Dome Improvement

A FRIEND OF MINE once dated a man who lived in a geodesic dome. I was slightly afraid to meet him; I’d never met anyone who lived in a geodesic dome before. For some reason, I pictured him permanently wearing a white lab coat. Some godlike figure, with a head as majestically bulbous as his house: the Dome Man, citizen of tomorrow. But when I was finally introduced to the dome dweller, he didn’t live up to my expectations. A slight, shy, almost entirely silent man with the wide-eyed, hunted look of a small woodland creature. As I later found out, that was essentially what he was.

The Dome Man had grown up in a hippie commune in the south of England. Back in the 1970s, a group of beautiful young people had been given an old gamekeeper’s cottage on a local aristocrat’s estate so they could live a more beautiful kind of life. They didn’t want to sacrifice their youth to some office or factory, build up their own miserable little pile of wealth, get married, buy a pebble-dashed house in the suburbs, and sit in there while slowly, over the course of a thousand beef dinners, coming to resent first their spouses and then themselves. They didn’t want to follow the bullshit rules of a bullshit society that shoves its people in boxes. They wanted to live joyfully on the land. They wanted to love without limits. They wanted to be free. When the Dome Man was born two decades down the line, none of that had changed. He grew up running naked in the fields, and that was fine. He didn’t need to go to school, where his natural creativity and sense of wonder would be stamped out by a regimen of corporal punishment and standardized tests. Children can teach themselves. He had no idea which of the men in the commune was his father, and that was fine too. They were trying to get rid of all these repressive structures—the father, the family, paternity, so stiff and formal—even if the threat of violence always lurked somewhere just beneath the surface. This was better. Or at least it was better until he became an adult and his mother partnered up with one of the men on the commune and that man decided that he no longer wanted her kid hanging around. The kid was a drag. He kept acting like he had some exclusive right to his mother’s love. And besides, the commune was getting on in age now, and the presence of this big eighteen-year-old among them had started to feel a bit threatening. So he was informally exiled. He had no real education, no qualifications, and nowhere to go, but the commune was generous. He couldn’t live in the cottage with the others, but he could stay on the estate. They let him live in a geodesic dome in the woods.

Apparently, it wasn’t so bad, the geodesic dome. It was made from plastic sheeting stretched over bamboo struts, and it had a thick, waterproof floor. He could fit a bed in there. He had a solar panel bank so he could keep his phone charged, and the commune let him come by every few days to stock up on snacks. It could be very cozy in the geodesic dome when it rained. Water thrumming against its taut plastic skin. It hardly even leaked.

The geodesic dome wasn’t invented by the American inventor and visionary R. Buckminster Fuller, but he did more than anyone else to popularize the design. He was certain that these structures were immensely meaningful for the future of the human species, but he wasn’t entirely sure what, in the basest practical terms, they were actually for. One of his first clients was the US Marines, which in 1955 ordered several hundred domes from his company, Geodesics Inc. Almost all those domes were immediately packed away in underground bunkers. The idea was that they could be used as lightweight, efficient, easily transportable shelters in the aftermath of an apocalyptic nuclear war. They would be useful after the end of the world, even if they weren’t useful yet. That war never came; in the end, a different apocalypse stepped in. Last summer, the New York Times reported that people were increasingly turning to geodesic domes to cope with the extreme weather that comes with climate change. One of them, a retired oil worker, hunkered down in his Louisiana dome home during a hurricane. “People came to my house and apologized to me and said, ‘We made fun of you because of the way your house looks. We should never have done that. This place is still here, when our homes are gone.’” But there are other, smaller worlds, ending without so much noise. The Home Counties Dome Man, living in his lightweight shelter in the woods, a refugee from the collapse of the hippie utopia.

A geodesic dome is a polyhedral structure made from short struts arranged in triangles. The idea is that the weight of the structure is evenly distributed across its surface, with no point columns or any other particular load-bearing elements, which tends to make it more durable. It’s a basically innocuous design. How did it become the shape of the end of the world?

