GAME A: THE MAYAN SCHEME
EPISODE 16 MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE: PART 1 of 3
Is it that demand drives supply or is it that supply drives demand? It’s very much both, and it’s really critical to get that, of course, originally demand drives supply. More people want something, and supply steps up. You want to protect the demand, because otherwise your business goes out, and maybe manufacture more demand, and that looks like marketing, and you can get feedback loops that move in the wrong direction, move in the direction of society, as a whole, getting worse.
Jordan Hall
“The only existential threat is marketing.” More broadly, we might simply suggest that the only existential threat is deception, or that which makes things that are insane appear to be sane — the classic upsell, the manufacturing of desire.
Bryce Hydsmith
WHAT IS GAME A?
Game A is a self organizing collective intelligence that generates an automated system of people created to accomplish a goal. It begins as some sort of attractor — could be an economic need, an aesthetic sensibility or a yearning that is able to grab the attention and energy of some group of people. The purpose of Game A is to create a system that is meant to do exactly what they want. It’s a mech suit composed of people. You could think of it as a spider, controlled by its head. Cut off his head and it dies.
For a long time it was necessary to create a GAME A when you were trying to do something that you didn’t have the capacity to do on your own, and at the same time were unable to find a competent person to handle the project for you. It’s a bureaucracy and its designed not have that much dependence on the wellbeing and capacity of individual humans. It actually minimizes or removes actual human involvement in the economy/politics.
Is there someone in charge? Yes. Depends on hierarchy. Are there a headquarters? Yes. If you thump it on the head, will it die? Yes. Take out the HQ and it dies. Is there a clear division of roles? Yes. Divided into departments. If you take out a unit, is the organization harmed? Yes. Every department is important. Power is concentrated? Centralized. Information and power are concentrated at the top. Membership is fixed and closed. Working groups are centrally funded. Groups communicate through intermediaries. Important information is processed through HQ. “All roads lead to Rome”.
WAGE LABOR
The values and practices of industrialism grew out of the needs of chartered monopolies for cheap labor. Game A does not favor expensive craftspeople, but instead required low-wage workers to specialize in a single , mindless aspect of manufacturing, alienating them from the production process and making them easy to replace
Craftsmen and merchants now needed government approval to run a business or participate in the marketplace. Only those with relationships to the aristocracy received charters and were permitted to operate. The rest had to abandon their businesses and become employees of the GAME A. This is when wage labor was born: people stopped selling the value they created, and instead sold their time.
The Digital economy is an extension -albeit amplified- of the chartered corporation of the middle ages simply following the script of its predecessors, the objective, to remove humans from the equation and extract as much value out of them. This means replacing human labor with machines, as well as preventing human beings from reaping the rewards of the value they might create.
By abstracting the production process, industrialism also alienates consumers from manufacturers, which creates a need for branding and marketing. And in the end, the culture of advertising and branding alienates people from one another, by creating a society of atomized, niche-marketed consumers.
Game A is built to align people and make them sufficiently competent by chaining them with rules and deliberately restricting innovation. Players of Game A are expected to act according to a script, or a set of procedures and not engage on thinking of their own. Proprietors of Game A don’t trust that players of Game A will be competent or aligned enough to act in line with their wishes out of their own accord.
Half a century ago, Elliott Jaques noticed that workers at different levels of the company had very different time horizons. Line workers focused on tasks that could be completed in a single shift, while managers devoted their energies to tasks requiring six months or more to complete. Meanwhile, their CEO was pursuing goals realizable only over the span of several years.
Jaques concluded that just as humans differ in intelligence, we differ in our ability to handle time-dependent complexity. Jaques observed that Game A implicitly recognize this fact in everything from titles to salary: line workers are paid hourly, managers annually, and senior executives compensated with longer-term incentives such as stock options.
