To understand why we’re stuck, Jim traces the three stages of the human story so far:
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:
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.
Necessary: Standard politics does “nowhere near enough”. It’s rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic while the iceberg is already inside the hull.
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.
