Game B

Note: This page, just like its primary subject, is a work-in-perpetual-progress. Perhaps there is a detectable structure, but don't treat it or any ideas as set in stone. There is no one definition of Game B, but here's an attempt to summarize Game B by James Allen.

Game~B is a memetic tag that aggregates a myriad of visions, projects, and experiments that model potential future civilizational forms. The flag on the hill for Game~B is an anti-fragile, scalable, increasingly omni-win-win civilization. This is distinct from our current rivalrous Game A civilization that is replete with destructive externalities and power asymmetries that produce existential risk. However, Game~B is not a prescriptive ideology (or an ideology at all): while the eyes of Game~B players may be fixed on the same flag, the hills are multitudes. The flag sits atop each, and no player individually is equipped to map a route in advance.

Rather, Game~B players gather together to feel their way up each hill with their toes, sensing for the loamy untrodden ground beneath them, slowly inching forward, listening for signals from one another, adjusting at each step to orient themselves toward the flag that is barely visible. Like an actual game, Game~B describes a modus operandi as much as it does a goal, although for now, the former can be brought into sharper focus.

Game~B players are already everywhere, and Game~B is already emerging. #gameb is merely a means to make the organism self-aware, to show its players that they are already in a community.

The evolutionary backdrop of Game B

Our universe selects for coherence and emergence

“How do we get fundamentally new things out of relationships of things where that didn't exist before? Emergence is the closest thing to magic that's actually a scientifically admissible term. ”

- Daniel Schmachtenberger

Coherence occurs when different parts come together and create something greater. The difference is emergence.

Coherence enhances evolutionary fitness because emergence may create properties that offer some evolutionary advantage. Things can come together in various ways. Adaptions that offer the most advantages are selected for and are what drives the arrow of evolution.

In complexity theory, evolution is defined as more elegantly ordered complexity.

From the big bang to stars to chemicals to planets to single-cell organisms to multi-cell organisms to humans, the universe has selected for increasing elegantly ordered complexity.

On the opposite side, defection, which occurs when parts are not aligned with the whole, is selected against. An example, and an instance of a multipolar trap, is the tragedy of the commons. In this scenario, a person exploits a shared resource at the whole community's expense instead of cooperating to ensure sustainability. Reciprocally, this incentivizes others to exploit the resource, too, defecting on the global optimum, thereby rendering the system eventually self-terminating. Thus, avoidance of defection in favor of coherence also enhances evolutionary fitness.

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Thresholds of increasing complexity: Ingredients + Goldilocks Conditions = New Complexity

As Big History suggests, new complexity results from having both the proper ingredients and goldilocks conditions. As an example, after the universe created stars, it consisted of hydrogen and helium only. When giant stars ran out of hydrogen, they collapsed, and with high enough temperatures, the fusion of helium nuclei created many different elements that form our periodic table. This collapse brought increased complexity that could lead to the formation of planets.

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An example of a new threshold when new chemical elements emerged

Our human advantage lies in collective intelligence

Skipping forward, the evolution of humans was a big milestone in the history of the universe. For the first time, something could contemplate its existence and consciously change the future.

Anatomically modern humans evolved about 150,000 years ago. As Jordan Hall mentions, human evolution required many different pieces to come together. They include:

• Humans beginning to grow larger and larger crania
• Significant increases of the gestation period
• Increased male attention in parenting
• Grandmothers living long enough to provide resources and knowledge for support

According to The Late Upper Paleolithic Model, humans were neither cognitively nor behaviorally "modern" until around 50,000 years ago. Jordan Hall characterizes this shift in human capacity as the emergence of our collective intelligence toolkit, including abstract thinking, planning depth, and symbolic behavior.

Yuval Harari called this emergence the Cognitive Revolution. Humans became the first species that could learn collectively rather than merely individually. Collective learning meant that with each generation, ideas and knowledge accumulated, and more information was retained than lost, allowing humans to become successively more powerful.

Hence, the human evolutionary advantage was constituted in the ability to learn collectively and collaborate. It is encoded in our genes.

Humans found coherence under the Dunbar number

With the new collective intelligence toolkit, groups of humans gathered at the band level numbering between 5 to 150. These groups were meta-stable due to the high level of coherence and ability to police defection. Robin Dunbar found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size. He proposed that for humans, 150 appears to be the limit of our neurological capacities to model every other member and all of the complexities of relationships. At 150, Dunbar speculated that 42% of the group's time would need to be devoted to social grooming.

As Jim Rutt hypothesized, a band that could have coherence at 150 had a substantial advantage over a band that could only have coherence at 80, so there was a group selection advantage. There was an evolutionary benefit of forming larger neocortices until the limit of the pelvic girdle in the human female was reached.

As examples, Dunbar found 150 as the estimated size of a Neolithic farming village; 150 as the splitting point of Hutterite settlements; 200 as the upper bound on the number of academics in a discipline's sub-specialisation. As bands approach 150, they tend to fractionate into two units.

With high degrees of coherence under 150, humans quickly acquired an asymmetric position relative to their natural environment and began to shape nature for their own needs. This asymmetric power allowed humans to spread, survive, and thrive in most environments, assuming the role of apex predators. Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, humans have been able to change their behavior quickly, transmitting new behaviors to future generations without any need for genetic or environmental changes. Consequently, the speed of evolution became dominated by cultural evolution rather than biological evolution.

Even with new (digital) technology increasing social connectivity across the globe, research still indicates that humans are somewhat restricted by the Dunbar number in the number of stable social relationships. A study of Twitter activity by Gonçalves, Perra and Vespignani in 2011 validated the Dunbar threshold insofar as biological and cognitive limits still apply in the current attention economy.

When was this coherence lost?

Humans spread and dominated every niche. By 11,000 years ago, the population grew to 6 - 8M, which was about the largest forager population the planet could support.

Agriculture arose independently across the world, starting in Mesopotamia, 11,000 years ago. This was likely because:

1. Global temperature rose after the last ice age
2. Humans gained a deeper understanding of plants and animals
3. Human communities grew dense, entailing increasing competition for resources

Farming allowed for the support of a larger population, taking up a much smaller land area than foraging. As humans began to organize beyond the Dunbar number, a larger population lead to more options for defection.

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Ingredients and goldilocks conditions for the rise of agriculture

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Rising global temperatures after the last ice age

Enter Game A

In the intimate context of hunter-gatherer life, defection was difficult. As societies increased in complexity, and people interacted with strangers, the civilization toolkit emerged to police defection.