I THINK THE SECRET might be buried somewhere in the life of the grand prophet of geodesics himself. Buckminster Fuller was an extraordinary man. Really, he was more than a man: He was the twentieth century.

All the details of his life are documented in Alec Nevala-Lee’s sprawling biography Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller (Dey Street Books, 2022). Fuller was born in 1895, into a slowly declining dynasty of New England patricians. The transcendentalist writer Margaret Fuller was his great-aunt. When he was young, his father suffered a massive stroke and spent the next three years bedbound in an old wooden house without electricity, with all the servants’ quarters empty, mumbling and whimpering and, finally, screaming in terror before he died. Fuller made it into Harvard on the basis of his family name, but he got expelled all by himself. He simply didn’t have any interest in learning, and he didn’t have the social grace to pretend. In 1915 he moved to New York to work as a beef lugger, loading frozen carcasses into trucks for ten dollars a week. When America entered World War I, he signed up with the navy, patrolling the East Coast for German U-boats; during a brief leave he married his girlfriend, Anne; just after the war ended she gave birth to a daughter, Alexandra; just before Alexandra’s fourth birthday the child died. Fuller coped by drinking heavily, repeatedly cheating on his wife, and going into business with his father-in-law. The company was called Stockade, and it made bricks out of wood shavings mixed with lime plaster and sugar. The bricks had two vertical holes in them: You piled them up and then poured concrete down the holes to form strong pillars. This promised to make building a home massively faster, cheaper, and easier, but as you might have noticed, most houses are not currently made from blocks of wood shavings and sugar. The company failed to get off the ground. Fuller was simply not a very effective businessman; in the end, the board of Stockade kicked him out.

The young Buckminster Fuller was one of the great American archetypes. The roving, hustling, odd-jobbing entrepreneur, messianically self-confident, totally persistent, but also totally inept. When he first met Anne she was dating a friend of his; he barged in anyway. She told him they would never be together; he bombarded her with violets and roses and letter—“You are the wife of my heart and soul, and nothing can stop me from fighting and fighting just for you”—until she gave in. He was a grand fabulist of himself. During this period, he claimed to have been one of the best scholars at Harvard; he failed to complete a single course. He claimed to have foiled a German plot to land saboteurs on the New England coast; he’d stolen the story from a silent movie called The Eagle’s Eye (1918). He claimed to have been the first man to land a plane in the state of Maine, which he wasn’t, and to have been present for the first transatlantic radio communication, which he also wasn’t. These were the men who built the American century: millions of magnificent, delusional losers, all scurrying around for their one big break.

Shortly after getting the boot from Stockade, Fuller thought he’d found his. The idea of a completely new way of building homes had been a good one, but the Stockade system simply wasn’t ambitious enough. Fuller saw where the trends were going. Increasingly, everything people bought was standardized and mass-produced; the world was exploding in vast new economies of scale. Why not homes? There was a thought experiment he liked. Imagine if, before you bought a car, you had to hire someone to design it, then some craftsmen to build it, while applying for permission from your banker and your local government every step of the way. The people of the future would be living in mass-produced houses for the same reason that they drove mass-produced cars. And Fuller was going to be the person who sold them.

HIS DESIGN WAS CALLED the Dymaxion House, with Dymaxion being a portmanteau of dynamic, maximum, and tension. (This was the 1930s; Fuller assumed that people in the future would use a lot of awkward, ungainly words like dymaxion—and he was right, but only because we ended up taking so many prescription drugs.) The tension was the really significant element. Later, he pointed out that humanity had lived in homes built on the principle of compression, piling weight on the earth’s surface, since the Stone Age. What broke us out of that static world were oceangoing ships: keels made from tensile arcs of wood, sails straining against the wind. Compression is static; tension moves. The challenge was to turn the principles behind a Portuguese carrack or a suspension bridge into a modest family home. The Dymaxion House was built around a central mast, which would plug into the power and water network. High-tension spokes radiated from this mast to the ground, held up by rings to form a kind of dome. This dome was then clad in aluminum panels. It would cost $3,000 and could be put up in a day. If you wanted to move, an airship would pick your home up by the mast and set it down again. Fuller spent years hawking his Dymaxion House to anyone who would listen. He made drawings and models and filed patents for its components, and eventually it started getting attention among the architectural avant-garde. Everyone seemed to agree that this was the shape of the future, but nobody wanted to put up the money for the enormous industrial system necessary to get mass production going.

