Momcilo Mijovic will discuss ‘Rapid Bonding - Extreme Methods of Manufacturing Social Capital’. This will be “an open exploration into social capital and co-operation as systems that can be intentionally designed. How can we accelerate trust formation, strengthen cooperative ties and imagine the goodness that comes out of it.”
Open to newcomers - join via the Luma link here: Life Itself Research: Weekly Meeting · Zoom · Luma
On the call live, my thinking about the topic at hand really won’t fit the Zoom call discussion format, so posting my ideas here instead. …
“Bridging Game B to Game A” involves some category confusion if we are not clear about what the respective “Games” are. I would propose that “Games” are processes that operate within embodied system boundaries. Game A and Game B are each processes operating within bounded matter/energy domains.
Luke Kemp’s book Goliath’s Curse summarizes much other research suggesting that Game B (collaboration) was the primordial human cultural condition prior to the Holocene. Game A is roughly comparable to Kemp’s “Goliath”. Human history has largely been the story of Game A/Goliath capturing an increasing percentage of matter/energy flows at the expense of Game B. The “limits to growth” perspective is that Game A is running into planetary hard boundaries and will be self-limiting for that reason.
My strategic thinking points to establishing “islands of coherence” (Prigogine) operating internally on Game B principles. These islands would not try to bridge to Game A processes. Rather, they would harvest/compost/process matter/energy Game A throws off in its collapse. Kemp illustrates how Game A creates “shatter zones”. Game B islands can scavenge those chaotic shatter zones and draw resources from them into Game B islands - and archipelagos - of coherence.
Also on the general topic of “how to form relationships” - that’s highly contextual with respect to age, maturity level, culture, gender roles, sociology-economic status, etc. Love to explore it all, of course. I watch a lot Rom Coms on Netflix, for example. Every single one of them is a study in “how to form relationships!”
The talk was very stimulating. Could you share the slides, Momcilo?
I do hope to get back on this one, as I was just going to write something related in any case, and I think it fits well. The general sense will be, what is in the way of our achieving the kind of culture and society that we mostly seem to want? And then, of course, how do we get there … but particularly relevant here, through the lens of relationship and “rapid bonding” – rapid if possible, I guess, but really, for me, depth and commitment are more important than speed.
Yes, if you elevate processes and disappear people - you end up with two systems.
If you recognise that the systems are groupings of humans and that the boundaries are permeable - then you start thinking about bridges.
Yes, it’s all conextual, structural and situational - but not as limitations, just in a sense that there’s no magic bullet that can work for everyone. However, most people need a nudge to wake up to their potentials - that’s why I’m introducing the idea (that’s probably Game A obsession with scaling and optimising). Viktor Frankl’s existential freedom beyond conditions, Maslow - self actualised people, Sartre - radical freedom
Let’s look at it this way. To the extent that people are caught up in Game A/Goliath (or as Karatani puts it, “Capital-Nation-State”) they are bound by Game A rules and incentives to make “progress” within those system parameters. In so far as people can absent themselves from that reigning system and siphon resources into Game B “islands of coherence”, they are seeding a GameB/anti-Goliath future model. (We could also assimilate other conceptualizations like “regenerative”, “GS3” (Pogany), and “Mode D” (Karatani) to what those islands of coherence are pointing too. “Second Renaissance” as well.)
The “bridge” then technically is a communications bridge to coax people out of Game A etc. into Game B, etc. When Game A lays off workers, refuses to hire college graduates, and declares humanity itself somewhat redundant due to the expansion of AI, it makes the Game B recruiting pitch quite a bit easier. People know in their bones the old system is breaking down and they are looking for SOMETHING. What that SOMETHING needs (@Naeema is spot-on on this point) is less obscure theorizing and more direct communications approaches. Just pitch the new thing and stop being so precious about it! My current Seattle project is exactly that. Theory meets practice in Q1 2026!
