From: jimruttshow8596
Humanity is currently undergoing a “world historical transition” [00:02:09] that could be catastrophic, leading to a “Mad Max” scenario, or could result in a “truly amazing future” [00:02:17] akin to “Star Trek” [00:02:17]. Achieving a better future requires a “significant upgrade of our individual and collective capacity for thought and action” [00:02:25].
The Current State: Game A
The current model of civilization, referred to as “Game A,” is characterized by an escalating reliance on force and competition [00:03:09]. Historically, unresolved disputes at the civilizational level led to conflict [00:03:22]. After World War II, humanity faced the existential threat of nuclear annihilation, realizing the need to “grow up as a species” [00:04:32] and pursue peace [00:03:39]. While the world has so far avoided nuclear war [00:04:34], the underlying “deep code of Game A” [00:04:44] fosters increasing technological capability within a context of competition [00:04:54].
Accelerating Risks in Game A
This competitive drive accelerates humanity’s capacity to destroy, leading to:
- Technological Proliferation: Technologies like CRISPR enable catastrophic biological risks to be accessible to more actors, including large criminal enterprises, at an increasing pace [00:05:41].
- Systemic Fragility: A deeply technological civilization becomes inherently fragile. Disrupting critical infrastructure like the power grid, which would have had little impact 150 years ago, could now be catastrophic [00:06:45].
- Arms Races: The underlying logic of Game A drives “heedlessness or even recklessness” [00:07:58], such as in AI research, where the imperative to stay ahead of competitors (e.g., China) leads to cutting corners on safety [00:08:49].
- Ecological Limits: Humanity is nearing or has exceeded the Earth’s carrying capacity to support 8 billion people at the current average lifestyle [00:09:05]. As population peaks at 10-11 billion and lifestyles improve globally, environmental externalities increase, leading to a “micro corrosion or toxicity” [00:10:29] that risks societal collapse [00:09:31].
- War on Sense-Making: Advanced cognitive neuroscience and AI are used to manipulate human choice-making through marketing and propaganda [01:12:00]. This “autoimmune disease on sense-making” [01:48:50] turns tools of understanding against themselves, disrupting the capacity for effective choice and compounding the race to the bottom [01:06:22].
These factors suggest that Game A is “careening towards the edge of the cliff” [00:07:35], as humanity wields “the power of gods without the wisdom of gods” [00:11:31].
The Alternative: Game B
Game B is a proposed trajectory towards a better world [01:14:15]. It is “notoriously difficult to think and talk about” because using Game A’s conceptual structures may “poison the well” [01:15:26]. Instead, it requires a “parallax perspective” [01:15:42], viewing it through multiple succinct constructions [01:15:50].
Defining Game B
Game B can be understood as:
- Navigating Complexity: Building the capacity to navigate complexity without resorting to complicated systems [01:16:16]. This involves developing skillfulness in individuals and groups to respond to natural, anthropo-complexity (of people), and techno-complexity (of technologies) [01:16:47].
- Meta-Protocol for Hyper Collaboration: Game B is an emergent, distributed, and uncoordinated phenomenon [01:17:55]. It is a “boot protocol” [01:19:14] that allows individuals to self-organize, orient themselves, and participate meaningfully [01:21:00]. Hyper collaboration suggests that everyone is already “playing Game B at level zero” [01:21:19], meaning it’s omnipresent and one can choose to step into it and increase skillfulness [01:21:31]. This fosters “synchronicity” [01:22:12], where disparate efforts align without formal coordination [01:23:13].
- Architectural Attributes: Early principles laid down for Game B emphasize being non-hierarchical, network-oriented, and “long-term metastable” [01:24:43]. These attributes appear to be driving its self-booting and self-growing aspects [01:24:56].
Optimism for Game B
While Game A is currently vast and powerful, Game B holds promise due to the concept of the “adjacent possible” [01:26:49], as discussed by Stuart Kauffman [01:26:49]. This concept suggests that new possibilities, generated by combining existing components, expand at a faster-than-exponential rate, potentially reaching infinity in finite time [01:27:51].
Game B, though starting small, can leverage a “slightly higher exponent” [01:28:59] in its capacity for innovation. This higher “rate of change” [01:33:36], especially in the context of accelerating change, can eventually “out-compete” [01:41:03] Game A [01:41:03]. This is because Game A’s deep code is about increasing technological capability in a context of competition [00:04:44], while Game B is designed to be “substantially better at innovation” [01:44:44] and creative collaboration [01:44:53].
A crucial distinction for Game B is that much of its innovation must occur at the level of “people, relationships, human beings” [01:48:03] and the cultivation of collective wisdom [01:48:43]. This wisdom must be symmetric with or superior to the power generated by creative collaboration, acting as a “meta-design constraint” [01:48:55] to prevent rapid self-destruction [01:48:20]. Game B must prioritize cultivating individual and collective sovereignty, wisdom, and maturity [01:49:08].
Preparing for Game B: The Pre-B World
The “pre-B” world is the current state where no fully functioning Game B group exists, but individuals and smaller groups are working to prepare for its emergence [01:50:11]. Key aspects of this preparation include:
Finding the Others
This involves connecting with like-minded individuals through platforms like the Game B Facebook group and GameB on Twitter [01:50:38].
Making Personal Changes
Individuals need to make changes in their lives to become “Game B ready” [01:51:04], including:
- Developing a Transparent Agentic Mind: Seriously engaging with “liminality” [01:52:03], being aware of one’s own axiomatic assumptions, and being able to shift paradigms as contexts change [01:52:19].