Introduction of scarcity

With the advent of agriculture, humans started to shape the environment for their own needs. For the first time, farming allowed the creation of a surplus. As Daniel Schmachtenberger notes, this created the concept of (property) ownership since now there was something to own. Ironically, the notion of scarcity and the need to distribute scarce resources among the population followed - the beginning of economics.

Game A's primary problems

Game A is almost everything that humans have been doing to design their world, especially in the last 10,000 years, to coordinate beyond the Dunbar number.

Game A, fundamentally, is about being able to solve three primary problems:

1. Resource production - coordinate people for the extraction of resources from nature, providing for the group's well-being
2. Interior defection - survive internal defection as the population begins to grow beyond the Dunbar number.
3. Exterior competition - survive and out-compete other groups

Accordingly, Game A is primarily characterized by scarcity and thus rivalrous or win-lose dynamics: How do we increase our resources production? How do we divide up the scarce resources? How do we compete with other groups of people?

Civilization became the toolkit to solve these problems. Civilization exerts continued effort to police local defection against the global optimum. However, this policing has been resting on a growing dependence on formal institutions and less interpersonal relationships.

Game A's increasing complexity

Chiefdoms

After agriculture first spread across a region, with enough surplus, chiefdoms tended to follow. Anthropologist Robert Carneiro defines a chiefdom as "an autonomous political unit comprising a number of villages or communities under the permanent control of a paramount chief." The exception was Papua New Guinea, probably because the root crops could not be stored, and agriculture was not quite productive enough to generate a surplus. Chiefdoms, the scholar Randolph Widmer wrote, "were at various times the most common form of society found throughout Europe, Africa, the Americas, Melanesia, Polynesia, the Near East, and Asia."

Agrarian civilizations

Chiefdoms sustained the basic trend toward larger and more complex social organization. The chiefdoms' villages evolved into greater conglomerates like towns, then city-states, then multi-city states, and then civilizations.

More refined and productive farming technology eventually allowed for the creation of more populous and more complex societies. These agrarian civilizations appeared all over the world. They are usually divided into four world zones: The Americas, Afro-Eurasia, Australasia, and the Pacific Island societies. Although every civilization was different, they had many things in common. They all had big cities. These cities featured monumental architectures like temples, pyramids, and palaces. They also had rulers, hierarchies, tax systems, armies, and a large population of peasant farmers to support civilization.

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Four World Zones

Game A's tools

With scarcity and rivalrous dynamics in Game A comes the power to influence and control resources.

Game A strategies to solve the three problems of resource production, interior defection, and external competition are:

• Formal Roles and Hierarchy
• Formal Narrative / Religion
• Armies / Police
• Formal Law

Formal Roles and Hierarchy

For the first time, with chiefdoms, there existed groups under the permanent control of a paramount chief. A chief's status was usually based on kinship, which was inherited or ascribed rather than derived from achievements like it was for leaders at the band level.

Chiefdoms relied on the centralization of authority, entailing pervasive inequality. This hierarchy resulted in at least two inherited social classes; farmers extracting resources from the environment, and a ruling elite that extracted resources from the farmers.

Through this exploitative dynamic, the ruling elite could accumulate surplus from other people's labor rather than their own. As Daniel Schmatchenberger says, this was the beginning of a new multiplicative economy.

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Typical hierarchy in civilizations

In civilizations, specialist roles began to emerge like potters, merchants, priests, and soldiers. People held formal roles. There were a few wealthy, politically powerful people and many more comparatively poor commoners who had little political influence and almost no possibility of acquiring it. As single-city kingdoms became multi-city empires with vast territories, the hierarchy became more rigid.  

Sacredness of the ruling elite

Chiefs had demigod status and possessed religious authority. They often styled themselves as representatives of gods and performed rituals that only they could perform.

Surveying the past few centuries, chiefdoms went to great lengths to legitimate their supremacy. Many forms of chiefly self-advertisement are enduring, such as monumental architecture. These include the vast mounds built in North America as tombs for past chiefs, pyramid-like temples on Tahiti, and even the giant stone heads on Easter Island.

Similarly, in agrarian civilizations, the ruler became a god-king with absolute authority. The Pharaohs of Egypt are a prime example of this. As living gods, their authority was absolute, as illustrated by monumental architecture like large pyramids.

Formal Narrative, Social Norms, Religion

Any large-scale human cooperation is rooted in shared myths. The crucial historical role of religion has been to give superhuman legitimacy to structures of states. Religion asserts that laws are not susceptible to human fallibility, but are ordained by an absolute and indisputable authority. This exempts them from critique and ensures social stability. As Yuval Harari describes, "The imagined order is inter-subjective." It exists in the shared imagination of everyone.

Armies and Police

As Chris Boehm suggests, it was the development of weaponry that allowed two betas to kill an alpha, and thus one alpha could not dominate unchallenged, resulting in an essentially egalitarian hierarchy at the band level. With the extra resources, Chiefdoms could assemble military forces and break out of the anti-hierarchical operating system that prevailed on the band level.

In 1970, the American anthropologist Robert Carneiro developed the coercive theory of state formation. It suggests that increasing population pressure in early agricultural societies resulted in intense competition with other societies for scarce resources such as land, water, salt, and wood. To persist in the ensuing wars of conquest, centralized governments developed to mobilize and direct armies. According to Carneiro, armies continued to exist to control conquered peoples, collect tribute, and allocate resources.

Formal Laws

Written laws came into existence after writing was invented. Writing allowed these laws to be easily shared and inscribed. For example, the Code of Hammurabi of 1776BC presented Hammurabi as a just king and served as the basis for a more uniform legal system across the Babylonian Empire. It asserted that Babylonian social order is rooted in universal principles of justice, dictated by the gods. According to the code, people are divided into two genders and three classes. With this collection of laws imposed through the threat of force, a social order was created that was clear and binding.

The Industrial Revolution created a global society

As the Persian, Roman, and Mongol civilizations expanded, they developed long-distance trade routes to expand their regional influence. New transportation and navigational technologies started to connect all world zones.

The Agricultural Revolution allowed humans to better harness the sun's energy, yielding more caloric output. Animals like horses and oxen pulled carts and carried burdens ten times heavier than humans could.

The next big revolution was the Industrial Revolution, which saw the origins of the modern world we live in today. The industrial revolution was arguably the primary cause of the dramatic trajectory change in human welfare, starting between 1800 and 1870. As Luke Muehlhasuer write, "Everything was awful for a very long time, and then the industrial revolution happened."

