Project Liminality
It takes the coordination problem seriously enough to treat it as metaphysics — and then, unusually for this space, builds the mechanism instead of stopping at the diagnosis.
Project Liminality is David Rug’s attempt to build the missing layer between two things everyone agrees are broken: how we think together, and how we coordinate. He studied physics in Heidelberg, ran into the GameB conversation, and came away with what he calls a physics of communication — the claim that sense-making and coordination are not soft problems but have structure you can design against.
The channel’s central work is Immanent Metaphysics, the formal system Forrest Landry developed through the 1990s. The video I came in through is The Age of Miracles, which carries the whole argument in one arc — from Landry’s system, down through Moloch, and back out to the more beautiful world. It is the piece I would hand someone first.
Its compact statement is love is that which enables choice; fear is what consumes it. From that single distinction Rug derives two modes of mind: domesticated, which uses story as a tool — narrative — and liminal, which serves story as a being — vision. Domesticated mind cannot feel that its choices are entangled with everyone else’s, so the behaviour of others looks like chance to it. From there the step to “winners and losers, predator and prey” is small, and from there to game theory is automatic. The observation I keep returning to is this: Nash’s framework is not wrong, it is local. Rug calls it the physics of fear. It describes exactly the slice of the world where fear has already consumed choice.
This is Moloch’s territory, arrived at from the inside. The multipolar trap is not a failure of intelligence — it is what intelligence looks like once the sense of connection is gone.
Then the third attractor, which is where the series lands. The frame comes from Daniel Schmachtenberger’s In Search of the Third Attractor: if the first attractor is civilisational breakdown and the second is the control dystopia built in response, the third is neither. Project Liminality’s own pass at it is in The InterBrain, which opens on exactly that chapter. What it adds is specificity. Stewarded technology, sense-making worth the name, and a coordination layer that makes the connection between people visible rather than merely asserted. That last part is the software the video is named for: a knowledge-gardening system that organises along your actual relationships instead of hierarchies — Dream Nodes implemented as git repositories, a Coherence Beacon that surfaces links you did not know you had.
Two things stay with me. First, that the useful diagnosis of Moloch is perceptual rather than economic — no protocol fixes a trap whose root is that people cannot feel each other. Second, that it is possible to hold an extremely abstract frame and still ship software. That combination is rarer than either half, and worth more.