Oleg Komlik — The Intellectual Origins of Sharing Economy [Bucky]

Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller (1895 – 1983) was a renowned and influential American inventor, designer, systems theorist, and futurist. Fuller saw himself as a practical philosopher and worked to solve global problems surrounding housing, transportation, energy, ecological destruction, and poverty. During his prolific career, in his different capacities he lectured a lot and published about 25 books, stimulating and leaving a great impact especially on “geeks” of his time and their successors who have then engendered the Information Revolution from the 1970s onward. 

In the 1960s, Fuller developed the World Game, a collaborative simulation game in which players attempt to solve world problems and overcome the uneven distribution of global resources.

The object of this anti-Malthusian and anti-militaristic game was in Fuller’s words, to “make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone”. Over the 1960s-70s, the World Game and its ideas diffused via workshops, seminars, conferences, and educational and strategic papers. 

The 1971 publication “The World Game: Integrative Resource Utilization Planning Tool” (open-access), along with the game instructions and charts, also included several Fuller’s talks about the essence of game. One of them, given in the US Congress in 1969, caught my eye....

Economic Sociology and Political Economy
The Intellectual Origins of Sharing Economy
Oleg Komlik | founder and editor-in-chief of the ES/PE, Chairman of the Junior Sociologists Network at the International Sociological Association, a PhD Candidate in Economic Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ben-Gurion University, and a Lecturer in the School of Behavioral Sciences at the College of Management Academic Studies