MetaGame & Metamodernism Part I

I often say how MetaGame is a real-life MMO-RPG with the short term goal of building a decentralized factory for the DAO space & the long term goal of “finding the most optimal ways to play life” - let me explain what I mean.

Its kind of the opposite of “effective altruism”. Its about helping & empowering people one by one, hoping some of them will impact tens, hundreds or thousands others - or at least a few more.

Think about it, we have this great new technology with literal shittons of potential for epic positive impact, yet the space is littered with scams. Its unlikely we’ll make a great change if the way people think & feel doesn’t change.

In fact, we don’t need no grand scheme for global wellbeing, no crazy top-down planning of global utopias; simply helping people become better people, p2p.

• Help people level up, take control of their lives & improve communities around them. That’s literally all it takes to change the world.

In this post 👇

• Modernism, postmodernism & metamodernism

• Everything all at once

• Nords & The Triads

• Meta Ideology

• Transindividual

• Focus on Wellbeing

• Developmental Stages

• Who makes it happen?

• How it relates to MetaGame

🤓 Modernism, Postmodernism & Metamodernism

Assuming ya’ll know about modernism & postmodernism, let’s just briefly recap.

Modern society is based around beliefs in science, progress & objective reality. It dominated the thinking of the 20th century with memes such as the individual self, liberal democracy, Left and Right, humanism, rationality (“free will”) & scientism.

Postmodernism doesn’t believe in “progress”, is suspicious of grand narratives and critical of power & hierarchies. Postmodernism sees what’s wrong with modernism but fails to suggest anything useful because its only concerned with being an anti.

Metamodernism is about keeping what works from modernism, maintaining the deconstructionist critical eye of postmodernism & constructing a synthesis, with the goal of solving three major problems of modernity:

• Alienation & neurotic anxieties

• Excessive global inequalities

• Ecological unsustainability

It argues the source of most modern ailments is alienation & a lack of meaning leading to negative feelings festering, manifesting as pathologies wreaking havoc.

• That a better future is built through personal development; it seeks to create a society where personal development & psychological growth are top priorities.

💥 Everything all at once

Compare the 17th century's scientific revolution, 18th century's Enlightenment, 19th century's industrial & chemical revolutions, 20th century's combustion engine to what’s happening today.

• It's as if all these revolutions are happening all at once.

Computers alone are augmenting, enhancing & revolutionized anything from production, distribution & transportion to governance & science. Top class education is widely available through online courses & being transformed through gamification.

What’s lacking today is people that are able to comprehend & manage all the complexity. Problems that require knowledge, creativity, patience, trust & cooperation across industries, disciplines & cultures.

• Current society is designed to achieve economic growth

• Future society must be designed to achieve psychological growth

If we keep building ever more powerful tech but aren’t making people more mentally stable, risk of the next unabomber killing millions goes up exponentially.

🔱 Nords & The Triads

Consider Sweden, an extremely modern, liberal, well-functioning country, stabilized around an unyielding acceptance of the market economy AND the welfare state.

There are effectively no parties in Nordic countries that aren’t green social-liberals.

The only way to make a conservative argument is by claiming to conserve the national values of Green Social Liberalism; even the nationalist party of Sweden is pro-abortion, pro women’s rights & has a responsible environmental agenda.

Being from wealthy countries that don’t skimp on public services & public goods, Nordic people are going full-on “post materialist.” They value quality of life & social entrepreneurship over working long hours & financial success.

This creates a vicious circle of caring families raising decent humans 😬

Looking into modern societies, you’ll see 3 systems:

• Civic sphere

• Democratic bureaucracy

• The market

Think of them as forms of governance for coordinating humans to create desirable outcomes for themselves & the society. Each has its pathologies & sicknesses as well as qualities; they depend on each other for their existence & keep each other in check.

• None are inherently good or evil

• None is fundamental or inherently superior to others

The sooner we accept we shouldn’t maximize nor get rid of any of the three, the sooner we can move on. 🤷‍♂️

🌍 Meta Ideology

The global capitalist system is based on perpetual growth on a finite planet, financial system seems to generate both growth & crisis, increasingly concentrating wealth, which in turn seems to hijack our political systems through lobbying.

• Who’s dealing with these problems best? Our dear Nordic friends.

• How? Green Social Liberalism.

Can’t say this ideology is what built effective non-corrupt institutions, but the countries that seem to be faring best with high GDP per capita, least inequality & happy citizens, seem to be libertarian but also ecologically & socially minded.

Green Social Liberalism 2.0 is about taking all three of these values to their extremes.

Societies that are:

• Extremely social

• Extremely libertarian

• Extremely green

The goal is to build societies that are without poverty & social insecurity, that have free enterprises & that are ecologically sustainable.

