Interesting perspective. Do you see a place or need for cultural changes (paradigm shifts in world view, how we think and relate to the world and each other etc.) in diminishing multipolar traps? Your approach seems to take for granted competitive games (all three procedures you propose presuppose them), a presupposition one could argue is parochial and one that might not be conducive to the kinds of procedures and ideas that will allow us to truly break free from Moloch. Operating within the paradigm of competitive games might so to speak be an «inside-the-box» approach, while what is required down the line is «outside-the-box» approaches, which could be thought of as more deeply cultural, epistemological etc.
One thing I disagree with, or perhaps I don't understand fully, is the low exit costs. I'm coming at it from the POV of finite vs infinite games and also geopolitics. In the grand game of geopolitics, you literally cannot opt out. I'm referring to Mearsheimer's description of offensive realism. In other words, planetary governance is an infinite game (evolving rules, you're always playing, and cannot opt out).
Hi David! Thanks for the thoughtful comment, and your civilized challenge of the "exit" strategy idea.
I agree to an extent with your analysis of the geopolitical arena. Balaji Srinivasan has been analyzing this area for some time to see what kind of "opt-out" vectors we can initiate. Indeed, it is not easy. I will note that I am not intimately familiar with "offensive realism," but I can get the gist of the idea from context clues. (I will conduct further research.)
That said, I don't believe at all that geopolitics has to be an "infinite game" concerning Carse's work. In the nascent network state and startup society space, we are experimenting with novel cloud communities and governance solutions. Our ecosystem is also working on building digital infrastructure that maintains anonymity, allowing for "netizens" to potentially remain shielded from the system while we usurp power from the nation-state. This idea is a huge focus of my whole Substack niche.
Suffice it to say, we ultimately "opt-out" of governance games by forming cloud communities when feasible and eventually beaming those to a physical territory where we can gain as much sovereignty as possible. At first, it will be difficult to maintain, but we will grow and attract new members over time while nation-states lose theirs. It's this balancing dynamic where global governance begins to build more freedom-based communities. It largely happens through exiting antiquated models and enacting a counter-governance regime. The eventual goal is that nascent governance models FORCE nation-states to compete like normal businesses. This is the problem of why geopolitics currently looks like an infinite game. In reality, it is just a finite game that has gone berserk.
Current examples: Network School, Vitalia/Prospera, Zuzalu, Esmeralda Edge City, etc. Note that each has its own governance apparatus.
I hope this helps, but I am happy to deepen the discussion. The low exit/switching costs are a gigantic focal point of my work.
Hmm, I think we're talking at two entirely different levels. Multipolar traps, at the highest levels, are driven by nation-states as rational actors. Even if citizens can "opt-out" (in part) is highly dubious when they're still operating within the containers provided by nation-states.
Any Molochian solution that doesn't take geopolitics into consideration, first and foremost, is completely dead on arrival. The reason that the framework you propose (e.g. citizens forcing nation-states to compete like businesses) is that they already do. The difference is that nations control borders, the flow of goods and people between them. Furthermore, they control their sovereign territory, including extractable resources (minerals, organics, petroleum) which underpin all economic activity.
Without understanding this and integrating into your framework, cloud netizen governance is tantamount to signing petitions. You need to understand the actual flows of power at the highest levels of civilization. I cannot emphasize enough the fact that you need to read John Mearsheimer.
Now, to help you along, you should look at the federated system of the US and the EU. The fact that citizens and businesses can easily move from state to state forces American states to compete, but are still boxed in by the federal system. Likewise, the EU system allows businesses and citizens to "vote with their feet" as well. But again, constrained by the membership of the EU.
In order for your proposal to work, it would have to global in nature (e.g. a global passport) which is likely decades if not centuries away (if ever). And that's not even the hardest part - for your cloud-based netizen communities to exercise any power whatsoever, they would need to challenge nation-states' monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.
None of that is happening. So when you use the word "force" you are not using it correctly. I recommend you start with a first-principles view of power, economics, and civilization.
I don't have the full energy or time to go into a detailed rebuttal of your account, but I will simply say that "nation-state cointainers" are not nearly as stalwart or long-term as your thought process implies. All empires grow, fade, and eventually die in a cyclical fashion. You can easily crack out of Molochian dynamics as a pseudo-infinite game with the proper tech, ideation, and anti-Molochian dynamics. I recommend also reading Leopohld Kohr's work, "The Breakdown of Nations."
Thanks for your thoughtful comments, though. They will likely inspire future pieces.
Great post; I particularly found your point 1) about low exit costs insightful, it was not something I'd sufficiently considered before. And while I also largely agree with the sentiment of point 3, I don't think it's sufficient to dismiss the anti-molochian power of top-down regulation entirely because a) it's not a given that regulatory capture ALWAYS happens, and also b) don't self-enforcing markets only work once said market's negative externalities are sufficiently accounted for and internalised, which in turn requires a near-perfect information transparency across the market (at which point Moloch is already defeated), no? Seems like a bit of a chicken-and-egg dilemma to me.
