Global Level Resources

Coordination Without Capture: Governance

Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the commons. Cambridge University Press; and Ostrom, E. (2010). Polycentric systems for coping with collective action and global environmental change. Global Environmental Change, 20(4).

The Nobel-laureate backbone of the whole level: shared problems can be governed by multiple overlapping, autonomous centres under shared rules, neither central authority nor fragmented isolation. The scholarly resolution to the false binary of global coordination, paired with the principle of subsidiarity.

Weinstein, B., & Heying, H. (2021). A hunter-gatherer’s guide to the 21st century. Portfolio. 

The source of the level’s “steady-state” spine: the “fourth frontier” (engineering an indefinite steady state that feels like growth while obeying physics and game theory), the senescence of civilisations, the Maya converting surplus into public works rather than excess, and the design principles, don’t optimise for a single value, stay resistant to capture, build an evolutionarily stable strategy. 

The Game B and sensemaking commons (the Game B wiki, the Consilience Project, Heterodox Academy). 

Contemporary efforts at designing better collective coordination and a healthier information commons: Game B as the search for a post-rivalrous civilisational operating system, the Consilience Project on repairing shared sensemaking, Heterodox Academy on viewpoint diversity. Orienting ideas and works in progress rather than finished answers, and direct companions to the Critical Thinking & Sensemaking page.

Steiner, R. (1919). Toward social renewal (the threefold social order). 

An early proposal to separate society’s cultural, political, and economic spheres so none dominates the others, an ancestor of the distributed-power thinking the level favours. Steiner’s social thought stands somewhat apart from his esoteric anthroposophy; take the structural idea on its merits.

Anti-Corruption & the Capture Problem

Stigler, G. (1971). The theory of economic regulation. Bell Journal of Economics; and the public-choice tradition (Tullock, Buchanan). 

The foundational analysis of regulatory capture and rent-seeking: regulation tends to be acquired by the industry it governs, and officials respond to incentives like everyone else. Why capture is the structural default, and why integrity has to be actively engineered, not assumed.

Transparency and accountability scholarship (e.g. the anti-corruption evidence base on transparency, independent oversight, and whistleblower protection). 

The evidence on what actually resists capture, transparency as the cheapest effective tool, independent oversight with teeth, protected whistleblowers and a free press, reduced discretionary complexity, and distributed authority. No single tool suffices; resilient integrity is layered.

Taleb, N. N. (2018). Skin in the game. Random House; and Antifragile (2012). 

Skin in the game on the accountability asymmetries at the heart of capture (decision-makers insulated from the consequences of their decisions), and Antifragile on systems that strengthen under stress. 

Collective Trauma & Healing

The intergenerational-trauma literature (e.g. Yehuda & Lehrner, 2018, on putative epigenetic mechanisms; and scoping reviews of the human evidence). 

The science behind The Mental Health of the Planet: transmission of trauma across generations is well-evidenced through psychosocial pathways, with a biological epigenetic contribution that is established in animal models but genuinely debated in humans. 

The global-mental-health critique (e.g. work on the “treatment gap,” sociotherapy for collective trauma in Rwanda, and the critique of exporting Western psychiatric models). 

The scholarship warning that scaling Western psychiatry globally can medicalise sane responses to intolerable conditions and overwrite indigenous, communal healing. The basis for the level’s community-and-culture approach to healing at scale.

Recapture the Rapture (Jamie Wheal, 2021). 

The source of the “Meaning 3.0” framing: cultural software that is open-source, scalable, and antifragile, fulfilling religion’s prosocial functions (inspiration, healing, connection) without its dogma, and the physiological state-shapers (breath, embodiment, music) that build it. Developed across the manual’s spirituality and individual-level work; read enthusiastically and critically at once.

Planetary Boundaries & Stewardship

Richardson, K., Rockström, J., et al. (2023, with 2025 updates). Earth beyond six (now seven) of nine planetary boundaries. Science Advances; the Stockholm Resilience Centre and Potsdam Planetary Health Check.

The field-defining framework and its current status: seven of nine Earth-system boundaries transgressed, the safe operating space for humanity exceeded. The scientific basis of Climate Resilience & Environmental Stewardship.

Raworth, K. (2017). Doughnut economics. Random House; and the “good life within planetary limits” research (Leeds). 

Meeting human needs within ecological boundaries rather than chasing limitless growth, the steady-state economics the level argues for.

Oreskes, N., & Conway, E. (2010). Merchants of doubt. Bloomsbury. 

The documented history of manufactured scientific doubt funded by industry, essential for following the money behind climate denial and seeing the manufactured-doubt pattern.

Schumacher, E. F. (1973). Small is beautiful: Economics as if people mattered. 

The classic case for human-scale, decentralised, sustainable economics, an ancestor of the bottom-up, post-extractive thread.

Transformative Technology

Bostrom, N. (2014). Superintelligence: Paths, dangers, strategies. Oxford University Press; and Tegmark, M. (2017). Life 3.0. Knopf. 

The serious treatments of advanced-AI risk and the long-range future. Read alongside the level’s emphasis that the nearer danger is the concentration of power happening now, not only the speculative far future.

Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism. PublicAffairs. 

The anatomy of the data-extraction-and-behavioural-modification engine, foundational for Technology, Regulation & Human Autonomy. (Treated in full on the Death/Rebirth shelf.)

Harari, Y. N. (2018). 21 lessons for the 21st century. Spiegel & Grau. 

The source of much of the level’s technology-and-governance material: the merger of infotech and biotech, the risk of a data-and-enhancement elite, the challenge transformative tech poses to democratic decision-making, and the warning against manufactured crises. 

The AI-governance landscape (the EU AI Act and the GDPR-lineage data-protection regimes; analyses of digital sovereignty and AI concentration). 

The current state of actually-existing technology governance: risk-based regulation, data-protection law, and the live tensions, enforcement against a few dominant global providers, the risk of entrenching incumbents, and the geopolitics of digital sovereignty.