DISPATCHESPERSPECTIVE
Trigger Happy
STEVEN POOLE
Shoot first, ask questions later
Ever felt as though the rich and powerful treat the world like a game? You’re in good company: Bruno Maçaes, -once Portugal’s European affairs minister and now a jetsetting analyst and consultant, argues as much in his new book, World Builders: Technology And The New Geopolitics.
‘World building’ is here defined as the way in which the system we all live in is manipulated at the levels of technology, energy, trade, and finance. Of course, this is not new in principle. Sulla, the first Roman to march with an army upon the seat of the Republic itself, spent his few years as dictator rewriting the constitution of Rome in order to streamline the offices of power to which people could aspire. He revised the rules of the game of politics, ostensibly so that no one