Note: This is a research note supplementing the book Unscarcity, now available for purchase. These notes expand on concepts from the main text. Start here or get the book.

Infinite Games: Why Abundance Needs a Mountain to Climb

The Paradise Paradox

In 1968, ethologist John B. Calhoun built mouse paradise. Universe 25 was a 9-foot square enclosure with unlimited food, unlimited water, no predators, and perfect climate control. Four pairs of mice were introduced. They could do nothing but eat, sleep, and reproduce in peace.

They went extinct.

Population peaked at 2,200—despite the enclosure being designed for 4,000—then collapsed into what Calhoun called a “behavioral sink.” Males stopped competing for mates and instead groomed themselves obsessively. Calhoun called them “the beautiful ones.” Females abandoned their young. Infant mortality in some territories hit 90%. The last conception occurred on day 920. The final mouse died in 1973, less than five years after the experiment began.

The mice weren’t destroyed by scarcity. They were destroyed by purposelessness. Paradise killed them.

Now consider that we are about to build a global version of Universe 25 for humans. AI, robotics, and fusion energy will eliminate the need for most labor within decades. Everything our survival instincts evolved to chase—food, shelter, safety—will be delivered automatically. The question isn’t whether we’ll achieve material abundance. The question is whether we’ll build a civilization with something worth doing after we do.

This is where James P. Carse comes in.

Finite Games vs. Infinite Games

In 1986, a quiet religious scholar at NYU published a thin book that would become something of a cult classic among technologists, philosophers, and, apparently, the architects of post-scarcity civilization. Finite and Infinite Games proposed a deceptively simple distinction:

Finite games are played to win. They have rules, boundaries, and endings. Chess. Elections. Job promotions. The Super Bowl. War. You play within the rules, and when someone wins, the game stops.

Infinite games are played to keep playing. The rules can change. The boundaries shift. New players can join. The goal isn’t to end the game with victory—it’s to ensure the game continues, with as many people playing as possible.

Here’s the core insight: “A finite player plays within boundaries; an infinite player plays with boundaries.”

Carse wasn’t writing about economics or political theory. He was writing about the fundamental posture humans take toward existence. Are you trying to win life, or are you trying to live it?

The 20th-century economy was a finite game disguised as survival. Work or starve. Compete or die. Accumulate or lose. There were winners (billionaires) and losers (everyone else). The game had an implicit endpoint: enough money to stop playing. Except nobody ever felt they had enough, because the game was rigged to keep everyone running.

What happens when AI wins the economic game for us? What happens when the survival game ends not in victory but in obsolescence?

We need a new game. An infinite one.

The Evidence: Humans Need Purpose Like Fish Need Water

The claim that humans require purpose isn’t philosophical sentimentality. It’s empirical fact.

Retirement and Depression: A meta-analysis of retirement studies found that the mean prevalence of depression among retirees is 28%—nearly one in three. A 2013 study from the Institute of Economic Affairs found that retirement increases the probability of clinical depression by about 40%. The most common manifestations? “The absence of a routine and the loss of identity.”

In a 2024 survey, 40% of retirees who returned to work cited boredom as their primary reason—not money. When asked why they hadn’t retired yet, 42% of pre-retirees said they “didn’t want to get bored.” The number-one reason, at 56%, was even more telling: “I’m enjoying working.”

These aren’t people who love commuting or corporate meetings. They’re people who discovered that decades of looking forward to not working left them with nothing to look forward to at all.

The Self-Determination Theory: Fifty years of psychological research has converged on a simple framework. Human flourishing requires three things: autonomy (control over your actions), competence (growing mastery), and relatedness (connection to others). Remove any leg of this tripod and motivation collapses.

Self-determination theory research shows that intrinsic motivation—doing things because they’re interesting and satisfying, not for external rewards—produces better performance, more persistence, greater creativity, and higher well-being than extrinsic motivation. Paradoxically, attempting to control outcomes through rewards and punishments actually backfires, producing lower-quality work.

This is the operating system of human purpose. It doesn’t care whether you “need” to work to survive. It needs the structure of meaningful challenge.

Open Source as Proof of Concept: If humans only work for money, explain Linux. Explain Wikipedia. Explain the nearly one billion contributions made to open source repositories on GitHub in 2024 alone.

According to the 2024 Open Source Software Funding Report—a collaboration between GitHub, the Linux Foundation, and Harvard researchers—organizations invest approximately $7.7 billion annually in open source software, with 86% of that investment being labor contributed for free by employees and volunteers. Not because they’re paid to. Because they want to.

In 2024, GitHub saw 1.4 million new developers contribute to open source projects for the first time. The number of generative AI projects increased by 98%. There was no grand paycheck waiting. There was something better: the chance to solve interesting problems with other people who care.

This isn’t idealism. This is how the modern internet runs.

The Ascent: An Infinite Game for a Post-Scarcity World

The Unscarcity framework addresses the Mouse Utopia problem head-on through what it calls “The Foundation and The Ascent.”

The Foundation (90%) solves survival. Housing, food, healthcare, energy, education—provided universally and unconditionally to anyone who passes the Spark Threshold (i.e., is conscious). You don’t earn it. You don’t lose it. It’s the floor beneath which no one can fall.

The Ascent (10%) solves meaning. Life extension research. Interstellar exploration. Breakthrough science. Paradigm-shifting art. The genuinely scarce, genuinely transformative opportunities that require human ambition and creativity.

Access to the Ascent is earned through Impact Points (IMP)—a non-transferable, decaying currency of contribution. You can’t inherit it, buy it, or hoard it. Like physical fitness, it must be continuously renewed through actual contribution. The decay rate enforces Axiom IV (Power Must Decay), ensuring yesterday’s achievements don’t become permanent privileges.