And in Jaques model, one can rank discretionary capacity in a tiered system. Level 1 encompasses jobs handling routine tasks with a time horizon of up to three months. Levels 2 to 4 encompass managerial positions with time horizons between one to five years. Level 5 crosses over to five to 10 years and is the domain of small company CEOs. Beyond Level 5, one enters the realm of statesmen and legendary business leaders comfortable with of 20 years (Level 6), 50 years (Level 7) or beyond. Level 8 is the realm of 100 year thinkers like Henry Ford, while Level 9 is the domain of the Einsteins, Gandhis, and Galileos, individuals capable of setting grand tasks into motion that continue centuries into the future.
GAME A are best thought of as an extension of their creators and as a source of power for them. However, the proprietors can lose control of the GAME A over time, as PLAYERS of GAME A convert borrowed power into owned power by exploiting information asymmetries. While owners will try to limit the owned power of their PLAYERS of GAME A, the PLAYERS of GAME A will have more than enough time to study the instruments of their control and will learn what is rewarded and what isn’t.
THE INTERNET
The internet was expected to reduce working hours and increase human connection. However, when the internet was opened to commercial activity, it only exaggerated the tendencies of Game A toward extraction, growth for growth’s sake, and the removal of human agency and connection. The economic “operating system” (corporate industrialism) remained the same, while the economic “software” (the web) made it more powerful than ever.
Game A is an example of the “power law dynamic,” where increased consumer choice actually leads to a few wildly popular market “winners,” a vast number of failures, and virtually no middle ground in between. When advertising and consumer recommendations are determined algorithmically, the power law dynamic becomes even more exaggerated. A handful of winners take all, while almost everyone else goes belly up.
As an alternative to earning money directly from consumers, companies instead seek to extract value from them in the form of data. Social networks, for example, offer their platforms to people for free in return for information about who people befriend and what media they consume. This “big data” is sold to advertisers, who use it to target and market to the users who generated it in the first place.
TYPES OF GAME A
1 ) You have a benevolent GAME A
The corporation does only what’s in the public’s interest.
2) Ruthless GAME A
A corporation that does only what’s in its own interest irrespective of the cost of society.
Let’s say, for example, that I have a growing law firm in which there are five associates at any given time supporting every partner, and those associates hope to become partners so that they can hire five associates in turn. That formula of hierarchical labor works well while the law firm is growing, but as soon as the law firm hits steady state, each partner can really only have one associate, who must wait many years before becoming partner for that partner to retire.
That economic model doesn’t work, because the long hours and decreased pay that one is willing to accept at an entry-level position is predicated on taking over a higher-lever position in short order. That’s repeated with professors and their graduate students. It’s often repeated in military hierarchies. It takes place just about everywhere, and when exponential growth ran out, each of these institutions had to find some way of either owning up to a new business model or continuing the old one with smoke mirrors and the cannibalization of someone else’s source of income.
3) Mixed strategy GAME A
You have a corporation that’s more realistic. There are some cost that will inflict on the public there are some costs that go too far and it tries to balance those concerns.
THE GROWTH TRAP
GAME A is “programmed” to keep growing at any cost, even beyond their capacity to survive. To better understand why this is, we look at Marshall McLuhan’s four basic questions — or “tetrad” — of media:
1. What does the medium enhance or amplify?
2. What does the medium make obsolete?
3. What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?
4. What does the medium“flip into” when pushed to the extreme?
GAME A, when it emerged in the late middle ages, amplified the power of shareholders and capital. It obsolesced the local, peer-to-peer marketplaces and bazaars that had defined the everyday society of the high middle ages. Corporatism retrieves the values of ancient Greece and Rome. Finally, when pushed to its extreme, the medium of the corporation “becomes a person.” That is the corporation became legally recognized as a person and granted human rights and protections under the law.
If we apply the tetrad to WalMart. WalMart, amplifies the extraction of capital from the communities where it operates; it obsolesces local trade; it retrieves the values of empire and it flips into personhood, both legally and as a brand, via its yellow smiley face mascot. However, this whole process has left WalMart in a predicament: the corporation has so effectively extracted wealth from local communities and obsolesced local trade that its customers have much less money to spend.
