World Game™ Workshop

top of the shelf

Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking

R. Buckminster Fuller

“During the decade leading up to the publication of Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, Buckminster Fuller has become something of an international culture hero and a lonely but eloquent optimist in a generation of professional prophets of doom…”Synergetics” is a comprehensive gathering, a kind of summa theological of Fuller’s mathematics, philosophy and design theories. It is all here – in 12 chapters, over 800 pages, charts, drawings, tables and digressions, from synergy to vector matrix to tensegrity to seven axes of symmetry to wrapability and beyond. The result is a major work, whose implications will be debated, acclaimed, questioned, and in some cases, attacked for years to come…You grope for analogies. The Notebooks of Leonardo, The Opera of Paracelsus, Pascal’s “Pensées.” Or Alexander Pope’s remark about Creation: “A mighty maze, but not without a plan.”  It is alternately brilliant and obscure, opaque and shot through with moments of poetry.”

Fuller’s was the first systematic “organicist” vision in the design world, the word used here not in the metaphorical sense, but in the technical one that issued from biological and philosophical circles in the 1920s and ‘30s around the principle of “organization.” Fuller had a profoundly scientific intuition, which meant that he was primarily interested in values such as beauty, elegance, and economy as they pertain to a solution, not to cloying ornamental, stylistic properties. 

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller

Alec Nevala-Lee

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Walter Rodney

An exemplary work of political, economic, and historical analysis, powerfully introduced by Angela Davis

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is an ambitious masterwork of political economy, detailing the impact of slavery and colonialism on the history of international capitalism. In this classic book, Rodney makes the unflinching case that African “mal-development” is not a natural feature of geography, but a direct product of imperial extraction from the continent, a practice that continues up into the present. Meticulously researched, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains a relevant study for understanding the so-called “great divergence” between Africa and Europe, just as it remains a prescient resource for grasping the multiplication of global inequality today.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

David Graeber and David Wengrow

For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.

Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume.

Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons

David Bollier and Silke Helfrich

From co-housing and agroecology to fisheries and open-source everything, people around the world are increasingly turning to 'commoning' to emancipate themselves from a predatory market-state system.

Free, Fair, and Alive presents a foundational re-thinking of the commons — the self-organized social system that humans have used for millennia to meet their needs. It offers a compelling vision of a future beyond the dead-end binary of capitalism versus socialism that has almost brought the world to its knees.

Written by two leading commons activists of our time, this guide is a penetrating cultural critique, table-pounding political treatise, and practical playbook. Highly readable and full of colorful stories, coverage includes:

• Internal dynamics of commoning

• How the commons worldview opens up new possibilities for change

• Role of language in reorienting our perceptions and political strategies

• Seeing the potential of commoning everywhere.

Free, Fair, and Alive provides a fresh, non-academic synthesis of contemporary commons written for a popular, activist-minded audience. It presents a compelling narrative: that we can be free and creative people, govern ourselves through fair and accountable institutions, and experience the aliveness of authentic human presence.

The rare metals war

Guillaume pitron

The resources race is on. Powering our digital lives and green technologies are some of the Earth’s most precious metals — but they are running out. And what will happen when they do?

The green-tech revolution will reduce our dependency on nuclear power, coal, and oil, heralding a new era free of pollution, fossil-fuel shortages, and crossborder tensions. But there is a hidden dark side to this seemingly utopian vision.

Award-winning journalist and documentary-maker Guillaume Pitron reveals that, by breaking free of fossil fuels, we are in fact setting ourselves up for a new dependence — on rare metals such as cobalt, gold, and palladium.

These are essential to electric vehicles, wind turbines, and solar panels, as well as our smartphones, computers, tablets, and other technologies. But we know very little about how rare metals are mined and traded, or their environmental, economic, and geopolitical costs; meanwhile, China has captured the lion’s share of the market and is using it to consolidate its position as a leading global power.

Handbook of Tyranny

Theo Deutinger

Handbook of Tyranny portrays the routine cruelties of the twenty-first century through a series of detailed non-fictional graphic illustrations. None of these cruelties represent extraordinary violence—they reflect day-to-day implementation of laws and regulations around the globe.

Every page of the book questions our current world of walls and fences, police tactics and prison cells, crowd control and refugee camps. The dry and factual style of storytelling through technical drawings is the graphic equivalent to bureaucratic rigidity born of laws and regulations. The level of detail depicted in the illustrations of the book mirror the repressive efforts taken by authorities around the globe.

