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World Builders: Technology and the New Geopolitics
World politics has changed, claims Bruno Maçães. Geopolitics is no longer simply a contest to control territory; in this age of advanced technology, it has become a contest to create the territory. Great powers seek to build a world for other states to inhabit, while keeping the ability to change the rules or the state of the world when necessary. At a moment when the old concepts no longer work, this book aims to introduce a radically new theory of world politics and technology. Understood as 'world building', the most important events of our troubled times suddenly appear connected and their inner logic is revealed; technology wars between China and the United States, the pandemic, the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and the energy transition. To conclude, Maçães considers the more distant future, when the metaverse and artificial intelligence become the world, a world the great powers must struggle to build and control.
274 pages, Hardcover
Published February 13, 2025
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May 31, 2025
The Geopolitics of Enchantment
World Builders appears to be the most theoretical of Bruno Maçães’ books, an attempt to render a unified vision of the nature of twenty-first century geopolitics, the culmination of an intellectual project of which I have had only one prior glimpse in the form of History Has Begun: a reflection on the origins and prospects of the American “virtualist” ethos. The basic thesis here is simple enough: whereas the term geopolitics initially referred to competition between states over the control of physical space and the (quite material) people, resources, and other objects of strategic advantage contained therein, it has taken on another form in the age of digitalization, global integration, and virtual reality. The object of this new geopolitics is no longer to control territory, but to create the terrain that every actor is obliged to inhabit; to program the rules of the “world game” by securing access to the “source code,” i.e. the technological implements that anchor the virtual world, which is speedily consuming the physical one.
The geopolitical contest takes place on at least two levels: the competition between players according to the rules of the game, and the struggle to design the game itself. The Ukraine War, for instance, appears on one level to be a very conventional, or even anachronistic, twentieth-century conflict between masses of armed men over territorial control. But the Western response has taken place largely on the higher level: reshaping the overarching rules and structures upon which every aspect of the war effort, from trade and finance to supply chain access to battlefield tactics, is predicated. The West used its programming power to change the rules of the game; expelling Russia from the SWIFT banking system and seizing Russian financial assets; crafting a regimen of export controls and price caps that were targeted not so much at Russian commodities themselves (namely oil and natural gas), but at the ability of the Russian state to benefit from their sale; and transforming Ukraine itself through technological and financial transfers in a process Maçães has elsewhere likened to the ability of the agents in The Matrix to take over the body, or avatar, of anyone inhabiting their virtual world. While the West has had success in creating a more favorable game environment, it has come at the price of raising questions among other players over whether the rules could be changed again at their own expense.
As the bulky, angular denizens of the material world migrate to the smooth, streamlined, airy platforms of the virtual, the leading powers of this epoch take on the role of world builders, akin to a systems administrator in an IT context, whose task is to design a game environment in which they can thrive, but in which the usage of their privileged position is not perceived to be arbitrary or heavy-handed. The world they construct must be coherent and universally acceptable. If an administrator, who is also a player, shows a propensity to change the rules whenever it starts to lose, other players will be impelled to “hack” the world game and override its operating system with their own. This is in fact the state of affairs behind the technological footrace between China and the United States over microchip production, 5G implementation, the green energy transition (which Maçães argues should be thought of as the virtualization of energy, a transition from energy fuels reliant upon a material substrate to energy flows—chiefly in the form of photovoltaics—processed through decentralized networks like those of the internet), and many other projects. These are the only two individual states currently capable of world building, but Maçães stipulates that multiple actors can contribute to the world game, with smaller players designing the equivalent of a few lines of code. It’s also not unheard of for players to play the game more successfully than the administrators.
Maçães identifies a few historical milestones which have heralded the subsumption of the physical by the virtual, each virtual world itself perpetually subject to manipulation and replacement; or, in negative terms, which have served to highlight the contingency of the world in which we live. By “the world” one means the human world, the world of technology, poetry, music, and myth, which has been offset from a supposed “pure nature” for as long as human beings have existed. If virtualism entails the participation of human beings in the construction of their own reality down to the most fundamental, ontological level, then it is hardly a new phenomenon, but rather an integral feature of human nature. What seems to be novel about our age is that the circle of the virtual appears to be closing around “nature” as we’ve traditionally conceived of it: a phenomenon identified, with its concomitant dangers and promises, by Adorno and Horkheimer in their Dialectic of Enlightenment. The first milestone was what Halford Mackinder described as the end of the Columbian age circa 1900, the era of European discovery and world conquest. With the encirclement of East Asia, the “carving up” of Africa, the closure of the American frontier, the polar expeditions, and the comprehensive mapping of the entire globe, the world was transformed from an “extension of unknown space” into an object, a single unit subject to “measurement and control.” Once there was no more “new” territory to be discovered and claimed, the geopolitical contest became one over differing blueprints by which the world would be organized.
The second milestone was the advent of nuclear weapons. As per Oppenheimer’s famous quote from the Bhagavad Gita, the newfound human potential to destroy the world made it an intermittent reality, “permanently on the edge of non-existence.” It also marked the penetration of human artifice to the level of the atom, the fundamental unit of matter. Maçães draws a connection between the splitting of the atom at the dawn of the nuclear age and the more recent innovation of using ultraviolet radiation to construct the features of atom-sized microchips: a powerful symbol of the complete overlapping of the material world by the virtual one.
Thirdly, there was the rise of China: the first instance since the beginning of the aforementioned Columbian age of a non-Western power achieving parity with the West; one with no interest in integrating into an American or Western world system. For the first time in five centuries, modernity, progress, and development are no longer synonymous with Westernization. The Western world order is no longer exclusive or inevitable; others might remake the world on their own terms. The American attempts to throttle Chinese innovation, the appalling incongruity between the Western response to the causes of Ukrainian and Palestinian freedom, the rise of nativism and protectionism in Europe and North America, the most furious frontal assault on civil liberties by a presidential administration in the United States in more than a century, and Trump’s repositioning of America as a revisionist power intent on taking a sledgehammer to the international system it has overseen since 1945, are all signals of a deep anxiety in the West over the decline of its relative power over the rest of the world. The longstanding question of whether the United States would continue to uphold an international order rooted in universal rules and values even if it were to lose its status as the sole superpower within that order seems to have been answered definitively in the negative. This newly-discovered contingency of Western paradigms has created a dangerous and volatile situation. If it were demonstrated that China had surpassed the West technologically, or if the United States were to lose in a direct confrontation with China over Taiwan, this could produce a profound psychological shock with potentially violent repercussions.
Among the most fascinating discussions in the book is Maçães’ explanation of how the ideals of democracy and universalism coterminate in world building, his master concept. If I understand him right, world building aspires to a positive universalism, as opposed to the negative and therefore insubstantial universalism offered by the concept of “reality.” Reality as such can never take on a positive character, because any positive descriptor represents a contraction of reality, the reduction of reality to one object among others. Reality can only be a foil to demiurgic pretensions, a reminder that no constructed world can be the only one possible. A world that combines the universal reach of the reality principle and the constructive, participatory nature of human artifice would be the true realization of the democratic ideal.
Democracy is not ultimately about individual choices. Analogous to the way reality is limited by every positive statement about it, democracy is framed and limited by the background conditions behind every democratic decision; conditions that were not themselves democratically chosen. Democracy can only be realized and legitimated in a framework that accommodates every possibility across space, time, and each member of the human race (since what any individual can theoretically become in the future is ultimately coextensive with what any other human being can become); which is to say, democracy can only be achieved through world building. Only this reality would constitute the rule of all by all. The dark alternative to world building is particularist simulation, the retreat from universality into private fantasy, a phenomenon characteristic of fascism and colonialism. The great question of the world building age is whether we will live in a cosmopolis built and rebuilt from our shared creative endeavors, or in bizarre and nightmarish fiefdoms built of private power fantasies.