Great thoughts, Liv. Thanks for the wise response. I am really happy to be contributing to this area of inqurity with people like you and Daniel. I think game theory contains the the best understanding of the problems we are dealing with in the most digestable and comprehensive way, especially because of all the complexities around our growing global and interconnected world.
As for your point about regulatory capture. I would push back a bit an say that it probably happens more often the larger the government gets. Anytime you have a regulatory regime that becomes bureacratically entrenched it is typically within the best interests of the biggest corporate players to capture those entities so they can create a rule set that benefits them at the expense of incumbents.
A few sources to get the best insight into this is to read the Austrian school economists (assuming you have not already), and their various theories on interventionism. Mises and Rothbard are both legit. If you are familiar with their take, I would love to discuss further. I also recommend following Balaji's work. His recent interview with Vivek was amazing. They discussed the FDA and its problems, which actually move a bit beyond capture.
Thanks to people like you, I will continue writing about these subjects. The intersection of markets, agorism, and game theory truly fascinate me. Cheers!
1. Those at the top can’t maintain an organization that is “corrupt” if their peons can exit easily. But they are NOT necessarily corrupt. They are just trying to survive. Within global capitalism, it is not just that people could exit, they would have nowhere to go where the Mollochian dynamics don’t happen. At least nowhere where they still need basic human needs. They could escape to a video game, but that is an illusion. Also, totalitarian states have expensive exit strategies, and suppress Mollochian dynamics. Low exit strategies can lead to group (company, village, state, family, integrated individual, organ…) instability/disintegration, so you might have got this backwards, but I don’t know for sure.
2. They lead to more experimentation with governance. But how does this lead to governance which is non-Mollochian? Is crypto ultimately non-Mollochian, and if so, how? Does it lead to prioritizing other values besides profit? Does it lead to less AI risk? Less climate change? Less nuclear proliferation? Less loneliness? More connectedness?
The whole point of Molloch is that even well intentioned people have to choose nasty long-run choices, it is not at all about power seeking by evilly evil people seeking loopholes to increase their power, it is about survival by everyone in certain (Mollochian) environments.
Governance is NOT a game like a video game. It is about coordinating people so that they can do better together than alone, or in smaller groups. Ultimately it’s about human needs and how to achieve them in an optimal way.
Whether people can cheat at bitcoin I don’t know. But even if they can’t, we need governance which goes beyond currency, into other human needs. How can we generalize the anti-cheating aspects of bitcoin to other resources besides currency?
“My thesis is that the optimal conditions for arms races are generated in environments where power has accumulated—in other words, a highly centralized entity or bureaucratic monoculture devoid of creativity.”
No. Power accumulation is one possible result of Mollochian dynamics, not a cause. And it’s not even a necessary result. You can have decentralized races to the bottom, with lots of cheaters (I thought that was the actually meaning of the “multi” in polar, not multiple options as you thought). Actually, power accumulation is more of a deterrent of Molloch, as in Mollochian dynamics don’t happen as much in totalitarian states, they are punished and suppressed. Daniel S. Thus distinguishes between the totalitarian and the Mollochian (or chaos) attractors.
“Indeed, “gamification” should be the term we use to denote governance dynamics that ultimately reward the players without creating perverse incentive structures. Markets have the capability to do this, but markets must be balanced with evidence-informed decisions and a culture of inspired experimentation.”
Why, because you say so? What is your evidence for markets that don’t ALLOW for perverse incentives? I have some, like small village and tribe markets, where people get punished immediately for cheating, because it is simple enough to catch quickly, especially when they follow Ostrom Principles. Or markets with monopolies, where there is only one company in the market, and the company is internally totalitarian.
“It is also true that we probably have not discovered a solution to Moloch at all.” True, but nature has already figured it out. The key is nested levels with a small number of parts, done recursively, with abstraction between levels, and with subsidiarity. This is how multicellular organisms are structured, how brains are structured, and how SOME families within tribes or villages, within federations of these used to be structured before capitalism.
I would love to converse about this in good faith.
Interesting perspective. Do you see a place or need for cultural changes (paradigm shifts in world view, how we think and relate to the world and each other etc.) in diminishing multipolar traps? Your approach seems to take for granted competitive games (all three procedures you propose presuppose them), a presupposition one could argue is parochial and one that might not be conducive to the kinds of procedures and ideas that will allow us to truly break free from Moloch. Operating within the paradigm of competitive games might so to speak be an «inside-the-box» approach, while what is required down the line is «outside-the-box» approaches, which could be thought of as more deeply cultural, epistemological etc.