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Metrics that show well-being increased after the Industrial Revolution

As the diagram shows above, all five measures of well-being dramatically increased after the Industrial Revolution:

1. Physical health, as measured by life expectancy at birth.
2. Economic well-being, as measured by GDP per capita (PPP) and percent of people living in extreme poverty.
3. Energy capture, in kilocalories per person per day.
4. Technological empowerment, as measured by war-making capacity.
5. Political freedom, as measured by percent of people living in a democracy.

Before the Industrial Revolution, in the 1400s, the world was divided into four isolated world zones: the Americas, Australasia, the Pacific, and Afro-Eurasia. European exploration eventually united all four world zones, and humans became a globally connected species. Technologies, innovations, ideas, goods, and belief systems were shared across the world.

The Industrial Revolution's marked impact is attributable to four factors:

Cheap fossil fuels

Coal, oil, and natural gas served as new sources of energy. These fossil fuels, storing energy from the sun for hundreds of millions of years, allowed the powering of engines of all kinds.

Wood was the primary source of energy in the pre-industrial world. For the same amount of heat, coal required much less labor to mine than cutting wood, and coal was much more abundant than wood, supplies of which were becoming scarce.

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New energy sources to fuel the human population

Improvements to the steam engine

Fundamental improvements to the steam engine were essential for the Industrial Revolution. Technical enhancements by James Watt saved 75% of coal costs and allowed steam engines to be used in various industries. The steam engines could use the untapped sources of coal to generate cheap energy and mechanically move large loads. By the early 19th century, steam engines drove industrial-scale production. The innovations of railways and steamships revolutionized transportation as well.

Increases in commerce and global markets

In agrarian civilizations, elites tended to extract resources through the threat of force. Increasingly, there emerged other classes of merchants and artisans who profited via competitive markets. To succeed, they needed to be innovative with their goods and services to flourish in competitive markets. By 1500, expanding global networks of exchange increased the importance of commerce and markets everywhere.

The Scientific Revolution brought growth in knowledge

Science differed from previous knowledge traditions by admitting ignorance, testing hypotheses, which lead to a surge in new technologies. As Francis Bacon argued "knowledge is power." Science is a particularly useful method to understand causal relationships.

Before the Scientific Revolution, most human cultures did not emphasize progress and had a static view of the world. During the last five centuries, belief in increased prosperity and well-being by virtue of scientific research strengthened. A strong feedback loop developed, whereby the more resources groups invested in science, the more knowledge and power they received.

Game A's trends of emergence

Since the beginnings of agriculture, there have been some trends of emergence through innovation, which explain humanity's path into the modern era::

• Improvements and innovation in transport and processing of energy, matter and information.
• A positive feedback loop: more population leads to more emergence and innovations, while more innovations allow for more population.
• In rivalrous dynamics, societies must embrace innovation or get conquered by more advanced societies.
• Innovations often redistribute power within societies.

Innovations in transport and processing of energy, matter and information.

Energy

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Daily energy usage has increased

As we moved from hunter-gatherer to agricultural civilization to modern civilizations, energy demand continually increased. Today, we can harness energy from the environment (sun, water, wind) and nuclear, which is the same way stars generate energy. As Daniel Schmachtenberger says, "we now have the power of the gods."

Matter

With increased energy, we could move matter faster and easier. Our transportation technologies have moved from animal and horses to trains and ships. Today, we can almost send and receive anything anywhere within days. Furthermore, commercial flights and space missions are possible.

Information

Many information technologies have dramatically increased humanity's ability to coordinate. Two primary innovations were writing and the printing press. First, writing helped store knowledge efficiently for centuries. Second, the printing press drastically reduced the cost of printing books and spreading knowledge. The printing press helped overhaul religious ideology and ushered in both the scientific and industrial revolutions.

Before the 20th century, information spread through our transportation technologies like trains and ships. In the 20th century, this changed with the invention of the telegraph, the telephone, the computer, and the internet. The latter allows us to connect with anyone in the world in seconds. The distance between people has continued to decrease over time.

With this decreased distance in communication, people with common interests can come together. This has lead to tribalism that fragments the population (ex. dissolution of Yugoslavia). On the other side, globalization of economics and culture integrates the world. This represents a tension between fragmentation and integration.  

Furthermore, with the information revolution, information is encoded in bits with 1s and 0s and copied at a very low cost. Instead of atoms, these bits have very little weight and travel close to the speed of light.

Other social and information processing technologies include the invention of money and markets. Money added liquidity to exchanges of goods. Markets brought together many buyers and sellers and used prices to efficiently value goods and services.

A positive feedback loop: more population leads to more emergence and vice-versa

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Population increase with each revolution

With the agricultural and industrial revolutions, the human population has dramatically expanded. With the industrial revolution, the global population has grown from 1 billion in 1800 to 7.6 billion in 2018. There is concern that the exponential population growth is putting a strain on natural resources, food supplies, and housing.

Additional population provides more nodes for emergence and innovation. The potential for collaboration and interactions grows exponentially with the number of people.

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Population growth since agriculture

Rivalrous dynamics - Innovate or perish

""Selfishness beats altruism within groups, but altruistic groups beat selfish groups. The rest is commentary.""

"-David Sloan"

Throughout history, more advanced civilizations generally conquer less advanced civilizations. This is exemplified by the former European colonization of most of the world.

Due to rivalrous dynamics, similar to evolution, the weaker civilizations will not last, and the ones with greater coherence, emergence, and innovations will continue to spread. Accordingly, complexity surges.

Innovations often redistributed power within societies

Innovations often expand the number of people who profit from the system and so wield power within it. There is a Hobson "take it or leave it" choice for governing elite: accept valuable technologies that may erode power or block them, which carries the risk of being outrivaled by a more advanced group.

The medieval historian Joseph Strayer once noted "an interesting problem in the history of civilization. If there is steady progress anywhere, it is in the field of technology, and yet this kind of progress seems to have little connection with the stability of society."

Elites dislike power shifts. For example, the instinct of feudal lords was to exploit the emerging class of merchants. However, it didn't take long for the merchants to unite into guilds and demand freedoms. Increasingly towns won the right to self-government. Feudal lords were in competition and soon realized that local prosperity was good for them, but required a bit of freedom.

A more recent example, the legacy of capitalism's growing power can be seen as democracy is widespread and more people have more representation and voting rights. (?)

Technology, time and again, has changed the balance of power within society. Moreover, people tend not to surrender power unopposedly. This underlying tension between the aggrandizing instincts of elites versus the decentralizing tendencies of technology, especially information technology, has played out repeatedly.

The status quo

Our quality of life has never been higher

As described in the previous section, for the first time, there exists a globally connected human society. There are billions of people who can instantly communicate with each other. We generate enormous amounts of energy. We understand quantum mechanics and relativity theory. We have markets that can solve most of our needs efficiently. Medical advancements have increased average life expectancy from 32 years in 1900 to 71 years in 2018.  