World Builders appears to be the most theoretical of Bruno Maçães’ books, an attempt to render a unified vision of the nature of twenty-first century geopolitics, the culmination of an intellectual project of which I have had only one prior glimpse in the form of History Has Begun: a reflection on the origins and prospects of the American “virtualist” ethos. The basic thesis here is simple enough: whereas the term geopolitics initially referred to competition between states over the control of physical space and the (quite material) people, resources, and other objects of strategic advantage contained therein, it has taken on another form in the age of digitalization, global integration, and virtual reality. The object of this new geopolitics is no longer to control territory, but to create the terrain that every actor is obliged to inhabit; to program the rules of the “world game” by securing access to the “source code,” i.e. the technological implements that anchor the virtual world, which is speedily consuming the physical one.
The geopolitical contest takes place on at least two levels: the competition between players according to the rules of the game, and the struggle to design the game itself. The Ukraine War, for instance, appears on one level to be a very conventional, or even anachronistic, twentieth-century conflict between masses of armed men over territorial control. But the Western response has taken place largely on the higher level: reshaping the overarching rules and structures upon which every aspect of the war effort, from trade and finance to supply chain access to battlefield tactics, is predicated. The West used its programming power to change the rules of the game; expelling Russia from the SWIFT banking system and seizing Russian financial assets; crafting a regimen of export controls and price caps that were targeted not so much at Russian commodities themselves (namely oil and natural gas), but at the ability of the Russian state to benefit from their sale; and transforming Ukraine itself through technological and financial transfers in a process Maçães has elsewhere likened to the ability of the agents in The Matrix to take over the body, or avatar, of anyone inhabiting their virtual world. While the West has had success in creating a more favorable game environment, it has come at the price of raising questions among other players over whether the rules could be changed again at their own expense.
As the bulky, angular denizens of the material world migrate to the smooth, streamlined, airy platforms of the virtual, the leading powers of this epoch take on the role of world builders, akin to a systems administrator in an IT context, whose task is to design a game environment in which they can thrive, but in which the usage of their privileged position is not perceived to be arbitrary or heavy-handed. The world they construct must be coherent and universally acceptable. If an administrator, who is also a player, shows a propensity to change the rules whenever it starts to lose, other players will be impelled to “hack” the world game and override its operating system with their own. This is in fact the state of affairs behind the technological footrace between China and the United States over microchip production, 5G implementation, the green energy transition (which Maçães argues should be thought of as the virtualization of energy, a transition from energy fuels reliant upon a material substrate to energy flows—chiefly in the form of photovoltaics—processed through decentralized networks like those of the internet), and many other projects. These are the only two individual states currently capable of world building, but Maçães stipulates that multiple actors can contribute to the world game, with smaller players designing the equivalent of a few lines of code. It’s also not unheard of for players to play the game more successfully than the administrators.
Maçães identifies a few historical milestones which have heralded the subsumption of the physical by the virtual, each virtual world itself perpetually subject to manipulation and replacement; or, in negative terms, which have served to highlight the contingency of the world in which we live. By “the world” one means the human world, the world of technology, poetry, music, and myth, which has been offset from a supposed “pure nature” for as long as human beings have existed. If virtualism entails the participation of human beings in the construction of their own reality down to the most fundamental, ontological level, then it is hardly a new phenomenon, but rather an integral feature of human nature. What seems to be novel about our age is that the circle of the virtual appears to be closing around “nature” as we’ve traditionally conceived of it: a phenomenon identified, with its concomitant dangers and promises, by Adorno and Horkheimer in their Dialectic of Enlightenment. The first milestone was what Halford Mackinder described as the end of the Columbian age circa 1900, the era of European discovery and world conquest. With the encirclement of East Asia, the “carving up” of Africa, the closure of the American frontier, the polar expeditions, and the comprehensive mapping of the entire globe, the world was transformed from an “extension of unknown space” into an object, a single unit subject to “measurement and control.” Once there was no more “new” territory to be discovered and claimed, the geopolitical contest became one over differing blueprints by which the world would be organized.
The second milestone was the advent of nuclear weapons. As per Oppenheimer’s famous quote from the Bhagavad Gita, the newfound human potential to destroy the world made it an intermittent reality, “permanently on the edge of non-existence.” It also marked the penetration of human artifice to the level of the atom, the fundamental unit of matter. Maçães draws a connection between the splitting of the atom at the dawn of the nuclear age and the more recent innovation of using ultraviolet radiation to construct the features of atom-sized microchips: a powerful symbol of the complete overlapping of the material world by the virtual one.
Thirdly, there was the rise of China: the first instance since the beginning of the aforementioned Columbian age of a non-Western power achieving parity with the West; one with no interest in integrating into an American or Western world system. For the first time in five centuries, modernity, progress, and development are no longer synonymous with Westernization. The Western world order is no longer exclusive or inevitable; others might remake the world on their own terms. The American attempts to throttle Chinese innovation, the appalling incongruity between the Western response to the causes of Ukrainian and Palestinian freedom, the rise of nativism and protectionism in Europe and North America, the most furious frontal assault on civil liberties by a presidential administration in the United States in more than a century, and Trump’s repositioning of America as a revisionist power intent on taking a sledgehammer to the international system it has overseen since 1945, are all signals of a deep anxiety in the West over the decline of its relative power over the rest of the world. The longstanding question of whether the United States would continue to uphold an international order rooted in universal rules and values even if it were to lose its status as the sole superpower within that order seems to have been answered definitively in the negative. This newly-discovered contingency of Western paradigms has created a dangerous and volatile situation. If it were demonstrated that China had surpassed the West technologically, or if the United States were to lose in a direct confrontation with China over Taiwan, this could produce a profound psychological shock with potentially violent repercussions.
Among the most fascinating discussions in the book is Maçães’ explanation of how the ideals of democracy and universalism coterminate in world building, his master concept. If I understand him right, world building aspires to a positive universalism, as opposed to the negative and therefore insubstantial universalism offered by the concept of “reality.” Reality as such can never take on a positive character, because any positive descriptor represents a contraction of reality, the reduction of reality to one object among others. Reality can only be a foil to demiurgic pretensions, a reminder that no constructed world can be the only one possible. A world that combines the universal reach of the reality principle and the constructive, participatory nature of human artifice would be the true realization of the democratic ideal.
Democracy is not ultimately about individual choices. Analogous to the way reality is limited by every positive statement about it, democracy is framed and limited by the background conditions behind every democratic decision; conditions that were not themselves democratically chosen. Democracy can only be realized and legitimated in a framework that accommodates every possibility across space, time, and each member of the human race (since what any individual can theoretically become in the future is ultimately coextensive with what any other human being can become); which is to say, democracy can only be achieved through world building. Only this reality would constitute the rule of all by all. The dark alternative to world building is particularist simulation, the retreat from universality into private fantasy, a phenomenon characteristic of fascism and colonialism. The great question of the world building age is whether we will live in a cosmopolis built and rebuilt from our shared creative endeavors, or in bizarre and nightmarish fiefdoms built of private power fantasies.
February 18, 2025
“My book starts with an Introduction, mapping the essential structure of global politics with its two levels of competition. The four chapters that follow provide a granular description of the world system and the way its distinct elements are ultimately connected. These chapters move across as many areas of state competition as could plausibly be discussed in a coherent and intelligible whole. They will help the reader navigate the processes of technological innovation, information technology, technical standardisation, currency statecraft, chip production, economic sanctions, global shipping, intelligent warfare, drones, climate change, energy flows, the energy transition, industrial policy, artificial intelligence, cyberwar and ransomware, central bank digital currencies, economic decoupling and infrastructure development, among many other subjects. To paraphrase what Salman Rushdie says in one of his novels, ‘to understand the world game, you have to swallow the world’. (…) In reality, from the moment when the whole planet became subject to measurement and control, the struggle would take place between different blueprints. The new geopolitics has its own logic, and it is a logic of world building.”
