(Excerpt from WealthBooster Magazine -- Issue #118 -- December 26, 2002)
The essence of ephemeralization is doing more with less, using fewer resources to achieve more, making better use of your time, etc.
Below are two articles, the first from: http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/leisure/bucky.html
Richard Buckminster Fuller, Jr. was born in Milton, Massachusetts, on the 12th of July 1895. He introduced ground-breaking ideas into the fields of architecture, design, art, engineering, cartography and mathematics and became known as "the planet's friendly genius." Fuller called himself a "Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Scientist" and committed his life to finding global strategies for making humankind "a success in the universe." He believed that human evolution could best be promoted by reforming the living environment through design on all levels rather than by reforming people through economics and/or politics.
Book Excerpt From Critical Path by Buckminster Fuller, 1982:
It is now possible to give every man, woman and child on Earth a standard of living comparable to that of a modern-day billionaire.
This is not an opinion or a hope -- it is an engineeringly demonstrable fact. This can be done using only the already proven technology and with the already mined, refined, and in-recirculating physical resources.
... This will be an inherently sustainable physical success for all humanity and all its generations to come. It can be accomplished not only within ten years but with the phasing out forever of all use of fossil fuels and atomic energy. Our technological strategy makes it incontrevertible that we can live luxuriously entirely on our daily Sun-radiation-and-gravity-produced income energy. The quantity of physical, cosmic energy wealth as radiation arriving aboard planet Earth each minute is greater than all the energy used annually by all humanity. World Game makes it eminently clear that we have four billion billionaires aboard our planet, as accounted by real wealth, which fact is obscured from public knowledge by the exclusively conceived and operated money game and its monopolized credit system accounting.
... We find all the no-life-support-wealth-producing people going to their 1980s jobs in their cars and buses, spending trillions of dollars' worth of petroleum daily to get to their no-wealth-producing jobs. It doesn't take a computer to tell you that it will save both Universe and humanity trillions of dollars a day to pay them handsomely to stay at home.
...
Ephemeralisation - humanity learning to do more with less
As a long-time student of foreign investment I saw a pattern developing. Between 1938 and 1940 I was on the editorial staff of Fortune magazine as its science and technology consultant, and my researchers harvested all the statistics for Fortune's tenth-anniversary issue, "USA and the World." In that issue I uncovered and was able to prove several new socioeconomic facts -- for the first time in the history of industrial economics:
- the economic health of the American -- or any industrial -- economy was no longer disclosed (as in the past) by the total tonnage of its product output, but by the amount of electrical energy generated by that activity; tonnage had ceased to be the criterion because
- we were doing so much more given work with so much less pounds of materials, ergs of energy, and seconds of time per given function as to occasion ever newer, lighter, and stronger metallic alloys, chemicals, and electronics.
Though at that time universally used as the number-one guide to the state of economic health of any world nation, tonnage no longer represented prosperity. The amount of energy being electrically generated and consumed became the most sensitive telltale of economic health....
There is not a chapter in any book in economics anywhere about doing more with less. Economists traditionally try to maximize what you have, but the idea that you could go from wire to wireless or from visible structuring to invisible alloy structuring did not occur to them at all. It was outside their point of view -- beyond their range of vision. Economists are specialists trained to look only at one particular thing.
In my Shelter magazine of 1930-33 and in my 1938 book Nine Chains to the Moon, I identified this progressive doing-more-with-less as ephemeralization. Though Fortune magazine also published my 1922 concept of ephemeralization in its tenth-anniversary issue of 1940 in a prominent manner, and despite ephemeralization having subsequently wrought epochal advancements in the standard of living for two billion previously deprived humans, ephemeralization is a phenomenon that in 1980 is as yet largely unknown to or overlooked by the world's professional economists. Nonetheless, the combination of accelerating acceleration and ephemeralization has now elevated 60 percent of all humanity from its year-1900 99-percent poverty level into realization of an everyday standard of living superior to that enjoyed by any kings, tycoons, or other power-commanding humans prior to the twentieth century.
Kirby Urner, in the R. Buckminster Fuller FAQ, wrote:
"Fuller's point in Critical Path was that even many of those gainfully employed are doing nothing very vital to the creation of sustainable life support systems. Market pricing is just the tip of the iceberg of a system of pushes and pulls. At the far end of the cheap jeans is the barrel of a gun, pointed at people who cannot prove legal tenure to the land their ancestors farmed for generations. The prices we pay have a lot of brute force behind them, not just self-interested parties freely making choices. Making cash scarce to keep it valuable, by making those who have it fear the miserable state of those who do not, is a coercive system, not a freedom-loving one."
