In my recent conversations with Jim Rutt regarding the personal-institutional spiral, we keep returning to a fundamental friction point: how do we build the coherence necessary to move from the extractive “Game A” world into something more regenerative, which Jim calls Game B.
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.
