⬅️🚶🏽‍♀️🚶🏻🚶🏿‍♂️Walkaway: Exit the Terminal Game

The rigged system is ending. A new infinite game of the Geotribal era begins.

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Table of Contents

🎮 Introduction: The Game Is Terminal — It’s Time to Walk

💥 1. The JPEG (Jobs, Population, Economic Growth) Implosion

🎭 2. The Four Fake Fixes

💸 3. The Great Debt Delusion

🛠 4. MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) — The Master’s Tools

🎰 5. MMO (Money, Markets, Ownership) — The Engine of the Terminal Game

🎲 6. SCIM (Scarcity, Competition, Incentive Misalignment) — The Hidden Rules of Collapse

🌱 7. ACAI (Abundance, Cooperation, Aligned Incentives) — The Code of the Infinite Game

🔥 8. Jubilee by the People — Dissolving Debt, Not Just Protesting It

🚶 9. The Walkaway Protocol — Exiting the Terminal Game

🌍 Conclusion: The Path Forward Is Already Beneath Our Feet

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🎮 Introduction: The Game Is Terminal — It’s Time to Walk

Everyone knows it now — even if they can’t always name it.

The game is rigged.

The rules aren’t fair. The scoreboard’s broken. The referees are bought. And the winners? Always the same: the top 1%. While the rest — the 99%, along with the forests, oceans, and future generations — are being driven off a cliff.

This framing should sound familiar — it echoes the rallying cry of the Occupy Wall Street movement: “We are the 99%.” But over a decade later, the system hasn’t just persisted — it has metastasized. Instead of occupying the centers of power, perhaps the next great movement isn’t about protest at all. It’s about dissolution. We don’t storm the gates — we walk away from them.

This is not a conspiracy. It’s a zero-sum, finite game¹, where winning means someone else must lose. In this game, debt is power. Ownership is exclusion. Growth is extraction. And time is running out.

Cory Doctorow calls this dynamic "enshitification" — the slow decay of systems that once served people but now serve only profit and control. And he’s right, but now our entire global game is shit, and it has to go. Or, in the immortal words of Jacque Fresco, who once realized that “the rules of the economic game are inherently invalid” — as he declared in Zeitgeist: Moving Forward²:

“This shit’s got to go.”

This is a terminal game — not just because it’s deadly, but because it’s reaching its end. And the most dangerous lie we still tell ourselves is that we have to keep playing.

But what if we don’t?

What if the goal isn’t to win the game — but to change it entirely?

What if we rewrote the rules around cooperation, not competition? Around sufficiency, not scarcity? Around care, not control?

Buckminster Fuller once proposed the idea of a World Game — a system where humanity could solve problems through coordination, not conflict. Cory Doctorow’s novel Walkaway³ picked up that vision and made it radical: what if we simply walked away from the collapsing structures and started something new — not by fighting, but by dissolving?

What I’m proposing is an evolution of that idea:

> A ⁴ Infinite Game — where we recognize ourselves as one human tribe, bound together by shared fate, and guided by new language, new logic, and a new story of what it means to win.

In the sections ahead, I’ll introduce you to the hidden structure of the terminal game we’re trapped in — and then share the acronyms and mental models I’ve been developing for a regenerative alternative.

From JPEG to MMO, from SCIM to ACAI, this is more than just a critique — it’s a new rulebook. A new mythos. A new invitation.

Let’s name the game for what it is — and then walk away from the board.

Because the only way to win the terminal game… is to stop playing it.

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💥 Section 1: The JPEG Implosion

In Chapter 10 of my 2016 book The Next Copernican rEvolution, I introduced the idea of the JPEG Implosion — a forecast that the collapse of Jobs, Population, and Economic Growth would unravel the very foundation of our debt-fueled global system.

At the time, many thought it was speculative. Now, it’s prophetic.

When I wrote that chapter, global debt was around $199 trillion. As of 2025, it has exploded past $326 trillion — an increase of more than $100 trillion in less than a decade. That’s not just unsustainable. It’s unpayable. And it’s the symptom of a game already spiraling out of control.