I have already reserved for this title the treatment I apply to those added to my "Best Books Read" list (currently 25). This means purchasing the printed version after, in the case, initially buying and reading the ebook over the weekend.
This is a wildly ambitious undertaking—an attempt to unravel the fundamental complexity of the contemporary world we are born into, live in, and eventually leave, all while pulling it off with remarkable success. So much so that, to my surprise, I found it incredibly difficult to put down—even for meals or sleep—until the very last line, which is quite unusual for me.
So, before anything else—masterpiece alert. This essay is fundamentally important and deeply illuminating. It’s clearly written, brilliantly structured, and solidly grounded—a true marvel of intellectual prowess. And thankfully, it’s not pessimistic!
In a book this exceptional and richly layered, selecting quotes and passages is no easy task—but even so, here are a few.
“As we enter an age of climate change, the meaning of terraforming becomes increasingly vivid and even literal.”
“I will be talking about spells, but one notion I want to dispel at the outset is that virtual worlds are something new. There is nothing more human than world building. Cave paintings gave our prehistoric ancestors something of the experience of seeing creatures and events that were not actually real. Human beings create virtual worlds every time they dream, and they often dream even when awake. The human brain is best understood as a virtual reality engine.”
“In a world ruled by fraud, honesty is a contradiction.”
“Every empire has an infrastructure, the ‘subterranean machineries’ through which power actually flows. Today, these structures include semiconductor supply chains, financial systems, server farms, communication cables, and so on. At the surface, these may look like open networks bringing people all over the world together.”
“Karl Rove once explained: ‘We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality, we will act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that is how things will sort themselves out.’”
“But in Gaza there is a reckoning, or a double reckoning. First, we now realise that a life of fantasy can easily become a source of deepest horrors. Fantasy dehumanises. As Gilles Deleuze once observed, there is nothing more terrible and more terrifying than to be captured by the dreams of others: ‘Beware of the dreams of others, because if you are caught in their dream, you are done for.’ And indeed, to be captured in so many concentric dreams has become the inescapable nightmare facing Palestinians.”
“The goal is to preserve exclusive control over a specific source of technological power and to ensure that access to that source of power is denied to a rival through a system akin to concentric fortifications. One author speaks of ‘four interlocking chokeholds’: chips, manufacturing equipment, design software and components for manufacturing equipment.”
“Chips are not a natural resource. They are not the new oil. Rather, they form the most basic layer in world building. They can be compared to the basic layer of a computer operating system. Take the metaphor seriously – as it is not just a metaphor – and two conclusions follow. First, the United States, as the original programmer of the world game, has root access to the code and thus the ability to rewrite it as it wishes. But the point is of course to continue running the program upon which its power and prerogatives ultimately rest, and thus broad economic links with China need to be preserved. Second, the more the United States uses its programming power to shape the global environment in its favour, the more will Chinese authorities attempt to hack the operating system, taking over its processes with a view to assuming control over the rules. Having control over chip production is no more than a simplified way to speak of having control over the source code governing the world game.”
“What would be the proof that we live in a fully artificial world? That, were it necessary, a new version of this world could be quickly designed. Such proof was provided with the pandemic. The pandemic is over, but the new perspectives it granted persist. (…) During those initial weeks of the pandemic, economic order appeared in the following general form: the propagation of a new social and economic model meant to create a synthetic environment as insulated from the virus as could reasonably be expected. Among the surprises was that it could work. It was possible only because software had already eaten the economy.”
“Human beings have become agents and producers, the original creators of the world they inhabit. The background is no longer just the background.”
“(…) as technological power increasingly threatened to replace our natural environment with new artificial worlds, the question of who would build and control these worlds became more acute. In a technological world, geopolitics is the struggle not to control territory but to create it. Geopolitics returned, but the ‘geo’ no longer refers to the world given to us by nature. It points to the virtual worlds we are capable of building.”
“The very term ‘Cold War’ is essentially a way to refer to such a conflict: a war taking place under certain technological constraints introduced by the nuclear revolution. But the Cold War led neither to a nuclear conflagration nor to a standstill. How was that possible?”
“Geopolitics used to mean the struggle to control the physical world. In the future it will be about the struggle to build a virtual one.”
“We live in artificial landscapes where everything is continuously being recorded and controlled. In this world, one knows as a definitional matter that every act or plan conducted anywhere in the world has left some kind of mark. Nothing ever disappears, as it does in the physical world.”
“Metadata does not lie, as Edward Snowden once said. On the other hand, metadata targets the individual as a virtual avatar. Therefore, one could plausibly argue that the real person is left alone. No one is reading your emails, and even your identity is kept secret until a threat has been positively identified. At that point, the system will turn against the invader, the irreconcilable intruder who refuses to live in that world according to its rules.”
“There is no greater power than to change the game world state. One moment, Russia had $300 billion in foreign exchange reserves; the next moment, they were gone.”
“Sanctioning central bank reserves on this scale was unprecedented. What Americans and Europeans hope is that the global system can be used against a large economy like that of Russia without being stretched to breaking point. For Moscow there may be the opposite attraction: now that Russia has stopped playing by the rules, its only hope is to put the system under greater and greater pressure, to the point at which it stops working or, conceivably, breaks down. The current crisis is showing with admirable clarity that the global financial system is best understood as a form of programming rather than a spontaneous order of exchanges.”
“Can the United States truly boast that it does not discriminate between assets held by residents and assets held by foreigners? Chinese companies would disagree, and many around the world now wonder if they might be next. It is not possible to both create the rules of the game and act like one of the players. Or, more epigrammatically: playing the game prevents one from winning the game.”
“Energy is so central to the functioning of Western economies and Russia such a leading oil and gas producer that one might justifiably doubt whether the Kremlin could in fact lose a generalised energy war.”
“What doomed the old gold standard would also doom any new monetary system backed by gold or other less noble commodities. In a modern economy, money must be programmable, but gold or commodities are not programmable.”
“One might be inclined to contrast two concepts: the globe and the planet. The globe is an object for technological and economic control, but the establishment of global societies takes us more or less inexorably to the category of the planet, and here human action is of no avail because to speak of the planet is to move beyond human existence towards the standpoint of cosmic time and sidereal space. Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay get at the interaction between the two systems with the following pithy sentence: ‘Never forget that the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of nature.’ But even that sentence falls short of the truth that, after the climate crisis, there is only one system.”
“Let us retrace some of the brief history of the Anthropocene, the civilisation of the twentieth century, when the human population increased from 1.5 to 6 billion, the global economy increased fifteen-fold and energy use increased between thirteen- and fourteen-fold.”
“Half of every tomato is made of fossil fuels, but in my experience knowledge of these realities is almost entirely absent from the general public, which prefers to think that our carbon footprint is due to excessive commercial or private flying. And tomatoes are far from the most energy-intensive food. In order to produce certain types of fish or seafood you might need up to three times their weight in oil. As Howard Odum vividly observed, ‘industrial man no longer eats potatoes made from solar energy; now he eats potatoes partly made of oil’. That we now eat transformed fossil fuels is the best illustration of how artificial the human machine has become.”
“The question is no longer one of access to natural resources but of existential risk. Taken in isolation, stocks of oil and natural gas could last for a few more centuries, but that is the wrong way to look at the problem. What we have been consuming is not gas or oil but degrees of warming from the burning of fossil fuels. When we finally consume all the degrees that humanity can bear, the energy supply has been spent.”
“To start with a foundational distinction, energy sources take two main forms: energy flows and energy stocks or fuels. (…) The problem with energy fuels turned out to be not their limited supplies but their embodiment in physical substances. In order to liberate the energy stored in those substances, some fundamental physical and chemical transformation is necessary, but that transformation brings about changes in the larger environment that, given the delicate balance necessary for human life, can threaten some of its basic conditions. The outcome is anything but an accident.”