Most large GAME A’s are stuck in this nowhere left to grow, corporate performance has been declining relative to productivity for years. Corporations have more capital than they know what to do with. Unable to generate more value through organic growth, corporations are reduced to managerial and financial tricks to please shareholders. This often takes the form of self-defeating policies that either starve or sell off parts of the business. Cost-cutting measures further impoverish the very customers who make up a corporation’s main source of income. When jobs leave a community, there is less money in the community for the corporation to extract.
Digital technology only exaggerates this process. In theory, businesses succeed in the marketplace through a process called “creative destruction.” A new technology will improve on an old one to such a degree that the old tech and its associated industry will be destroyed. In its place, the new technology will develop its own comparable industry and infrastructure, and the economy will keep humming along. However, corporations such as Uber and Amazon do not create comparable industries to the ones they disrupt. Instead, they shrink their respective industries by drawing all market activity onto a single platform.
Ironically, this is bad for business. For the same reason that WalMarts must close shop after they impoverish their communities, platform monopolies suck wealth out of the overall economy, such that there is less money for consumers to spend on, say, taxis and books. This has led to a prevailing business model that is not about long-term corporate health, but inflating stock valuation, consciously creating bubbles in share price so that inside investors can cash out before the bubble pops.
The most clear cut example of this “business model” is that of the contemporary digital start-up. In this model, the strategy is actually to run-up debt that can’t be paid back. Start-ups will acquire capital from “angel investors” far beyond what their company can possibly hope to be worth. However, so long as the start-up continues to take angel investment, it increases its value. The hope is either to sell the start-up to a larger corporation, or to sell out with an inflated IPO (initial public offering). In either case, the bubble of fake valuation quickly pops. Angel investors and the start-ups’ founders usually sell out for a handy profit, while latecomers are left with badly devalued shares.
RULES OF THE GAME
RULE 1
“do the right thing.”
Then the second rule might be something like
RULE 2
“make as much profit as you can and try to do the right thing”
Somebody who plays by Rule 2 compared to somebody who plays by Rule 1 is going to actually make more money, and, by virtue of doing that, is more likely to be able to, say, get more access, more power. They’ll go up the ladder. They’ll have more choice making and, of course make more money.
RULE 3
“Do what it’s arguably legal.”
Then, it’s not too far to say,
RULE 4
“Well, do what you can get away with.”
Then, maybe
RULE 5
“do whatever you want because getting caught is less expensive than not getting caught” Even to the point of where the costs of bribery, corruption, greenwashing, manipulation, et cetera, is less expensive than the benefits of playing the other way. It is in fact a race to the bottom, a downward slope. A evolution towards ruthlessness
What is good for GAME A is somewhat different from what is good for society the ruthless operation has the greatest advantage why because it can do anything it wants and the corporation that is bound by what’s good for society can’t do anything the corporation that tries to balance these concerns finds that it competes best with the ruthless corporation the more ruthless it becomes and the outcome is predictable in the end
In sectors of our economy where there is not a lot of room for utility increasing innovations we see an evolution towards ruthlessness that has predictable consequences and that has interacted with what is the central flaw in our system. What we have here are feedback loops that interact wealth that is made in the market is capable of increasing one’s power over regulation power over-regulation allows increased opportunity to make money in the market this is a positive feedback loop that should scare any engineer or biologist because positive feedback loops that are not bounded by some negative feedback force are unstable they detonate they explode. In our case this feedback loop has re-engineered our system cryptically and turned it into an engine for the concentration of wealth and power and it has installed amongst an unelected group of very powerful and wealthy people effective veto power over any attempt to change from the status quo we can take
Bret Weinstein
The problem is that, at each step, the underlying intrinsics of what kinds of behaviors are rewarded in Game A leads to movement down that slope being actually showing up as a winning strategy. Of course, then we end up with what I think many of us observe today, where a person who runs a pharmaceutical company, who does not in fact jack up prices to the highest they can possibly get away with, is in fact a loser and will end up either being bought out by somebody who’s playing more aggressively, being thrown out by their shareholders or board of directors, et cetera, et cetera.
