Five people are sitting at a table.

Each of them has spent the last decade working on what they would call, if pressed, the transition. They use slightly different vocabularies but they recognize each other. The conversation has been going for two hours and there has been a great deal of nodding. The dinner is excellent. The wine is open. They walk away from the table at midnight convinced there is alignment in the room.

None of them, in those two hours, has said a number.

I have been at that table many times. Sometimes I have been one of the people doing the nodding. Sometimes I have been the one who left feeling that something important did not get said.

Not because anyone in that room was hiding anything. Because the questions had not yet entered the room.

What did not get said is what I want to write about.

We talk as if we agree about the shape of the world we are trying to build. And in fact, surprisingly, we mostly do.

Walk into any room of serious people working on this. The metacrisis crowd. The Game B people. The bioregionalists. The cooperative economy people. The doughnut economists. The Indigenous futurists. The regenerative agriculture community. The commons scholars. The cosmo local builders. The four currency designers. The post growth thinkers. The Buen Vivir, sumak kawsay, ubuntu people.

The room has dozens of vocabularies. Underneath the vocabularies, the shape is the same.

Cooperation rather than extraction. Membranes rather than platforms. Bioregional rather than global. Plural rather than singular. Long rather than short. Care rather than capture. Many rather than one. The shape is so clear that anyone who has spent more than a year in any of these conversations could draw it on a napkin, and the other dozen vocabularies would recognize it without prompting.

The shape is not the disagreement.

The disagreement is the when.

And almost none of us sees that we need to say it out loud.

The AI accelerationist who came to your dinner party last month thinks the transition is fifteen years away. He thinks the substrate is about to flip, that the new economy will be running on agentic infrastructure by 2040, and that everything we are doing to prepare slow community fabric is either irrelevant or will be absorbed into the new substrate.

The Game B builder you met at the conference thinks the transition is fifty years. She thinks the cellular substrate has to be grown one viable community at a time, that the cold start problem is real, and that we are in year ten of a fifty year crossing.

The deep ecologist you keep reading thinks the transition is a hundred and fifty years. He thinks anything faster is hubris. He thinks the work right now is to protect what we can and to seed practices that will only fully mature in his grandchildren’s generation.

The despair positive thinker you keep almost arguing with thinks the transition is after collapse. She thinks no transition is possible until the existing system has actually fallen, that everything we build inside it gets captured by it, and that the real work is preparation for the rebuild.

The civilizational designer who wrote you that long email last week thinks the transition has already begun and that the window for the decisive moves is the next eight years.

These five people will sit at the same table and use the same words and nod at each other and walk away convinced that there is alignment.

There is no alignment.

There is alignment about the shape of the destination and total disagreement about the duration of the journey, and the disagreement about duration is the actual reason none of their projects fit together.

Because if you think it is fifteen years, you build differently. You bet on technology compounding. You underinvest in slow social fabric because the substrate change will outrun it. You make peace with capital.

If you think it is fifty years, you build communities and accords and currencies and you assume that the political layer is mostly downstream of the cultural layer and that the cultural layer takes generations to soften.

If you think it is a hundred and fifty years, you build seeds. You write the book. You plant the oak. You teach the apprentice who will teach the apprentice. You stop thinking about your own life as the unit and start thinking about lineages.

If you think it is after collapse, you build the seed bank, the monastery, the protocol that will be needed in the rebuild.

These are not the same project. They cannot share the same money. They cannot share the same staff. They cannot share the same urgency. They produce, when put in the same room, the maddening sense that everyone is talking past everyone else, even though everyone agrees about the shape.

But there is a second variable.

It diverges even more than the first. And we see it even less.

The second question is this. How many people do you expect to be alive at the end of your timeline?

Not how many you would want to be alive. Not how many you think should be alive. How many you actually, in the quiet of your own thinking, expect.

Twelve billion? Ten? Eight? Four? Two? One? Less?

Each of the five people at the table has a number for this too. The numbers are not in the same neighborhood. None of the five has been asked. Most of them have not yet asked themselves.

The AI accelerationist, if you asked him, would probably say twelve billion without much hesitation. Better medicine. Longer lives. Greater abundance. The projects he funds and the timelines he believes only make sense if he assumes most of humanity carries through. He just has not been asked.

The Game B builder expects something like eight billion. She thinks the transition is hard but survivable for most. Her communities are designed to absorb people, not to replace them. Her math assumes that the cooperative substrate, once built, can hold the species.

The deep ecologist has read the overshoot literature for thirty years. He cites carrying capacity numbers without flinching. He believes in a hundred and fifty year transition through climate disruption. The arithmetic is already in him. He has just never been invited to read out the sum, and so the sum has stayed in the margin of his thinking rather than the center.

The despair positive thinker may, if she sat with the question, name a number close to one billion. Her whole frame assumes collapse happens before transition begins, and collapse on the scale she expects is depopulating at scale. She has not, as far as I can tell, stated the population implication of her own framework. Almost nobody in her conversation has asked her to.

The civilizational designer expects something close to current population, maybe nine billion. Her decisive eight year window is, fundamentally, a bet that decisive action right now keeps the bottleneck from closing too hard. The number is doing all the work in her sense of urgency.

These are not the same expectations of the same future. And every project, every dollar, every life decision downstream of a population number is doing different work depending on what the number is.

If you expect twelve billion at the other end, you build for abundance and inclusion.

If you expect eight billion, you build for resilience under stress.

If you expect two billion, you have already, whether you have named it or not, accepted that something most of us would call a catastrophe is part of the path. You build for what survives it.

If you expect one billion, you are working on a different planet from the person who expects twelve, even if you use exactly the same words.

This is the second axis. Timeline and population. When and how many. The combination of the two creates the actual project a person is working on, no matter what the stated mission says.

Two people who agree on a fifty year timeline but disagree about whether eight billion or two billion are alive at the end are not doing the same work. They cannot be. The work the eight billion person is doing is transition. The work the two billion person is doing is triage with rebuild. These are different verbs.

And almost nobody has yet found a way to name which one.

These are not hidden questions. They are unseen questions. There is a difference. A hidden question is one you have refused to look at. An unseen question is one nobody has pointed at yet. Once it is pointed at, it cannot be unseen.

There is a discipline available to us, once we can see the questions, that we have not yet had a chance to use.

The discipline of saying our numbers.

Not the right numbers. There are no right numbers. Anyone who tells you they know how long the transition will take, or how many people will be alive at the end of it, is selling you something. But each of us, in the quiet of our own thinking, already operates on both. We have already decided. We have just not yet seen that we have.

The fifteen year, twelve billion person has decided. The fifty year, eight billion person has decided. The hundred and fifty year, two billion person has decided. They built their lives around the decisions. They chose where to live, what to study, what to fund, who to marry, what to have children for, around the decisions. The numbers are doing enormous work in each of their lives. They are doing it in a place nobody has yet thought to look.

So here is the modest proposal.

Before the next meeting where five aligned people talk past each other for two hours, name both questions out loud.

Not vaguely. Specifically.

How many years from today until the world we are trying to build is the world most people actually live in?

And how many people do we expect to be alive when we get there?

Write both numbers down. Have everyone else in the room write theirs down. Pass them around the table.

I have done this twice now. In both rooms the spread on the timeline was an order of magnitude. The spread on the population was an order of magnitude too. The people giving the answers had spent the previous two hours nodding at each other. None of them had been angry about the questions. Most of them had been a little surprised that the questions existed.

Once the numbers are on the table, the conversation about what to do this year changes shape. The fifteen year, twelve billion person and the hundred and fifty year, two billion person discover they cannot share the same calendar, the same hiring decisions, the same theory of how change happens, or the same definition of what counts as progress. They may still want to collaborate. They may even find places where their work braids. But the collaboration is now legible to itself. It knows what it is and what it is not.

This is what making a horizon explicit does. It allows the work of the year ahead to be done against it. The horizon is not flexible. The horizon is the discipline.

Most of us do not yet have a horizon. We have a vague sense, a sentiment, a felt slope. We have numbers we have never said out loud, never thought to say out loud, and would have to look at directly before we could state.