“Photovoltaics is the first major electricity generation technology that does not involve making a turbine go round. An entire energy chain, from solar generation to the internet and large language models, with zero moving parts. ‘Only moving electrons. Nothing is burning. Nothing is turning. Nothing needs maintenance. Nothing is emitted.’”
“Transmission moves power through space and batteries move power through time.”
“On Earth, the dominant energy flow is sunlight, with geothermal and tidal energy flows contributing residual amounts of all the energy arriving at the Earth’s surface. Other energy flows come indirectly from sunlight. The incident solar energy that goes into evaporating water is the source of the energy we harness with our hydropower facilities. And wind power is a product of air motions resulting from the differential solar heating of the planet and constituting a very small percentage of incident solar energy. ‘Like waterpower, wind power is an indirect form of solar energy.’ The total amount of solar energy that reaches our planet is something on the order of 4 million exajoules. In 2020, the energy consumption of the whole world was about 635 exajoules. A mere rounding error in the amount of solar radiation energy reaching us can satisfy our energy needs. Alternatively, capturing more of that energy input would multiply our energy supply by several orders of magnitude.”
“It is the system, not the machine, that frees us from the tyranny of the physical world: ‘The remarkably prolific inventors of the late nineteenth century, such as Edison, persuaded us that we were involved in a second creation of the world. The system builders, like Ford, led us to believe that we could rationally organise the second creation to serve our ends.’ As Frederick Winslow Taylor famously put it, ‘in the past, the man has been first; in the future the system must be first’”
“So let me suggest that the physical Earth is not where the question of global power will be decided. In order to escape the remorseless logic of diminishing returns, human progress will have to be rebuilt on new artificial grounds, a novel civilisation where technological progress leaves no physical footprint in the larger environment. Those who first succeed in designing and building this world will enjoy a form of power largely exceeding that present in previous world building exercises.”
“Critical minerals are different from coal and oil: they can be reused. After all, ‘apart from a minuscule amount of aluminium and titanium that we have shot into outer space, all of our material resources are still here on Earth’. (…) Fossil fuels are consumables for energy production. Critical minerals are inputs for a technological transformation. They are inputs for components, equipment and devices. (…) The risk of disruptions in the supply of critical materials is therefore less an energy security risk than a risk to the speed of the energy transition. The lesson for geopolitics is hard to miss: Beijing cannot stop the sun from shining on solar panels in Germany, even if those panels were made in China, ‘but Moscow really did cut the flow of gas to Europe’.”
“As energy supplies become increasingly free, many projects requiring practically limitless energy will enter the realm of possibility. As the global need for fresh water becomes more critical, desalination may be a prime candidate. (…) Computing power on a planetary scale requires energy so abundant it can only be converted directly from uninterrupted energy flows.”
“Imagine a future civilisation where the planet has been brought alive by numerous AI models, each continuously trained on endless amounts of data and connected by global networks composed of billions or trillions of devices, machines and sensors, a virtual world not merely replicating the complexity of the physical one but, in time, exceeding it by several orders of magnitude (…) Businesses, industries and countries that recognise the importance of zero marginal cost energy will be the ones designing and creating the world of tomorrow – the world everyone else will be forced to inhabit.”
“There is nothing to fear because the worlds we are about to enter are no less true than the world we inhabit today, and our lives will be no less valuable on account of being virtual.”
Further readings!
In addition to the author's recommendations, references, and mentions, I would suggest reading a book on the concept of “World Order”—such as Glenn Diesen’s “The Ukraine War & the Eurasian World Order”. While Maçães’s take on the Ukraine War diverges sharply, Diesen’s perspective stands out as the one grounded in reason. Moreover, his analysis of the idea and history of “World Order” is peerless.
For an exploration of our current post-capitalist reality, Yanis Varoufakis’s “Technofeudalism” is essential reading, and one could complement it with Cory Doctorow’s “Chokepoint Capitalism”.
Discussing the Anthropocene, Maçães makes this argument: "The notion of geoengineering seems to forget this basic fact: were humanity to attempt to reduce the temperature on Earth by injecting aerosols into the stratosphere aimed at reflecting sunlight, the process would vastly constrain our autonomy by forcing us to maintain the exact same deployment for the indefinite future or then face a sudden and catastrophic collapse." For a science fiction novel that offers an optimistic take on this very issue, Neal Stephenson’s “Termination Shock” is excellent.
But the book I would strongly urge reading immediately after this one is “Exadelic” by Jon Evans. A state-of-the-art work of science fiction at the genre’s finest, it even features a Dyson sphere at one point and serves as a remarkably satisfying projection of the themes explored in “World Builders”—starting with the very act of world-building itself.
I have already reserved for this title the treatment I apply to those added to my "Best Books Read" list (currently 25). This means purchasing the printed version after, in the case, initially buying and reading the ebook over the weekend.
This is a wildly ambitious undertaking—an attempt to unravel the fundamental complexity of the contemporary world we are born into, live in, and eventually leave, all while pulling it off with remarkable success. So much so that, to my surprise, I found it incredibly difficult to put down—even for meals or sleep—until the very last line, which is quite unusual for me.
So, before anything else—masterpiece alert. This essay is fundamentally important and deeply illuminating. It’s clearly written, brilliantly structured, and solidly grounded—a true marvel of intellectual prowess. And thankfully, it’s not pessimistic!
In a book this exceptional and richly layered, selecting quotes and passages is no easy task—but even so, here are a few.
“As we enter an age of climate change, the meaning of terraforming becomes increasingly vivid and even literal.”
“I will be talking about spells, but one notion I want to dispel at the outset is that virtual worlds are something new. There is nothing more human than world building. Cave paintings gave our prehistoric ancestors something of the experience of seeing creatures and events that were not actually real. Human beings create virtual worlds every time they dream, and they often dream even when awake. The human brain is best understood as a virtual reality engine.”
“In a world ruled by fraud, honesty is a contradiction.”
“Every empire has an infrastructure, the ‘subterranean machineries’ through which power actually flows. Today, these structures include semiconductor supply chains, financial systems, server farms, communication cables, and so on. At the surface, these may look like open networks bringing people all over the world together.”
“Karl Rove once explained: ‘We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you are studying that reality, we will act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that is how things will sort themselves out.’”
“But in Gaza there is a reckoning, or a double reckoning. First, we now realise that a life of fantasy can easily become a source of deepest horrors. Fantasy dehumanises. As Gilles Deleuze once observed, there is nothing more terrible and more terrifying than to be captured by the dreams of others: ‘Beware of the dreams of others, because if you are caught in their dream, you are done for.’ And indeed, to be captured in so many concentric dreams has become the inescapable nightmare facing Palestinians.”
“The goal is to preserve exclusive control over a specific source of technological power and to ensure that access to that source of power is denied to a rival through a system akin to concentric fortifications. One author speaks of ‘four interlocking chokeholds’: chips, manufacturing equipment, design software and components for manufacturing equipment.”
“Chips are not a natural resource. They are not the new oil. Rather, they form the most basic layer in world building. They can be compared to the basic layer of a computer operating system. Take the metaphor seriously – as it is not just a metaphor – and two conclusions follow. First, the United States, as the original programmer of the world game, has root access to the code and thus the ability to rewrite it as it wishes. But the point is of course to continue running the program upon which its power and prerogatives ultimately rest, and thus broad economic links with China need to be preserved. Second, the more the United States uses its programming power to shape the global environment in its favour, the more will Chinese authorities attempt to hack the operating system, taking over its processes with a view to assuming control over the rules. Having control over chip production is no more than a simplified way to speak of having control over the source code governing the world game.”
“What would be the proof that we live in a fully artificial world? That, were it necessary, a new version of this world could be quickly designed. Such proof was provided with the pandemic. The pandemic is over, but the new perspectives it granted persist. (…) During those initial weeks of the pandemic, economic order appeared in the following general form: the propagation of a new social and economic model meant to create a synthetic environment as insulated from the virus as could reasonably be expected. Among the surprises was that it could work. It was possible only because software had already eaten the economy.”
