Most change is a ghost. It haunts you for a weekend at a silent retreat, fills your lungs with clean air and your head with “goodness,” and then vanishes the moment you clock back into your Game A life.
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:
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.
The First Accord: The group realizes this food is a “humane misuse of human beings.” They set a rule: Home-cooked food only.
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.
