[This is a mashup of Bucky samples edited to present his idea that we are now entering ‘humanity’s final exam.’ The text is drawn mainly from his early 1980s writings. I offer this as a whole greater than the sum of its parts, a synergetic Bucky symphony. - David]

We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims. But we are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully for much longer unless we see it as a whole and our fate as common. Humanity is moving ever deeper into a crisis without precedent brought about by evolution intent upon transforming humanity into an integrated harmonious whole, living sustainably at a higher standard of living than has ever been experienced.

Ninety-nine percent of humanity does not know that we have the option to make it on this planet. We do. We have the know-how to feed, clothe, and give every human on Earth a chance. We have the option for all humanity to make it successfully on this planet in this lifetime. An alternative to extinction does exist – by veering big business away from weaponry onto the accommodation of all humanity, a vastly larger and far more profitable enterprise for all.

Never before have the inequities and momentums of unthinking money-power been more glaringly evident. The great nations are simply the operating fronts of behind-the-scenes, vastly ambitious individuals who have become powerful because of their ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national scenery. To expose the 4.2 trillion dollar (c.1980) rip-off of the people by the largest corporations over the last hundred years will be a tall order of business.

But integrity is the essence of everything successful. Whether humanity is to continue and prosper on Spaceship Earth depends entirely on the integrity of the human individuals and not on the political and economic systems. If humanity does not opt for integrity we are through.

There’s a soon-to-occur critical moment when the responsibly inspired majority of humanity, faced with the complete discontinuity of the nationally contained techno-economic system, will accomplish a world-around reorientation of our planetary affairs. At this critical moment the majority will realize that to sustainingly support all humanity, we must employ all the resources all the time as a completely integrated system operating on its daily income of solar energy. This is already underway. Can it be accomplished before fear and ignorance preclude success?

Fortunately, things emerge in emergencies. So, don’t fight forces, use them. The social revolution can now realize full economic success for all, without toppling the economically successful minority, by instead elevating all humanity to a sustainable higher level of existing and interacting than any humans have heretofore experienced or dreamed.

This is humanity’s final exam, to be administered once, and it is pass/fail. Whether it is to be utopia or oblivion will be a touch-and-go race right up to the final moment, and each of us could make the difference. Only integrity is going to count. This has nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with economic systems. It has to do with the individual. Does the individual have the courage to really go along with the truth?

But the new economy is grounded in the fact that this assumption is no longer valid. In the new economy energy and materials are, for a fact, expensive and hard to get.

So in the new economy performance improvements in human labor and in materials and energy are valued and sought, with the emphasis on continually getting more and more from less and less – especially with respect to energy and materials, because we have barely begun to realize the possible improvements in this area.

In fact, most new growth in the new economy will derive from activities that either discover and disseminate improvements in materials and energy performance, or from activities that use such discoveries to dramatically shrink the energy and material used to things done. For example, in architecture this trend is now called ‘dematerialization,’ and it is rapidly rising in significance as a concern for design.

This trend has, of course, actually been with us for all time. More and more with less and less has always been a good core strategy for making money. But now we recognize that the accepted facts that underlie and drive most business decisions include the realization that energy and materials resources are expensive and scarce.

What we see happening in this new environment is the progressive substitution of knowledge and human capital for energy and materials. This often shows up as effort to use know how and knowledge producing social networks to reduce costs, i.e. – to substitute knowledge and human capital for finance capital. And it works.

Indeed, the fundamental capital of the old economy was finance capital, with access to finance acting as the primary lever controling growth in the economy. But in the new economy the fundamental capital is human and knowledge capital, with access to information and communications resources, i.e. – to the converged digital media, and with participation in emerging new social networks platformed in the converged digital media, acting as the primary lever controling growth in the new economy.

And the focus of this new capital base is, of course, access to and use of the internet. It is migration of all processes of coordination, communication and control onto the internet, and participation in and use of the emerging new internet-based social media through the creation and operation of digital media based social networks. And I note here that social netorks of various forms have always been the primary engine for the production of both human and knowledge capital, with significant historical examples being the networks of conversation in the coffee houses of Old Amsterdam and London in the 15th and 16th centuries, or the networks of authors and subscribers to scientific and technical journals in the ’70s and ’80s, etc.

So exactly at the moment the investment banks and stock exchanges are failing all around us, as the old economy gives way, the new digital converged media are giving birth to incredible new leveraged means for generating human and knowledge capital, including: crowd sourced instant access to knowledge thru tools like Google and Wikipedia; twitter-based communities of shared interest that emerge, function and dissolve in hours, migration of all business operating processes into the computing cloud, and the accelerating migration of our interface with all this media onto iPhone-like devices that give us continual participation in a globally based engine of social network production.

One big point here is that the actual global economy is not failing or faltering. It is instead – transforming, shifting from the old finance capital base to the new social media base. And those clear headed enough to see the new way are going to prosper.

Another give point is this leaves us with entirely new questions, new lines of enquiry we desperately need to explore:

• How are knowledge and human capital generated? How destroyed?
• What are the implications for capital formation given all the converged media are pull, not push-based?
• How can we mitigate the dislocations of the transformation from the old to the new economic base?