Here are some other metrics that show the progress we have made, 200 years ago vs. 2015:

• 94% vs. 10% of people lived in extreme poverty
• 83% vs. 14% did not have a basic education
• 88% vs. 15% were not able to read
• 99% vs. 44% did not live in a democracy
• 100% vs. 14% were not vaccinated
• 43% vs. 4% of kids died before they reached the age of five

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Now, there are many more metrics to look at. We still have a lot more progress to make, but conditions of life have significantly improved for most people compared to just a century ago.

The crises produced by Game A

""If we are scaling toward the power of gods, then we have to have the wisdom and the love of gods, or we self destruct.""

-Daniel Schmachtenberger

Global threats to all of humanity

With all this progress, we have become an interconnected world that is susceptible to collapse.

Here are four big problems:

1. Exponential tech - Exponential tech in a win-lose world poses an existential risk
2. Environment - Human activity dramatically affects our planet
3. Fragility - The modern, interconnected world is fragile
4. Poorer sensemaking - There is a war on sensemaking

Exponential tech in a win-lose world poses an existential risk

In the 1940s, humanity has gained the ability to self-destruct entirely via nuclear weapons. Other advancing technologies that improve exponentially are AI, synbio, and nanotech. If technological development continues, small groups or even individuals could gain the capacity to devastate all of civilization. Nick Bostrom calls this the Vulnerable World Hypothesis in his 2018 working paper.

Game A is about scarcity and, thus win-lose dynamics. Disagreement often ends in war. Today, this belligerence could produce catastrophic damage. Imagine someone with a gun or bomb that could blow up a whole block now could blow up a whole country because they are unhappy. In other words, misaligned agents could bring about disastrous consequences.

In Game A, rivalrous dynamics push groups to amplify their offensive and defensive capacities in order to survive. This is a prisoner's dilemma or, more abstractly, a multipolar trap, where the agent's optimal equilibrium contrasts with the global optimum. Destructive potential expanded from stone tools to guns to weapons of mass destruction. With exponential tech, it is now lose-lose for everyone because any war may blow up everything.

For instance, there is an arms race between China, the US, and Russia to develop autonomous weaponry. Irrespective of any mutual assurances, each party could defect, constructing these weapons secretly. Contrarily, in April 2018, China indicated its support for a ban of autonomous weapons on the battlefield, only to release plans for an intelligent swarm design on the same day. Lastly, these win-lose dynamics also incentivize speed and the need to cut corners while developing technologies.

Why does the current operating system based on individualism fail?

The invisible hand, introduced by the 18th-century Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith, characterizes the putative mechanism through which beneficial social and economic outcomes may arise from the accumulated self-interested actions of individuals, none of whom intends to bring about such outcomes.

This is a bottom-up approach that provides more information processing than a top-down approach. Specifically, with the bottom-up approach, there are many situations where perverse incentives contribute to the misalignment of agents leading to overall detriment.

Here are some examples that Daniel Schmachtenberger provides:  

• A for-profit military-industrial complex as one of the largest blocks of the global economy. Peace would mean bankruptcy. Ongoing war and threat of war to continually manage is optimal. War for any cause is profitable. Military contractors have massive lobbying resources and major shareholders in decision making positions of military and government.
• A for-profit health care system that makes no money on healthy people, makes a little on permanent cures and makes the most on long term symptom management
• Information as competitive advantage, incentivizing hiding information, protecting it as intellectual property to keep it from being useful to others, and actively creating and promoting disinformation.

This individualism has encouraged people to construct and defend their niches to benefit themselves. Furthermore, politically, there is a lot of strategy and planning, focusing on the narrow goals of some individuals, which may not necessarily account for the well-being of all.

Modern society dramatically affects the planet

Using up non-renewable resources

With exponential technology, we could do enormous damage very quickly. An example is long-range fishing that could deplete the oceans of fish very quickly. The current economy encourages the extraction of dwindling resources faster than they can replenish because a fish is worth nothing in the ocean, but worth something if caught.

Furthermore, our progress has also been dependent on non-renewable resources like oil that have taken its toll on the environment.

Open loops are affecting the planet

Currently, we have an "open-loop" system, where there are externalities that are not factored into the system. We have a linear materials / consumption / extraction system where we extract, use one time, and then dispose. Therefore, waste is accumulated, and natural resources depleted.

Our current open-loop economic systems does not account for the cost to the environment. The consequences are readily observable: sea level rises, desertification, wildfires, ocean acidification, pollution, soil degradation, extreme weather, species extinction at 1000x the normal rate, a 76% decline in insect biomass, and many more issues.

Reaching the limits of earth's capacity

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With exponential population growth, many believe our ecological footprint has exceeded the planet's biocapacity. If we do not change our current trajectory, we could be on our way to a Malthusian catastrophe, where population growth outpaces agricultural production.

Fragility in an interconnected world

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Here is the full list of the civilizations displayed above.

As illustrated above, every civilization has collapsed. Collapse can be defined as a rapid and enduring loss of population, identity, and socio-economic complexity. Due to global interconnections and dependencies, a severe collapse in one region could prove catastrophic for all of humanity.

As Luke Kemp wrote, there are many reasons why a civilization could collapse, including:

• Climate change - When climate changes, there can be cascading effect. The collapse of the Anasazi, the Tiwanaku civilization, the Akkadians, the Mayan, the Roman Empire, and many others have coincided with abrupt climatic changes, usually droughts.
• Environmental degradation - Societies could collapse when they overshoot the environment's carrying capacity. Jared Diamond's Collapse debatably claimed that this was the fate of Easter Island
• External shocks - Also known as the "four horsemen": war, natural disasters, famine, and plagues. For example, smallpox arriving in the Americas was devastating, and a reason why Aztec and Incas were defeated.
• Inequality - With advanced technology, and accelerated winner-take-all dynamics, the wealth of the top 1% is growing in the US since 1980. Inequality causes social distress, which is arguably one of the reasons why authoritarian hardliners get elected.
• Red Queen Effect - Statistical analysis on empires suggests that collapse is random and independent of age. An explanation is the "Red Queen Effect": if species are continually fighting for survival in a changing environment with numerous competitors, extinction is probable.
• Complexity - Collapse expert and historian Joseph Tainter has proposed that societies eventually collapse under the weight of their own accumulated complexity. We describe this in more detail below.

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Dave Snowden created the Cynefin framework to explain the difference between complicated and complex.