But we can, this week, look. And then ask each other.

Until we know whose clock each of us is on, and how many of us we each expect to make it through, we cannot help each other carry.

And what we have to carry will need to be carried for a long time.

The system is extractive. It is locked into growth. It is driving us, with mathematical precision, into a wall.

We have a name for this. We have books about it. We have podcasts. We have conferences. We have a generation of thinkers who can describe the Moloch of it all in their sleep.

And still.

The money does not move.

I sat with Jim Rutt this week to ask, plainly: why is it so hard to get systems change funded? Jim has been in this field since 2012. He has had the conversations. He has watched the wallets stay closed.

His first answer is the one I keep hearing in my own life. Most of the people who are psychographically aligned with what we are trying to do are young, successful entrepreneurs. They cannot get their head around anything that is not a business. They keep trying to turn Game B, or metamodernism, or whatever you want to call the work, into a profitable venture.

That is not what this is.

The pure philanthropic ask, for something that does not promise a return, gets close to zero. And the sums we are talking about are not even astronomical. We are not asking for trillions. We are asking for what a single hundred metre yacht costs.

Still no.

So what is going on?

Two camps emerge among people with significant wealth. Both groups have understood that the system is breaking.

The first camp says: collapse is coming, I will make sure that a small radius around me is safe, the rest is not my problem. Maybe some of it going away is even fine. This is the bunker strategy. This is where no funding for systems change will ever come from.

The second camp says: yes, we need to move toward something life serving, something heliogenic, something like Game B. Then they fixate on a single piece of the problem. Education. Food. Energy. Governance. They will fund the part they understand and refuse to fund the whole, even though everyone in the conversation knows the whole is the point.

This is the first wall.

The second wall is the legitimate question hiding inside it. What is the money actually for? What gets built? What can a funder point at after the cheque is cashed?

The honest answer is that you cannot flip the global system by main force. The trillions sloshing through the financial markets, locked into profit maximization by their growth obligations, dwarf anything philanthropy could marshal. The strategy has to be different.

Demonstration at scale.

Twenty, fifty, a hundred communities operating under the new paradigm. Open. Visitable. Airbnbs so people can come and live inside a different operating system for a week. If the thesis is right, and we do not yet know that it is, then those demonstrations create a wave. People come, people see, people return changed. Resources begin to flow. Something like an origin of life event.

That is the realistic play.

Which raises the harder question.

When does the opening come?

I keep thinking about the Arab Spring. The vegetable seller in Tunis who set himself on fire was the trigger, but the trigger only worked because years of preparation had been funded underneath it. People had been quietly building groups that could rise in the moment.

What if something similar could be prepared for the next big correction?

A 2008 sized financial crisis is the obvious candidate. Jim’s read, which I share, is that the accumulation of public and private debt across the industrialized world, with the partial exception of Germany, Switzerland, Norway and Sweden, looks unsustainable. The 2008 crisis was about 800 billion. The US alone now carries something like 30 trillion in national debt. The next correction will probably be bigger.

When it comes, it could come tomorrow afternoon. It could come in ten years. The financial markets run on the anticipation of anticipation of anticipation, which means today’s facts do not have to trigger anything. The probability of future facts cycling backward through belief is enough.

There are signals to watch. Interest rates on bonds from supposedly stable countries. The moment Japan starts selling its US treasuries instead of buying them.

But the timing is unknowable. What is knowable is that the window will open.

The question is what is in place when it does.

In Game B’s framing, crises increase the osmotic pressure of people wanting to move into different membranes. If a few hundred well functioning communities exist when the crisis hits, the pressure pushes people across the membrane. The communities take in newcomers, split, form new communities, grow in spurts driven by the crisis.

If nothing is in place, the pressure dissipates. Or worse, it gets captured by reactionary movements that are very much in place and very well funded.

So what needs to be ready?

First, the demonstrations themselves. The proto communities. Either built from scratch, or selected from existing intentional communities whose DNA is already aligned and which need scaffolding rather than invention. Most existing intentional communities will not qualify. They were built as one offs, not as seeds of a viral movement, and many carry strong points of view that would not generalize. But some might.

Second, a population of associates. People who do not yet live inside the new structures but who think in their terms. Who are running babysitting cooperatives, car shares, dinner parties operating under the new logic. Who are preloaded with the why before the crisis arrives. Today this group is in the hundreds of thousands. It needs to be in the millions.

Third, the cultural carriers. Young people, because the future is always young people. Independent media. Public intellectuals. Artists. Musicians. Filmmakers. Poets. The people who can metabolize the ideas into forms that travel further than essays do.

Notice who is not on that list.

Politicians.

Jim is firm on this and I have come around to it. Politicians no longer lead the public. They follow it. They map themselves to whatever the conventional wisdom is. The few who break from the conventional wisdom break in the reactionary direction, toward nationalism and retrograde social arrangements. The road to political change runs through public sentiment, not through politicians.

You change the public. The politicians follow.

But there is a fourth piece, and this is the one that nags at me most.

Pre legislation.

When the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation wanted to reshape the United States, they did not wait for the moment to arrive and then start drafting policy. They wrote the handbooks years in advance. Project 2025, whatever you think of its content, is a remarkably detailed and intelligent document. The Trump administration’s speed of action would have been impossible without that preparation.

There is no equivalent on the life serving side.

There are partial efforts. The Center for Humane Technology. A handful of small think tanks with a few million in annual budget. Nothing at the scale of Heritage. Nothing operating with the assumption that legislation will be needed and that drafts ready in a drawer are worth more than drafts written in a panic.

This may be the single biggest gap in the field.

A think tank for a life serving civilization. Serious policy writeups. Draft legislation. Modular, ready to be picked up by any aligned policymaker in any jurisdiction the moment the window opens. Game B has always penciled this in as the Game B Foundation. Nobody has built it.

So why has nobody built it?

Here is where the conversation got uncomfortable.

The neoliberal think tanks are funded so well because they are self serving for their funders. Lower taxes. Less regulation. More room for capital. The wealthy donor who funds Cato is funding their own portfolio.

The pro social side is the opposite. You are asking wealthy people to fund work that runs against their immediate personal benefit. That is always harder than asking people to fund work that flatters their interests.

And the deeper thing, which I have been turning over for days now: anyone with a large pool of capital, whether inherited or earned, has learned the game that produced that capital. They have absorbed its logic at a level below thought. They know how the extractive system functions because they have functioned inside it. Stepping out of that pattern, letting go of that legacy, is genuinely hard. Not philosophically hard. Hard in the body.

This may be the actual reason systems change does not get funded. The people with the means to fund it cannot quite think the thoughts that would make funding it feel right.

And yet.

There is a category of holder I keep coming back to. The people with vastly more than they can ever spend. The ones for whom another yacht, another house, another foundation in their own name, has stopped meaning anything. The ones who are starting to think about legacy. About descendants. About what humanity will look like when their grandchildren are old.

For that person, this is not philanthropy. It is the most rational wager available. A bet that the trajectory of the species can be improved, and that being a quiet architect of that improvement is a better legacy than another wing of another museum.

If that person is reading this: you know how to find Jim. You know how to find me.

The window is opening either way.

The question is whether anything is built before it does.

That is what Facebook earns from the average user. Twitter earns less than fifty cents.

Every distortion of public reasoning we now live with sits downstream of a business model that, per person, is fighting over the price of a coffee. The algorithmic enragement. The endless scroll. The slow flattening of our capacity to think together.

For two dollars, we sold the membrane through which a culture talks to itself.

I had a long conversation with Jim Rutt this week. Jim has been building social platforms since 1982. He has watched four decades of attempts to make this work, and has been the architect of several of them. Especially the failed ones.

We were circling the question we keep returning to.

What would the InfoSphere of a civilization aligned with Life actually look like?

Not better Facebook. Not nicer Twitter.

The membrane. The connective tissue. The substrate of a culture that intends to be alive.

In 2013, Jim’s team forked Reddit and built LightNet, the early Game B home. It was elegant. It was thoughtful. It failed.