Fuller decided to compromise. His first product would be a Dymaxion Car, conceived as a piece of the house capable of detaching from the main structure; eventually, he insisted, it would be able to fly around on “jet stilts,” but for now he was content to build a “ground taxiing” model. He managed to raise $1,500 in funding from a curious socialite and set about making his prototype. Building the Dymaxion Car essentially involved buying a Ford Tudor (which swallowed up $450 of that initial investment), taking it apart, and then rearranging the pieces in a new chassis. This Frankencar was three-wheeled, with two at the front and steered by the one at the back. It was teardrop-shaped and covered in aluminum panels mounted over a wooden framework, which made it nicely aerodynamic but also meant that at high speeds the tail would lift off the ground, rendering it impossible to steer. Only a few months after his prototype was unveiled, Fuller had it driven to Chicago so a visiting British aviator could admire the design. As the aviator was being chauffeured down Lake Shore Drive, the vehicle crashed and killed its driver. The Dymaxion Car was never mass produced. Fuller had started by observing how stupid it would be to slowly and painstakingly craft cars one by one; somehow, he’d ended up doing exactly that.

But he didn’t let his failure in manufacturing and selling a product hold him back. In 1943, he decided to plan a new economy for the country of Brazil. He claimed his expertise had been requested by the Brazilian government; it had not. His report argued that Brazil could modernize its economy by skipping ground infrastructure entirely. Instead of building ports or railways, the country should go “trackless,” saturation-bombing the Amazon rainforest to clear space for new factories connected to an enormous sky port. The Brazilians did not follow his advice. Unbothered, he churned out books and articles, advancing himself as a prophet of the new, totally administered world that already seemed to be taking shape out of the ruins of World War II: postcapitalist, postcommunist, spun from the high-tension lattice connecting industry and logistics and human demand. He developed concepts like ephemeralization: the observation that as industry becomes more advanced, its physical footprint tends to shrink and the inputs of materials and labor required diminish. If efficiency means doing more with less, he wrote, eventually there would be nothing left at all except “a pure scientific abstraction of energy control,” at which point it would be possible to do anything and everything. He started talking a lot about “Universe,” always without the definite article, which he defined as an “omni-interaccommodative complex of unique and eternal generalized principles.” He didn’t coin the phrase “Spaceship Earth” but acted as if he had, and people believed him. We are all on a raft sailing through space, he liked to say, and if we want to achieve our mission we all need to work together. This sounds inoffensive. What he meant was that the entire world needs to be organized like a crew, with architects and engineers—people like him—giving the orders.

EVENTUALLY, ALL OF Fuller’s ideas found a definite shape. The ancestor of the geodesic dome was something called the Dymaxion Map. (Fuller appended the word dymaxion to basically everything he did, whether or not it involved dynamism or tension.) This map preserved the outline and size of the continents by splitting the planet into a series of triangles and projecting them onto an unfolded icosahedron. The process involved sacrificing any singular or comprehensible north or south, but that was the point: In Universe there is no north or south. Eventually, Fuller landed on the idea of reversing the procedure by building a sphere out of triangles. Like the Dymaxion House, the geodesic dome could be mass produced; unlike the Dymaxion House, it didn’t need anyone’s funding for a prototype. He built one himself out of Venetian blinds. You can dent or deform a dome, and it’ll spring right back into place. A self-supporting dome would enclose the maximum amount of space with the minimum amount of building materials. It was ephemeralization in action. It was almost ludicrously cheap. He had finally come up with a design that could actually be built at scale.