The twenty-first century shows a general striving for an ever more regulated and protective society. Yet the scale of authoritarian intervention and their stealth design adds to the growing difficulty of linking cause and effect. Handbook of Tyranny gives a profound insight into the relationship between political power, territoriality and systematic cruelties.

Energy Slaves

By Stuart McMillen

Just as a sunken ship provides the opportunity for a coral reef to form, I used the launch of my Energy Slaves comic as an opportunity to create a host of essays about my thoughts on energy.

Energy Slaves is a thoughtful comic that weaves together multiple topics. I discuss environmental and civilisational issues involving energy consumption. I examine these issues both from both personal and societal levels.

After I completed and published the 84-page comic, I took time to ask myself “what does it all mean?”. This led to a 6,500 word essay, which I have split up into seven blog posts – each with plenty of artwork. The essays each cover distinct topics, but could easily be read as one flowing thread:

1. Hidden in plain sight: our invisible slaves

2. The mind, but not the muscle: understanding Energy Slaves

3. Building up steam: our civilisation’s history of collecting energy slaves

4. Diminishing returns: understanding ‘net energy’ and ‘EROEI’

5. Powered by energy: the many layers of civilisation

6. Living within limits: low-energy lifestyles

7. All part of the problem: our collective wastes of energy

Critical Path

R. Buckminster Fuller

“In our comprehensive reviewing of published, academically accepted history we continually explore for the invisible power structure behind the visible kings, prime ministers, czars, emperors, presidents and other official head men, as well as the underlying, hidden causes of individual wars and their long, drawn-out campaigns not disclosed by the widely published and popularly accepted causes of those wars.”

“What my experience taught me was that if the physical laws thus far found by science to be governing Universe were intelligently and fearlessly employed in the production of ever higher performances per each pound of material, erg of energy, and second of time invested, it would be feasible to take care of all humanity at higher standards of living than had ever been known by any humans - and to do so sustainingly. Evolution seemed to be operating in such a manner as to drive humans to inadvertent accomplishment of their own success.”

”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 at one particular thing.”

Global Energy Interconnection

Zhenya Liu

Global energy network is an important platform to guarantee effective exploitation of global clean energy and ensure reliable energy supply for everybody. Global Energy Interconnection analyzes the current situation and challenges of global energy development, provides the strategic thinking, overall objective, basic pattern, construction method and development mode for the development of global energy network. Based on the prediction of global energy and electricity supply and demand in the future, with the development of UHV AC/DC and smart grid technologies, this book offers new solutions to drive the safe, clean, highly efficient and sustainable development of global energy.

The aim of GEIDCO is to promote the worldwide interconnection of power grids by 2050 in order to optimize the use of electricity coming from every power plant on the planet, employing supercritical UHV (ultra-high voltage) lines for fast, long-distance power transmission as well as smart grids to boost end-use efficiency.

GEI could be the backbone of a decarbonized world economy thanks to the full exploitation of renewables and clean technologies.

the world for sale: Money, power and the traders who barter the earth’s resources

Javier Blas and Jack Farchy

The modern world is built on commodities — from the oil that fuels our cars to the metals that power our smartphones. We rarely stop to consider where they came from. But we should.

In The World For Sale, two leading journalists lift the lid on one of the least scrutinized corners of the world economy: the workings of the billionaire commodity traders who buy, hoard and sell the Earth’s resources.

It is the story of how and handful of swashbuckling businessmen become indispensable cogs in global markets: enabling an enormous expansion in international trde and connecting resource-rich countries — no matter how corrupt or war-torn — with the world’s financial centers. And it is the story of how some traders acquired untold political power, right under the noses of western regulators and politicians — helping Saddam Hussein to sell his oil, fueling the Libyan rebel army during the Arab Spring, and funneling cash to Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin in spite of western sanctions. They result is an eye-opening tour through the wildest frontiers of the global economy, as well as a revelatory guide to how capitalism really works.