For a platform to work, it has to become a daily habit. A nexus is not a place you visit. A nexus is a place you return to. Email got there. Facebook at its peak. TikTok now.

LightNet got perhaps twenty people there, out of two hundred. Most things never tip.

Funding. Talent. Design. Motivated early adopters. None of it is enough.

So what would we build instead?

Not on Ethereum. The chains are slow, complex, and the only thing they really add is trustlessness. And if you need trustlessness inside your own platform, something has already gone wrong with your culture.

Not as a DAO. Most have failed because they are too rigid. Human cultures change continuously. Tribes around a fire negotiated and renegotiated for millennia. The DAO movement tried to legislate this away.

Not in legalese. Almost every online community Jim has watched fail has failed for the same reason: missing governance. What happens when someone is genuinely a bad actor?

Governance is not optional. Governance has to be designed first.

But not invented from scratch each time.

The hundred people who know everything about regenerative agriculture probably know nothing about governance at scale. They should not have to invent it. They should be able to fork the accords of a Nebraska cooperative restaurant that has worked for fifteen years, modify them, and run.

Forkability is the deep argument.

Biological evolution is slow because every generation has to recombine and mutate from zero. Culture lets us copy what works, with modification.

This is what GitHub did for code. We do not yet have it for living together.

If accords are written in plain language, a model can hold them. Monitor a community against them. Surface drift.

You said you wanted to do X. What is actually happening looks more like Y. Change what you said. Change what you are doing. Or negotiate.

A human could do this. No human will. A model can. Cheaply enough that small groups can afford one.

Not a bot. A living charter. A fair witness. Always there. Never tired. Never partisan.

The next move will horrify every German data protection lawyer reading.

Step away from the screen. Treat the screen as a fallback. Prioritize the campfire. The dinner table. The meeting room.

Then record. Continuously.

The hardware exists. The models exist. The bottleneck is no longer technical.

The bottleneck is trust. And therefore: business model.

I would not wear a recording pin in every context of my life if the back end were owned by anyone whose incentive is rent extraction. The infrastructure has to be a commons. Owned by the people who use it. Governed by them. Priced, if priced at all, at cost.

The Chris Anderson free trajectory of the early internet is precisely what got us to two dollars a month for the corruption of public discourse.

We cannot make that mistake twice.

And here is the part that is actually exciting: you do not need a hundred million users to make this valuable.

If the hundred smartest people each of us knows recorded their conversations into a shared commons, governed in good faith, the resulting artefact would be extraordinary.

Value first. Network later.

So why has nothing worked yet?

Bad location decisions. Internal conflict. Insufficient funding. The usual three.

The more honest answer is the one neither of us quite said out loud. None of these projects has ever had enough sustained power. Money. Time. Attention. Talent. Never enough to run the experiments that would actually let us learn.

A few dozen people on a piece of land for eighteen months is not a fair test of anything.

And under that, the deeper failure.

Aligned people who refuse to collaborate.

We agree, roughly, on where the summit is. Each of us is too convinced of our own particular path up to walk together.

This is the failure I find hardest to forgive. In myself. In the people around me.

Jim mentioned Asimov’s Foundation in passing. The small group that calculated the crash was coming and asked: how much can we preserve?

I can no longer dismiss this framing.

If the boom phase ends without us implementing what we already know works, the question becomes whether we can build artefacts durable enough to survive the bust and reach whoever comes next. Accords. Knowledge bases. Governance templates. Recorded wisdom.

So they do not have to start from zero.

That is a smaller, sadder, and possibly more achievable project than rebuilding civilization.

It is, increasingly, the one I think about most.

If you are working on any of this, I would very much like to hear from you. The recording into commons. The forkable accords.

Two dollars are not going to fix themselves.

And the membrane is not going to weave itself.

A bridge that only reaches the middle of the river is not a project: it is a monument to failure. Yet, most systems change efforts are currently trapped in “Tin Cup” mode, raising just enough to survive another month while the bridge to a life-serving civilization remains unfinished.

In my latest conversation with Jim, we performed a forensic audit on the chronic underfunding of Game B. We explored why these projects fail and how to build the financial plumbing required to move the needle.

The Tin Cup Trap

The majority of social change projects fail for two reasons: insufficient capitalization or internal decoherence.

In Game A, we understand that a startup requires a specific “activation energy” to reach the threshold of viability. Game B projects often ignore this physics. We buy the land but forget the mortgage. We start the farm but ignore the sewage system. This is what Jim calls the “Tin Cup” mode: a cycle of constant, small-scale fundraising that drains the most scarce resource we have: time and attention.

To build the exit, we need a “Game B Foundation” operating at the scale of hundreds of millions. We need to tap into Game A “guilt money” and the next generation of billionaires to fund experiments with enough redundancy to survive the valley of death.

The Human Filter: Institutionalists vs. Soulsets

Money is a necessary condition, but it is not a sufficient one.

The “Great Filter” of social systems is often internal decoherence, or what Gregory Bateson called schismogenesis. Projects die because the team cannot maintain coherence. We have found that success requires a delicate balance between two types of people:

1. The Institutionalists: Those who can build a profitable organic farm and a working sewage system.

2. The Personal Change People: Those who focus on the “Soulset” shifts and the relational health of the membrane.

If you have only the former, you build a corporation. If you have only the latter, you build a commune that starves. You need both, and you need them to meet face-to-face.

The 10x Multiplier of Presence

We have observed that trust and coherence happen ten times faster in person than in the virtual space.

High-dimensional relationship management is a primate heuristic. In the early days of Game B, we flew the team together every six weeks. It was expensive, but it was the magic that created the synthesis. We must stop trying to save the world solely through Zoom. We need to dance around the fire, share a drunken dinner, and look into each other’s eyes to see if we are “Fair Witnesses” or just more assholes in disguise.

The path to a new world requires both the rigor of a spreadsheet and the vulnerability of a shared meal.

Once a proto-B becomes large enough to be noticed, it enters the danger zone. It becomes a threat to be crushed or, more likely, a resource to be co-opted. In my latest conversation with Jim, we explored the kinetic and memetic power imbalances at this threshold. We asked the question: how do we navigate the transition without being hijacked by the very structures we are trying to replace?

The Shield of Strict Legality

The first move is counter-intuitive: Strict Legality. Jim argues that under the rule of law, we must not give the authorities a stick to beat us with. The hippies of the 1960s failed because they provided Game A with a legal pretext for their own destruction. To exit the multipolar trap, we must practice jurisdiction shopping: finding the “nooks and crannies” in the legal operating system where rams-earth houses and compost toilets are not just dreams, but legal realities.

By committing to the law, we buy time. We use the existing mechanisms of democracy to leverage local power, turning a small community of two hundred into a decisive political force.

Membrionics and Cultural Power

We cannot do this as isolated islands. We need Meta-membranes.

We require coordination structures that concentrate our political and economic power without falling into the divisive partisan traps of Team Red or Team Blue. This is the infrastructure of the new civilization: a stack of interpenetrating membranes that protect our communication and our capital.

But the strongest shield is not kinetic; it is cultural. When we reach the point where the general public sees Game B as a transparent, unself-serving sanctuary for human flourishing, we achieve a cultural win that no dominator hierarchy can easily suppress.

The Great Filter: Internal Schismogenesis

The greatest threat, however, is not external. It is the Great Filter of Schismogenesis.

Jim and I looked back at the early fissions of Game B: the moments where smart, good-hearted people were torn apart by minor differences in perspective. This is the internal hijack. To counter it, we must adopt the role of the Fair Witness: a neutral, independent observer who surfaces the undercurrents before they turn into personal grudges.

Whether we use high-dimensional human intuition or the analytical power of LLMs as neutral analyzers, we must build an immune system that keeps “Dark Triad” personalities away from the levers of power.

We are not just building houses. We are building the social technology required to survive the shift.

For centuries, that shared vertical anchor provided our moral compass. We have also, in our hubris, attempted to “kill” nature by assuming a dominance that is as impossible as it is destructive. We have severed the umbilical cord of interbeing.