And domes were built. The Pentagon bought some to house its radar antennae, and the Marine Corps bought more to hide away in preparation for nuclear war. Ford Motor Company enlisted Fuller’s services for its headquarters in Dearborn. Another dome was put up as the US pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal. But Fuller kept seeking more and more applications for his idea. Domes underwater. A floating geodesic sphere-city called Cloud 9, which could hover above the earth’s surface by making the air inside a few degrees warmer than the surrounding atmosphere. He kept threatening to build a three-kilometer dome over Manhattan, for reasons that were not entirely clear.

His fixation on this shape is hard to understand. But maybe it has something to do with what happened back in 1927, when Buckminster Fuller was thirty-two years old, bankrupt, and miserable. He’d just been fired from Stockade. He had no idea how he could support his wife and newborn daughter. He sat by the lakeside in Chicago, staring out at the water, and decided to kill himself. Suddenly, he felt himself lifted off the ground by an unseen hand. A voice told him: “You do not have the right to eliminate yourself; you do not belong to you. You belong to Universe.” Later, he said that he was inside a ball of light, “a sort of sparkling kind of sphere.”

EVERYONE KNOWS that God is shaped like a sphere.

Fine; not everyone. God can also be an elderly man with a big gray beard. When Christian artists have chosen to depict him as an abstract shape, sometimes, on the basis of the doctrine of the Trinity, they show him as a floating triangle. But God-as-sphere seems to make the most intuitive sense. Borges records that “the rhapsodist Xenophanes of Colophon, tired of the Homeric verses he recited from city to city, denounced the poets for giving the gods anthropomorphic traits and proposed to the Greeks a single God who was an eternal sphere.” According to Diogenes Laërtius, Xenophanes also believed that “the substance of God is spherical.” In the Timaeus Plato writes that God made the universe in the shape of a sphere, “round as from a lathe and every way equidistant from the center, as was natural and suitable to him. He was finished and smooth…. And he moved in a circle turning within himself, which is the most intellectual of motions.” (In the same dialogue, Plato assigns other, lesser shapes to the elements. Atoms of earth, being heavy and stable, are cubes; fire is tetrahedral; air is octahedral; water icosahedral. The dodecahedron, meanwhile, has another, more mysterious, more cosmic purpose: It was used in “the delineation of the universe” and “as a model for the twelvefold division of the Zodiac.”) Parmenides wrote that there is only one thing that genuinely exists, and that thing is a sphere. In the medieval Liber XXIV Philosophorum, widely attributed to the mythical sage Hermes Trismegistus, one of the definitions of God is as a “sphaera infinita cuius centrum est ubique circumferentia vero nusquam,” or an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. The Middle Ages absolutely loved that line; it was repeated by Alain of Lille, Meister Eckhart, and Marsilio Ficino. Later, Blaise Pascal said it too; the people who’ve repeated it since, usually cite Pascal as the originator. When God appears in Dante’s Paradise, it’s as three equal circles.

Shapes are purer than things. There have always been some people who were convinced that the best way to divine God’s nature and intention is not through the world or the word but through geometry. For a while, sacred geometry looked like an entirely viable science. In his 1596 Mysterium Cosmographicum, Johannes Kepler tries to demonstrate that the orbits of the planets can be described in terms of the regular solids Plato describes in the Timaeus: that God really had built the world out of tetrahedrons and octahedrons. The book comes with a lot of fun esoteric diagrams of the geometric structure of the universe, with the heavenly spheres nestled inside cosmic polygons. Thomas Browne devoted his 1658 Garden of Cyrus to rhapsodizing over the quincunx, a pattern of circles and lines that ends up revealing the mystical properties of the number five. “All things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again; according to the ordainer of order and mystical Mathematicks of the City of Heaven.” Sacred geometry involves a lot of the same objects as its more respectable cousin, but its methods are very different: It’s interested in balance, symmetry, cool new ways of producing interesting patterns. Expanding from Plato, the sacred geometers come up with shapes like Metatron’s Cube, a diagram of the tetrahedrons connecting the vertices of a cube overlaid with thirteen circles, through which, according to various patchouli-scented experts online, the archangel Metratron oversees the flow of divine energy into the Universe. These currents are less interested in awkward, irregular quirks of our universe, like the irrationality of pi. Kepler did eventually work out the laws of planetary motion, but to his disappointment they ended up not having anything to do with the Platonic solids. He died without ever quite accepting his own discovery. The story goes that when Hippasus discovered that the holy sphere is not made up of nice, friendly integers, the Pythagoreans drowned him in the sea.