Let’s break down the JPEG Implosion:

Jobs: We’ve long tied human worth to employment — but automation, and now AI, are vaporizing entire sectors. Productivity rises, but employment doesn’t. No jobs means no wages — and no wages means no consumer demand. The game breaks down.

Population: In nearly every developed nation, birthrates are falling and societies are aging. That means fewer workers, fewer consumers, and shrinking tax bases — all while debt and dependency costs grow. The demographic dividend is over.

Economic Growth: The core assumption of capitalism — infinite growth — has hit the ecological ceiling. Climate breakdown, resource depletion, and collapsing biodiversity all signal that the game’s growth mandate is suicidal.

This trifecta of collapse means one thing: we can’t grow our way out of debt — the standard play in the old rulebook. Even the most optimistic AI boosters fail to account for the demand-side collapse that JPEG guarantees.

The JPEG Implosion isn’t coming. It’s here.

And yet, governments and economists keep doubling down, trying to “stimulate growth” in a system that structurally can’t grow without unraveling the planet.

They’re not fixing the game. They’re speeding up its end.

In the next section, we’ll look at the four conventional responses to the debt crisis — and why none of them can work within the rules of the terminal game.

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🎭 Section 2: The Four Fake Fixes

When confronted with unpayable debt, economists and politicians rotate through four familiar plays — each pretending the game isn’t broken, just mismanaged. But in the face of the JPEG Implosion, these so-called solutions are nothing more than delaying tactics. Let’s break them down:

1. More Growth

The default answer. Just grow the economy faster and the debt shrinks relative to GDP. But this relies on a fantasy: that jobs, population, and growth will magically rebound. They won’t. And even if they did, the level of growth required would incinerate the planet. You can’t fix a game by doubling down on the rules that broke it.

2. Austerity

Cut public spending, tighten belts, make “hard choices.” But this just accelerates collapse. Austerity weakens demand, increases inequality, and turns public infrastructure into rust. It’s a game of musical chairs where the music stops — and only the rich are still standing.

3. Debt Restructuring

Move the debt around. Rename it. Repackage it. Lower interest rates. This is financial theater — rearranging the chairs on the Titanic. It doesn’t address the underlying issue: the system requires endless debt to sustain itself. Restructuring a lie doesn’t make it true.

4. Debt Jubilee

Historically, rulers have occasionally wiped the slate clean — releasing debtors, resetting balances. It’s the most humane of the four, but it’s still a top-down decision, dependent on the very elites who benefit from the system’s continuation. And without structural change, the game resumes — until the next crisis.

None of these approaches work in a post-JPEG world. They’re relics of a game that depends on endless expansion, extraction, and exclusion. And they all share one fatal flaw: they try to fix the game without questioning it.

In Section III, we’ll ask the real question: What is debt, actually? And what happens when we stop believing in it?

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💸 Section 3: The Great Debt Delusion

Here’s a radical truth hiding in plain sight:

Debt is imaginary.

A story. A spreadsheet entry. A social agreement enforced by law, reputation, and fear.

It’s not gold in a vault. It’s not grain in a silo.

It’s code in a database — a claim on future energy, labor, and resources that may not even exist.

And yet, this fictional construct rules our lives. Nations cut social programs to appease credit rating agencies. Families suffer under medical and student debt. Whole ecosystems are destroyed just to “service” financial obligations that aren’t even backed by anything real.

But who owns this debt? Who holds the assets on the other side?

Mostly, it’s the wealthy — the top 1%. Debt is their mechanism of control.

It funnels wealth upward through interest payments, foreclosures, and labor desperation. It gives them leverage — not just over money, but over policy, media, even culture.

It’s not just that the game is rigged — it’s that the game is entirely made up, and enforced by belief.

And here’s the kicker: we will never pay off this debt.

Not because we’re lazy. Not because we lack resources. But because the system is structurally designed to create more debt than can ever be repaid. Every dollar is loaned into existence with interest — which means there’s always more owed than there is to pay with.

So even if we could pay it off, why would we?

It would require hyper-exploitation of people and nature on a genocidal, ecocidal scale — just to balance a mythic ledger.

It’s time to stop believing in the debt story.

Because debt is not just a number — it’s a mechanism of obedience.