In my latest conversation with Jim, we asked the hard question: what gives rise to a shared sense of morality now? What is the foundational prerequisite for a large-scale shift toward a life-serving civilization?

The Interestingness Heuristic

Jim proposes a fascinating North Star: Interestingness.

Physics grounds out at stars and planets. Biochemistry is more complex, but life—especially life with general intelligence—is where the universe becomes truly open-ended. If we use “generating interestingness” as a pruning rule, we find a vector for ethics that doesn’t require a top-down ideology.

Free people generate more interesting culture. Nature, unmolested, produces more intricate food webs. This is the transition from the “exploitative mode” to one of co-evolution. It is the recognition that human flourishing is not a zero-sum game played against the planet, but a result of being a part of its complexification.

The Custodial Species

We discussed Tyson Yunkaporta’s concept of humans as a Custodial Species. Our role is not to be the “apex predator” or the “supremacy” in the web. Our role is to be the caretakers of the interesting. We are the first general intelligence in the universe that we know of, and that carries a moral obligation to preserve that intelligence and move it forward.

But this requires a radical humility. We are rushing forward with AI and market-driven extraction like three-year-olds building atomic bombs. We are so afraid of insecurity—biological, financial, and existential—that we cling to the “Game A” machinery because it promises a safety it cannot deliver.

Bootstrapping Security

How do we move the compass? We must address the Insecurity Loop. The status quo keeps us on our toes by cultivating precarity. Even in the richest countries in history, we feel two weeks away from the street. This fear is the anchor of the multipolar trap.

To exit, we must build the Membrane. The membrane is where we bootstrap basic survival—food, shelter, relationship—independent of the extractive system. It is where we remember what we already know: that we are social animals, and that the fundamentally collective nature of human experience is our only true security.

We don’t need a machine to tell us how to live. We need to start being a part of life again.

You can measure the frequency of the light. You can map the atmospheric refraction. You can even write a poem about the bleeding of purple into gold. But the touching: the visceral, internal shift that occurs when you stand before that fading light, cannot be transferred through words.

In my latest conversation with Jim, we decided to tackle the impossible: the participatory side of system change. We explored the things that can be named but never fully explained.

The Left-Brain Hijack

Our civilization has been hijacked by the left brain.

As Iain McGilchrist argues, we have traded the intuitive, scanning, and integrative capacity of the right brain for the linear, grasping, and categorizing mode of the left. We have turned life into a series of “mentioned” sentences rather than lived experiences.

This is the core of the multipolar trap. We have commodified time to the point where “being mode” feels like a betrayal of productivity. If you spend four hours watching a sunset or picking coffee with friends, the system marks you as a defector. But this “defection” is actually the first step toward sanity.

The Status Game of Moloch

Why do we choose the car chase over the rose garden?

It is a question of granularity and status. We are wired for the high-intensity signal: the explosion, the $M_3$ growth, the aircraft-carrier-sized truck. These are the artifacts of a culture that has lost its connection to “Qualia,” the raw, felt sense of being alive.

Jim and I discussed the ultimate lever for shifting this: the status game. If we want to change the world, we must change what we reward with our attention.

We need new stories. We need a “Netflix for Game B” that doesn’t just entertain but lifts the viewer into a higher granularity of mind. We need to reach the point where the person participating in a community sunset drumming circle holds more social capital than the one trading Bitcoin in a basement.

Building the Asshole-Free Zone

How do we start? We build the Membrane.

Individual agency is fragile, but a membrane of conviviality is resilient. One of my own heuristics for this is the creation of the “Asshole-Free Zone.”

In business and in life, we must learn to trust our high-dimensional intuition. We must filter for the “rate of learning” and the quality of being rather than the resume. When you find “the others”—the ones who are willing to embarrass themselves, to fail, and to grow—you create a mycelial network that Moloch cannot penetrate.

We must move from the “having mode” to the “being mode.” We must follow the water until the ecosystem accepts us.

In todays conversation with Jim, we decided to perform a forensic audit of his own worldview. We used the John Vervaeke framework: propositional, procedural, perspectival, and participatory knowing. We anchored the analysis in late 1992: a time when Jim was re-entering the corporate world as a high-stakes executive.

The result is a “Delta Analysis” of a human soul.

The 1992 Baseline: The Market as God

In 1992, Jim was a “hill-climber.” He saw a summit and he took it. His worldview was built on a few rock-solid, if slightly embarrassing, propositions:

1. Naive Newtonianism: The belief that the world is a lawful, predictable, and fundamentally knowable machine.

2. Market Fundamentalism: The conviction that markets are the smartest entities humans have ever created. If there is a problem, a carbon tax or a slight adjustment of the knobs will fix it.

3. The Rationality Myth: The belief that people are perfectly capable of ascertaining their own desires, free from systemic programming.

Back then, Jim would have looked at his current self and seen a “naive hippie.” He was focused on talent-vs-money arbitrage, hiring “A-plus” players, and mastering the spreadsheet as a superpower. It was a world of extraction, even if it was done ethically.

The 1994 Phase Shift: The Sustainability Wall

The pivot began on The Well. Jim encountered top-tier ecologists like Stewart Brand and Paul Hawken who pointed to the edges of the petri dish.

He realized that the “Green Revolution” had merely delayed the inevitable. We were depleting topsoil, poisoning aquifers, and hitting the biophysical limits of the planet. But Jim’s unique contribution to this realization was the identification of the “Coherence Mechanism”:

Advertising.

Advertising is the programming language of the status quo. It creates a reflexive cycle where products create profit, which is reinvested in high-impact psychological programming to create “new” needs: aircraft-carrier-sized trucks and heart-stopping fast food.

The 2026 Perspective: Complexity and Service

Today, Jim has “hung up the sword.” He has moved from being a principal who intervenes with intensity to an advisor who guides with wisdom.

The shift is profound:

• From Propositional to Emergent: He no longer sees a Newtonian machine; he sees a world of 27 layers of emergence, where politics and economics are far too complex for “knobs and dials.”

• From Self-Authoring to Self-Transforming: Following Robert Kegan’s developmental scale, Jim has moved from a self-authoring “game player” to a self-transforming “servant of the whole.”

• From Individualist to Relational: His participatory knowing is now grounded in the “vibrant heartbeat of life”: teaching his granddaughter chess, following the water in his local ecosystem, and refusing to be paid for his work.

The First Step into Game B

If you want to prepare for the transition, Jim’s advice is ruthlessly practical: Cut the feed.

Disconnect from high-impact advertising. Pay the three dollars to remove the ads. Your subconscious was evolved to fit in socially, and if the only social signals you receive are designed to keep you in the “multipolar trap,” you will never develop the agency required to exit.

We must become objects in the game, not subjects of the programming.

Jordan Hall once recounted an anecdote about a man attempting to grasp the scale of our civilizational transformation. After forty-five minutes of deep inquiry, just as the logic began to click, the man’s internal “immune system” triggered a hard reset. He returned to zero. He began asking the same questions he had asked an hour prior.

This isn’t just a failure of intellect. It is a biophysical defense mechanism.

Our current worldview is a “frozen accident” of history, a cage built from M3 growth obligation driven extraction and the multipolar trap. To see outside of it is, quite literally, a threat to the self.

In my latest conversation with Jim, we decided to map the Epiphany Axis. This is the process of deprogramming the “Subject,” the one who is acted upon, and evolving the “Agent,” the one who acts.

The Three Walls of Moloch

We are hitting the edges of the petri dish. Jim and I identified three distinct forcing functions that make our current “Soulset” untenable:

1. The Planetary Limit: We have reached a point where 80% of the weight of all birds on Earth is human poultry. We are no longer living in nature; we are living in a factory that has run out of floor space.

2. The Attentional Limit: We are suffering from an “information hijacking.” The thousands of digital interrupts we face daily: the ads, the blather, the pop-ups, have depleted our capacity for collective sense-making. We are too distracted to be free.

3. The Debt Limit: Our system is designed to grow debt exponentially in a finite biophysical world. It is a mathematical death spiral.

The Membrane Strategy

How do we evolve agency in a world that thrives on our obedience?

The answer is the Membrane.