Geotherapy: Innovative Methods of Soil Fertility Restoration, Carbon Sequestration, and Reversing CO2 Increase

Thomas J. Goreau, Ronal W. Larson, Joanna Campe

Global climate change, increasing pollution, and continued rapid population growth is wreaking havoc on the planet. Stabilizing the environment at safe levels requires a large-scale restoration of damaged ecosystems. Geotherapy: Innovative Methods of Soil Fertility Restoration, Carbon Sequestration, and Reversing CO2 Increase outlines the basic concepts of geotherapy and highlights the importance of healing the biosphere’s ability to store soil carbon to prevent climate change impacts. Facing challenges head on, it addresses how and why policymakers have underestimated the long-term impacts of climate change and how we can correct the flawed carbon management mechanisms today. The book also factors in where carbon can be most effectively stored, how quickly that can be done, and the practical and policy actions needed to get there.Global climate change, increasing pollution, and continued rapid population growth is wreaking havoc on the planet. Stabilizing the environment at safe levels requires a large-scale restoration of damaged ecosystems. Geotherapy: Innovative Methods of Soil Fertility Restoration, Carbon Sequestration, and Reversing CO2 Increase outlines the basic concepts of geotherapy and highlights the importance of healing the biosphere’s ability to store soil carbon to prevent climate change impacts. Facing challenges head on, it addresses how and why policymakers have underestimated the long-term impacts of climate change and how we can correct the flawed carbon management mechanisms today. The book also factors in where carbon can be most effectively stored, how quickly that can be done, and the practical and policy actions needed to get there.

Buckminster Fuller Inc. : Architecture in the Age of Radio

By Mark Wigley

The real architecture of our world is that of electromagnetic frequencies. We are constantly being reshaped by countless overlapping waves that pulse through our buildings and bodies. Buckminster Fuller Inc.: Architecture in the Age of Radio extensively explores Richard Buckminster Fuller’s work and thought, shedding new light on the questions raised by our increasingly electronic world.

The publication investigates Fuller’s multi-dimensional reflections on the architecture of radio and his idea that the real site of architecture is the electromagnetic spectrum. It draws on Fuller’s archive to follow his radical thinking from toilets to telepathy, plastic to prosthetics, nanostructures to networks, and deep data to deep space.

Buckminster Fuller Inc. rethinks the legacy of one of the key protagonists of the twentieth century – a unique amalgam of theorist, designer and performance artist –and becomes a crucial reference point in trying to understand the development and impact of our electronic environment.

The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis

Amitav Ghosh

A powerful work of history, essay, testimony, and polemic, Amitav Ghosh’s new book traces our contemporary planetary crisis back to the discovery of the New World and the sea route to the Indian Ocean. The Nutmeg’s Curse argues that the dynamics of climate change today are rooted in a centuries-old geopolitical order constructed by Western colonialism. At the center of Ghosh’s narrative is the now-ubiquitous spice nutmeg. The history of the nutmeg is one of conquest and exploitation—of both human life and the natural environment. In Ghosh’s hands, the story of the nutmeg becomes a parable for our environmental crisis, revealing the ways human history has always been entangled with earthly materials such as spices, tea, sugarcane, opium, and fossil fuels. Our crisis, he shows, is ultimately the result of a mechanistic view of the earth, where nature exists only as a resource for humans to use for our own ends, rather than a force of its own, full of agency and meaning.

Writing against the backdrop of the global pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests, Ghosh frames these historical stories in a way that connects our shared colonial histories with the deep inequality we see around us today. By interweaving discussions on everything from the global history of the oil trade to the migrant crisis and the animist spirituality of Indigenous communities around the world, The Nutmeg’s Curse offers a sharp critique of Western society and speaks to the profoundly remarkable ways in which human history is shaped by non-human forces.

Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order

By Bruno Maçães

From Lenin’s theory of imperialism to Wallerstein’s world-systems theory, a range of Marxist writers have insisted that the unit of social reality within which we operate, whose rules constrain us, is for the most part the world economy. In Beijing, these writers have been and remain in vogue.

China is quickly assuming a central role in world politics. Suddenly, every global story has a China angle, whether it is the growing instability in the Balkans, the coup in Zimbabwe, domestic politics in Australia or the midterm elections in the United States. The traditional opaqueness of Chinese politics and of the Chinese state was once a useful shield, a means of staying out of the limelight. Now it is a way to magnify Beijing’s reach: that we know so little about what China is doing seems to show that it is present everywhere. As Howard French puts it in his recent book, East Asia and the Western Pacific are starting to look less and less like a place configured for the needs and ends of the West and, in a return to the past, ever more like the world briefly dominated by China from the late twelfth century until the early sixteenth. China is already the largest trading partner for almost every country in the region and—short of total war with the United States—its military is quickly acquiring superiority across the region.