You can find out more about Bucky Fuller at the following sites:
Buckminster Fuller Virtual Institute
SEE ALSO: Buckminster Fuller Dome Seeks Donor (Current owner of Bucky's Carbondale Illinois dome seeks buyer to make it a Memorial Park for Bucky and his wife Anne.)
Second article from: https://www.worldtrans.org/essay/ephemeralization.html
by Flemming Funch, 11 Mar 95.
Buckminster Fuller was very fond of the word "ephemeralization", which he used roughly in the sense of "progressively accomplishing more with less". A gradually smaller and smaller amount of materials and effort will accomplish more and more useful functions. We get better and better at using materials in more sophisticated ways, so we need less and less quantity of materials.
Bucky gives many examples. It took Magellan two years to sail around the planet in a wooden sailing ship in 1520. 350 years later it took a steel steamship two months to do the same. 75 years later a plane, made of metal alloys, took 2 weeks to fly around the planet. 35 years later a space capsule, made of exotic metals, takes 1 hour to circle the planet. Continuously the materials used get lighter and stronger and more versatile.
Not only can we do more with less, the rate of doing-more-with-less-ness is increasing. There is an acceleration taking place.
We can also very well project out that the eventual result of increasingly doing more with less is doing everything with nothing. Bucky gives examples of how war shifted to being fought more effectively with PR and economics (i.e. with no equipment) rather than with lots of heavy equipment.
Now, the example of the Internet readily comes to mind. The Internet represents a degree of ephemeralization that allows one individual to influence or interact with hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people, with a use of resources that is negligible.
For example, my Internet account costs $17.50 per month. I get on the average 150 messages per day and I send 15. I have two mailing lists where 400 people are having an ongoing discussion. I participate in about 10 other mailing lists and several newsgroups, together with thousands of members. I have a Web area where more than a 100 people visit every day and look at about 800 different documents with a total of 10 million bytes of information. About one person per day picks up one of the training manuals I've written from my ftp site.
If I were in the business of information (which I pretty much am) then that is a heck of a lot of action to get for $17.50. If somebody sends me a check for one of my training manuals, which happens about once per month, it would cost me in the neighborhood of the same $17.50 plus an hour of my time to go to the local copy shop and produce one paper copy, which I then need to package and send. And then maybe one person will be happy.
Somebody is bound to say: "Sure, but are you making any money off of that Internet stuff?" No, I am not, but that is not the point, unless my purpose in life is "making money" which it isn't. I accomplish a lot more of what I want with a lot less than what would previously have been required.
But now, this is the all fine in the area of information, that is ephemeralized now. Next would be other areas of life.
I would hardly have to work for money to pay for my Internet account. I could mow somebody's lawn once per month and that would take care of that. But unfortunately I still seem to need money for housing, transportation, food, energy, insurance, taxes and stuff like that. That is where we need ephemeralization next.
I have the suspicion that somebody is deliberately and artificially keeping these basics of life ineffective and expensive. Despite phenomenally accelerating technological changes, these necessities appear to take about the same trouble to acquire as they did 50 years ago. They offer more comfort and more features and they are somewhat more evenly distributed, but they still work roughly the same way. That doesn't quite add up when compared with the actual rate of technological change. Looks like somebody's trying to make us keep running around for money, rather than accomplishing the most with what we can and know.
So, I am very interested in anything that will ephemeralize other areas of our lives than information. I think it is inevitable that the means for doing so will appear, despite forces that might want to work the other way. I agree with Fuller that it is an inherent element in evolution.
It makes no sense to me that one would have to work half one's life to be able to pay for a box to come home to and sleep in. It makes even less sense to me that most of the western world has laws (building codes) decreeing that you can only build stuff in roughly the same ways.
I can't believe that a car is still this heavy 4 wheel metal thing with a fossil fuel engine. It is nicer to drive in than 50 years ago, but also somebody's trying to push the idea on us that it has to be much more complicated and take specialized technicians with specialized tools and computers to repair.
I would like the tools so I can build my car and my house by myself, just like I can set up my Web area by myself. And I'd like good enough tools so I can build some that others can use too, without wearing out my resources.
Energy is probably the most important area to get ephemeralized and put into people's hands. I don't want to buy energy, I'd like to buy some tools for making or acquiring energy that allow me to produce it for nothing from that point on. There should be no incremental cost for each unit of energy produced, just as a good Internet account shouldn't charge you anything per byte or per message.
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