GROWTH BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY
If someone is addicted to the stuff that I sell, I’m going to sell more of it than if they have the ability to say no and not take it often. Whether we’re talking about food, games, social networks … If I’m selling more addictive stuff, then people are going to eat it more often, and if I make more money by how many times people buy my thing, maximized lifetime revenue of a customer, then I have a financial incentive to optimize towards maximum addictiveness.
Interestingly, I’m going to figure out how to market in the most compelling ways, because behavior change actually isn’t hard there. If preventing illness ends up meaning that you don’t sell your product, and treating/curing illness quickly means that you can only charge as much as you have for a short time, but managing the symptoms of illness for a very long time is very profitable, that’s a perverse incentive system. If treating the side effect of a drug that you give someone involves them having to buy another drug that you also make, and it’s called an upsell, that is also a problem.
That brings up the thought of financial services, and that people start mistaking production and extraction as one of the dynamics that financial services cannot meaningfully increase the production of the types of goods and services that increase the quality of life of everyone, while still extracting a lot.
The terrible thing is then that actually predisposes whole generations of people needing the medicine, and the medicine companies also make more money when you need more medicine. As the people get sicker from eating more food that they’re addicted to, and then get addicted to, meaning dependent upon, the diabetes medicine or the statin or whatever it is that came from that food, GDP goes up in both cases.
GAME A COMPOUNDED
Think of the “good German.” He was playing a zero-sum Game. I can have a decent life, finally — but only if I take away yours. That is GAME A COMPOUNDED: structured along lines of the supremacy of an ideal, market, race, or party one tribe decides to take all that belongs to a society, and distribute it amongst itself. In that way, an illusory kind of “growth,” a sense of stability, purpose, meaning, belonging, and prosperity, are produced.
It should go without saying that GAME A COMPOUNDED is the bad choice. The price is that such a society will never be one that is free, democratic, equal, or fair. The one we shouldn’t want. Because it is self-destructive. It “solves” the problem of stagnation in a way that kicks off a vicious cycle that must — must — end in war, genocide.
It is taken as dogma, that as long as we remain inventive we will stay ahead of any threat by continuous and more ingenious innovations. But there’s a catch. The theory dictates that to sustain continuous growth the time between successive innovations has to get shorter and shorter. You may recall that the gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly push a huge rock up a mountain, from which it would immediately roll back down only for him to have to start all over again from the bottom. Our task is actually much harder than Sisyphus’s because we have to push the rock back up to the top of the mountain at a faster rate each time.
Geoffrey West
Scale
Why GAME A’s Collapse Feels Weirdly a Lot Like Communism’s
Modernity is based on two myths: that material production creates social wealth, and that information produces meaning. In both cases, the accumulation of quantity leads to quality. These myths — and the society based on them — is collapsing. The reason it is collapsing is that there is an excess of information and of commodities. Meaning is not being produced. Instead it is disappearing. We reject the theory GAME A today is aimed at producing something, or satisfying some need or desire, outside itself. Instead, we argue that the system is today a pure system of reproduction. Increasingly, the system puts aside most of its product to simply reproduce itself — through functions such as education, health and research.
Much of this investment is actually just patching up the effects of the system’s own dysfunctions — health treatments for system-created ailments, responses to stress, compensatory coping mechanisms such as drinking, cleanups of pollution, petrol use to reach out-of-town amenities, police and military spending and so on. Yet it is made to seem like a rising standard of living.
With most of the budget going to keeping the system functioning, the population is left once more at a minimal level of survival. National statistics and the like become ‘accounting illusions’, which serve as a kind of magic or bewitchment. The immeasurable is left out, damage and obsolescence are either ignored or treated as gains, and so on.