Individual agency is metabolically intense. Radical individualism is a Game A trap that leads to burnout and isolation. Instead, we must find “The Others,” groups of two or three, where we can practice a different way of being.

This starts with Participatory Knowing. It starts by fixing a toaster the system wants you to throw away. It starts by making gnocchi with your children instead of buying it in single-use plastic.

These aren’t “hobbies.” They are acts of rebellion. When you try to fix that toaster, you suddenly see the entire systemic embedding of proprietary interfaces and extractive supply chains. The “Machine” becomes visible only when you choose to act against its grain.

Following the Water

Jim speaks of “artful” governance. I want to move toward joyful governance.

There is a lesson from the indigenous elders of the Imagination Group in Australia: If you want to understand an ecosystem, follow the water. By following the water, you see the water: how it feeds the trees, which feed the birds, which sustain the soil. You begin to see the interconnectedness not as a theory, but as a felt sense. You reach full understanding when the water “accepts” you, when the life around you stops fleeing because you finally smell like the ecosystem.

We are looking for that transition point. The moment where it becomes entirely obvious that the “infinite game” is more powerful, more stable, and infinitely more beautiful than the exploitation model.

In this 10th session with Jim, we take a hammer to the “Molochian shit show” of finance and start sketching the blueprint for Game B economics.

Sourcing and the Bluefish Coin

Game A only “sees” what is denominated in money. It sees a hospital bill as “economic activity,” but it doesn’t see health. It sees overfishing as “profit,” but it doesn’t see the death of the bioregion.

Jim proposes a different modality: Sourcing Tokens. Imagine a bioregion that issues tokens for the sustainable harvest of bluefish. If you want to fish, you need a token. If you want to eat bluefish, you need a consumption token. These aren’t just currencies; they are “brakes” tied directly to the carrying capacity of the land. They are market forces made smart enough to respect the planet.

The Central Bank of Dreams

I pushed Jim on the “care economy”, the things like shamanism, art, and localized care that money can never properly value. I invoked my mentor Bernard Lietaer’s “Central Bank of Dreams.”

What if money wasn’t a claim on lost life, but a tool to fulfill the passion of our neighbors? Imagine a world where your “basic security” is provided by the community, not your bank account. In this world, a Porsche isn’t a status symbol; it’s a cry for help. The community wouldn’t laugh at you for owning it; they’d ask how they could help you so you didn’t need the Porsche to feel significant.

The Problem of the “Villager”

We hit a wall during this talk, a wall I’ve seen in my own software company: Everyone wants a village, but nobody wants to be a villager. Being a villager requires responsibility. It requires closing the loop on negative externalities. In Game A, we are programmed to “take” and disconnect. We want the cheeseburger, but we don’t want to see the cow. Game B economics is the process of closing those loops: making the producer “eat the dog food” they are creating. If you’re designing a sports-betting app that exploits your own neighbors, you might think twice.

The Great Repeal

The transition to a thriving Game B economy isn’t just about tokens; it’s about the Great Repeal. We have to dismantle the “push-button” alienation of late-stage Game A. We need to legalize composting toilets, rewrite zoning laws that forbid self-sufficiency, and move toward a “punctuated equilibrium” where our communities are prepared to absorb millions of people when the Game A debt bubble finally bursts.

This conversation was hazy, difficult, and exploratory. It shows how far we are from a perfect theory but it also shows that we are finally asking the right questions.

Let’s start building the bridge between the theory and the substrate.

If Game A is a sinking ship, how much does it cost to build the lifeboats?

Jim, being the veteran strategist he is, doesn’t deal in vague utopianisms. He deals in numbers. And the number to reach “Phase One”, the proof of existence that actually scales, is roughly one billion dollars.

The 3% Tipping Point

We often feel like we need to convince everyone to change. We don’t. Social complexity science suggests that once a committed cadre reaches 3% of the population, the status quo starts to wobble. At 15%, the game flips.

In the U.S., 3% is about 10 million people. To house them in functioning, trading “proto-bees” (communities of 150 to 3,000 people), we need a massive infusion of capital. But here’s the kicker: the total cost to transition the U.S. over the next 60 years is about $200 billion.

That sounds like a lot until you realize it’s only one-half of one percent of annual U.S. philanthropic spending. We aren’t asking for the impossible; we’re asking for the rounding error on the guilt-money of the billionaire class.

The Strategic Hedge

So why hasn’t it happened? Because nobody has presented a plausible battle plan. Until now.

The pitch to the rich isn’t just “save the trees.” It’s a sophisticated financial hedge. We tell them: Keep 98% of your assets in the game you know, but put 2% into building the standby operating system. If the shit hits the fan [and between the debt burst and climate change, it will] you want a world that actually knows how to function.

It’s insurance for their descendants. It’s buying a stake in the only system that won’t burn down when the grid fails.

Conquest from the Bottom Up

While the media is obsessed with the “Kings” and the national drama in D.C., Jim points to a more effective flank: Local power.

In a rural county, 1,000 to 10,000 votes don’t just influence an election, they own it. If Game B communities start taking over county commissions and school boards, they can begin the “Great Repeal.” They can legalize composting toilets, rewrite zoning laws that forbid self-sufficiency, and dismantle the health department rules that treat nature as a biohazard.

We don’t need the Presidency yet. We need the local permit office.

Punctuated Equilibrium

The growth won’t be a smooth line. It will be “punctuated equilibrium.” We build the infrastructure in the quiet years, and then, when Game A hits a crisis like a financial collapse or a climate disaster, we surge. We provide the “osmotic pressure” that sucks people out of the burning building and into a membrane that actually works.

It takes three generations to fully enculturate a new way of being. We are the first generation. We are the ones who have to build the first five experiments, learn from the failures, and “fork” the governance until it’s unbreakable.

It’s time to move from talk-talk-talk to walk-walk-walk.

In this 8th session with Jim, we dive into the “soul shift”, into the radical realization that 90% of our decision-making isn’t happening in our conscious, calculating minds, but in the dark, wet basement of our heuristics. If the soul is for feeling what the mind is for thought, as my mother once told me, then our souls have been hijacked by a Game A operating system.

We are on autopilot, playing extractive games because our “feelings” have been socialized to crave status, fear failure, and worship the ladder. Moving to Game B isn’t about a new policy or a better spreadsheet. It’s about a fundamental rewriting of the internal code.

The Immunization of “Fucking Off”

Jim is a rare specimen: an anti-neurotic strategist who spent decades in the belly of the beast without becoming a monster. I wanted to know why. How did he build an immunity to the “immortal psychopaths” we discussed in our last talk?

The answer is surprisingly human. He spent five years “fucking off.”

Before he became a CEO, he was hitchhiking across the country, selling cars, peddling textbooks, and reading 75 books a year while sitting by a pool. He wasn’t “climbing.” He was developing a “leitmotif of life” that prioritized the life of the mind over the status of possessions. He immunized himself against the crushing need to play the game by proving to himself, early on, that he didn’t need the game to be happy.

Most of us never get those five years. We are pushed into the “sausage factory” of testing-based education, where curiosity is a nuisance and boredom is a sin.

The Bridge Between the Abstract and the Physical

We talk about “thinking,” but what is it, really? Jim describes it as the bridge.

He recalls fixing tractors on a “hillbilly farm” in Appalachia and laying concrete driveways with his father. This is the groundedness that keeps the strategist from floating away into pure abstraction. When you know how to replace a water line or swap a Volkswagen motor at age eleven, the world stops being a “push-button surface.” You realize you can influence the substrate.

In a world of DoorDash and Uber Eats, we are being alienated from the very mechanics of our survival. This alienation is the primary tool of the extraction machine.

The Cursor of Attention and the New Goebbels

“You are your attention.”

Jim calls attention the “cursor of consciousness.” Every quarter-second, your brain decides what to focus on. And right now, there is a multi-billion dollar vacuum called TikTok sucking up every spare second of human thought.

Boredom used to be the prelude to a breakthrough. Now, it’s a dopamine deficiency that we “fix” with a scroll.

