RIP Jim Rutt (1953-2026), and Thoughts On Philanthropy And Culture-Building

I didn't know Jim well, but he had an impact on my life

I didn’t know Jim Rutt very well. I met him in 2013, which was the year I moved to San Francisco. I was in my late twenties, and I was kind of freaking out.

I’d spent basically my entire twenties working on activism and/or art stuff. Some of my achievements were legitimately impressive. I’d gone to Africa with the Peace Corps, for example; I’d achieved minor fame, and genuine influence, as a pseudonymous activist blogger; I’d worked at a highly-respected game design company. But I did not feel impressive. I felt like a scruffy, scared little beggar. The value of my resume was tough to communicate, and at age 28, after a life-threatening accident that I was lucky to recover from, I felt like I had to earn more money; in particular, I wanted corporate health insurance.

Immediately upon occupying a friend’s guest room in the Financial District, I set about meeting everyone I possibly could, hoping to charm my way into the bubbleicious economy of startup tech. This worked, but first I had to white-knuckle my way through countless parties and brunches. In some ways I fit in really well, and I had real friends at all these events. In other ways, I felt very alone. My friends in the tech industry seemed almost shockingly wealthy to me. It took me a while to grasp that few of them felt that way.

To me, it felt like their wealth and privilege fundamentally disconnected most of them from what I saw as basic real-world concerns, and that they weren’t trying very hard to see their way out of the resulting blind spots. I was raised in an upper-middle-class household, so I was in their social class, but having spent my twenties on activities like living in a Third World village, I sometimes felt like I was going nuts trying to relate. Eventually, however, I came to appreciate how many of them tried to be helpful and generous to others, including me.

Jim was co-organizer of a loose subcultural community called Game~B, which instantly adopted me. Another writer on Substack, in his obituary for Jim, pulled up this definition for Game~B:

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.

— original quote from the Game~B wiki, included in Jonathan Rowson’s obituary for Jim Rutt

I often found the conversations among Game~B folks so abstract that it drove me up the wall. As a result, I didn’t participate much in the online fora, but over time I noticed that I kept running across Game~B people across a very wide array of fascinating settings.

I met Jim during a Game~B dinner in 2013 and we chatted a few times online. I didn’t realize he was keeping an eye on my work, from a distance, until about a decade later, when I went through a very high-profile and disastrous engagement to a famous far-right writer. A lot of people were mad at me for getting engaged to my ex-fiancé, and then the engagement suddenly ended while I was pregnant with his child, leaving me in a terrible position. I was isolated from many of my former friends; my health was affected; and my finances (including the money I’d worked so hard to save from my time in the tech industry) were being slowly consumed.

In some ways, I was lucky. For instance, my parents came through, even though they (understandably) felt like I’d made some really bad decisions. Still, I felt alone for a long time, and like my life was over. And yet there were a whole bunch of unexpected people who showed up, in unexpected ways: People who came to help care for my son, for instance. Some people sent me money. One of them was Jim.

Jim messaged me one day in 2024. Among other things, he said this:

While I’m 3000 miles away and too old and arthritic to chase an 18-month-old, if money could be traded to free you up, I could help.

I have an annual budget for “microgrants” to help lubricate worthy endeavors in the liminal web world or whatever it is that we are both part of….

One condition is that these grants must remain strictly anonymous. Ok to say “you got a grant” but not even an indirect description of the source. [Note from Lydia: Obviously, I agreed to this condition at the time, but since Jim has now passed away, I think I am released from this promise.]

I was very surprised by this, and thanked him effusively. Jim said:

From time to time I’ve read some of your writings. I’ve seen something deep. You haven’t quite landed at the right place to fully utilize your talents but I suspect with some luck you will. Glad to be of minor assistance towards making that true.

During one of Jim’s visits to the Bay Area last year, we had brunch at Tanzie’s Thai Brunch (I recommend Tanzie’s, by the way — they have legit khanom krok!). Jim told me that he’d interviewed my ex-fiancé a couple times, years before, and he concluded that my ex was “evil.” He said that my short-lived engagement came as a surprise to him, but he never shamed me for it, or for the fact that I’d ended up a single mom. He gave me some good parenting advice, and expressed a lot of faith in me and my work. He spoke well of his wife. I asked to meet her someday, and he said maybe we’d be able to figure it out.

I’ve thought a lot about Jim’s gesture since then, and especially since I heard about his death. He died surrounded by loved ones, following a 45-year marriage, which to me is one of his most impressive achievements after a lifetime full of them.

Throughout my career, I’ve intersected a lot with the philanthropy world. Most grants and grant-making organizations are designed to be completely impersonal. This approach has its benefits. But what strikes me about Jim’s microgrant was how utterly human it was.

To say that single mothers need support is an understatement so vast that it almost makes me cry. In fact, all mothers need much more support than our society tends to provide. Over the last several years, my experiences have helped me understand that some critical social problems are nearly impossible to address with philanthropy as it is generally constructed, in this moment. On the occasion of his death, I honor Jim for how he saw this, for how he worked to construct community, and for how, even at his level of wealth, he kept that human touch.

If you would like to leave a note for Jim’s family or contribute to his funeral, there is an official obituary and virtual guestbook here.

•

—

—