This project is being led by John Gerstner, a writer and former communications executive whose work has long explored the intersection of technology, organizations, and human systems.
The Buckminster Challenge grew out of a conviction that some of the most urgent questions of our time are not primarily technical, but systemic. Questions about abundance, work, power, coordination, and meaning have circulated for decades, often without resolution. This inquiry revisits those questions openly, in public, and without assuming final answers.
In 1982, Gerstner interviewed Buckminster Fuller in what would become Fuller’s final published conversation. At the time, the interview felt significant. Its deeper implications took much longer to register. Fuller’s assertions—that humanity could support everyone in abundance, that politics as practiced were invalid, and that war was obsolete—were easy to dismiss as utopian. They are harder to ignore today.
This project is not an attempt to preserve Fuller’s ideas or defend them uncritically. It is an effort to take them seriously enough to test them under contemporary conditions, particularly in light of artificial intelligence and accelerating technological change. If abundance is technically possible, then the persistence of scarcity, poverty, and conflict demands examination—not as moral failures alone, but as potential failures of design.
Gerstner’s earlier work spans corporate communications, organizational strategy, media, and technology. Much of it focused on how institutions talk to themselves and to the world, and how those conversations shape behavior. That background informs this inquiry, but does not determine its conclusions.
This is an intentionally open-ended project. Chapters present positions rather than conclusions, and responses are treated as part of the work rather than commentary on it. The goal is not consensus, persuasion, or prediction, but inquiry: to explore whether long-standing assumptions still hold, and what might replace them if they do not.
The direction of this work will evolve over time, shaped as much by challenge and response as by authorship. Readers are invited to engage with the ideas directly, question their assumptions, and contribute where they see fit.
