Buckminster Fuller's World Simulator -

From the introduction to a World Game activity book:

“Now, for the first time in the history of man, all the political theories and all the concepts of political functions are completely obsolete. All of them were developed on the you-or-me basis. This whole realization that mankind can and may be comprehensively successful is startling.”

By comprehensively successful, R. Buckminster Fuller meant that every human being could live in abundance. This idea gets dismissed even today as Utopian bullshit, but I’d like to frame this with a few short, simple questions:

1. Can the quality of life on Earth be improved?

2. Will everyone benefit from those improvements?

3. Is that worth spending time on?

To me, it’s self-evident that the quality of life, for many billions of human beings, needs serious improvement, here on Earth. I also believe that all humans will benefit from ending hunger, poverty and oppression. When everyone has a place at the table there’s no need for resource wars, violent revolutions, or terrorist acts. When we all generate our own power and grow our own food, that will be the strongest and most stable domestic security possible.

Like you, though, I don’t have a printed copy of my detailed plans for How To Fix The World. Yet. I do have an idea, though: we should make Bucky Fuller’s World Game a reality today, and put it online for everyone to play with. This is basically a call for a government-funded world simulator game to “crowdsource” solutions for ongoing global problems.

We’ve proven that this model works, and we have the technology to make it happen—world simulators, as you’ll soon see, are already running, and being sold to corporations and militaries.

Version 1.0

The first World Game was all on paper. It was 1961 when Fuller announced the concept, noting modestly that he’d been doing it since 1927. Although the dense “Fact Books” that got handed out to students were indeed generated by a computer database, for the most part Bucky’s version of the World Game was something students did on paper, using the figures and facts provided.

This is the first element I’d like to update: What facts do you trust? Who are the real authorities? Any thinking human would be suspicious of being handed a document that literally claims to tell you everything that is true about the Earth, whether that document is titled “An Objective Report by a Supercomputer” or “The Holy Bible.” Teaching people the basic source-synthesis methods behind doing their own research should be a logical opening lesson for any World Game. Give kids the tools to build their own picture of the world. Perhaps rather than handing out “world factbooks,” we could hand out blank templates where kids could research and fill in their own data and conclusions.

This is the question Bucky posed to students: “how can we make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone?”