I think this is the tradition to which Buckminster Fuller belongs. He claimed to have had a major insight while patrolling the coast of Maine for U-boats, as he watched the water bubbling in his wake. He knew that to describe a circle you had to use pi, and pi is irrational and therefore can never be fully resolved. “When nature makes one of those bubbles,” he wondered, “how many places did she have to carry out pi before she discovered you can’t resolve it? And at what point does nature decide to make a fake bubble? I don’t think nature is turning out any fake bubbles; I think nature’s not using pi.”

When I described the process by which he came up with his geodesic dome, I left out a lot of steps. First, it involved the pattern of the most efficient packing of twelve spheres around a central sphere, which just so happens to broadly resemble Metatron’s Cube. If you draw lines to connect the centers of these spheres—another standby in sacred geometry—you get a solid Fuller started calling the “vector equilibrium.” (Originally, his name for this new shape was—no surprises here—the Dymaxion. He seems to have genuinely believed that he discovered it. In fact, it’s called the cuboctahedron, and it was first described by Archimedes.) Rotating a vector equilibrium produces the pattern of lines that form a geodesic dome. In Synergetics, his enormous geometrical magnum opus from 1975, Fuller writes that the vector equilibrium is the true shape and basis of Universe, and the lines between his spheres demonstrate that “unity is inherently two.” Synergetics also explains that “numerologically, 59865279171 = 6” and “four produces a plus fourness,” while “five produces a minus fourness.” The whole book is like this. None of this is mathematics. None of it makes sense.

THE POLITE WORD for what Fuller was doing is mysticism. But he was the first of a brand new species: the business mystic. For Fuller, the order inherent in Universe wouldn’t be revealed through prayer or grace or ecstatic communion with the divine; you got there by starting a company and setting up a production line. All that practical emphasis meant he could pretend to be a figure like Henry Ford or Frederick Winslow Taylor; maybe he even believed it himself. But he was one of the wizards.

If Fuller couldn’t see it, others could. By the 1960s, Buckminster Fuller was a short, bald, aging man who worked with the military, supported the Vietnam War, wore the same dark suit along with a pair of Coke-bottle glasses, talked a lot about the power of industry, and wanted to build a basically stifling global technocratic order—and yet somehow he had become one of the heroes of the emerging counterculture. Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin invited him to deliver a talk to the Yippies. Drop City, the first hippie commune, tried to construct a utopian community of artists and lovers out of the “garbage of America,” rearranged into geodesic domes. Domes were everywhere in hippie circles: If you wanted to live off the grid, if you wanted to go back to the land, there’s a good chance you’d do it in a dome. Fuller was fulfilling million-dollar orders for highly engineered domes to be put up by shadowy Cold War agencies, and meanwhile handmade versions were sprouting up across America. In 1968, a piece of samizdat called the Dome Cookbook was circulated by one Steve Baer: It contained the “chord factors,” the list of figures and ratios needed to properly construct a geodesic dome. Instead of the pinnacle of rationalized, centralized mass production, dome homes became an early object of data piracy.