Soviet style communism was always marked by chronic, predictable shortages. Especially for luxuries. The line for jeans, sweaters, boomboxes, and TVs, which stretched around the block, while decadent Westerners simply trundled down to the store and bought them by the truckload. But this Capitalist type of GAME A is collapsing now in a weirdly similar way. It’s marked by chronic, persistent shortages for just the opposite. Not for luxuries — but for life’s basic necessities. Medicine, hospitals, education, good schools, income, decent media. Even potable drinking water. Economies are stagnant and so people’s lives aren’t improving.
Game A makes things artificially scarce. When things costs thousands, though we all know it can and should cost pennies — that’s artificial scarcity. And yet those are the lives the Players of Game A live now — everything is artificially, not really scarce. Individuals and GAME A don’t have the same fundamental need. Individuals want to get on with life and maybe be happy, and GAME A want individuals to consume. Most of us don’t feel personally responsible for stoking GAME’s A economic engine; we feel personally responsible for increasing our own well-being. These different goals present a real dilemma, and society cunningly solves it by teaching us that consumption will bring us a good position inside Game A.
GAME A is cracking as the sole (or highest) organizing principle of a society. That is how you get to the weird paradox of a “growing” economy in which life expectancy, income, trust, meaning, and Game A are all falling. Hence, for large chunks of the Players of GAME A, their lives are worse in many ways than a few decades ago. Unless you believe that a bigger TV is a substitute for a stable job, a raise, savings, a mortgage you can pay off, healthcare you can afford, and stability that you can depend on.
Game A leads to the end of production. Signs, instead of goods, now become equivalent. Game A does not offer signifiers in which to invest. Instead, it offers the equivalence of all signifiers, thereby deterring them from signifying anything. The system of interpreting signifiers overgrows its referents. It develops with no relation to whatever it signifies. In a system of signs, everything is exchangeable — anything can in principle be a sign of anything else. This has the effect of suppressing the symbolic. Life is emptied of emotion and intensity
The left tends to help sustain the system by upholding the credibility of the categories which used to be real, but have become ideological: reality, production and so on. In everyday life, the effects of the replacement of production by reproduction include a constant labour to simply uphold a particular ideological arrangement of signs. The real has become the alibi of the model. In other words, the appearance of reality is used to cover up the fact that the model actually precedes it. The realities we see are like faraway stars which are already gone, but which we still see because of the delay caused by the travelling of light. Things are stopped before their end, and maintained indefinitely in the form of an apparition
In a bizarre plot twist, GAME A is a system that contains externalities in which the ends justify the means is turned on its head. The means justify the ends, the destination is unimportant — only the the continuation or preservation of the system is necessary. As long as the means of securing more growth are justified by the careless management of available wealth and resources, any judgement of their validity is rendered irrelevant.
In other words, the only existential threats are threats that render ineffective our ability to have agency, either by having us pretend fake complexity exists, or by requiring by convention us to ignore real complexity that is relevant to our lives. We have been incentivizing the way in which we conduct ourselves at a micro-scale that is awful at a macro-scale. A thing that is accepted as truth, generally, is that we must create these places of extreme wretchedness and squalor for “GAME A,” in a bizarro inverse of a deferred gratification strategy. While it is reasonably logical for us to, as a society, ration in times of scarcity, it does not make sense for us to feast without eating, consuming massive quantities of resources that do not feed us with the assumption that it will improve our prosperity in the long run, without directly improving our experiential or tactical situation in the present.
Bryce Hidysmith
CONCLUSION
Much as we might rightly observe the very real human cost GAME A impose, they currently provide services that cannot be found any other way. The way that Game A was designed, and the fact that it ended up winning in the 20th century showed up lots and lots of positives. What we’re observing now is not that Game A was always a terrible thing, but rather that there’s certain characteristics of that style of play that ends up in a bad place. By acknowledging our collective and individual dependence on them we might plan to interact accordingly.