We end on a chilling warning. The propagandists of the past used radio and TV. The Joseph Goebbels of 2026 won’t use a megaphone; he’ll use an AI-based therapy app. He’ll get you at your most vulnerable, in a trust-based interaction, and subtly program your values before you even know you’re being indoctrinated.

The “soul shift” is a war for our attention. It’s about reclaiming the cursor.

We’re moving from the institutional to the personal, searching for the “density of experience” that might finally allow us to wake up.

Think about the “progress” we celebrate. From the first steam engine pumping water out of coal mines to the algorithmic AI “therapy” apps of today, every step forward has been a step away from our own humanity. We’ve traded the real-time, rhythmic power of the sun for a frantic, one-time burn of “saved solar” energy aka fossil fuels. It gave us 10X the power, but it unanchored us from the cycles of life and put us on a collision course with the cold laws of thermodynamics.

The Rise of the Immortal Psychopath

Jim and I trace a history that is essentially a timeline of alienation.

We created interchangeable parts to fix rifles on a battlefield, but in doing so, we broke the craftsman. We traded the pride of a human soul for the “economic efficiency” of a screw-turner. Then, we birthed the Corporation, an immortal, legal person with all the rights of a human but the morality of a parasite. A psychopathic entity that never dies, never feels guilt, and lives only to optimize one single, narrow metric: money-on-money return.

This isn’t just an abstract legal tweak. It’s a foundational violence. We’ve empowered a species of artificial life that lives forever and views the biosphere and human potential as mere fuel to be extracted, converted, and sold.

The System Hacking the Player

The game truly ran off the tracks during what we call the Bernays Epoch.

Before Edward Bernays (Freud’s nephew), products existed to satisfy human needs. After him, the system learned how to manufacture those needs from scratch. We were programmed to want things we didn’t need to satisfy status-games we didn’t choose. We moved from satisfying hunger to chasing 300 types of shampoo and $300,000 cars.

Then came the credit cards, the “hedonic treadmill” powered by easy money and finally, the 1971 exit from the gold standard, which unanchored finance from reality entirely. The result? A global financial system that has effectively hacked our biology, making us heroin-addicted to a growth that is killing us.

The Broken Safeties

We are currently witnessing the total failure of our error-correction mechanisms.

• Science has done its job when it told us about climate change 150 years ago but its voice has been muzzled by a propaganda machinery that treats truth as a cost to be minimized.

• Democracy was supposed to be the regulator, the “wise enough” guardrail. Instead, it’s been bought and sold. As Jim notes, our tech titans are currently sucking up to power just to keep their licenses for further extraction.

• Finance is the only pillar left standing, and it isn’t “broken” it’s doing exactly what it was designed to do: maximize returns even if the planet becomes a graveyard in the process.

The Loop Over Which We Wake Up

So, how do we stop the extraction? How do we find the “glitch in the matrix”?

We end this conversation on a provocative hook: the possibility of a “shortcut” to waking up. If Game A is a dead end leading to planetary suicide, we need to move toward a coherent pluralism. We need a worldview that doesn’t just “calculate” limits but feels them as sacred.

Is there a way to accelerate the journey through the developmental hierarchy? Can we reach a state where the integration of limits becomes natural, even obvious, without needing seven years of meditation to get there?

Jim brings the institutional rigor; I’m looking for the spiritual shift. We’re trying to find the place where the system meets the soul.

It’s raw, it’s honest, and it’s a necessary look at the claims we’ve made on lost life and how we might finally start reclaiming it.

PS: if you made it all the way here, i want to warmly invite you to join the INFINITIVE community - once you’ve passed the gate (38 days of 30 minute commitment), you’re in. https://infinitive.world

For 190,000 years, humans lived under a “Forager Operating System.” It was egalitarian not because people were “nice,” but because they were vigilant. If someone tried to act like a “Big Man,” the tribe didn’t bow; they gossiped, they ridiculed, and if necessary, they executed. Leadership was role-based: the best hunter led the hunt; the best gatherer led the search.

Then came agriculture and with it the glitch.

Surplus grain allowed the genetically-inclined dominators (the 2% “Big Men”) to hire henchmen. We traded the freedom of the forager for the safety of the hut, entering a 10,000-year “Dominator Period.” It was a hierarchy of “Big Men” dominating “Little Men,” who in turn dominated women and children. It was a world of “Position-based” authority: I am the Chief because I have the most thugs.

The Grandmother’s House: Balancing the Action Ring

We discussed Alexander Bard’s nomadic model: a society organized as concentric rings, not a pyramid. At the center sits the Feminine Core (45%), weaving the cultural fabric. Around them, the Masculine Ring (45%) handles the “chilling and killing”, action and defense.

Modernity has broken this balance. We have legal equality (a mandatory upgrade), but we lack structural wisdom. Jim proposed a radical institutional fix: The Grandmother’s House. Imagine a third branch of government where only grandmothers vote or serve. Their sole power? The absolute authority to declare war or peace. Why? Because grandmothers possess the most mature feminine energy the only perspective incentivized by the long-term survival of the lineage rather than the chest-pounding short-termism of the masculine action ring.

The Red Button: Killing the “Idiot Lottery”

Human history is an “idiot lottery.” We’ve spent millennia ruled by the random eldest sons of kings, regardless of whether they were fools or sociopaths.

To bridge to Game B, we need Forrest Landry’s governance model:

1. Consensus: To delegate power.

2. Meritocracy: To execute tasks (giving a “Master of Waste” absolute authority to run the sewers).

3. The Red Button: A 51% democratic vote that can instantly revoke that authority.

This is the antidote to the “Shit Dictator.” You give someone total authority to get the job done, but you keep your finger on the kill-switch.

The Three Pillars: The 1700 Error-Correction Machine

Jim defines “Game A” as the specific synthesis that emerged around 1700. To escape 10,000 years of stagnant “Big Man” rule, we inserted three “error-correction machines” into our social OS. These were designed to destroy the “take it on authority” model of the Church and King.

1. Science (The Reality Machine)

• The Modality: Falsification and peer review.

• The Correction: Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it. If the experiment doesn’t support the theory, the theory is discarded. It replaced the “Metaphysical Authority” of the priest with a self-correcting loop of data.

• The Failure: Capture. When Science is funded by Finance, the “falsification” machine is jammed. We now see “Science” used as an appeal to authority, the very thing it was designed to destroy.

2. Democracy (The Governance Machine)

• The Modality: Collective sense-making and the franchise.

• The Correction: Constitutional limits and the ballot box. It replaced the “Idiot Lottery” of primogeniture with the ability to fire the King (or Parliament) without a civil war. It was meant to ensure policies were tested against the needs of the many.

• The Failure: Scalability and complexity. In a world of 8 billion people and hyper-specialization, the “metabolic energy” required for an average citizen to make sense of the world is depleted. Democracy has devolved into a battle of competing “identitarian caucuses” and regulatory capture.

3. Finance (The Resource Machine)

• The Modality: The Market and price signals.

• The Correction: Profit and loss. If a project is a bad use of social surplus, it fails. It was a way to optimize the economic cycle outside the control of the state.

• The Failure: The Accumulation Glitch. When Finance is no longer about transaction but about accumulation, it skews the price signals. Money stops being a tool for resource allocation and becomes a tool for capturing the other two pillars.

The Triptych in Collapse

In 1700, there were 625 million people. Our footprint was invisible. These machines were a massive upgrade, but they are now cannibalizing each other.

Finance has eaten Science, turning inquiry into a marketing arm. Finance has captured Democracy, turning policy into a service for the highest bidder. The error-correction mechanisms are jammed because they have all been denominated in a single, corruptible currency.

We are at the limit of the Game A growth curve. The software that pulled us out of the mud is now the machine eating the ecosystem.

At the heart of this transition lies the problem of the Blight. As Jim describes it, the Blight is the inherent tendency for individuals to defect against the commons. It is the “warrior at the back of the line” who wants his village to win but doesn’t want to be the one on the front line . In modern institutions, this manifests as embezzlement, nepotism, or the simple misallocation of shared resources.