And then there was the Whole Earth Catalog, published the same year. Stewart Brand’s infamous counterculture magazine was inspired by his meetings with Fuller; it took its name and its ethos from Fuller’s insistence on regarding the earth as a single system. Early editions of the Catalog were essentially Fullerian propaganda for the hippie generation: diagrams of tensile structures and poems with lines like “I see God in / the instruments and the mechanisms that work / reliably,” alongside a vague smattering of Jung and Norman O. Brown. But if you’ve heard of the Catalog, it’s probably not because of geodesic domes. As the 1970s wore on, each issue was more and more devoted to one instrument in particular: the computer. Brand took Fuller’s ideas and ran with them until they ended up being the seedbed of Silicon Valley; today, the Catalog is remembered as the book that preempted and invented the internet. Along the way, it ended up nurturing a new system of thought. The California Ideology was a hybrid of countercultural rebellion, Randian individualism, Austrian economics, cybernetics, McLuhanite media theory, and Fuller’s holisticism. Its adherents proposed that in aggregate, undirected human behavior within a system—like the free market or a computer network—will produce and express a profound mathematical order. In other words, they claimed to have found, beneath the messiness of contingent reality, the perfect tetrahedrons and octahedrons out of which God had built the world. And those who understood that order could control the rest of us by letting us do whatever we wanted. In the end, there never was any tension between Fuller’s technocratic world order and the hippie program of tuning in, turning on, and dropping out. Someday we might discover that total freedom and total control are exactly the same thing.

While these people might have been living in Fuller’s Universe, they were no longer living under geodesic domes. Stewart Brand ended up writing a kind of eulogy for the design: “Domes leaked, always. The angles between the facets could never be sealed successfully. If you gave up and tried to shingle the whole damn thing—dangerous process, ugly result—the nearly horizontal shingles on top still took in water…. When my generation outgrew the domes, we simply left them empty, like hatchlings leaving their eggshells.” Lloyd Kahn, another Fuller admirer and Catalog editor his first two books were called Domebook One and Domebook Two (1970 and 1972)—also abandoned the form. He wrote a list of “what’s good about 90 degree walls.” “They don’t catch dust, rain doesn’t sit on them, easy to add to; gravity, not tension, holds them in place. It’s easy to build in counters, shelves, arrange furniture, bathtubs, beds. We are 90 degrees to the earth.”

Mathematically, the domes were perfect. Somehow, that didn’t matter. The real world is not a vector equilibrium.

THIS IS WHY I said that Fuller was the twentieth century. Before he died, in 1983, he managed to bring together all its weird convolutions: the repressive globe-girdling master plans, the wild individualist enthusiasms, and the strange synthesis between the two that ended up dominating our lives. Today, a kind of business mysticism seems to be the dominant ideology on TikTok; they don’t know it, but the numerology girlbosses are Fuller’s heirs. Anyone can embody their age; Buckminster Fuller managed to embody three entirely different ages—high modernity, counterculture, and whatever it is we have now—while never being anything other than himself. He might have been wrong about almost everything, but he really was a fascinating figure. So it’s a shame that Inventor of the Future, Alec Nevala-Lee’s 650-page biography of the man, is one of the worst and most boring books I’ve ever read.

The depth of Nevala-Lee’s research is extraordinary: He has seemingly managed to dig up the details of every single meeting Fuller ever attended. Unfortunately, he’s decided to tell us about every single one of them. The result is a book that feels less like the life of Buckminster Fuller and more like his appointment book. For five hundred pages, we’re bombarded with an unremittingly tedious barrage of people who show up, interact in some way with Fuller, and then vanish. So, for instance, in 1958 Fuller returns to Chicago to teach at the Institute of Design at the invitation of its director, Serge Chermayeff, and we get this:

Poor Brownjohn never appears in the story again. Those are the only two things we ever learn about him: Bond films, heroin. Why are we being told this? Because it happened, I guess. Imagine dozens of these potted biographies on every page, hundreds in every chapter, an endless gnat cloud of mere facts. Every time Fuller is commissioned to build a dome, we learn how much it cost, how it was received, and how badly it leaked. Then he gets another gig and we hear pretty much the same story again.