• Complicated - In principle can be taken apart and put back together again. Cause and effect are easy to follow
• Complex - Cannot be taken apart and put together again because the phase space in time is changing and dynamic. In complex systems, it is hard to determine cause and effect relationships

Complicated systems tend toward entropy. Complex systems tend toward emergence. Part of the problem we are facing is that we have been trying to replace complex systems with complicated structures for a long time. For instance, the complexity of a tree, as part of the living, natural environment, is transformed into a complicated structure like a house. Moreover, complicated systems are not only prone to failures and anti-fragility but may create externalities. A complicated system may evolve to become ever more complicated until the point where the expenses for its maintenance lead to its collapse.

Here is an example: Because of the difficulty of policing defecting behavior, formal laws are established. These laws are endeavoring to coordinate the complex reality of humans. However, a complicated system can only approximate a complex system; as the complex system changes and new possibilities emerge, the complicated system has to become more complicated.

Today, we solve most problems by using complicated systems to manage the complex. Science has been an excellent tool to determine cause and effect for complicated systems. This is why many infectious diseases were eradicated since they are identifiable, and an accurate diagnostic tool likely exists. On the other hand, non-communicable diseases like diabetes, cancer, and cardiovascular diseases are harder to overcome because they are complex.

As Tainter hypothesized in his book "The Collapse of Complex Societies", societies eventually collapse under the weight of their own accumulated complexity. Take oil as an example. First, societies start with the lowest hanging fruit. For a little while, there is a substantial boon of surplus capacity and energy that allows the society to grow. Later on, this society finds itself dependent on its tools. As the society picks the low hanging fruits, upgrades to technical infrastructure like pipelines and tankers are needed to be able to continue to maintain the same amount of supply.  

What will end up happening inevitably, as Tainter points out, is that society gets an S-curve happening at the level of innovation. At a certain point, it takes more energy per unit innovation. As society burns through the low hanging fruits, it arrives at an increasingly fragile relationship between how it meets its needs and its relationship with the resources that happen to be in the environment. This tension then generally leads to a collapse.

On a grander scale, our system is optimized to continue growing its complicatedness to reduce everything that is complex into something simple. Our civilization is a kind of paperclip maximizer. An example is the emphasis on GDP growth at the expense of other variables. No matter how comprehensive a set of variables we optimize, as complex systems can with current methods only be approximated, there will be imbalances and missing factors. This reductionism leads to externalities.

Our system is fragile

As we move up the technological curve, any perturbation may entail more pronounced cascade effects. Our system is currently not set up to have the resilience to deal with these culminations.

One hundred fifty years ago, shutting down the power grid would not have had much impact. However, because we are so reliant on the system, an agent's capacity to shut down the power grid could result in a catastrophe. Centralization and connectedness introduce a fragility, whereby several different ways to shut down the power grid like an EMP, cyber warfare, or even a distributed drone swarm are imaginable. Experts predict that a Carrington flare, a solar geomagnetic storm, would cause widespread electrical disruption, blackouts, and damage to the electrical grid. To make a point, the solar storm of 2012 missed earth's orbit by nine days.

Natural disasters could also compound this issue. An example is the 2010 eruptions of Iceland's volcano. Although in a remote location and relatively small for a volcanic eruption, air traffic was disrupted by the ash plumes for an entire week. Overall, 10 million travelers were affected. If the flights had been disrupted for more weeks, it could have affected global supply chains.

There is a war on sensemaking

Finally, there is what Daniel Schmachtenberger has called a war on sensemaking. Our information ecology is broken, making it harder to understand what is happening and make the right choices. Every individual or group has vested interests for sharing information, rendering it challenging to assess a source's trustworthiness.

For example, marketing and sales are rarely telling the truth and doing what is best for the customer. There is an incentive to manufacture artificial demand because one group wants to maximize the customer lifetime value, decoupling revenue from actual use-value.

Furthermore, companies have teams working on hacking our attention by broadcasting supernormal stimuli. Economic incentives lead to more sensational and fake news being consumed and shared. In a search for user attention, platforms create filter bubbles that repeat and confirm their views and lead to strong ideologies.

Finally, information is and has always been used as a competitive advantage, epitomized in the concept of intellectual property. With rivalrous dynamics, incentives to conceal and misinform others for a competitive advantage abound.

All these factors make it hard to do proper sensemaking. The sensemaking crisis may be characterized by the observation that our ability to trust mediated communication is rapidly approaching zero.

The need for a phase shift or evolutionary transition

As Daniel Schmachtenbeger said, ""if we are gaining the power of gods, then without the love and wisdom of gods, we self-destruct" ".

When a shift is getting exponentially better and exponentially worse at the same time, it shows that a system is destabilizing. So, we will either get the emergence up into a higher degree of order or an entropic drop down into a lower degree of order. That is the precipice we are on.

The challenges we face are solvable. For the first time in history we have the technological infrastructure and capability to make the changes necessary to create a world that works not just for human life, but for all life now and in the future. Our problems are not the result of unavoidable human nature but are the result of changeable systems.

If there is one species capable of addressing this sort of problem, it is us. The human niche is niche switching; we can figure out what to do in new situations. It is what we do better than any other species that has ever existed on earth. We have collectively figured out what to do when the wisdom of ancestors has run out and will need to do this again to tackle these problems.

Enter Game B

What is Game B?

""Game B is notoriously difficult to think and talk about for the very good reason that if you were using the conceptual structures that came out of Game A to do so, you may very well be poisoning the well.""

"- Jordan Hall"

Defining Game B precisely would suffer from the reductionist Game A tendencies. Looking at the constituents of Game B from multiple angles might help to elucidate the concept. Here are some different constructions that point to Game B:

1. Game B is the flag on the hill for an omni-win civilization that maximizes human flourishing.
2. Game B is the environment that maximizes collective intelligence, collaboration, and increasing omni-consideration.
3. Game B is building or developing the capacity to navigate complexity without resorting to complicated systems.
4. Game B is establishing coherence within complex systems.
5. Game B is a meta-protocol for hyper-collaboration.
6. Game B is the infinite game where the purpose is to continue playing. Game A is the finite game where the purpose is to win.
7. Game B is the theoretically optimal condition for creative collaboration and, thus, for maximal innovation.
8. Game B must orient its primary innovation capacity towards cultivating individual and collective sovereignty. It must foster awareness of how choices show up and are decided, more than it augments individual and collective power.
9. Game B is a new mode of societal, economic, and political organization that leverages people's authentic, long-term interests towards a healthier, more cooperative society and improved well-being. A Game B system is any cooperative, mutually-beneficial system that can outcompete exploitative, adversarial systems through manifest appeal and willful, voluntary participation.