“Human beings have become agents and producers, the original creators of the world they inhabit. The background is no longer just the background.”
“(…) as technological power increasingly threatened to replace our natural environment with new artificial worlds, the question of who would build and control these worlds became more acute. In a technological world, geopolitics is the struggle not to control territory but to create it. Geopolitics returned, but the ‘geo’ no longer refers to the world given to us by nature. It points to the virtual worlds we are capable of building.”
“The very term ‘Cold War’ is essentially a way to refer to such a conflict: a war taking place under certain technological constraints introduced by the nuclear revolution. But the Cold War led neither to a nuclear conflagration nor to a standstill. How was that possible?”
“Geopolitics used to mean the struggle to control the physical world. In the future it will be about the struggle to build a virtual one.”
“We live in artificial landscapes where everything is continuously being recorded and controlled. In this world, one knows as a definitional matter that every act or plan conducted anywhere in the world has left some kind of mark. Nothing ever disappears, as it does in the physical world.”
“Metadata does not lie, as Edward Snowden once said. On the other hand, metadata targets the individual as a virtual avatar. Therefore, one could plausibly argue that the real person is left alone. No one is reading your emails, and even your identity is kept secret until a threat has been positively identified. At that point, the system will turn against the invader, the irreconcilable intruder who refuses to live in that world according to its rules.”
“There is no greater power than to change the game world state. One moment, Russia had $300 billion in foreign exchange reserves; the next moment, they were gone.”
“Sanctioning central bank reserves on this scale was unprecedented. What Americans and Europeans hope is that the global system can be used against a large economy like that of Russia without being stretched to breaking point. For Moscow there may be the opposite attraction: now that Russia has stopped playing by the rules, its only hope is to put the system under greater and greater pressure, to the point at which it stops working or, conceivably, breaks down. The current crisis is showing with admirable clarity that the global financial system is best understood as a form of programming rather than a spontaneous order of exchanges.”
“Can the United States truly boast that it does not discriminate between assets held by residents and assets held by foreigners? Chinese companies would disagree, and many around the world now wonder if they might be next. It is not possible to both create the rules of the game and act like one of the players. Or, more epigrammatically: playing the game prevents one from winning the game.”
“Energy is so central to the functioning of Western economies and Russia such a leading oil and gas producer that one might justifiably doubt whether the Kremlin could in fact lose a generalised energy war.”
“What doomed the old gold standard would also doom any new monetary system backed by gold or other less noble commodities. In a modern economy, money must be programmable, but gold or commodities are not programmable.”
“One might be inclined to contrast two concepts: the globe and the planet. The globe is an object for technological and economic control, but the establishment of global societies takes us more or less inexorably to the category of the planet, and here human action is of no avail because to speak of the planet is to move beyond human existence towards the standpoint of cosmic time and sidereal space. Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay get at the interaction between the two systems with the following pithy sentence: ‘Never forget that the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of nature.’ But even that sentence falls short of the truth that, after the climate crisis, there is only one system.”
“Let us retrace some of the brief history of the Anthropocene, the civilisation of the twentieth century, when the human population increased from 1.5 to 6 billion, the global economy increased fifteen-fold and energy use increased between thirteen- and fourteen-fold.”
“Half of every tomato is made of fossil fuels, but in my experience knowledge of these realities is almost entirely absent from the general public, which prefers to think that our carbon footprint is due to excessive commercial or private flying. And tomatoes are far from the most energy-intensive food. In order to produce certain types of fish or seafood you might need up to three times their weight in oil. As Howard Odum vividly observed, ‘industrial man no longer eats potatoes made from solar energy; now he eats potatoes partly made of oil’. That we now eat transformed fossil fuels is the best illustration of how artificial the human machine has become.”
“The question is no longer one of access to natural resources but of existential risk. Taken in isolation, stocks of oil and natural gas could last for a few more centuries, but that is the wrong way to look at the problem. What we have been consuming is not gas or oil but degrees of warming from the burning of fossil fuels. When we finally consume all the degrees that humanity can bear, the energy supply has been spent.”
“To start with a foundational distinction, energy sources take two main forms: energy flows and energy stocks or fuels. (…) The problem with energy fuels turned out to be not their limited supplies but their embodiment in physical substances. In order to liberate the energy stored in those substances, some fundamental physical and chemical transformation is necessary, but that transformation brings about changes in the larger environment that, given the delicate balance necessary for human life, can threaten some of its basic conditions. The outcome is anything but an accident.”
“Photovoltaics is the first major electricity generation technology that does not involve making a turbine go round. An entire energy chain, from solar generation to the internet and large language models, with zero moving parts. ‘Only moving electrons. Nothing is burning. Nothing is turning. Nothing needs maintenance. Nothing is emitted.’”
“Transmission moves power through space and batteries move power through time.”
“On Earth, the dominant energy flow is sunlight, with geothermal and tidal energy flows contributing residual amounts of all the energy arriving at the Earth’s surface. Other energy flows come indirectly from sunlight. The incident solar energy that goes into evaporating water is the source of the energy we harness with our hydropower facilities. And wind power is a product of air motions resulting from the differential solar heating of the planet and constituting a very small percentage of incident solar energy. ‘Like waterpower, wind power is an indirect form of solar energy.’ The total amount of solar energy that reaches our planet is something on the order of 4 million exajoules. In 2020, the energy consumption of the whole world was about 635 exajoules. A mere rounding error in the amount of solar radiation energy reaching us can satisfy our energy needs. Alternatively, capturing more of that energy input would multiply our energy supply by several orders of magnitude.”
“It is the system, not the machine, that frees us from the tyranny of the physical world: ‘The remarkably prolific inventors of the late nineteenth century, such as Edison, persuaded us that we were involved in a second creation of the world. The system builders, like Ford, led us to believe that we could rationally organise the second creation to serve our ends.’ As Frederick Winslow Taylor famously put it, ‘in the past, the man has been first; in the future the system must be first’”
“So let me suggest that the physical Earth is not where the question of global power will be decided. In order to escape the remorseless logic of diminishing returns, human progress will have to be rebuilt on new artificial grounds, a novel civilisation where technological progress leaves no physical footprint in the larger environment. Those who first succeed in designing and building this world will enjoy a form of power largely exceeding that present in previous world building exercises.”
“Critical minerals are different from coal and oil: they can be reused. After all, ‘apart from a minuscule amount of aluminium and titanium that we have shot into outer space, all of our material resources are still here on Earth’. (…) Fossil fuels are consumables for energy production. Critical minerals are inputs for a technological transformation. They are inputs for components, equipment and devices. (…) The risk of disruptions in the supply of critical materials is therefore less an energy security risk than a risk to the speed of the energy transition. The lesson for geopolitics is hard to miss: Beijing cannot stop the sun from shining on solar panels in Germany, even if those panels were made in China, ‘but Moscow really did cut the flow of gas to Europe’.”
“As energy supplies become increasingly free, many projects requiring practically limitless energy will enter the realm of possibility. As the global need for fresh water becomes more critical, desalination may be a prime candidate. (…) Computing power on a planetary scale requires energy so abundant it can only be converted directly from uninterrupted energy flows.”
“Imagine a future civilisation where the planet has been brought alive by numerous AI models, each continuously trained on endless amounts of data and connected by global networks composed of billions or trillions of devices, machines and sensors, a virtual world not merely replicating the complexity of the physical one but, in time, exceeding it by several orders of magnitude (…) Businesses, industries and countries that recognise the importance of zero marginal cost energy will be the ones designing and creating the world of tomorrow – the world everyone else will be forced to inhabit.”
“There is nothing to fear because the worlds we are about to enter are no less true than the world we inhabit today, and our lives will be no less valuable on account of being virtual.”
