Game B
Note: This page was initially created from Phil's Game B synthesis document which was in turn based on James Allen's Google Doc. This does not mean this is the correct, ultimate structure for the page but all of that existing work seemed like an invaluable foundation to build from.
"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
This document, just like its primary subject, is a work-in-perpetual-progress. Perhaps there is detectable structure, but don’t treat it or any ideas contained within as set in stone. It’s not, and perhaps will never be, a declaratory manifesto. It’s an emergent mosaic of ideas that seem to be coalescing around Game~B.
So, what is Game~B?
That’s hard to say exactly. It’s evolving. But here's an attempt to synthesize Game B.
Game~B is a memetic tag that aggregates a myriad of visions, projects and experiments that model potential future civilisational forms. The flag on the hill for Game~B is an anti-fragile, scalable, increasingly omni-win-win civilisation. This is distinct from our current rivalrous Game A civilisation that is replete with destructive externalities and power asymmetries that produce existential risk. Yet 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 and 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. In that way, just like a 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 than the latter.
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 community.
Introduction
I’m sure you are familiar with the many converging crises our global civilisation faces today. To begin, there is climate change. The impacts that have already occurred — including arctic and sheet ice loss, as well as increasing storm, drought and flood frequency — are at the very worst end of predictions that were made in the early 1990s. Meanwhile, the human activities driving these changes show little sign of stopping. This alone seems beyond our capacity to resolve. Yet it’s only the beginning. There is the depletion of conventional oil and gas reserves, forcing expensive innovation to access deeper and more remote reserves, gradually shrinking the energy return on energy invested toward a non-viable state. There will be supply for some time to come, but the age of cheap, abundant energy is slowly coming to an end. Then there are our topsoils, which are rapidly disappearing. Ocean acidification is rising and overfishing has caused catastrophic dwindling of fish stocks. Worse still is that at sea and on land, the sixth mass extinction in the history of Earth is already underway, with the current pace of species loss outstripping the average for the last ten millions years by an extraordinary margin.
Our problems don’t even end there. To our environmental woes we should add the rapid growth in exponential technologies, coupled with a fundamentally rivalrous global political dynamic. Similar to the splitting of the atom, the rise of artificial intelligence, bioengineering and nanotechnology hold the potential for immeasurably good ends for humanity and life on Earth. But as with nuclear technologies, the rivalrous nature of our relationships with each other guarantees these technologies will be subject to an arms race. In this way we will multiply both the means and the likelihood of humanity’s self-termination.
Finally, there remains the most existential risk of them all: our diminishing capacity for collective sensemaking. Sensemaking is the ability to generate an understanding of the world around us so that we may decide how to respond effectively to it. When this breaks down within the individual, it creates an ineffective human at best and a dangerous one at worst. At the collective level, a loss of sensemaking erodes shared cultural and value structures. It renders us incapable of generating the collective wisdom necessary to solve complex societal problems like those described above. When that happens, the centre cannot hold.
Threats to sensemaking are manifold. Among the most readily observable sources are the excesses of identity politics, the rapid polarisation of the long-running culture war, the steep and widespread decline in trust in mainstream media and other public institutions, and the rise of mass disinformation technologies, e.g. fake news working in tandem with social media algorithms designed to hijack our limbic systems and erode our cognitive capacities. If these things can confound and divide us both within and between cultures, then we have little hope of generating the coherent dialogue—let alone the collective resolve—that is required to overcome the formidable global-scale problems converging before us. And so it seems, as Daniel Schmachtenberger might say, we are approaching the power of gods without the wisdom of gods.
We may have been originally responsible for putting the flame to the tinder, but now we are contending with a wildfire beyond our control. The problems before us are emergent phenomena with a life of their own, and the causes requiring treatment are obscure. They are what systems scientists call wicked problems: problems that harbour so many complex non-linear interdependencies that they not only seem impossible to understand and solve, but tend to resist our attempts to do so. For such wicked problems, our conventional toolkits are grossly inadequate.
So how did we end up here? And if our old toolkits are redundant, then what will be useful? These are the questions that this document focuses on, tracing our trajectory through deep time to this point of crises, and then beginning with a small step into the liminal, the in-between, the gloaming, to feel our way into something like Game~B… whatever that is.