And when we collectively stop believing in it, we dissolve its power.

In the next section, we’ll explore Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) — an attempt to shift how we think about public finance, and how even that theory, while useful, still plays by the old game’s rules.

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🛠️ Section 4: MMT — The Master’s Tools

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) exploded into mainstream discourse in the last decade by challenging one of the system’s core illusions: that governments “run out of money” like households do.

MMT reveals a simple truth: if a government issues its own currency, it can never run out of money in that currency. It doesn’t need to “find the money” through taxes or borrowing. It can simply spend — as long as there are real resources available (like labor, materials, and energy). Inflation is the actual limit, not insolvency.

And yet — while we’re constantly told there’s “no money” for universal healthcare, affordable housing, education, or repairing crumbling infrastructure — there’s always enough for bombs, battleships, and bloated military budgets. The masters of the game know how MMT works. They just choose to use it for war and empire, not for care and community.

The truth isn’t that we’re broke. It’s that our priorities are broken.

The truths of MMT shattered the false comparison between national budgets and family checkbooks — and rightly so. It exposed the scarcity myth used to justify cuts, privatization, and austerity.

But while MMT offers a more honest map of how fiat economies actually work, it still accepts the basic terrain of the old game:

• It doesn’t question the existence of money as the central organizing logic of life.

• It still assumes we must mediate all value through markets.

• And it leaves untouched the concept of ownership — and the inequality, hierarchy, and control that come with it.

In short, MMT is a better operating manual for the master’s house — but it still reinforces the master’s architecture.

We can acknowledge MMT’s insights and still ask a deeper question:

Why are we organizing society around artificial abstractions like money at all, when we could be coordinating directly around real needs, real capacities, and real care?

In Section 5, we’ll begin to challenge the three pillars that prop up the terminal game: Money, Markets, and Ownership — MMO.

And we’ll ask: what would it take to walk away from this MMO game entirely?

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⚙️ Section 5: MMO — The Engine of the Terminal Game

If the terminal game we’re trapped in had a software stack, it would run on MMO — Money, Markets, and Ownership.

These aren’t neutral tools. They’re deep operating assumptions that shape how we value, produce, distribute, and relate. They encode a worldview. And they bias the game toward competition, hierarchy, and control.

Let’s break them down:

• Money — A symbol we’ve mistaken for substance. We’ve turned the map into the territory. Real wealth is food, shelter, care, time, ecosystems. But in this game, if you don’t have the token, you don’t get the resource — even if there’s plenty. The result? Artificial scarcity in a world of abundance.

• Markets — Once a way to trade surpluses, now a coercive system that assigns value only if something can be sold. What can’t be priced — love, forests, attention, community — is devalued or destroyed. Markets were meant to serve life. Instead, life now serves markets.

• Ownership — The idea that a person or corporation can “own” land, water, housing, or even ideas — and exclude others from using them — is perhaps the most dangerous abstraction of all. Ownership turns commons into commodities and care into rent.

Together, MMO creates perverse incentives:

• Hoard, don’t share.

• Extract, don’t regenerate.

• Exploit, don’t cooperate.

And worst of all, MMO turns every living being into a player in a zero-sum game — where someone else’s security is seen as your threat, and their liberation as your loss.

This is the engine behind enshitification. Behind debt. Behind ecological collapse. Behind loneliness and burnout and burnout and burnout.

MMO is the code of the terminal game.

In the next section, we’ll introduce an alternative code — a new acronym, and a new direction.

Because if MMO is the game of collapse, then SCIM is the invisible logic behind it.

And it’s time we name it.

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🧨 Section 6: SCIM — The Hidden Rules of Collapse

Beneath Money, Markets, and Ownership (MMO), there’s an even deeper game being played — one that most people don’t realize they’re trapped in.

I call it SCIM — a toxic cocktail of:

• Scarcity

• Competition

• Incentive Misalignment

These are the game mechanics that MMO runs on. They don’t just influence outcomes — they shape behavior, warp priorities, and engineer dysfunction into everything from education to healthcare to climate policy.

Let’s break it down:

• Scarcity — The artificial scarcity created by money and markets ensures that there’s never “enough” — not because resources are lacking, but because access is gated. Even abundance becomes inaccessible if you don’t have the token. This generates stress, fear, and hoarding — even in times of plenty.