Here’s the crucial design choice: Impact Points can be earned for any validated contribution—not just moonshot research. Caregiving accumulates Impact. Community organizing accumulates Impact. Creating art that moves people accumulates Impact. The system is explicitly designed to recognize that meaning comes in many forms, not just the ones that generate patents.

This is an infinite game by design. There’s no final score. No ultimate winner. No endpoint at which you’ve “made it” and can stop. There’s only the continuous opportunity to contribute, grow, and participate. The mountain never ends—but neither does the climbing.

The Objections (And Why They’re Wrong)

“But won’t people just consume without contributing?”

This concern sounds plausible and repeatedly fails empirically. Wikipedia has no shortage of contributors. Linux has no shortage of committers. Open source projects reached nearly a billion contributions in 2024 despite paying essentially no one.

The difference between Universe 25 and human civilization isn’t biological—it’s architectural. The mice had no way to contribute meaningfully. No complex challenges. No social recognition for achievement. No opportunity to build something larger than themselves. The Ascent creates those structures deliberately.

And here’s what the “lazy masses” theorists always forget: social visibility. In a transparent system where contribution is legible, non-contribution is also visible. You can live perfectly well on the Foundation doing nothing. But your neighbors will know. Your community will know. In a world where status comes from what you give rather than what you own, that matters.

“This sounds like the Chinese social credit system.”

It’s the opposite. The Chinese system is punitive—lose points for bad behavior, get excluded from society. The Unscarcity system is enabling—earn points for contribution, gain access to new opportunities. The Foundation provides unconditional dignity regardless of Impact. You can never be punished into poverty. You can only be rewarded into significance.

More importantly, Impact is validated through the Diversity Guard, which requires consensus across demonstrably different Commons (communities). No single authority decides what counts. If a Heritage Commons and a Synthesis Commons and an Art Collective all agree your contribution matters, then it matters. This is decentralized meaning-making, not top-down social engineering.

“Who decides what counts as a valid contribution?”

Everyone and no one. AI systems handle objectively measurable contributions (did this code run faster? did this research get replicated?). For subjective contributions—art, philosophy, care work—validation comes through PoD-Verified Value, which requires endorsement from multiple culturally distinct Commons. This prevents the “tyranny of the easily measured” while still requiring broad consensus.

The key insight: validation happens after contribution, not before. You don’t need permission to create. You need recognition to accumulate Impact. The barrier to entry is zero; the barrier to reward is consensus across difference.

Society vs. Culture: Carse’s Deeper Insight

Carse made a distinction that illuminates the entire project: “Society is a finite game; culture is an infinite game.”

Society establishes boundaries, rules, winners, losers. It assigns roles and enforces hierarchies. It plays for keeps.

Culture creates, transforms, plays with boundaries. It doesn’t seek to end but to continue. It welcomes new players and changes rules when they no longer serve the game.

The 20th-century nation-state was a finite game. Compete with other nations. Control territory. Accumulate power. Win or lose in wars hot and cold.

The MOSAIC governance structure—Modular, Autonomous, Interconnected Communities—is designed to be an infinite game. Thousands of Commons, each sovereign, each interpreting the same five axioms differently. You can join one. You can leave for another. You can found your own. The goal isn’t for any single Commons to “win” but for the entire civilization to keep playing.

This is why Voice and Exit are the dual mechanisms of freedom. Voice: participate in your Commons’ governance. Exit: leave and join another if you disagree. The game continues even when particular games end.

Training vs. Education: Preparing for Surprise

Carse distinguished training from education with a line that haunts modern schooling: “To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.”

The 20th-century education system was training for a finite game: acquire credentials, get a job, climb the ladder. Every surprise was a threat to the plan.

Post-scarcity education must be preparation for the infinite game: cultivate curiosity, develop judgment, learn how to learn. Surprises aren’t threats—they’re invitations.

This is why the Unscarcity framework replaces industrial schooling with what might be called cultivation: personalized AI tutoring for skills, human mentorship for meaning, and exposure to radically different ways of life. Not “what career do you want?” but “what problems fascinate you?” Not “how do you fit in?” but “what do you want to explore?”

The goal isn’t to produce workers. The goal is to produce players—people equipped to join, shape, and create the infinite games of a civilization that no longer needs their labor but desperately needs their participation.

The Beautiful Ones, Revisited

Remember Calhoun’s “beautiful ones”—the male mice who withdrew from all social competition, all mating, all conflict, to simply groom themselves in isolated narcissism? They never reproduced. They contributed nothing to colony survival. They were the first generation of mouse NEETs.

There is an uncomfortable resonance with certain trends in developed societies: declining birth rates, rising social isolation, epidemic anxiety among young people who see no point in playing a game they believe is rigged. These aren’t failures of individual character. They’re symptoms of a system that has made the finite game too exhausting while providing no infinite game to join.

The solution isn’t to make the finite game easier (more handouts, lower bars). The solution is to build an infinite game worth playing.

This is the bet the Unscarcity framework makes: that humans, unlike mice, can consciously design their environment. That we can recognize the behavioral sink before we fall into it. That we can build structures of meaning—impact systems, contribution pathways, communities of purpose—that give the ambitious something to climb toward, the creative something to build, and the weary something to rest upon before climbing again.

Universe 25 failed because it gave its inhabitants everything except something to do. The Ascent exists to ensure that no matter how abundant the Foundation becomes, there will always be a next mountain. Not because we must climb it to survive, but because climbing is what makes us come alive.

The game doesn’t end. That’s the point.

"Infinite Games: Why Abundance Needs a Mountain to Climb"