Howdy on the other side

Jim Rutt RIP

I’m sad to hear of the passing of Jim Rutt, December 11, 1953 — May 27, 2026, as indicated in the Obaugh Funeral Home notification in McDowell, Virginia, where he lived.

“Howdy! I’m Jim Rutt, and this is The Jim Rutt Show.”

Then the drums and the electronic music kicked in, and you knew an hour or so of intellectual fun would follow.

Jim Rutt was a huge asset to the liminal web broadly conceived and was always keen to signal boost ideas and initiatives that intrigued him. I was on the show four times - after my book, The Moves that Matter, after my essay on ‘Tasting the Pickle’ (about the metacrisis), after our video on The Antidebate, and during the Chess Cheating scandal. It was always a pleasure and a privilege.

I never met Jim in person, but he appears to have lived a full, successful and generative life. His Wikipedia entry gives an idea of what he got up to, but studying at MIT, riding the wave of the dot.com boom, becoming a major Game B architect, Chair of the Santa Fe Institute, and hosting his legendary podcast come to mind.

While he liked goofing around with his guests, there was a serious intellect in play, informed principally by a keen grasp of complexity science. While Game B is by no means entirely Jim’s idea, if you want a sense of how he saw the world, you could do worse than scroll through the Game B wiki where it offers this wonderfully elaborate series of metaphors:

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.

The same site highlights the following about Game B:

1. Game B is the flag on the hill for an omni-win civilization that maximises human flourishing.

2. Game B is the environment that maximises collective intelligence, collaboration, and increasing omni-consideration.

3. Game B is building or developing the capacity to navigate complexity without resorting to complicated systems.

4. Game B is establishing coherence within complex systems.

5. Game B is a meta-protocol for hyper-collaboration.

6. Game B is the infinite game where the purpose is to continue playing. Game A is the finite game where the purpose is to win.

7. Game B is the theoretically optimal condition for creative collaboration and, thus, for maximal innovation.

8. Game B must orient its primary innovation capacity towards cultivating individual and collective sovereignty. It must foster awareness of how choices show up and are decided, more than it augments individual and collective power.

9. Game B is a new mode of societal, economic, and political organization that leverages people’s authentic, long-term interests towards a healthier, more cooperative society and improved well-being. A Game B system is any cooperative, mutually-beneficial system that can outcompete exploitative, adversarial systems through manifest appeal and willful, voluntary participation.

For Jim, Game B was ‘The fifth attractor’ which he wrote about on Medium. The four other attractor basins are not, ahem, attractive, and include neofeudalism, neofascism, religious fundamentalism, or some collapse, environmental and/or what he called endogenous collapse, by which I think he meant financial.

Chit chat, it was not.

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He prepared thoroughly for his podcast interviews, and he had a wonderful mixture of deep scepticism and abiding curiosity towards worldviews that were not his own. There was a fierce folksiness about him that made his guests feel welcome while also keeping them on their toes.

A highlight for me was the last eight minutes of my first conversation (from 1:26) with Jim, where we went from God to Fermes’s paradox, to outer space, to Jesus, to the sublime uniqueness of planet earth; and after I shared something that I thought would make him recoil, he said he totally agreed…

Jim was always eager to think, happy to ask, and quick to laugh.

I am glad to have known him. My condolences to his family.

He will be missed.

RIP.

Jim Rutt December 11, 1953 — May 27, 2026