It may also be helpful to define Game B in terms of what it is not. Following Ariadnae:

• It is not an ideology nor a political stance; much different than Right and Left, which both strive to find ways for a fairer, more productive and sustainable Game A. Game B is an attempt at freeing oneself from any ideology and dispel biases, attempting to see the world for what it is
• It is not an apocalyptic view of the world; actually, the world in all its manifestations of cultures and extremes is remarkably plastic, resilient and adaptable.
• It is not an esoteric, psychedelic, cult-like movement trying to blow-up the classical success-based hierarchies of the Western world; instead, it is an earnest attempt at analyzing human spirituality, psychology, and sociology in order to understand what drives us as individuals and collectives. It is an attempt at leveraging old traditions and discoveries to build everlasting ever longer bridges across people with a myriad of backgrounds, cultures, languages, and religions and take the best of each in order to make sense of humanity as such.
• It is not a utopia in the making, nor a movement aimed at replacing markets and money with some obscure technology-driven new social order; instead, it is an attempt at understanding how money, technology, and political systems shape the world order as it is. It attempts to discover ways to advance societies via more creative, cooperative, and sustainable low-resolution forms of collaboration, to support healthy markets and societies.
• It is not a secret brotherhood of people armed with "bullshit baffles brains" jargon talking in such complicated words that laymen would find hard to understand. It is every one of us who is trying to make sense of the world using precise and accurate speech, evidence-based facts and scientific inquiry methods; we strive to make complex theories simple enough for the individual understanding, but without simplifying things to a point, where they would lose their essence and value of truth.
• It is not a counter-reaction to the great thinkers of yesterday and today; it is an attempt at distilling and integrating the truth in all that the classical and contemporary thinkers have to say, in order to create a round and comprehensible story of who we are and where we are heading as individuals and collectives.

Game B players are already everywhere, and Game B is already emerging. #gameb is merely a means to make the organism self-aware and show its players that they are already in a community.

How does Game B emerge and evolve?

As Jordan Hall mentions, there are at least three kinds of effort. All three are parallel - doing very different things but at the same time.

• Amelioration efforts - These are the things that are focused on minimizing the harm that Game A does as it winds down. From seed banks to cleaning plastic out of the oceans to preventing catastrophic war.
• Transition efforts (Transition B) - prototyping new models, building necessary infrastructure, taking well-considered and intentionally evolving swings at chunks of the larger problem (e.g., decentralized education models, permaculture at different levels of scale, much but not all of "green tech"..)
• Game B Proper (Game B) - Consciously and carefully co-creating an emergent and scalable new game.

Note that there are no plans or strategies to get to Game B because it is hard to plan for emergence. As a collective, each of us discerns with our full self the best "next action" and the "adjacent possible" and moves in that direction.

Through analogy, Game B players gather together to feel their way up each hill with their toes, sensing for the loamy untrodden ground beneath them, slowly inching forward, listening for signals from one another, adjusting at each step to orient themselves toward the flag that is barely visible through the gloaming.

So, to play Game B is to eschew reductionism, prescription and strategizing, and instead embrace complexity, uncertainty, and emergence. It is to adopt epistemic humility and deep listening as a default mode of engagement to notice what is emerging that may be omni-win. It is to cultivate a different form of knowing that leans less heavily on the propositional forms of the past and more on relational coherence, intersubjectivity, and participation to support that which encourages the universal flourishing of life.

How would Game B supersede Game A?

""The omni-win-win system actually outcompetes the win-lose system, while obsoleting win-lose dynamics itself.""

- Daniel Schmachtenberger

If we can create a social technology to hyper-coordinate with others, then Game B would be better at innovation than Game A. Then, the only way to beat it would be to coordinate even better, which is in and of itself a more Game B solution.

Origins of Game B

As Jordan Hall describes on Facebook, a series of meetings happened in between 2012-2013. In the third meeting, the group pondered the concept of Game B. They named it Game B and proposed it on their fourth meeting. By their fifth meeting, there were about thirty people in the group and the first formalization was proposed. This group included Jordan Hall, Eric Weinstein, Seb Pacquet, and Venessa Miemis (now Hall).

Jim Rutt mentions that Game B emerged in 2013 as an evolution from a failed attempt to launch the Emancipation Party. Ultimately this kicked off "Deep Code" where Jim assigned Jordan Hall the task of "going as deep as necessary" to establish the basis of any possible "game~b".

Game B, as an operating group, fell apart over two directions: personal change vs. institutional change. The group went into "spore mode" and disbanded and were to use the concepts in ways that they saw fit. Game B got reintroduced by Bret Weinstein on the Joe Rogan Experience in December 2017.

Design criteria of Game B

Although Game B does not have an exact vision, there are design criteria that it may solve in order to tackle the problems that we face.

Daniel Schmachtenberger started The Emergence Project to develop a set of necessary and sufficient design criteria for developing comprehensive solutions. Their vision is of an omni-considerate, integrally developed, effectively, and spontaneously self-governing global civilization.

An omni-considerate civilization is one where the incentive of any actor (individual or group), must be rigorously aligned with the well-being of all other agents in the system and of the commons.

The emergence model

Through the Emergence Project, a model was created. The model is derived from Ken Wilber's Integral Theory and draws upon the work of leading contemporary thinkers to:

• Include a comprehensive taxonomy of necessary and sufficient "metastructures" that support human civilization
• Provide criteria for evaluating the performance of existing structures
• Account for interactions between structures
• Prioritize the highest level initiatives that lead to omni-considerate outcomes

File:The emergence model.jpg

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The four quadrants represent the memetic structure (I = individual subjective) , physiologic structure (IT = individual objective), social structure (WE = collective intersubjective) and infrastructure (ITS = collective interobjective)

• Memetic Structure:
  • Human Values, Beliefs, Meaning, Orienting Stories and Narratives, Worldview, Identity, Definition of success.
• Physiologic Structure:
  • Behavioral Influencers -- Nutrition, Neurochemistry / Neurobiology, Endocrinology, Epigenetics, Toxicity, Nutrition
• Social Structure:
  • Economics, governance, law
• Infrastructure:
  • Modes of production: Energy, Agriculture, Transportation, Energy Generation, Water, Building Technology, Waste Management

All factors that condition human behavior live in these quadrants. Each of the quadrants is fundamental and irreducible with respect to the others, so these categories are both necessary and sufficient for inventorying all sources of human conditioning.

Metastructures in each of the four quadrants co-evolve and co-influence each other in complex ways, and must all be integrated to evolve society effectively. Most social philosophies have emphasized one of these areas as fundamental, leading to projects focused on one area, excluding the others. Such a reductionist orientation simply is inadequate for systems as complex and interconnected as human society and the biosphere.