• Competition — When survival is tethered to individual performance, everyone becomes your rival. This drives innovation, yes — but also isolation, deception, burnout, and violence. It fragments communities and erodes trust. Cooperation becomes risky. Vulnerability becomes dangerous.

• Incentive Misalignment — Perhaps the most insidious part of SCIM: the system rewards behavior that is destructive in the long term. Polluting is profitable. Lying is lucrative. Exploitation is efficient. And those who act ethically or regeneratively are often punished — or priced out.

This isn’t a glitch. It’s baked in.

In a SCIM world, we optimize for extraction, not wellbeing — because that’s what wins. And then we wonder why the winners are sociopaths and the planet is dying.

SCIM is a Moloch made system.

It’s the game-theoretic logic of misaligned incentives that Daniel Schmachtenberger, Liv Boeree⁵, Tristan Harris⁶, and others have warned about: where rational actors make irrational decisions because of the rules they’re forced to play by.

If we don’t transcend SCIM, we will destroy ourselves — not because we’re evil, but because the game punishes cooperation and rewards domination.

So what’s the alternative?

In Section 7, we introduce a new logic — the code of a new game. It’s time to rewrite the acronyms.

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🌱 Section 7: ACAI — The Code of the Infinite Game

If SCIM is the logic of collapse, ACAI is the language of life.

Where SCIM drives fragmentation, burnout, and rivalry, ACAI invites connection, wholeness, and aligned thriving.

ACAI stands for:

• Abundance

• Cooperation

• Aligned Incentives

It’s the new code — the logic we must adopt if we want to exit the terminal game and play something infinite instead.

Let’s break it down:

• Abundance — Not the hyper-consumption of capitalist fantasy, but the recognition that we already have enough — if we steward and share. Abundance is about sufficiency, resilience, and access. It means we stop mistaking hoarding for wealth, and start designing systems that prioritize enough for all.

• Cooperation — The evolutionary engine of thriving ecosystems and successful communities. True cooperation isn’t forced collectivism — it’s voluntary synergy. It’s mutual aid, peer-to-peer networks, mycelial governance. It’s how we go from rugged individualism to rugged interdependence.

• Aligned Incentives — The heart of the shift. In an ACAI system, what’s good for the individual is good for the collective. Incentives are no longer misaligned with wellbeing — they promote it. We reward regeneration, compassion, stewardship, and trust. We build feedback loops that reinforce health — not harm.

ACAI is not utopian. It’s necessary. It’s not a dream — it’s a design principle. And it’s already being prototyped — in community currencies, open-source platforms, cooperative governance models, and post-capitalist economies around the world.

But to activate ACAI at scale, we have to do more than tweak policies.

We have to walk away from the logic of SCIM.

We have to choose to play a new game.

Which brings us to the ultimate challenge — and opportunity — of our time:

How do we stop playing a rigged game that is killing us?

In the final sections, we’ll explore Debt Dissolution, the myth of creditworthiness, and how we reclaim our power — not through revolution, but through coordinated refusal.

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🕊️ Section 8: Jubilee by the People — Dissolving Debt, Not Just Protesting It

Historically, a debt jubilee meant that kings or rulers would cancel debts from the top down. It was an occasional release valve — a way to prevent society from collapsing under the weight of inequality. But it was always granted — by those in power, to maintain power.

Today, global debt has ballooned to over $326 trillion. That’s triple the world economy. It will never be paid. And there’s no king coming to save us.

But what if this time, we don’t wait for permission?

What if we the people declare the jubilee?

We call it Debt Dissolution — a coordinated, defiant, nonviolent refusal to continue playing the game.

Not bankruptcy. Not begging. Not protest.

Walking away. Together.

Imagine millions of people collectively deciding:

• To stop servicing unpayable debts.

• To reject the shame narrative of “creditworthiness.”

• To prioritize life, health, and community over extractive obligations.

• To create mutual support systems, parallel structures, and cooperative economies that render the old ones obsolete.

This isn’t just economic rebellion — it’s a spiritual jailbreak.