To fight this, Jim has long advocated for radical transparency. In a Game B “membrane”, a container like a Proto-B village or an intentional community. This might mean world-readable bank accounts where every penny is tracked.

However, transparency only takes us so far.

The Limits of Seeing Everything

During our talk, I argued that transparency doesn’t eliminate the need for trust; it simply shifts where that trust is placed. If you cascade transparency all the way down, you eventually hit a floor. As I put it to Jim: “The question remains if it is turtles all the way down, the last turtle still has trust”.

Even in a radically transparent system, you still have to trust the people seeing the data to do the right thing with it. You have to trust that the “behind closed doors” moments (which are necessary for personal privacy or sensitive personnel investigations) are handled with integrity.

So, how do we bootstrap that trust?

Animal-Level Integrity and the Dunbar Scale

Jim emphasizes that we are evolved for face-to-face, animal-level interaction. While we can have impressive intellectual conversations online, we can’t truly “smell out” a person’s integrity until we spend three days with them, carousing and sharing “true confessions” at 2:00 AM.

For me, the shorthand for this is simpler: people must say what they do and do what they say. Trust is built over duration, observing consistency across time, especially when the incentive to be honest is low.

Vulnerability as a Human Advantage

One of the more profound realizations I’ve had in exploring the future of AI is that machines can “patch” themselves. If a machine has a data error or a software glitch, it can roll back or fix the code. Humans cannot.

Our inherent vulnerability/our woundedness and our inability to simply “fix” our emotional states is what makes us human. By revealing these wounds and shortcomings to others, we give them a way to exploit us. When they choose not to exploit that vulnerability, trust is built more deeply and quickly than any transparency ledger could ever achieve.

Cultivated Interdependence

We also discussed the “design principles” of a membrane. Trust thrives in safe environments where the cost of being wrong is lower.

I shared an anecdote with Jim about a mechanic whose grandmothers would send him to neighbors to borrow a cup of sugar, even if they already had it at home . When he asked why, they told him: “If we don’t ask for help, they will also not ask for help”.

This is cultivated interdependence. By practicing the habit of relying on each other for small things, we build the “reciprocal altruism” needed for the big things. In a Proto-B, this means knowing you will never be homeless or hungry as long as the membrane exists.

Scaling Beyond the Dunbar Number

The real challenge, of course, is scaling this trust beyond the 150-person Dunbar limit. Jim suggested that we need to architect our connectivity so it doesn’t “fan out” too fast. Instead of one representative for 700,000 people, we might need multiple levels of “proxies” and liquid democracy, where you give your “defense proxy” to someone you actually know and trust, who then carries that trust upward.

Owning the Solution

Ultimately, the difference between the “Game A” world and the “Game B” world is the feeling of agency. In Game A, the system is given to you; you are either “fucked with or without Vaseline”. In Game B, you own the solution.

Whether it’s a dinner club, a babysitting group, or a startup, we can begin by explicitly declaring our “accords” and practicing these new social operating systems at a small scale. We don’t have to bet our entire lives on it yet; we just have to start playing with the design of our own membranes.

By Monday afternoon, you’re back to processing insurance forms, navigating suburban sprawl, and responding to the same old perverse incentives. The retreat didn’t stick because there was nothing to hold it in place.

This is Part 4 of an open-ended series of conversations where I sit down with Jim Rutt—architect of the Game B movement—to explore the edges of his thinking. In this session, we untangle the knot that has strangled almost every social movement of the last century: the false choice between changing yourself and changing the system.

The Personal-Institutional Spiral

In 2013, the first iteration of Game B collapsed. The reason? A civil war over sequence. One camp insisted on “Personal Change First.” The other demanded “Institutional Change First.”

Jim’s hard-won realization is that sequence is a trap. It’s not a line; it’s a spiral.

You need a tiny fragment of personal change (the 1–3% of us ready to try something else) to build a slightly better institution. That institution then provides the scaffolding to support further personal growth. That growth, in turn, allows for even more sophisticated institutional design.

When they move together, you ratchet upward. When you separate them, you collapse back to the baseline of Game A.

Following the Water: The Dinner Club

I often think of Tyson Yunkaporta’s lesson: to understand a bioregion, you must follow the water. If the water accepts you—if the fish don’t swim away because you smell like the land—you have become part of the system.

Jim brings this “following the water” down to the kitchen table with his example of the Dinner Club:

1. The Game A State: A group meets once a month. They buy Kentucky Fried Chicken and Budweiser. It’s conviviality, but it’s powered by engineered, hyper-stimulating poison.

2. The First Accord: The group realizes this food is a “humane misuse of human beings.” They set a rule: Home-cooked food only.

3. The Ratchet: This small bit of scaffolding changes the “Currents.” People take pride in their craft. They talk differently. They start asking bigger questions: Why not a collective meal service for our kids? Why not a community garden?

A Friday night social has suddenly evolved into a proto-sovereign food system.

Membranes and the “Blight”

Jim borrows from the logic of early life. A cell needs a Membrane—a semi-permeable boundary that keeps the metabolism high and filters out toxins.

For our social membranes to work, we need:

• Accords: Explicit, evolving agreements (our “Social OS”).

• Currents: The ethical gravity. In a healthy membrane, doing the right thing feels like the right thing.

• Role vs. Position: We must kill “Position-based leadership” (The Chief) and replace it with “Role-based leadership” (The person who knows the most about tracking antelope leads the hunt).

Then, there is the Blight. Jim is a realist: 1% of the population are sociopaths. They will always try to defect from the commons for personal gain. To protect the spiral, the membrane must be radically transparent. As Jim put it: “If you steal from the commons, we march you to the border. No toleration for the blight.”

Lowering the Activation Energy

The biggest hurdle for these “Proto-B” experiments is that the people doing the work are usually too busy to document how they did it.

I proposed a “Git for Social Accords.” Imagine an AI-powered Integrators Guild that documents the successes of a dinner club in Berlin so that a group in Costa Rica can “fork” the code and adapt it to their own bioregion. We can use the current AI stack to summarize, curate, and signal inconsistencies between what we say we value and what we are actually doing.

We don’t need to fix global democracy by Tuesday. We need to start the spiral in the small institutions of our lives.

Follow the crack in the sidewalk. Follow the wind. Follow the water.

• Epoch 1: The Egalitarian Game (~290,000 years): For most of our history, humans lived in forager bands where no single “Big Man” could tell others what to do. Two dudes with spears acted as a check on any bully trying to dominate the tribe.

• Epoch 2: The Big Man Game (~10,000 years): Agriculture allowed for surplus, which allowed for henchmen. For millennia, kings, priests, and warlords ran the world through hereditary power and monopolies.

• Epoch 3: Game A (~300 years): Starting around 1700, humanity combined proto-democracy, science, and modern finance. It unleashed massive creativity but failed to kill the Big Man game. Instead, it financialized it.

The Crisis: We are now on an exponential curve on a finite planet. Our “pruning rule” for what exists in the world is no longer human well-being; it is simply money-on-money return. This is how we end up with TikTok, opioid addictions, and fast food: innovations that make us sick but make the Big Men rich.

Minimum Necessary Radicalism

Jim argues that the “Game B” revolution must be calibrated with surgical precision:

1. Minimum: Most revolutions go too far, ending in camps and killing fields (the French and Russian models). We must do no more than is required.

2. Necessary: Standard politics does “nowhere near enough”. It’s rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic while the iceberg is already inside the hull.

3. Radicalism: We have to think from first principles. The time for micro-adjustments is over; we need a “bigger swing” to move the world to a new attractor.

Engineering the Exit

We discussed the institutional “forks” required to build a world that isn’t a suicide pact:

Membranes & Subsidiarity

Game B isn’t a top-down empire; it’s a collection of membranes, small communities with their own local “accords” or rules. Decisions are pushed down as far as they can go (subsidiarity), meaning a bureaucrat 300km away shouldn’t be deciding what happens in your local bar.

Growth via Forking

In Game B, if a community turns into a cult or stops working, you fork it. You copy the operating system, change the parts that suck (the “delta”), and start a new lineage. This creates a horizontal search for what actually works for humans.