Further readings!
In addition to the author's recommendations, references, and mentions, I would suggest reading a book on the concept of “World Order”—such as Glenn Diesen’s “The Ukraine War & the Eurasian World Order”. While Maçães’s take on the Ukraine War diverges sharply, Diesen’s perspective stands out as the one grounded in reason. Moreover, his analysis of the idea and history of “World Order” is peerless.
For an exploration of our current post-capitalist reality, Yanis Varoufakis’s “Technofeudalism” is essential reading, and one could complement it with Cory Doctorow’s “Chokepoint Capitalism”.
Discussing the Anthropocene, Maçães makes this argument: "The notion of geoengineering seems to forget this basic fact: were humanity to attempt to reduce the temperature on Earth by injecting aerosols into the stratosphere aimed at reflecting sunlight, the process would vastly constrain our autonomy by forcing us to maintain the exact same deployment for the indefinite future or then face a sudden and catastrophic collapse." For a science fiction novel that offers an optimistic take on this very issue, Neal Stephenson’s “Termination Shock” is excellent.
But the book I would strongly urge reading immediately after this one is “Exadelic” by Jon Evans. A state-of-the-art work of science fiction at the genre’s finest, it even features a Dyson sphere at one point and serves as a remarkably satisfying projection of the themes explored in “World Builders”—starting with the very act of world-building itself.
March 15, 2025
I don’t mind pushing—but goodness
I had to grit my teeth picking this book up and trying with effort to read repetitious iterations of repetitious renderings. Reading this book was kind of like eating bran flakes:
You know it's good for you, and to some degree
you enjoy the wholesomeness of it, but it's not always particularly exciting.
Just my opinion and would be curious to hear the views of other readers.
I had to grit my teeth picking this book up and trying with effort to read repetitious iterations of repetitious renderings. Reading this book was kind of like eating bran flakes:
You know it's good for you, and to some degree
you enjoy the wholesomeness of it, but it's not always particularly exciting.
Just my opinion and would be curious to hear the views of other readers.
May 28, 2025
World Builders is a fascinating book that argues for a new paradigm in the understanding of geopolitics - ‘world building’, the creation of artificial worlds or reshaping the environment to create a favourable situation for own agenda or ambition. According to Maçães, the essence of power has migrated from conquering land to designing the operating system of the planet. This thesis forms a rather loose thread through the narrative, which is constructed through a wide range of theoretical and empirical academic studies.
The book is structured across four chapters, named after four years in which the event demonstrating the change in paradigm occurred. Across the book, two constant themes are present: that because the global system is a ‘modular software’, rival architects (mainly the US and China) can each replace pieces and set rules in specific domains – from 6G to AI – without total war. What used to be called “ideology” now acts like a background program that feels natural to its users; the struggle is to embed your values so deeply that others mistake them for the world itself
First, 2018, is named after the year during which the ‘Spy Hack’ story was revealed (spying chips were installed in motherboards made in China) and the first restrictions on the sale of advanced microchips were imposed on China by the United States. The chapter, to a large extent, deals with the creation of an artificial world through the computing power of microchips. It considers the erection and limits of the barriers to trade in advanced technology. With microchips, it deals with themselves as well as the restrictions on their sale being chokepoints within the system.
Second, 2020, deals with the notion that the pandemic allowed us to see (what heterodox approaches have been saying for decades) that the economy is a social construct that can be redefined to help social objectives. Instead of classic industrial policy, states now work on the framework (skills, data regimes, climate security) that lets their preferred system flourish - what Secretary Yellen called ‘modern supply-side economics’. Covid revealed that macro-management must expand into engineering the underlying platform.
This chapter has a section on the possibility of development of competitive advantage through active policy that references one of my favourite books of all time, Embedded Autonomy by Robert Evans, which is worth quoting in full:
“As Robert Evans argued in his classic Embedded Autonomy, modern states must fit their economic aspirations and activities into a global division of labour, but their place in the global hierarchy is never given in advance. Comparative advantage - the relative efficiency of different sectors and activities - is not structurally determined but 'constructed'. The contrast between these two views was the subject of an intense debate in Japan during the early postwar period. Economists at the Ministry of Finance favoured what they called a 'natural path' of revealed comparative advantage. The Ministry of International Trade and Industry believed that this path would perpetuate low productivity and low incomes. Public policies should be designed, it said, not merely to make the most efficient use of existing resources, in the static sense of conventional theory, but to furnish the directional thrust and raise the finance for a set of heavy and chemical industries that had to be created.'8 And since we know that certain positions in the global system are more favourable than others, trying to get into more desirable niches is a natural part of global competition and a prime object of domestic policy.”
Third, 2022, deals with the changing nature of war. Starlink, Palantir and other companies are changing the nature of war to be much more about the design of the environment in which the operations are conducted, even before shots can be fired. The economic sanctions and monetary chokepoints serve as another battlefield on which the war is being fought.
“If hegemonic wars have become impossible, that does not mean they cannot be won. But they must be won not by direct conflict with an opponent but by shaping the war environment in such a way that an opponent can be defeated before a direct clash becomes necessary. One could say that in this case, an artificial environment or metaverse decides the outcome. (…)
The logic of the offset is to create a new battlefield where the confrontation happens on terms set by its creator. This new battlefield is synthetic or virtual in some obvious sense, but that does not mean it can be isolated from a larger economic and technological environment.
Both Eisenhower and Brown stressed how warfare needed to be reconfigured in order to maximise American economic and technological primacy. In the dialectics of the offset, building a global technological system must precede its deployment on the battlefield. As the war in Ukraine demonstrates, the conditions under which the conflict takes place are not merely military but extend to critical financial, energy and technological networks. The way to win is to reprogram the system, to step outside the game world. Science fiction fans might call the strategy a Kobayashi Maru, in reference to a simulation exercise depicted in the Star Trek movie franchise, where victory is made possible by changing the conditions of the game.”
Fourth, 2024, is about the energy policy and the climate crisis. He deals with it in terms of the competitive advantage of individual countries that succeed in developing forms of cheap and abundant energy. Most of the chapter deals with the uniqueness of solar energy. Solar-plus-storage creates an energy system with “zero moving parts… only moving electrons,” mirroring the logic of the internet. He understands fossil fuels as a tool that buys us time until we are able to better utilise the extreme amount of energy that the sun is emitting towards Earth at all times.
The conclusion deals with dematerialisation through developments of the metaverse, the nature of the LLMs and how they relate to the wider internet. The conclusion is probably close to what one might expect from the advertising of the book, due to its quite strong futuristic nature. I found it to be the least insightful part of the book.
A number of themes run through the book. World-building versus rule-following: The gap is widening between the handful of actors—Washington, Beijing, and perhaps Brussels or Delhi—that aspire to write the world’s source code, and the many states that must pick which version to install. Technology as territory. Composability and decoupling: because systems are modular, rivals can swap out one layer at a time (5G, CBDCs, microchips) and rebuild it with their own values baked in. Crisis as design rehearsal: pandemic lockdowns, drone swarms in Ukraine and climate emergencies all show how quickly states can rewrite the ordinary if they own the right levers. Ontological stakes: when the battlefield is the code of the world itself, geopolitics ceases to be merely existential (who lives) and becomes ontological (what is).
The book is quite theory-heavy, and at various points reads with some level of difficulty (might also be the small font), but if one persists, the analytical points are quite enlightening.
The book is structured across four chapters, named after four years in which the event demonstrating the change in paradigm occurred. Across the book, two constant themes are present: that because the global system is a ‘modular software’, rival architects (mainly the US and China) can each replace pieces and set rules in specific domains – from 6G to AI – without total war. What used to be called “ideology” now acts like a background program that feels natural to its users; the struggle is to embed your values so deeply that others mistake them for the world itself
First, 2018, is named after the year during which the ‘Spy Hack’ story was revealed (spying chips were installed in motherboards made in China) and the first restrictions on the sale of advanced microchips were imposed on China by the United States. The chapter, to a large extent, deals with the creation of an artificial world through the computing power of microchips. It considers the erection and limits of the barriers to trade in advanced technology. With microchips, it deals with themselves as well as the restrictions on their sale being chokepoints within the system.