Maybe the most egregious example comes in 1970. Fuller is lecturing at the International University of Art in Venice, where his talks are attended by none other than Ezra Pound. This prophet of another modernity, now permanently disgraced; this hollow, guilty ghost; this piece of the fascist dream still wedged in the Technicolor age like an impacted tooth. And now he’s meeting Buckminster Fuller, a very different kind of deeply fallible genius but one who dreams of a new, total global order. What would they have talked about? What does their meeting represent? Here’s how Nevala-Lee renders it: “They shared pomegranates for lunch, and in the afternoon, they were filmed on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, where Fuller commented on the beauty of the pinecones.” That’s pretty much it.

I don’t mean that Nevala-Lee is entirely uninterested in the bigger questions and contexts surrounding Fuller’s life and work. He does, for instance, emphasize the link between Fuller and the tech industry that frothed in his wake. The book’s introduction is an account of the 1980 meeting between an eighty-five-year-old Fuller and a twenty-five-year-old Steve Jobs. But he doesn’t wonder whether it’s significant that the companies that now govern our lives are ultimately rooted in Fuller’s industrial Neoplatonism. The meeting is there to situate this book in relation to Walter Isaacson’s equally tedious 2011 biography of Jobs—and also so Nevala-Lee can describe Fuller as “the original digital nomad.”

Maybe the biography is just the wrong medium. There’s a well-oiled industry mass-producing these tedious, pedantic door stoppers about designated Great Men. (Nevala-Lee is clearly trying to corner one particular end of this market. In 2019, he was a Hugo Award finalist—not for writing a piece of actual science fiction, but for a group biography of John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and other actual writers. This is where we’ve ended up: unable to create much of anything, just reworking the lives of the people who once did.) Sooner or later, Buckminster Fuller was bound to get the Steve Jobs treatment, but since he was always part businessman and part mystic—and much more successful in mysticism than in business—that treatment inevitably fails. There are other forms.

IN 1971, A BRITISH filmmaker named John Boorman visited some of the communes of Northern California. He was there researching a film he wanted to write, set a few years in the future, about a student who mysteriously vanishes and the professor who searches for her among the intentional communities of the hippie hinterlands. Boorman was a self-declared Marxist, but he was a weirder, more moss-flecked kind of Marxist than you usually encountered in the ’70s. He was into Jung, the Grail Cycle, deep folklore, the green and whispering world. He’d written a script for a film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings that drenched Tolkien’s half-Christian narrative in sex and psychedelia, but the story failed to satisfy him. “The more I worked on the Tolkien, the more it diminished—in the end, Tolkien always really avoids the big issues,” he said. But his time in the “mostly rather sterile” hippie communes seemed to raise the big issues: He came away with an idea for something much bigger than a story about a missing student. These utopian communities, Boorman realized, were small fragments of the end of the world.

The result was 1974’s Zardoz, a luridly kitschy cult masterpiece that, most famously, stars Sean Connery in nothing but tight red underwear and a pair of bandoliers. Connery plays Zed, who is an Exterminator: He rides around a gray, treeless post-apocalyptic wasteland raping and killing any human he sees. Every so often an enormous stone head descends from the sky to spew out guns for the Exterminators and remind them of their creed: “The gun is good! The penis is evil! The penis shoots seeds and makes new life to poison the earth with a plague of men, as once it was. But the gun shoots death and purifies the earth of the filth of Brutals. Go forth, and kill!” Eventually Zed gets curious; he sneaks inside the stone head to see where it goes. Its destination is the Vortex: an oasis surrounded by an invisible protective dome. The Vortex is full of attractive old country houses interspersed with futuristic plastic bubbles. This is where the techno-scientific elite ride out the apocalypse; thanks to their technology, they are all beautiful, immortal, and totally sexless. They spend their days feasting and laughing and punishing each other for minor social infractions; there’s an all-pervading artificial intelligence that governs every instant of their infinite, frivolous lives. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, their technology took them to distant stars, but that turned out to be “another dead end.” Now they just wait, shipping guns to the wasteland to keep its population under control. Eventually, Zed understands why he’s here: He has come to bring these people the gift of death.