- Orienting Choices by Meaningfulness: Building the capacity to base choices on a deep sense of meaningfulness [01:52:30]. This means overcoming the Game A tendency to rationalize or ignore what is truly meaningful [01:53:03]. It requires reconnecting with one’s intrinsic values and making choices aligned with what is genuinely important [01:54:19]. This also involves escaping the “matrix of status-oriented consumerism” [01:51:13], which can lead to sacrificing personal well-being for external validation [01:55:31].
- Cultivating Humility: Humility is “the handmaiden of liminality” [01:41:40] and a “primary capacity to play Game B well” [01:41:47]. It entails recognizing the richness, depth, and complexity of reality that cannot be simply understood from a manual [01:42:05].
- Vocation and Right Livelihood: Perceiving and pursuing one’s “calling” or “ikigai” [01:13:58]—that which one is uniquely capable of doing with exquisite care and capacity, and which lights up one’s sense of meaningfulness [01:13:53].
Experimenting with Piece Parts
Game B will require a holistic approach, which means discovering and adapting existing solutions or developing new ones across many domains:
- Parenting: Shift from an asymmetrical “master and student” or “boss and employee” relationship to one of deep symmetry and humility, recognizing the child as a “fully realized soul” [01:11:18]. The parent supports the child’s self-capacity building rather than impressing their own learned propositions [01:11:48], while also being open to the child’s teaching through liminality [01:12:16].
- Conviviality: Conscious design of culture (including rituals, tools, and gatherings) that fully supports personal, relational, and holistic growth [01:15:51]. This emphasizes face-to-face interaction, taking relationship as sacred, and realizing the sacred in the ordinary [01:17:06]. A simple potluck picnic can be more fulfilling than an expensive vacation [01:18:46].
- Sense-Making and Action-Taking: Developing tools and practices for effective sense-making (like the Rally Point Alpha Facebook group [01:19:16]) and then translating that understanding into effective action [01:19:43].
- Health and Well-being: Viewing health holistically, encompassing physiological, psychological, and relational health [01:21:18]. Well-being then becomes the context that supports health “ongoingly” [01:22:44], even under diverse circumstances [01:23:08].
- Policing and Justice: Rather than simply punishing, an event showing injustice is seen as a signal to slow down, enter a liminal space, and listen deeply [01:29:04]. The focus is on increasing capacity for a more meaningful relationship [01:27:58], healing deep hurts [01:29:17], and strengthening conviviality from the bottom up [01:29:29]. This approach aims to make the system “anti-fragile to injustice” [01:29:34]. When dealing with “defectors, free-riders, predators, and sociopaths” [01:30:04], boundaries are necessary but implemented from a place of maturity and support, not reactive conflict [01:31:20]. “Discernment” [01:34:23], the capacity to perceive reality without projecting one’s framework, is key [01:36:11].
- Coherence: A synergistic relationship among distinct parts that generates an emergent whole greater than the sum of its parts, while simultaneously enhancing the autonomy of each part [01:38:00]. This “coherent pluralism” [01:39:15] allows for immense specialization and division of labor while maintaining the integrity of the whole [01:40:58]. This capacity for coherence and supporting specialization may be a fundamental “biological code” [01:41:16] for humans [01:41:08].
- Scaling Beyond the Dunbar Number: The “hard problem of Game B” [01:42:40] is to scale these coherent, collaborative principles beyond the Dunbar number (approximately 150 individuals, the limit for face-to-face communities [01:42:04]). This requires finding an “attractor in reality itself” [01:44:04] – an intrinsic dynamic between accelerating change and the structure of a distributed cognition group that allows it to move rapidly while maintaining integrity [01:44:52]. This implies “meta-learning” [01:48:01]: improving the experimental protocol itself to accelerate learning [01:48:52].
The Emergence of “Proto-B”
The emergence of “proto-B” entities—the first attempts to create an “integrated way of Game B life” [01:49:42]—is expected to be a gradual, perhaps even surprising, process [01:51:39]. These proto-B groups will likely initially depend on Game A for certain resources (e.g., computer chips, hospitals) [01:50:16] and must become adept at “parasitizing Game A,” essentially pulling energy from it to build Game B [01:50:35].
Unlike past intentional communities that failed by operating at the lowest level of Game A (e.g., selling artisanal crafts), Game B experiments can leverage the “highest quality members,” [01:53:41] such as creative professionals (software developers, designers, scientists) [01:53:46]. If these individuals step into Game B, their capacity for creative collaboration will increase, potentially generating “highly disruptive economic innovations” [01:54:18] that provide massive asymmetric competitive advantages in Game A [01:55:10].
Characteristics of Proto-B Groups
- Geographical Anchor (or Episodic Physicality): While a hard pruning rule for a proto-B is to be geographically anchored as a face-to-face community [01:56:09], episodic physical relationships (e.g., meeting quarterly) can maintain strong bonds for groups that primarily collaborate virtually [01:57:00].
- Inter-Group Collaboration: Proto-B groups, being coherent and convivial, can also collaborate synergistically with other proto-B groups, largely virtually, expanding their collective innovation velocity [01:58:25].
- Learning from Failure: Proto-B communities will inevitably face failures. However, these “honorable failures” [02:00:12], when experienced from a place of integrity and humility, lead to “deep learning” [01:59:45] and “wisdom,” [01:59:50] which individuals then carry forward to future attempts [02:01:24].
The challenge of developing Game B is complex, akin to the decades-long process of developing a laser from fundamental physics to physical implementation [02:02:42]. What Game B is attempting is “a whole lot harder and with a whole lot less resource” [02:02:45]. Nevertheless, continued experimentation and meta-learning can drive progress [02:03:07].