Thread by @eriktorenberg

Here's a deep dive into this #gameb idea I've been fascinated by recently 👇

We face a pivotal time in our development as a species

Things are better than ever, but also more precarious

The practices that have gotten us here (AKA Game A) are not sufficient to solve the challenges that Game A has created, which is why we need to transition to Game B

All civilizations have always collapsed — Mayans, Greeks, Romans, etc — and new ones took their place.

Why should this time be any different?

Exponential technology.

You used to be able to “live and let live” and civilizations would come and go. It was fine.

Not anymore.

We are all increasingly interconnected:

https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg/status/1120196466859888640

Which means one civilization’s collapse means the collapse of all civilizations

Not only that, b/c our global supply chain is so integrated w/ our biosphere, one civilization collapsing also threatens our planet

Think about it.

Exponentially more people, making exponentially more impact per person, and an exponential curve point reaching escape’s velocity—

Eventually you can't externalize anymore.

Our intuition is not scoped for the challenge that we face.

We increasingly have the power of gods without the wisdom of gods, and any society that has exponential increase in risk without exponential increase in choice-making capacity will self-terminate.

In summary, for the first time, this means that one civilization’s collapse is truly existential

We can’t put the technological curve caps back in the bag — we must innovate our way through this

This is our predicament — and this is why we need to transfer from Game A to Game B

What exactly is Game A?

Game A is the way things are currently run. Markets. Democracy. Socialism. Everything we’ve tried since agricultural revolution

It’s our civilizational toolkit—the thing that has produced 7.5 billion people in unprecedented levels of wealth & well being

Game A leads to amazing abundance, but, as it currently stands, it can’t solve the problems it creates.

While things are getting exponentially better, they’re also getting exponentially worse (increased exponential risk), which means destabilization

Game A is a kind of paperclip maximizer.

It is a system that is optimized to continue growing its complicatedness in order to pursue its aim of reducing everything that is complex into something that is simple (e.g. a complex tree in an ecosystem, into wood, into money).

To be clear, Game A used to work—

In fact, it worked so well it sowed the seeds for its own destruction.

While it was perfect for our needs at the time, for the existential risks we now face, it falls short.

What got us here won’t get us there.

We need something different.

Existential risks have similar root causes.

If you try to solve one without solving the root, you’re just playing whack-a-mole.

Existential risks are symptoms of a couple underlying root generator functions:

One of them is Rivalrous/Zero-Sum Games.

https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg/status/1183207348099137536

Ok. So existential risks are why we need to move on from Game A to Game B.

If Game A is everything to date, What’s Game B?

Simply—It’s what’s next.

Game B isn't a fully fleshed out idea, it’s a design space.

Wait. Why can’t we just tinker within Game A? Why can’t it be democratic capitalism?

TLDR on why unchecked markets aren't sustainable: If I’m internalizing externalities, but you’re not, then I’m losing. So no one can internalize externalities and still survive.

But regulation often falls short too:

You cannot legislate against incentives long-term.

If you make a piece of law that says it's illegal to do X, but it's still profitable to do X, companies and gov'ts will still do X.

Even our sacred democracies are Game A.

When Winston Churchill said democracy is the worst form of governance ever created save for all the other forms, what he was saying that was really insightful was that getting lots of humans to agree on anything is just a hard thing to do

So if the solution isn’t democratic capitalism, or anything else we’ve tried — what is it?

We don’t know yet —Remember Game B is a design space — and we’re wary of people who claim to have all the answers.

Game B trusts the process rather than trafficking in utopias.

We don’t know what it is specifically, but we know what it isn’t

We know that it’s not going to look like nation states and private balance sheets

It's not Marxism, it's not socialism, it's not capitalism. It's not democracy. It's not a retrofit of any of those systems either

We may not know how to get there, but we know the general direction:

We know that the incentive of every agent in the system, and that's every person or group of people has to be better aligned with the well being of every other agent *and* of the commons writ large.

We know that it involves a real-time balance sheet of the commons that internalizes more externalities.

We now have new technologies that can help us do exactly that (sensor grid, IOT, satellites, people sensor processes)

We know it has to be a structure whereby actual innovation is rewarded in proportion to its value, that rent seeking is eliminated from the system and that the reward takes into account the "externalities" produced by the innovation.

So: How do we get from here to there?

For starters, Game B needs to beat Game A on its own terms (e.g in the market)

Game B evolves by creating the systems of economics+ governance that deliver on the promises of Game A better than Game A can, thereby rendering Game A obsolete

An example is Wikipedia.

It's functioning within the existing system, competing with old encyclopedias and for profit enterprises by delivering information for free, and it's winning, because it's superior.

Another example is Bitcoin.

You can convert Bitcoin to dollars, and Bitcoin functions inside that realm, it's not illegal, it works, so that entity is a solution that is superior to Game A, but it functions within Game A terms and is winning.

We need new economic systems.

As long as I'm incentivized to do something that is harmful to you, it can't be prevented.

But if we change the underlying incentive, and make it to where you're well being and mine and the commons are more tightly coupled, then it can.

We need new governance systems.

How can we avoid both the top down kind of structured organizational model of trying to create consensus, or the bottom up thing, which takes so long that no one's ever gonna actually come to agreement in time to solve the problem?

As Robert Wright wrote in Nonzero, anytime there’s an increase in social complexity, we’ve need an increase in moral progress to meet it.

Now is no different.

We need a change in consciousness that acknowledges:

a/ We're all connected

b/ Verbs to nouns

c/ Adapt to abundance

We're all connected:

When we also identify as fundamentally interconnected parts of an interconnected universe rather than separate discrete things, we cease thinking there is any definition of success for self that isn't also success for the whole.

That’s fundamental.

In some Native American tribes would say when kids would ask "What's that"?

Rather than say “it's a crow” they'd say, "that's the great spirit expressed as a crow".

So their initial semiotics/ontology had the interconnectivity of everything first, and then the distinction.

OK, I can think about myself as a separate thing.

But what am i without the atmosphere? I don't even exist.

What am I without the plants that generate the atmosphere? I don't even exist.

You get the idea.

This solves the rivalrous problem, because zero-sum games require separate sense of self, leading to rivalrous competition for some scarcity.

Ppl think about optimizing their own quality of life independent of + maybe even at the expense of other ppl's quality of life + climate

If instead, however, we see self as an emergent property of everything, as a fundamentally interconnected property of the biosphere, then we can't get ahead at the expense of that which we're connected to.

When we internalize interconnectedness, we become positive sum by default

How else do we get to Game B?

Civilization Prototype

What’s the minimum viable scale to start prototyping a different economy, a different governance, a different materials economy, a different set of social dynamics and coherence?

Goal of prototypes is to create civilizations that are anti-rivalrous, anti-fragile against rivalry, and auto-propagating (their design starts to get implemented in other places.)

For inspiration of what Game B can look like, consider the human body

The heart and the lungs are not rivalrous with each other.

They’re not competing to extract scarce resource and hoard it.

They’re in this radically necessarily symbiotic relationship.

And if you tried to model like the organs in a capitalist relationship with each other, where the heart and the lungs were competing against each other for scarce resource to hoard as much resource for future as possible, the body would die very quickly.

Many of these ideas were paraphrased & directly taken from Jordan Hall, Daniel Schmactenberger, + others in the Game B community.

more on Game B (evolving, crowd-sourced, doc from the community): docs.google.com/document/d/1Vq…

FB group: facebook.com/groups/1447251…

civilizationemerging.com