In Against the Vortex (Zer0 Books, 2023), Anthony Galluzzo attempts to uncover Zardoz’s true nature: not a fun cult classic, but a potent political critique, ranged against Buckminster Fuller and his present-day heirs. Galluzzo divides the twentieth-century counterculture into two streams. There are the “hippie modernists,” people like Stewart Brand, with their utopian dreams: brand new societies, brand new ways of living, powered by brand new technologies, built out of brand new materials. Maybe we can even overcome death. This current has its heirs among the techno-libertarians of Silicon Valley, but Galluzzo also sees a similar tendency on the left, in the movement for “fully automated luxury communism” or the Promethean account of socialism as humanity’s self-liberation from nature. No matter how it’s dressed up, though, Galluzzo sees it ending up in the same place: If any of these utopias were ever achieved, the result would be the hollow, listless, genocidal world of the Vortex.

But there’s another tendency, one Galluzzo calls Critical Aquarianism, embodied by people like Boorman, Ivan Illich, James Lovelock, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Unlike the hippie modernists, Critical Aquarians have made their peace with limits. They don’t need to constantly transcend everything that makes us human in the name of some all-consuming progress. They are also utopians, of a type—but while modernist utopianism is a denial of what actually exists, the utopianism of the Critical Aquarians is different: It’s rooted in the cycles of human life. Galluzzo writes, “To truly love life: we must accept death. To build a better life, individually and in common: we must accept death. To deny death leads to a culture of death, as we project death outward onto others and the earth in attempting to avoid and repress our own finitude.”

If the geodesic dome ended up being the shape of the technocratically administered apocalypse, it’s because its perfection is deathly. This kind of cold, sacred functionalism doesn’t make any sense within our world, but it’s biding its time, waiting until everything we love is gone, when our lives are swept away, and it can bloom.

I THINK GALLUZZO is right that Zardoz is the true biography of Buckminster Fuller and his ilk; it’s definitely a more insightful one than Nevala-Lee’s effort. (Meanwhile, at a nice zippy 88 pages, Against the Vortex is a lot more digestible.) But in his coda, Galluzzo presents a vision of what his own “limited utopia” would look like. It’s a world of small towns “integrated into their bioregions, surrounded by belts of farmland, organized along agro-ecological lines that blend traditional and contemporary modes of farming.” There’s a renewable power grid, but any computers must be “used solely in the service of eco-human ends coordinating the action of these various communes, when such coordination is necessary.” You’ll get around by bicycle or animal power. Long journeys will involve, inevitably, dirigibles. As far as I can tell, you will be a farmer. Everyone will be a farmer.

Maybe you find this vision appealing; for what it’s worth, I can only stare at the words in dull horror. I would much, much rather live in a world of faceless mass-produced domes than in Galluzzo’s virtuous shtetl. In fact, I think I’d rather eat a faceless, mass-produced dome than live in Galluzzo’s virtuous shtetl. As much as he tries to reclaim the world for the earthworms, his “degrowth utopia” is still a utopia: the vision of a pure form, one that necessarily involves shearing off some of the messy contingencies of the world. Fuller built his Universe out of sacred geometry and assembly lines—but it couldn’t encompass the fact that humans walk upright. Galluzzo, meanwhile, builds his reactionary-socialist agroecological wonderland out of all the fundamental limitations intrinsic to human life—but it can’t encompass the aspect of human life that wants to invent cars that can’t steer; mass-produced homes that aren’t mass-produced; and mad, sweeping, geometrical visions of the ultimate order totally unencumbered by human limitations.

All these visions may have failed, but they still feel like an important part of our condition. It’s not something to be abolished lightly. Buckminster Fuller may have been the greatest recent avatar for this impulse: the most lurid visionary and the most brilliant failure, a man who invented the world we live in by mistake while he was trying to do something else. But as I’ve tried to show, the yearning for that geometrically perfect cosmos didn’t begin with Fuller. It’s much, much older than modernity. This messy, contingent reality we live in is nothing more than the rubble of a thousand failed utopias.