposure time of one hundred years and the camera works in the simplest possible terms, because anything more complicated is more likely to break down in one way or another. It's a pinhole camera that lets in very low light and instead of exposing film, which is going to spoil within a matter of days or weeks, I'm using ordinary black paper.

[Buckminster] Fuller said that everything at the time was basically a horse and buggy in the form of an automobile and it had that boxiness and basically aeronautics hadn't been invented.

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

I don't think that I am hopeful because I have some data that you don't, that I am going to share with you and going to convince you on that basis.

Just enough of that to be able to give the reader a sense of skepticism that all - it seemed like all that was necessary. I don't really care. But what I do care about is what was happening within the realm of automobiles at the time that [Buckminster Fuller] invented his Dymaxion car because that is really relevant.

To me, the reason to write about [Buckminster] Fuller is because I think that he has ideas that are incredibly pertinent.

I'm not especially interested in the job of the historian or journalist of trying to figure out what was true and what was not.

On the other hand, the way in which that car fit into this whole very roundabout way of attempting to solve the problem of what - the problem that [Buckminster Fuller] perceived as being the cause of his daughter's death and meningitis. I mean how you get from your daughter dying from meningitis to making a car with three wheels and saying that it's like a bird and a fish. That really is amazing.

I would say that what the value of talking about and thinking about a dome over Manhattan is that [Buckminster] Fuller has identified a scale of action I think is actually really compelling.

It isn't a matter of hope. It's a matter of - between the options of trying nothing and trying something, let's try something but let's also be very thoughtful about what that something is.

I would say that by being irresponsibly disorganized, by saying yes to everything and then seeing how it all works out, that I end up in some place closer to where I had imagined I would be, before I started to study philosophy, than I would ever be had I followed through in any sort of responsible way, and become the professor of philosophy that I shudder to think I might potentially have become.

Once you start backing into all of that, then you see this incredibly intricate, totally wrong-headed way to do things, but nevertheless has a lot of merit to it for the fact that [Buckminster Fuller] is recognizing much larger patterns, seeking much larger patterns and seeking much larger ways of trying to solve for the problem of unhygienic conditions in slums. They really were unhygienic. Whether his family was living in the slum is debatable but they were unhygienic. That needed to be addressed. He was attempting to address it.

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

I think it was impossible not to come upon a lot of confabulation simply because any good scholarship that has been done since [Buckminster Fuller] death has really delved in that.

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.

I think that what we need to do is we need to think about what scale makes sense for dealing with our need to live within a habitable zone and to do so without using air conditioning and heating in the way that is so incredibly expensive to the environment.

All sorts of problems and the interconnectedness between them that [Buckminster Fuller] was able to perceive sometimes rightly, often wrongly, always interestingly and also the fact that he was looking at solutions often that were not feasible in his own time but potentially could be applied today.