Game A, Game B, and ISITAS
People have been contemplating the metacrisis and the causes for it built into our legacy socioeconomic system, and imagining what a new type of system could look like for several years now. One set of labels that gained popularity for a while is Game A and Game B.
Game A represents our current global socioeconomic system and all the corporations, governments, institutions, laws, customs, conventions, traditions, and practices that come with it.
Game A is the incumbent global economic system that is dominated by multinational corporations, particularly those in key industries like banking, energy, manufacturing, media, health care, defense and others, and that encompasses all almost all other businesses and organizations from large to micro. It involves extracting resources from the environment, processing them, consuming them, and then disposing of the waste when we are finished.
The system is fundamentally based on a competitive, market-driven mentality and timed to the Quarterly Business Cycle. The built in imperative is for all of us to do more and more of all of the above: extraction, processing, consumption and waste.
The prime directive of a Game A corporation is to maximize profits for shareholders, and the underlying philosophy is that acquiring more and better stuff, is the key to enjoying a higher standard of living.
In Game A system, employees are considered resources to be optimized while employed, and released as soon as circumstances change and their position is no longer justified.
In such an environment, many employees’ objectives are to work their way up the corporate ladder, pursuing higher paychecks, bigger bonuses, nicer offices, and more accolades. Other employees are not as ambitious, and prefer to dig in and consolidate their positions. And unfortunately, many, many people are just clinging for dear life to various gigs as they careen wildly through the pinball machine of life.
Game A is an unsustainable multi-player game, in which the objective is for each player to maximize their own consumption and/or accumulation of material wealth while sluffing off as much of the work, costs, and waste to the other players as possible.
This unfortunate state of affairs is known as the Tragedy of the Commons, and as terrible as it sounds when you spell it out like this, that is the formula driving the machines that make the wheels of commerce turn in our Game A world.
It’s a game where people who focus on their own short-term gains at the expense of everyone else’s long-term losses are the most likely ones to take the lion’s share of the material wealth, while those who sacrifice their own well-being for the good of the collective are most likely to lose in the game.
In such a system, the rich continue to get richer while the poor get poorer, until a growing majority of people are effectively wage slaves to the ultra-wealthy elite.
So that’s Game A.
Game B is as different from Game A as day is from night.
In a Game B paradigm, society and the economy would be more equitable, sustainable and relaxed. In such an environment, the production and consumption of material goods wouldn’t be the primary driving force of the economy. Rather, people would learn to enjoy simpler pleasures in life such as learning new things, spending time engaging with each other, and experiencing nature.
There would be less emphasis on producing more output and bigger profits for the people at the top of the pyramid, and more emphasis on everyone enjoying life’s simple pleasures, slowing down, and being kinder to each other.
Many people today don’t see any way that we could transform our society to such a utopia. They simply accept that the Game A system is so firmly established that it can’t be stopped, even if continuing means our destruction. So they look away and ignore it. They just put their heads down and forge ahead into the meat grinder of day-to-day life and hope that it doesn’t get any worse.
ISITAS is a quintessentially Game B project, designed to usher in a fundamentally new ecosystem. In fact, ISITAS could be the elusive Third Attractor that Daniel Schmactenberger and others have referred to. By providing an endless supply of essential work that simultaneously drives a Universal Basic Income (UBI) and Human/AI Alignment, all based on a token economy based on sharing and sustainability, ISITAS can become the catalyst that spawns an entirely new Game B ecosystem.