🤝 Transindividual

In an obviously interconnected & co-evolving universe - Metamodern society stops seeing humans as individuals with their own separate stories & problems. Instead, humans are seen as inseparable from language, relations, roles & culture.

Each human is seen as an open social process, a whirlwind of participation & co-creation with others; society as a whole is seen as a self-organizing system which creates transindividuals who in turn create & recreate societies.

Yes, even that dude who built his own cabin & is living in the woods. A product of the culture, thousands of years of evolution & knowledge at his fingertips.

• Also, he wouldn’t be uploading so many videos & hang out in voice channels if he wasn’t so damn lonely now, would he? Social animal.

Why did Facebook become the most successful company? Connecting people.
Top 3 downloaded apps in 2022? All social.

• Social animal, not an individual.

🤗 Focus on Wellbeing

Why? Even happiness & pain are social. Hurt, shame & fear make us mean, controlling bosses, jealous friends, bad parents & teachers.

Many people live with a pervasive lack of meaning, sludging along & numbing the pain with whatever distraction or happy-pill. Some think money is the solution, end up with an ever-increasing appetite to fill the hole in their soul. Some end up so crazed by unhappiness, they end up killing.

So, metamodern politics aim to make everyone feel secure at the deepest psychological level so they can live authentically:

• Leading to a sense of meaning & lasting happiness

• Leading to kindness & increased ability to cooperate

• Leading to deeper freedom & better outcomes for everyone

• Leading to shitloads lower likelihood your streets will be full of homeless addicts

Simply giving kids access to talk-therapy reduced depression and thus suicide rates in northern Sweden from 9.5% to 1.5% in two years.

Kids spending 15 mins/day on mindfulness show less anxiety & aggression. Studies show the programs improve self-control, attentiveness, respect, school climate & teachers' moods.

• The costs are extremely low and the effects are huge

The ridiculous part is that more welfare actually ends up saving tax money as well as boost entrepreneurship & innovation.

Just think of all the kids who grow up without good role models & not feeling safe. The long term cost of not entering the labor market, turning to illegal activities, police work, courts & prisons; harm to other citizens, healthcare costs, lower public security causing surveillance & security costs to rise etc.

• Cutting costs at the source leads to less costs downstream. Crazy, I know!

Moreover, it’s a competitive advantage in the global post-industrial economy.

Would it be strange if societies that are great at increasing emotional, social and collective intelligence, become the most competitive ones in terms of innovation, capital investment and quality of life? 🤷‍♂️

Developmental Stages & Value Memes

The terrible truth is: Human beings are not equals. Human development matters and it can be studied in coherent & reliable ways.

According to Hanzi & others, human development is split across 4 aspects.

It takes the best out of all other theories & marries them into one coherent framework of human development.

1) Cognitive complexity

Cognitive complexity is about how many layers of complexity can you peek into, how abstract of a thinker you are. It mostly has to do with IQ.

Unfortunately, it cannot be improved without morally questionable eguenics. Its a slow process of evolution, trending upwards but over long periods of time.

Luckily, it bears almost no correlation to happiness.

2) Symbolic code

Symbolic code has to do with how much & how high quality knowledge you have. How you understand the functioning of the world around you.

It goes Archaic, Faustian, Post-faustian to Modern, Post-modern & Metamodern.

Anyone can install better code tho successful integration unfortunately depends on cognitive capacity at least to a degree.

3) Subjective states

Subjective states are simply how you’re feeling.

State is generally improved through positive feedback by completing work, good relationships, love & sex as well as things that benefit health & physiological wellbeing. It can be radically developed through meditation as well as other practices of the mind & the body.

States span across 13 level & 3 stages: low, medium & high.

Getting a person just one level up eg. from “7. Somewhat uneasy” to “8. Satisfied” & the resulting behavioral changes could have a huge effect at the societal level.

4) Depth

Depth is most often associated with “wisdom” & old age.

It’s the number of states that have become an inseparable part of us; integrated into our memories & personalities. Its not knowledge or any particular belief. It’s just one’s wordless relationship to existence itself.

It can be split into dark & light, where dark depth is developed by successful acceptance of tragedy, by facing fundamental hopelessness & deciding to carry on, whereas light depth is developed by spending lots of time in high states.

Value Memes

Value memes are the aggregate of the above. Think Spiral Dynamics on steroids.

What wisdom teachers & people of great depth, people with newest code & highest states all seem to have in common is going beyond materialism & selfishness as well as a belief in the importance of being goodhearted & treating others well.

It seems obvious that safe, efficient & technologically advanced societies that take care of their people also spur their growth into higher value memes.

• However!