In any Rom Com, our leading lady has her eyes on the future “Mr. Right”, but she is too shy, or too involved with work or ambition or other social entanglements to open herself up to the ONE her heart is calling her towards. So she always needs that “nudge” from her girlfriends or mother or friend zone guy friend or (some other variation on the theme) to put on her party dress (or whatever the proper flirty move is) and take the risk to start the relationship. (There are “guy goes for girl” versions of this too - or non-binary - but the general archetype holds across cases). The analogy to the classic Hero’s journey is also clear - the “call to adventure”.
Great, looking forward to hearing your thoughts - and just to note, I think you are down for hosting a session on 2 January, so maybe you can share some ideas then and we can continue the conversation..
Yes, and this is where, as I suggested in the call Jim Rutt I think makes a valid point that you also need to think about the economics of game B communities - how can they get the resources they need from game A - if they’re going to be sustainable and continue to attract and retain people from game A after the initial novelty factor wears off - a bit like the way romantic partnerships need hard work and decisions about money and chores to continue well after the first flush of falling in love. This is what it would take to genuinely outcompete game A as a transitional dynamic.
Here’s the transcript of the video:
[01:03:00] Jim: I do know some people that have, and most of them have failed, and pretty sure we know why is that? They didn’t realize they were living in a membrane. Think of your classic hippie communes, right? Mm-hmm. Or the eco-village today. Right. What they haven’t done is stopped before they started and said, wait a minute. I’m in a membrane. There’s, it’s semi-permeable. Stuff has to go in has to go out, but also stuff has to come in. And so what’s the, what’s the economics of my membrane? What, what engine is the equivalent of the mitochondria in my membrane so that my brain works, the word I use is membranes have to work and holding hands and saying Kumbaya is not enough to make the membrane work. So what what does your internal economy look like? What can you provide to each other? You know? Okay, we’ll apply babysitting to each other and maybe homeschooling and maybe we’ll grow some percentage of our food, but we still need to buy a lot of stuff too. What could we do for game A that will make us, allow us to make enough game a tokens to buy the things we need from outside to bring through the membrane?
Yes, and in those kinds of everyday cases, there’s often a lot of humility and recognition that the nudge may not work, and ‘who am I to know what you really want’, etc. An interesting question for me is to what extent one can be intentional and even strategic about this kind of nudge - much of the coaching profession - and there are coaches that specialise in romance - is built on the idea that one can be, though there’s often a recognition of the importance of humility and lack of ‘one size fits all’ solutions there too.
Honestly, I’m not so sure it’s a competition so much as a systemic phase transition in Gaian evolution. By analogy, human fetal cell counts double at exponential rates for quite awhile in the gestation period. But at some point that growth rate moderates. By the transition to adulthood, we stop adding net cell count altogether and our metabolisms slow to more of a maintenance cycle.
At this point, I’m officially bored with the whole evils of modernity/civilizations sucks narrative. History happened. Let’s get over it! Yes, of course, we can’t keep doubling GDP forever, no more than human mothers could be birthing 80 pound babies. This is not a deep insight. This is obvious. So of course the world is going to slow down and transition to a different mode. The challenge is more to blend with what the next version of the world must surely become, rather than trying to drag people kicking and screaming into a future that is likely inevitable in any case.
Action learning in the work place … rom coms for recreation. Very similar models, really. We all flounder quite a bit where relationships are concerned. Try, fail, try, fail, try, fail, try, try again! But my son offered a nice phrase at a recent family gathering - a sports analogy - “You are guaranteed to miss 100% of the shots you never attempt.”
Sorry about the delay - the link to the slides
Regarding “rapid if possible” - I think that’s where the research is - is rapid to the detriment of depth.
This model comes from the world of business, but honestly it applies to most anything. Want to attract new participants to your regenerative, bio-dynamic, radically egalitarian, prosocial, post-capitalist, indigenous-informed, meta-meta-commune? You’ll need a marketing funnel!
So, yeah, relationships all start superficial. They deepen over time. How else could this possibly be?