Second, 2020, deals with the notion that the pandemic allowed us to see (what heterodox approaches have been saying for decades) that the economy is a social construct that can be redefined to help social objectives. Instead of classic industrial policy, states now work on the framework (skills, data regimes, climate security) that lets their preferred system flourish - what Secretary Yellen called ‘modern supply-side economics’. Covid revealed that macro-management must expand into engineering the underlying platform.
This chapter has a section on the possibility of development of competitive advantage through active policy that references one of my favourite books of all time, Embedded Autonomy by Robert Evans, which is worth quoting in full:
“As Robert Evans argued in his classic Embedded Autonomy, modern states must fit their economic aspirations and activities into a global division of labour, but their place in the global hierarchy is never given in advance. Comparative advantage - the relative efficiency of different sectors and activities - is not structurally determined but 'constructed'. The contrast between these two views was the subject of an intense debate in Japan during the early postwar period. Economists at the Ministry of Finance favoured what they called a 'natural path' of revealed comparative advantage. The Ministry of International Trade and Industry believed that this path would perpetuate low productivity and low incomes. Public policies should be designed, it said, not merely to make the most efficient use of existing resources, in the static sense of conventional theory, but to furnish the directional thrust and raise the finance for a set of heavy and chemical industries that had to be created.'8 And since we know that certain positions in the global system are more favourable than others, trying to get into more desirable niches is a natural part of global competition and a prime object of domestic policy.”
Third, 2022, deals with the changing nature of war. Starlink, Palantir and other companies are changing the nature of war to be much more about the design of the environment in which the operations are conducted, even before shots can be fired. The economic sanctions and monetary chokepoints serve as another battlefield on which the war is being fought.
“If hegemonic wars have become impossible, that does not mean they cannot be won. But they must be won not by direct conflict with an opponent but by shaping the war environment in such a way that an opponent can be defeated before a direct clash becomes necessary. One could say that in this case, an artificial environment or metaverse decides the outcome. (…)
The logic of the offset is to create a new battlefield where the confrontation happens on terms set by its creator. This new battlefield is synthetic or virtual in some obvious sense, but that does not mean it can be isolated from a larger economic and technological environment.
Both Eisenhower and Brown stressed how warfare needed to be reconfigured in order to maximise American economic and technological primacy. In the dialectics of the offset, building a global technological system must precede its deployment on the battlefield. As the war in Ukraine demonstrates, the conditions under which the conflict takes place are not merely military but extend to critical financial, energy and technological networks. The way to win is to reprogram the system, to step outside the game world. Science fiction fans might call the strategy a Kobayashi Maru, in reference to a simulation exercise depicted in the Star Trek movie franchise, where victory is made possible by changing the conditions of the game.”
Fourth, 2024, is about the energy policy and the climate crisis. He deals with it in terms of the competitive advantage of individual countries that succeed in developing forms of cheap and abundant energy. Most of the chapter deals with the uniqueness of solar energy. Solar-plus-storage creates an energy system with “zero moving parts… only moving electrons,” mirroring the logic of the internet. He understands fossil fuels as a tool that buys us time until we are able to better utilise the extreme amount of energy that the sun is emitting towards Earth at all times.
The conclusion deals with dematerialisation through developments of the metaverse, the nature of the LLMs and how they relate to the wider internet. The conclusion is probably close to what one might expect from the advertising of the book, due to its quite strong futuristic nature. I found it to be the least insightful part of the book.
A number of themes run through the book. World-building versus rule-following: The gap is widening between the handful of actors—Washington, Beijing, and perhaps Brussels or Delhi—that aspire to write the world’s source code, and the many states that must pick which version to install. Technology as territory. Composability and decoupling: because systems are modular, rivals can swap out one layer at a time (5G, CBDCs, microchips) and rebuild it with their own values baked in. Crisis as design rehearsal: pandemic lockdowns, drone swarms in Ukraine and climate emergencies all show how quickly states can rewrite the ordinary if they own the right levers. Ontological stakes: when the battlefield is the code of the world itself, geopolitics ceases to be merely existential (who lives) and becomes ontological (what is).
The book is quite theory-heavy, and at various points reads with some level of difficulty (might also be the small font), but if one persists, the analytical points are quite enlightening.
March 16, 2025
(3.2 stars)
World Builders is an amalgamation of Macaes’s thinking about the ongoing evolution of the modern world order. Some of his earliest ideas trace back to a 2020 Substack post, where he notes the difference between the West and East as it pertains to Chinese linguistics and culture:
“‘Do you know why the Chinese are so naturally good at deep learning? Because the black box has been part of Chinese society and Chinese culture since the very beginning. Zen meditation, yes, but not only. Chinese medicine. There is an input, some herb or infusion. You have no idea how it works, but it does. All you can do to get a different result is enter a different input.’”
“But if you can accept not knowing how things work, a host of new possibilities become available. Officials in Beijing will readily explain that the reason China was not affected by the Global Financial Crisis was that the country was not hampered by economic theory. It did what worked at the time and gave little thought to what was prescribed — or proscribed — by economics textbooks.”
- https://brunomacaes.substack.com/p/th...
Macaes’s main thesis is that the world is stratified into world builders and world players. Geopolitics has historically been concerned with mediating these interactions in physical meatspace, largely controlled by formal governmental entities with defined interfaces and power hierarchies. He argues that recent technological and cultural advancements will lead to the digital realm being similarly stratified into the world builders <> world players axis, and will actually be more important than their physical counterparts.
Technology (Greek root: techne) has referred to the human ability to manipulate and control nature by leveraging the natural world’s resources and basic economic structures to increase global welfare (oil, transistors, etc.). Technology will continue increasing in this sense to do more with less, but the real battle will be using technology to control human nature via alternate digital realities controlled by the digital world builders.
To be sure, these realms are inextricably linked and will continue to be. Macaes recognizes this, citing Elon’s unilateral Starlink power in Ukraine and the importance of the digital world builder to secure energy production and chips in the physical world while simultaneously controlling AI models/distribution.
Macaes accurately notes how the transition of the physical being downstream of the digital is already underway: people optimizing aesthetics for Instagram, X/Substack for ideas, digital fraud leading to real-world consequences. Frustratingly, he does not expand or extrapolate on these ideas, opting to veer to seemingly random tangential anecdotes.
One of my first-order pushbacks against his theory would be that we already see evidence of these two worlds bifurcating, most notably with crypto and crypto-native assets. A small set of people are comfortable holding their money on-chain and place it in a different mental dimension over dollars that live on traditional banking rails. Granted, crypto is a tiny industry with a miniscule impact on the outside world. However, its outsized mindshare in the digital realm bleeds into the physical world ($TRUMP, government crypto reserves), indicative of evidence that it is upstream along certain axes (narrow utility, ideas, etc.).
—
A good first pass at describing a macro worldview, though lacks definitional characteristics that make it feel much more like an ambiguous Grand Unified Theory, failing to draw insights from trends or excerpts beyond major headlines and platitudes. I would have liked to see Macaes explore more implications of this master <> slave dynamic both historically and how it might manifest in the digital world. Furthermore, some of his most interesting and thought-provoking ideas are left hanging, most notably the last sentence of the book:
“One might recall the history of religion with its numerous examples of how a divine intelligence must manifest itself in human form in order then to reveal its true nature.”
It’s either too Straussian for me to fully appreciate it, or it’s far too macro-journalistic for my liking. Macaes is still one of the leading thinkers I’ve found and one of my favorite writers on this subject.