Below are examples of metastructure shifts, by category. Note that these do not include all design criteria.

Memetic Structure

From	To
Separate parts	Interconnected Wholes
False Dichotomies	Meaningfully Reconciled Paradox
Competition	Collaboration
Random Universe	Emergent Universe
Unifying Through Homogeny	Unifying Across Diversity
self Centered or Self Sacrificing	Omni-considerate

Physiological structure

OPTIMIZING SYSTEM BEHAVIOR IN THE CURRENT CODE

Reduced Toxicity

Addressed Nutrient Deficiency

Addressed Pathogens

Addressed Structural Imbalances

EVOLVING THE CODE ITSELF

Epigenetic Upgrades

Genetic Upgrades

Transhumanism (Biological and Transbiological)

Social structure - Economics

From	To
Win/ lose structures	Win-Win structures
Growth	Post Growth, Evolving Homeostasis
Separate Ownership	Resource Optimizing Commonwealth
Transactional Accounting	Systemic Accounting
Possession	Access
Extrinsic Motive	Intrinsic Motive
Competition as driver	Conscious evolution as an attractor
Profit/ Resource Extraction	Resource Circulation
Extraction & Production Cost Accounting	Life Cycle Cost Accounting
Scarcity Valuation	Utility Valuation
Competing Metrics	Comensurated Metrics

Social structure - Governance

From	To
Imposed (Command & Control)	Emergent Self-Governance)
Person Mediated	Process Mediated
Conflicting Values	Inclusive Holarchy of Values
Imperialistic vs. Anarchistic	Consciously Self Regulating
Implicit Outcomes	Explicit Outcomes
Symptomatic	Cause (solutions)
Uncoordinated Partial Solutions	Systems Solutions
Opinion based	Data based
Arbitrary purview	governance at the level of effect law
Punitive	Protective and rehabilitating
Interventionary	Preventative

Infrastructure

From	To
Centralized	Decentralized & Distributed
Linear Materials Economy	Closed Loop (materials economy)
Depleting & Extraction	Regenerative
Fixed	Modular & Adaptive
Goods	Services
Possession & Ownership	Access & Sharing structures
Nature & Technology Divide	Biomimicry
Commodity Based	Technology Based
Labor Work Force	Automation

What are some design criteria of Transition B?

Similarly, there are also design criteria for a Transition B system. Daniel Schmachtenberger wrote about some design criteria for the transitional system here.

The Transition B system must be able to interface with the current economic system. Thus, it must be able to move resources from the current system into the transitional system. It must:

• Lead to a new attractive basin that moves a critical mass of resources to the new system, that past a tipping point becomes auto-poetic. Auto-poetic means that the system is capable of growing and maintain itself.
  • Requires offering enough increased advantage over the current system, with enough ease of use, and reaches the tipping point towards auto-catalysis.
• Avoid/ be resilient to attack from the current economic system, including any associated systems (media, law, military). It also needs to be resilient to attacks from and outcompete any other emerging autopoietic systems that do not converge towards post-transition viability.
• Scale as fast as the current system might collapse.
• Move economic capacity to choice making agents and processes with higher omni-consideration.

The Transition B system also must serve as a bridge to the post-transition Game B system. It must:

• Not be capturable.
• Be oriented to evolve into the post-transitional system; must not be oriented to maintain its transitional structure.
• Not increase the probability of any near term catastrophic risk scenarios or tipping points towards long term risks.
• Converge towards the post-transitional system as quickly as viable; must allocate the resources to building the post-transitional economic infrastructure.

How can you move forward?

Many ways were suggested to move forward without an understanding of the specific context. Jordan Hall provides these meta-principles:

1. Understand the truth
2. Develop your sovereignty
3. Develop the right relationship
4. Develop coherence with others

Below are some suggestions by Jordan Hall that have been roughly edited.

Recognize that you need to change first

It starts with you. You can only control yourself. In order to create the change that you wish to see, you need to shift yourself first. In some ways, you are a microcosm of the larger whole. In solving problems in yourself, you are learning how to do so for the whole as well.

Move slowly

Recognize that the journey to Game B will take time. It likely will not be realized for two to three generations from now. Compared to our current environment, which places importance on speed, Game B moves at a much slower pace because that is the pace of meaningfulness. As Jordan Hall says, "Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. So become smooth first."

Have infinite humility

Jordan Hall recommends infinite humility. This means that we all probably do not know much. Recognize that everything that you have learned that got you to who you are today may not be useful in moving forward. The models, the frameworks, the habits, the strategies, and the relationships that got you to the top of your niche in Game A are likely not going to be useful when moving to Game B. If you have been optimizing in any sense, you probably have ignored other important stuff along the way while you are engaging in hillclimb. That means you are not whole. Starting from a beginner's mindset and unlearning will take time.

Heal

We have significantly destroyed human capacities at an industrial scale with our current systems (educational, economic, political). Remediating that damage and bringing people back to the basic capacity of being mature adults, who can use their minds to think (and not simulated thinking), and use the whole of their body and emotional intelligence, is quite hard.

The healing piece is a massive issue. Healing is going to be both an individual journey - because each individual has their history - but also a collective one (on many different scales) because lots of harm and injustice have been perpetrated to different kinds of groups and cultures.

Get rid of the malware

Using a different analogy, we each are filled with malware from growing up. We have to figure out how to reboot our individual system. It is a non-trivial problem. Fortunately, it is a solvable problem; it can be done or seems reasonably solvable.

Learn to use your full self

The more you can use your most full self, the more you are able to become whole. As anybody who has ever done anything meaningful knows, it is important to learn how to actually use the whole self, the whole of your body and mind. Tune your instrument that is yourself. One of the many ways that exist could be meditation. Jordan Hall has noticed that the answer to the question of what to do is only answerable by that instrument.

Embody knowledge

Be rather than think - or: merge being, sensing, and feeling with thinking. Even though many know Game B by talking intellectually, at the end of the day, our ways of knowing and acting will need real and deep embodiment. As John Vervaeke says, there is a difference between intellectual propositional knowing and embodied participatory knowing.

There are things that you absorb into yourself, and you are increasing your capacity as that happens. At the basic level, you are not thinking about it, and any degree to which you're thinking about it is getting in the way. An example, it is laborious to learn how to play golf by verbal instructions. Your whole body needs to have the feeling of golfing to learn.

We should continue to explore the forgotten foundations of our participatory knowing, and grappling with all levels, from participatory, through perceptual, to perspectival, and to propositional knowing.