Greater depth & higher states without new code simply results in spiritual arrogance. Civilization develops in ways that destroy others, exploitative chairmen in boardrooms & even fundamentalist terrorists; all are simply developmental imbalances.

• None are seen as evil, just developmentally challenged. Retarded.

Now, the key is not to be condescending or feel superior! You must treat these people with respect & dignity regardless of how retarded you think they are.

Since this work will be happening over decades, we must learn to actively & consciously manage all of the existing value memes. In the new game of life, whoever has mastered the most perspectives, wins.

As opposed to the class struggle of postmodernists, metamodernists define themselves through the struggle of value memes against value memes.

🤔 Who makes it happen

The people most likely to succeed in the new post-industrial societies are those who are creative, well-connected, socially & emotionally intelligent, idealistic, educated & adept with digital tools.

They are… Another triad!

Hacker, Hipster and Hippie archetypes

⌨️ Hackers

They are building solutions for bypassing capitalist ways of distributing & exchanging good & services, digitizing & gamifying education, building applications for solving social problems & improving democratic deliberation, apps for anything from measuring heart rates or our environmental impact to whistleblowing on abuses.

👨 Hipsters

Hipsters are helping us orient, make sense & find meaning. They are artists, designers, thinkers, social entrepreneurs & writers. They develop ideas of posthumanism, complexity, participatory politics & social movements, critiques of wage labor, ecological & social resilience, personal & organizational development etc.

☮️ Hippies

Hippies are creating lifestyles, habits & practices that make life happier & healthier. They understand meditation, contemplation, diets, physical training, communication, sexuality & life wisdom. They are providing social & personal technologies for improving health, happiness, community & enchantment in a strange, alienating world.

Unlikely allies: yoga bourgeoisie

The yoga bourgeoisie are rich & successful urban dwellers who also found that money is not the answer to happiness & therefor cultivate self-awareness, authenticity & intimacy. Aggregated around yoga parlors, self-help courses & coaches - they often work in tandem with the above anti-establishment archetypes.

Strange bedfellows

They are united by an alternative relationship to work and the market. Working by a different social & economic logic; they are intrinsically motivated and seek self-realization, rather than extrinsic motivators like money.

You are seeing more & more people whose lives are no longer governed by the logic of economic capital. They are forming a united front against the capitalist society, a subtle yet unprecedented revolution of cultural & social capital.

😱 The Great Conspiracy

The main idea of political metamodernism is to create a society that that mitigates everyday suffering and uses a range of social technologies & political strategies to support the psychological growth of all humans.

We need to conspire:

• To enable, educate & seduce humanity into taking the path towards a more existential & sustainable future.

• To hijack the political, economic and cultural systems and create a fairer, more transparent & caring societies.

• To push towards social entrepreneurship, peer-to-peer production, sharing economy & democratic dialogue techniques such as Art of Hosting.

Btw, to “con-spire” simply means to breathe together 🙃

We must learn to listen & see with each other’s eyes, to merge our realities & see how all perspectives are a part of reality.

🐙 Onwards!

Sorry ancap, its not about free market maximalism. The future society won’t be a “socialist utopia” & likewise, eco-fascism won’t save the world. It’s about finding the fine balance between the three.

A lot of issues aren’t fit for nation states. There are problems to be solved at the local or city level, problems to be solved at the corporate level, at the state level, continental & global levels.

• Political metamodernism is transnational.

• So is MetaGame.

MetaGame doesn’t need any Great Scheme for How to Build a Perfect new Society & Make Everything Better - the only thing we need to scheme is how to help people get better, level up, take control over their lives & help their communities.

It just so happens that DAOs & Web3 in general are revolutionary new technology to empower people to build their own organizations, experiment with governance tools, build institutions & economies, ultimately rebuilding societies from ground up. 👀

Our main point is that everybody deserves to live a meaningful life with a supporting community, knowledge on how to better themselves & tools for making an impact.

• DAO space is simply our starting niche 🤷‍♂️

• Subscribe & wait for the second (& final part) of this series 🙃

• Also for the interview with Hanzi Freinacth 😱

• Then wait a bit longer for MetaGame & Game B 👀

• …and a bit longer for Fractal Societies 😶

Eager to start doing shit & not just wait for more posts?

• Jump down MetaGame’s rabbit hole through here

• Get started building on Web3 January Hacktober

“We can go ahead creating Green Social Liberalism 2.0, working non-linearly, co-developing ourselves towards a listening society. We go ahead with pragmatic idealism, with magical realism and informed naivety. At the crossroads of fact and fiction, we work and play with religious fervor, keeping an ironic smile at our own self-importance.”

- Hanzi Freinacht

Interested in learning more?

• Go pick up the book this post is based on