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In the 4.5 billion years since taking, Earth has never (as best we can tell) gestated a species quite like homo sapiens: a mammal that is capable of the most complex level of social organisation, capable of conceptual thought and deep empathy, and equipped with extraordinary dexterity to boot. The odds of that combination emerging are ridiculously small.
Yet, here we are in all our unlikeliness. And with our emergence 350,000 years ago, the universe became self-aware, capable of looking back on itself, pondering itself. This is without precedent.
This very day is also unprecedented in human history. We've been a clever species, but our technological sophistication has never been so advanced. It continues to increase exponentially. Nor have we ever been a truly planetary species before. At the same time as these exponential advances are occurring, risk is mounting exponentially on the other side of the equation. And it seems that these risks have mounted as a direct consequence of our advancement. We could not have achieved the computer without industrial civilisation, and yet industrial civilisation is what is eating the substrate of our world. If things are getting both exponentially better and exponentially worse at the same time, do you think they could be related? That we have the highest living standards ever, and that our environment has never been so degraded?
And so it seems an evolutionary transition is needed of the order of those shifts from prokaryote to eukaryote cells. But this time, when we say that nature will push the evolutionary transition forward, we need to be clear that by 'nature' we mean us, human beings. This transition must be initiated by the self-conscious agents of nature to create an omni-win civilisation. If we do not, then it is dire. As Daniel Schmactenbeger said, “If we are gaining the power of gods, then without the love and wisdom of gods, we self-destruct.”
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The view from complexity.
The universe is grown in complexity. It happens with the right ingredients and conditions. It starts with the Big Bang, moves to stars, elements, our solar system, life, humans, to the present day. Most of these things feel inevitable. Humans are a collective learning species. More people breed evermore complexity, each sharing their ideas and innovations.
There is something interesting about humans, with the ability to abstract: we can think about ourselves in abstract terms, and about evolution itself. We are the first species to be able to envision a future fundamentally more beautiful and interesting and be part of that creative process. If we learn how to use our capabilities well, we can learn from the past of how the universe works to imagine a future that has less suffering and higher quality of life across all meaningful metrics. Our purpose is to bring more of the timeless properties of the infinite in time. If you are creating beauty that didn’t exist before in the universe that is uniquely yours to create, you feel a kind of aliveness that is not matched by anything else. We are an emergent part of the universe. And in reality, there is one reality that we call universe of which we are all inextricably interconnected facets. And your experience of self is a facet of that. Now, what's so fucking fascinating is that it is interconnected with all of it. It's an expression of the foundation of all of it and it's also completely unique and all of the universe. So when you get that your own self actualization is compulsory, right you have an obligation to it. But then when you get that everyone else if they don't self actualize universe is less, your participation with helping everyone else self actualize is also compulsory. So competition is an obsolete concept. symbiotic to remember universe moves towards more differentiation, more novelty and then more symbiosis across that novelty for more emergence. And what we're moving towards is a civilization where everyone actually identifies this way, as an emergent property of the whole as an interconnected part of universe with a unique role to play with unique synergies with all the other unique roles to play. And then with that synergy with that human participation, then humanity actually becomes a thing, it actually becomes an emergent property. Right now it's an idea, but we don't have humanity. We don't have civilization. We have humans bumping. It's we have a bunch of organelles that haven't organized as a cell that starts breathing. Right? You don't have behavior of the whole that is centrally unconsciously self organizing.
So the things getting better are the pieces that can be reorganized to create a new civilization with a foundation Lee new structure, right? biosphere metrics are getting exponentially worse from Miss application of technology, technologies, right application or making things fundamentally better. But technology is giving us the capacity to do things like have data analytic capabilities, to inventory all the world's resources to then be able to allocate all the world's resources to meet of the world's needs. optimum efficiency we never had that ability before
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. The ones that came together and offered 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 that occurs when parts are not aligned with the whole is selected against. An example is the tragedy of the commons, whereby a person exploits a common resource for their own gain at the expense of the whole instead of cooperating to ensure the resource is used sustainably. The result is that it incentivises others to also exploit the resource, thereby defecting on the global optimum, and thereby rendering the system eventually self-terminating. So, avoidance of defection in favour of coherence also enhances evolutionary fitness.