Figure your vocation

As Jordan Hall says, "First, stop carrying that which is not yours to carry. I find that lots and lots of people, and probably for quite good reasons, endeavor to do more than that is theirs to do. This is largely because they can't find other people to carry those parts and often times, they need a whole bunch to get anything done. Well, become more and more skillful at not doing that. Be careful to carry less and less of what is not yours to do.

Second, really fully carry that which is yours to do. Sense the parameters and the shape and the characteristics of why you're here. What is your unique capacity in the context of the larger story? Become masterful at it, like a 100% commitment. I mean, 100%, no compromise. Doing whatever is necessary in yourself, to make yourself capable of fully bringing into the world, that aspect of the bigger story, that is your responsibility. "

Thor's hammer is a good metaphor. Thor's hammer is infinitely heavy unless it is exactly yours to carry. However, if you are worthy, then it is infinitely light. In doing so, more bandwidth and more energy will flow through the system. On the other side, stop carrying something and trying to do something that is not very, very deeply specifically yours to do. Otherwise, it becomes infinitely heavy, and you will become Atlas holding the Earth. It will just flatten you.

When you find your calling, you learn to say no to things that are not aligned with your calling. This will enable you to say yes to supporting people who are very close to you. Then you will find yourself in what I would call a de facto collaboration. If you were working on your calling, even if I have never met you and never shall, and I am working on mine, then we are nonetheless collaborating on the same shared future.

Your calling is similar to the Japanese term 'ikigai'. You need to discover the overlap between your unique singular capacities, the moment that which is really most needful now, and your joy, your bliss, which most fully feeds your growing soul.

Understand that optimization is Game A

A metric to optimize around a finite set of metrics is ultimately complicated. In order to optimize, you artificially constrain the space of possibility. Even the notion of optimization itself is something of a problem. We don't get to the kinds of solutions that we need by optimizing for any single metric, or even any finite set of metrics. Game B will happen in the domain of complexity - no optimization there!

Move to non-rivalry

The things that are necessary for humans to achieve fulfillment turned out to be the things that maximize our generation of non-rivalrous phenomena. Non-rivalrous phenomena have an exponential growth rate; each time we get a level up, we dramatically increase our capacity. So we get this nice feedback loop that if we shift into increasingly non-rivalrous modes, then we get increasing escape velocity; we are constantly rewarded for getting better and better at achieving fulfillment.

Make less bad people and provide universal love

It is not really about making better people; it's about making less shitty people. If we want to stop people from doing catastrophic damage, it is important that they feel loved and are connected to others.

Be in the right relationship with those around you

Take care of your family, and take care of your community. Also, be in the right relationship with nature. Learn how to connect with and remember the benefit of the natural environment.

So, weave the fabric of culture at the level of direct relationality and the level of getting better and better at being a good friend, being a good partner, being a good parent, or being a good child.

Discernment, in this particular sense, is the ability to identify the relationship that is possible with another so that we can find out the highest possibility of the relationship. The right relationship is the practice of stepping into that and then enabling a future frontier of that relationship. And then again, discerning what is available, and continue to go into that.

Have coherence with others

Coherence means that my relationship with you is a relationship where I am endeavoring to support your sovereignty. Moreover, you endeavor to support my sovereignty. The relationship, by directionality, begins to have more and more depth and richness to it. We begin to have agreements and begin to have communication protocols. We begin to have a history and a connectedness that allows us to do deeper and tougher things together. At the same time, it allows us to get deeper into our selves.

Find the truth

Find the truth because all perspectives on reality are going to be a reduction of reality. You are going to have unavoidable blind spots. The only way you start to address them is by having more perspectives.

"So how do we have more perspectives?"

By having conversations. We think in groups in conversation with each other. Learn the art of coming together in groups that can have these conversations.

"With who?"

By talking to people around you. No matter what the original source is, if it is broadcast, it is broadly untrustworthy, which means that you can listen to it, but you need much extra work to extract sense from it. So in order for you to find out the truth, talk to the people around you because the best source of information is people you know. In other words, rather than trying to get information from new sources of people you do not know, you are better off getting that information from people you know because you do not know the filter the information is coming through. We make sense of things in the community of people that we know and trust. It gives you a lot more information and not to mention, a lot more sense making capacity than receiving information from anonymous sources. So the kind of activities that we naturally enjoy like hanging out with our friends and have conversations - we should do that a lot more and more deliberately. And then we do it with the kind of intention that is the specific intention of seeking insight and with greater depth, and a greater dimensionality of perception than would otherwise be possible.

Also, seek out the right people that have divergent views. Learning how to have productive conversations with others with different worldviews is a skill.

"How?"

Here are a couple of tips:

• Share what is yours to share
• Follow Rule Omega - amplify the signal in what people are saying. After a few turns of speaking, the signal will be clearer.

Create a Game B environment

One of the primary things that a person will notice when participating in a Game B environment is a radical upgrade of the meaningfulness of their lived experience. Their life will, in fact, be and feel more meaningful.

As Jordan Hall describes, a Game B environment will probably be around 1,500 to 3,000 people. It is somewhere in the range of a village to a small town, but it has all of it. It has kids being born, it has kids going to school, it has old people, it has people dying, it has food production, it has energy. For the moment, it will still need to interface with Game A, if only in an asymmetrical way. For example, goods are sold into Game A.

Think of it as a Google village, where the capacity to generate high-value products into Game A is asymmetrically high, producing the output that generates the influx of resources necessary to be able to get the things you cannot get out of the community. The community is continually looking for ways to use its capacities and its relationship with the larger world to become increasingly local and increasingly autonomous.

Develop the meta principles or selecting constraints

Forrest Landry on designing Game B: "So thinking about design questions in a way that neither top down, which is maybe accurate, but not precise enough, or bottom up, which may be really, really precise, but takes a long time. We find ourselves in a situation where we need to come up with design capabilities, design characteristics that have the rapidity of top down, but the effectiveness of bottom up and so in a sense, our exercise is essentially to develop a set of tools to develop a set of conversations of intelligence building apparatus that allows us to deal with complexity in a profoundly clear way."

Develop the meta-psychotechnologies

Psychotechnologies may also play a role in opening up the cognitive spaces for new forms of perception and knowledge to emerge.

We should find the meta-design for psycho-technologies, to come back down to the level of doing the psycho-technologies of Game B, which would be in principle now at this point distinct from the psycho-technologies of Game A.

We can endeavor to curate the psycho-technologies that are the most effective and then recursively use them to bring groups together using these techniques. This might provide insight into what might be a deeper and better way of doing it.