Liquid Democracy

The “bullshit” of current politics is a failure of sense-making. Jim proposes liquid democracy, where you give your “proxy” to people you actually trust for specific topics—like giving a building expert your vote on construction—but you can revoke that power instantly.

The Ultimate Stakes

Why go through this radical trouble? Because of the Fermi Paradox. It is entirely possible that we are the only technological society in the universe.

“We better be damn careful not to fuck up this chance for the universe to come to life.”

Living in Game B should feel like swimming with the current rather than against it. It means security, the end of alienation, and a status game based on what you give to the community rather than what you can extract from it.

In our next conversation we will explore the Personal Institutional Spiral - keep an eye out for this in a week.

we find ourselves herenow at the edge of a civilizational “shitshow.”

two days ago, i started running a thought experiment in my mind: a “Black Swan” scenario that breaks the current rules of how we think about the world. i’ve been contemplating the unthinkable: the European Union applying for membership in BRICS. let’s call it the Brussels-Kazan Axis.

this isn’t a prediction. it is a sensor reading of a system that is running out of steam.

For decades, the EU has been the world’s “moral compass,” a project built on the old settings of the Western alliance. but as the US turns inward—consuming its own energy rather than radiating it: the protective skin of Europe, our “membrane,” is beginning to shake. the way we handle money and energy is no longer serving Life.

The Trap of Choosing Sides

right now, we are stuck in a “multipolar trap.” we feel forced to choose between a fading Atlantic partnership and a rising group of nations in the Global South.

this is a “Mindset” problem, seeing the world as a game of winners and losers. a “Heliogenic” civilization, one that acts like the sun, doesn’t just pick a side; it creates a boundary that allows for growth. it’s about being “exothermic,” meaning we generate more value and life for the world than we take from it.

The Physics of the Shift

if we look toward Kazan as a theoretical partner, the data tells an interesting story about our survival:

• Industrial Oxygen: our industries are “hypoxic” starved of the energy oxygen they need to breathe. turning toward new partners is an attempt to restore that breath.

• The Green Resource Gap: our “Green Deal” depends on materials like lithium and cobalt. most of these are currently found inside the BRICS network. we can’t build a new world if we are cut off from its building blocks.

• A New Financial Pulse: we could integrate the Euro into new digital payment systems. this would be an “exit to planet” a way for our societies to trade and create value without being dependent on a single, aging financial system.

if we treat money as a flow of energy rather than just numbers in a bank, this move is about realigning our sensors with the reality of what the planet actually needs.

Walls vs. Membranes

my contemplation of this scenario suggests that such a shift would be a massive shock. it might even cause a split within Europe between those who look West and those who look East.

this tension happens because we still think in “masculine” ways: using hierarchy, force, and walls. a more “feminine” way of scaling would see this not as a breakup, but as a maturation. nature doesn’t use rigid walls; it uses membranes. a membrane is a skin that is strong enough to protect what’s inside, but smart enough to let the “good stuff” in.

we are at the edge between the “herenow” of energy crises and the “thenthere” of an economy that actually works with the planet.

this Brussels-Kazan thought experiment isn’t about “joining a club.” it’s about sensing a transition. we must ask ourselves: does our current path serve Life? does it help us thrive, or is it just helping us manage our decay?

to live up to a higher standard, we have to start building membranes instead of walls. we have to recognize that “the other Others”, whether they are in Kazan, New Delhi, or right here in our own neighborhoods, are part of the same living system.

we understand this. we are sensing the shift.

Basically, how do we design a social operating system where greed isn’t the feature, but the bug?

In this new episode, Jim and I stop hovering at the theoretical level and start drawing the blueprints. We dig into the “architectural” changes required to move from our current game of status competition where billionaires stack chips just to say they have more than the other guy to a model of genuine, resilient flourishing.

Here are a few of the deep currents we explore in this session.

The Shared Purse vs. The Blight

We start with a radical but historically grounded idea: shifting the nexus of wealth from the individual to the “membrane”, a community of roughly 150 people (a Dunbar number group).

Imagine a “Shared Purse” economy, similar to the early Israeli Kibbutzim. When assets are pooled, the incentive to exploit your neighbor dissolves because their loss is your loss. But we aren’t naive. We know that wherever power gathers, “The Blight” (corruption) follows. We discuss why absolute, world-readable transparency in financial ledgers isn’t just a nice-to-have it’s the only immune system capable of keeping the Blight in check.

The Pruning Rules of Innovation

Why does our current society produce incredibly sophisticated sports betting apps designed to addict young men, but fail to build a resilient electrical grid?

It comes down to what Jim calls “Pruning Rules.”

Every time humanity jumps to the “adjacent possible” (the next stage of innovation), we filter our choices through a pruning rule. Right now, that rule is almost exclusively Money-on-Money Return. If it’s profitable, it survives. If it’s merely “good for civilization,” it often dies. We discuss how to change these rules so that we stop optimizing for addiction and extraction.

Viscosity, Voice, and Exit

We also tackle the hard problem of governance. A free society cannot be a prison. We discuss the non-negotiable principles of Voice (having a say) and Exit (the ability to leave on fair terms).

But perhaps the most provocative part of the conversation was about Death.

Nature understands that for new life to emerge, old things must die. Our institutions, however, try to live forever. We talk about the concept of “Sunsetting”: the idea that every law, institution, and corporation should have a built-in expiration date.

The Thought Experiment: A Terminal Value for Tech Giants

This led us to a wild thought experiment.

Imagine if companies like Google or Facebook couldn’t be sold to private equity or inherited by a dynasty. Imagine if, after 25 or 50 years, they had to be sold to the public commons.

Here’s the kicker: The price the public pays wouldn’t be based on projected profits, but on the company’s Net Contribution to the Planet.

If your company extracted value, destroyed attention spans, and polluted the ecosystem, the price is zero (or you owe us). If you added genuine value to the biosphere and humanity, you get a handsome reward. It’s a mechanism that would change the incentives of a founder from Day 1.

We even toyed with the idea of writing this up and sending it to Larry Page and Sergey Brin to ask: Does your 25-year-old self agree with this? Does your current self? (so, @Sergey if you happen to read this, let’s chat :))

This conversation was a journey from the mechanics of local farming to the governance of Mars colonies. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Why Life is More Interesting Than Non-Life

The universe is vast and largely silent. As we discuss in the video, we are part of a rare process where the universe has begun to wake up. We explore why we have a profound moral obligation not to “screw this up” and how we can move from being a species in crisis to one that is actively bringing the universe to life.

Key Themes We Cover

• The Power of Emergence: Why change happens fastest when systems are in “disequilibrium.”

• Social Scaffolding: Why personal change isn’t enough—we need communities and “membranes” to stabilize our growth.

• Mutual Dependence: Moving away from hyper-individualism toward systems where we actually need one another to survive and thrive.

• The 10,000-Year View: Why shifting our timeframe changes every decision we make today.

“Life is more interesting than non-life... we need to change what we want at some level if we are going to survive the transition to a galactic civilization.”

Takeaways to Keep in Mind

• Small is Beautiful: We need to build small, coherent things initially to prove new ways of living.

• Worldview as Design: Your worldview isn’t just a philosophy; it’s a design element for how you build your life and community.

• The Role of Technology: How to use our tools to encourage mutual dependence rather than isolation.

Chapter Guide

• 00:00 The Emergence of Life and the Universe

• 05:05 The Next 10,000 Years: A Vision for Humanity

• 09:55 Understanding Emergence: From the Big Bang to Life

• 19:53 The Role of Technology and Society in Our Future

• 29:57 Navigating the Future: Choices and Consequences

• 43:20 The Role of Membranes in Emergence Management

• 49:24 Personal Pathways to Emergence

• 54:57 Worldview as a Central Design Element

• 01:01:51 Building Coherent Communities

• 01:10:40 Designing Membranes for Global Cooperation

• 01:20:41 Establishing Mutual Dependence in Systems

What do you think? Are we ready to take on the responsibility of being the “consciousness” of the universe, or are we still too caught up in the “small things”? Let’s discuss in the comments.