It’s how we reclaim agency from systems that treat us like digits on a balance sheet.

And yes, it will be scary. The old game is sticky. It punishes disobedience and praises compliance. But as Cory Doctorow wrote in Walkaway, “The most dangerous thing you can do is stay.”

Dissolving debt is about dissolving power.

It’s about stepping off the hamster wheel of financial control and into the messy, beautiful terrain of human dignity and mutual care.

In the final section, we’ll reframe what it means to truly walk away — and how this isn’t the endgame, but the outgame.

We’re not playing to win their game.

We’re playing to change the game entirely — to step into a new infinite game that belongs to all of us.

🚶‍♂️ Section 9: The Walkaway Protocol — Exiting the Terminal Game

We’ve tried reform.

We’ve marched, occupied, and shouted for change.

But what if the real power move isn’t resistance — it’s refusal?

Not rebellion, but redirection.

Not protest, but protocol.

The Walkaway Protocol isn’t about waiting for collapse.

It’s about synchronizing our exit from a game that was never meant for us to win — and building the scaffolding of a new one as we go.

As Buckminster Fuller said:

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.

To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

Occupy tried to change the game by taking space.

We walk away by reclaiming our time, our labor, our love, our imagination.

This is the Walkaway Protocol:

• Exit MMO and SCIM wherever and however you can.

• Experiment with ACAI in your community, your work, your life.

• Find others walking too — and sync up.

• Create and join networks of mutual aid, trust, and aligned incentives.

• Stop treating illegitimate debt as sacred.

• Remember: you’re not alone. Millions are quietly exiting too.

And also:

• We stop trying to fix a system designed to fail.

• We stop feeding a machine that converts life into capital.

• We stop apologizing for debt that was structurally inevitable.

• We stop playing a terminal game with planetary consequences.

• We walk away — physically, economically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually.

• We walk toward the infinite game of shared thriving.

We’re not waiting for permission.

We’re not asking for reform.

We’re not negotiating with collapse.

We’re walking away — not to escape, but to initiate Revolution Z, just as the young protagonist Trim and countless others do in this collective hero’s journey portrayed in my serialized fiction novel Parable of the Rosebush, a story about walking away from the terminal game.

This is the uprising that dissolves power instead of seizing it.

The revolution that ends the terminal game… and begins the infinite one.

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🌱 Conclusion: The Path Forward Is Already Beneath Our Feet

What comes after we walk away?

We walk toward each other.

Toward the commons.

Toward a world where care is currency, and dignity is non-negotiable.

Where value isn’t extracted — it’s created, shared, and stewarded.

We walk toward Geotribalism — not a return to the past, but a leap forward into belonging at planetary scale.

A one-tribe consciousness that transcends borders, markets, and the myth of separation.

A world where every being matters, and no one is sacrificed for someone else’s profit margin.

And we don’t have to wait.

All around the world, fragments of this new game already exist —

In mutual aid networks, cooperative farms and eco-villages, open-source tech, permaculture projects, post-capitalist experiments, solidarity economies, and syncretic spiritual movements.

This isn’t utopia.

It’s scaffolding.

It’s blueprint.

It’s invitation.

You don’t have to fix the old system.

You don’t even have to destroy it.

You just have to walk away from its logic —

and walk toward a life, and a world, worth living for.

That’s Revolution Z —

the uprising without violence,

the turning that dissolves power instead of fighting it.

The infinite game has already begun.

Will you play?

Footnotes:

1. Finite and Infinite Games is a profound book and thought experiment by James P. Carse

2. Zeitgeist: Moving Forward is the third installment in Peter Joseph's Zeitgeist film series. The film premiered at the JACC Theater in Los Angeles on January 15, 2011, at the Artivist Film Festival, was released in theaters and online. As of November 2014, the film had over 23 million views on YouTube.

3. Walkaway is a 2017 science fiction novel by Canadian writer Cory Doctorow

4. The Geotribal Stage and the Geotribal Age

5. Daniel Schmachtenberger & Liv Boeree on AI, Moloch & Capitalism

6. Tristan Harris and Liv Boeree talk Game Theory: The Driving Force Behind Humanity’s Biggest Issues