World Builders is an amalgamation of Macaes’s thinking about the ongoing evolution of the modern world order. Some of his earliest ideas trace back to a 2020 Substack post, where he notes the difference between the West and East as it pertains to Chinese linguistics and culture:
“‘Do you know why the Chinese are so naturally good at deep learning? Because the black box has been part of Chinese society and Chinese culture since the very beginning. Zen meditation, yes, but not only. Chinese medicine. There is an input, some herb or infusion. You have no idea how it works, but it does. All you can do to get a different result is enter a different input.’”
“But if you can accept not knowing how things work, a host of new possibilities become available. Officials in Beijing will readily explain that the reason China was not affected by the Global Financial Crisis was that the country was not hampered by economic theory. It did what worked at the time and gave little thought to what was prescribed — or proscribed — by economics textbooks.”
- https://brunomacaes.substack.com/p/th...
Macaes’s main thesis is that the world is stratified into world builders and world players. Geopolitics has historically been concerned with mediating these interactions in physical meatspace, largely controlled by formal governmental entities with defined interfaces and power hierarchies. He argues that recent technological and cultural advancements will lead to the digital realm being similarly stratified into the world builders <> world players axis, and will actually be more important than their physical counterparts.
Technology (Greek root: techne) has referred to the human ability to manipulate and control nature by leveraging the natural world’s resources and basic economic structures to increase global welfare (oil, transistors, etc.). Technology will continue increasing in this sense to do more with less, but the real battle will be using technology to control human nature via alternate digital realities controlled by the digital world builders.
To be sure, these realms are inextricably linked and will continue to be. Macaes recognizes this, citing Elon’s unilateral Starlink power in Ukraine and the importance of the digital world builder to secure energy production and chips in the physical world while simultaneously controlling AI models/distribution.
Macaes accurately notes how the transition of the physical being downstream of the digital is already underway: people optimizing aesthetics for Instagram, X/Substack for ideas, digital fraud leading to real-world consequences. Frustratingly, he does not expand or extrapolate on these ideas, opting to veer to seemingly random tangential anecdotes.
One of my first-order pushbacks against his theory would be that we already see evidence of these two worlds bifurcating, most notably with crypto and crypto-native assets. A small set of people are comfortable holding their money on-chain and place it in a different mental dimension over dollars that live on traditional banking rails. Granted, crypto is a tiny industry with a miniscule impact on the outside world. However, its outsized mindshare in the digital realm bleeds into the physical world ($TRUMP, government crypto reserves), indicative of evidence that it is upstream along certain axes (narrow utility, ideas, etc.).
—
A good first pass at describing a macro worldview, though lacks definitional characteristics that make it feel much more like an ambiguous Grand Unified Theory, failing to draw insights from trends or excerpts beyond major headlines and platitudes. I would have liked to see Macaes explore more implications of this master <> slave dynamic both historically and how it might manifest in the digital world. Furthermore, some of his most interesting and thought-provoking ideas are left hanging, most notably the last sentence of the book:
“One might recall the history of religion with its numerous examples of how a divine intelligence must manifest itself in human form in order then to reveal its true nature.”
It’s either too Straussian for me to fully appreciate it, or it’s far too macro-journalistic for my liking. Macaes is still one of the leading thinkers I’ve found and one of my favorite writers on this subject.
August 22, 2025
Excelente ensaio, muito bem estruturado e claro sobre geipolítica, ou como o autor coloca, relações internacionais.
Em especial, confronta os EUA e a China como os atores principais de um jogo que inclui outros, como a Rússia ou a Europa, mas que jogam um jogo que não é o mesmo. Construtores de mundos apresenta uma tese que desenvolve de forma superior, em que o território e o físico possuem atualmente uma nova camada que é o digital que possui uma lógica mais complexa e definitivamente transformadora, na forma como constroem as economias e as relações de poder, em especial, na informação, associando aos chips e na energia, associada à energia verde e aos fluxos.
Discussão brilhante, de uma mente brilhante.
Lido em três dias de férias, bem entretido e profundo.
Em especial, confronta os EUA e a China como os atores principais de um jogo que inclui outros, como a Rússia ou a Europa, mas que jogam um jogo que não é o mesmo. Construtores de mundos apresenta uma tese que desenvolve de forma superior, em que o território e o físico possuem atualmente uma nova camada que é o digital que possui uma lógica mais complexa e definitivamente transformadora, na forma como constroem as economias e as relações de poder, em especial, na informação, associando aos chips e na energia, associada à energia verde e aos fluxos.
Discussão brilhante, de uma mente brilhante.
Lido em três dias de férias, bem entretido e profundo.
May 18, 2025
Nations are units created by kings, nobelities and churhes when society was run by use of horse and sail, and analphabetism was dominant. Today we are entering the digital era.
The autor discussed the development, he outlines how moder times need organisation with New qualities.
The autor discussed the development, he outlines how moder times need organisation with New qualities.
Want to read
January 26, 2025in dubii podcast
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 12, 2025
Power over Spice is power over all
Bruno is a strong thinker who has been able to contextualise his vision of a new geopolitics. He intertwines a constructivist idea of a fight between two actors in the efforts to create a world in their image while also adding an element of realism—understanding that great powers are central to the game in an anarchic world.
However, as is every first book from a newly emerging field, it has to deconstruct everything from the first principle to concretise the world itself. Much like every book that begins with a new theory of examining the external world, it becomes predisposed to repetitive statements and large prose with the priority of maintaining clarity. In this way, the same way as Leviathan by Hobbes, this book suffers from the same anal analysis. Though admirable and understandable, I don’t want to read about Deleuze; I came here to read about geopolitical competition.
The parallels don’t end there; as we all know, Hobbes was probably an atheist. At least, he intended his theory of the leviathan to be based on material legitimacy rather than divine legitimacy. In this way, he had to censor himself heavily and implicitly state many arguments to prevent himself from being persecuted. Bruno certainly does the same. Throughout the book, he alludes to the incompetent structure the EU currently has, but he cannot say out of self-preservation (which I commend); maybe this book would look different if it was written post-Draghi reforms.
Lastly, the 2024 and concluding chapters truly do bring down his credibility through a failure to honestly assess the energy dynamics in geopolitics over a clear ideological bias and the conclusion in making a prediction of AI that is so unbelievably speculative that it makes me think if he’s trying to mimic Franz Herbert.
In summary, it is a mediocre read if you are interested in the subject, made worse by how it’s written.
Bruno is a strong thinker who has been able to contextualise his vision of a new geopolitics. He intertwines a constructivist idea of a fight between two actors in the efforts to create a world in their image while also adding an element of realism—understanding that great powers are central to the game in an anarchic world.
However, as is every first book from a newly emerging field, it has to deconstruct everything from the first principle to concretise the world itself. Much like every book that begins with a new theory of examining the external world, it becomes predisposed to repetitive statements and large prose with the priority of maintaining clarity. In this way, the same way as Leviathan by Hobbes, this book suffers from the same anal analysis. Though admirable and understandable, I don’t want to read about Deleuze; I came here to read about geopolitical competition.
The parallels don’t end there; as we all know, Hobbes was probably an atheist. At least, he intended his theory of the leviathan to be based on material legitimacy rather than divine legitimacy. In this way, he had to censor himself heavily and implicitly state many arguments to prevent himself from being persecuted. Bruno certainly does the same. Throughout the book, he alludes to the incompetent structure the EU currently has, but he cannot say out of self-preservation (which I commend); maybe this book would look different if it was written post-Draghi reforms.
Lastly, the 2024 and concluding chapters truly do bring down his credibility through a failure to honestly assess the energy dynamics in geopolitics over a clear ideological bias and the conclusion in making a prediction of AI that is so unbelievably speculative that it makes me think if he’s trying to mimic Franz Herbert.
In summary, it is a mediocre read if you are interested in the subject, made worse by how it’s written.
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