[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.

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.

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.

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.

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 think that in the first place, why we can get excited about [Buckminster ] Fuller, why it's plausible that people might - why my publisher would publish this book [You belong to the universe] about it long after he's dead and irrelevant by many standards has to do with the fact that he was in a sense coming up with this job for himself that is the job that we now refer to when we speak about world change.

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.