I recently wrote a piece on the metacrisis and multipolar traps, and would be interested to hear your thoughts on my perspective: https://tmfow.substack.com/p/the-metacrisis-analysis
One thing I disagree with, or perhaps I don't understand fully, is the low exit costs. I'm coming at it from the POV of finite vs infinite games and also geopolitics. In the grand game of geopolitics, you literally cannot opt out. I'm referring to Mearsheimer's description of offensive realism. In other words, planetary governance is an infinite game (evolving rules, you're always playing, and cannot opt out).
But perhaps I misunderstand your point.
Hi David! Thanks for the thoughtful comment, and your civilized challenge of the "exit" strategy idea.
I agree to an extent with your analysis of the geopolitical arena. Balaji Srinivasan has been analyzing this area for some time to see what kind of "opt-out" vectors we can initiate. Indeed, it is not easy. I will note that I am not intimately familiar with "offensive realism," but I can get the gist of the idea from context clues. (I will conduct further research.)
That said, I don't believe at all that geopolitics has to be an "infinite game" concerning Carse's work. In the nascent network state and startup society space, we are experimenting with novel cloud communities and governance solutions. Our ecosystem is also working on building digital infrastructure that maintains anonymity, allowing for "netizens" to potentially remain shielded from the system while we usurp power from the nation-state. This idea is a huge focus of my whole Substack niche.
Suffice it to say, we ultimately "opt-out" of governance games by forming cloud communities when feasible and eventually beaming those to a physical territory where we can gain as much sovereignty as possible. At first, it will be difficult to maintain, but we will grow and attract new members over time while nation-states lose theirs. It's this balancing dynamic where global governance begins to build more freedom-based communities. It largely happens through exiting antiquated models and enacting a counter-governance regime. The eventual goal is that nascent governance models FORCE nation-states to compete like normal businesses. This is the problem of why geopolitics currently looks like an infinite game. In reality, it is just a finite game that has gone berserk.
Current examples: Network School, Vitalia/Prospera, Zuzalu, Esmeralda Edge City, etc. Note that each has its own governance apparatus.
I hope this helps, but I am happy to deepen the discussion. The low exit/switching costs are a gigantic focal point of my work.
Hmm, I think we're talking at two entirely different levels. Multipolar traps, at the highest levels, are driven by nation-states as rational actors. Even if citizens can "opt-out" (in part) is highly dubious when they're still operating within the containers provided by nation-states.
Any Molochian solution that doesn't take geopolitics into consideration, first and foremost, is completely dead on arrival. The reason that the framework you propose (e.g. citizens forcing nation-states to compete like businesses) is that they already do. The difference is that nations control borders, the flow of goods and people between them. Furthermore, they control their sovereign territory, including extractable resources (minerals, organics, petroleum) which underpin all economic activity.
Without understanding this and integrating into your framework, cloud netizen governance is tantamount to signing petitions. You need to understand the actual flows of power at the highest levels of civilization. I cannot emphasize enough the fact that you need to read John Mearsheimer.
Now, to help you along, you should look at the federated system of the US and the EU. The fact that citizens and businesses can easily move from state to state forces American states to compete, but are still boxed in by the federal system. Likewise, the EU system allows businesses and citizens to "vote with their feet" as well. But again, constrained by the membership of the EU.
In order for your proposal to work, it would have to global in nature (e.g. a global passport) which is likely decades if not centuries away (if ever). And that's not even the hardest part - for your cloud-based netizen communities to exercise any power whatsoever, they would need to challenge nation-states' monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.
None of that is happening. So when you use the word "force" you are not using it correctly. I recommend you start with a first-principles view of power, economics, and civilization.
I don't have the full energy or time to go into a detailed rebuttal of your account, but I will simply say that "nation-state cointainers" are not nearly as stalwart or long-term as your thought process implies. All empires grow, fade, and eventually die in a cyclical fashion. You can easily crack out of Molochian dynamics as a pseudo-infinite game with the proper tech, ideation, and anti-Molochian dynamics. I recommend also reading Leopohld Kohr's work, "The Breakdown of Nations."
Thanks for your thoughtful comments, though. They will likely inspire future pieces.
Great post; I particularly found your point 1) about low exit costs insightful, it was not something I'd sufficiently considered before. And while I also largely agree with the sentiment of point 3, I don't think it's sufficient to dismiss the anti-molochian power of top-down regulation entirely because a) it's not a given that regulatory capture ALWAYS happens, and also b) don't self-enforcing markets only work once said market's negative externalities are sufficiently accounted for and internalised, which in turn requires a near-perfect information transparency across the market (at which point Moloch is already defeated), no? Seems like a bit of a chicken-and-egg dilemma to me.
Great thoughts, Liv. Thanks for the wise response. I am really happy to be contributing to this area of inqurity with people like you and Daniel. I think game theory contains the the best understanding of the problems we are dealing with in the most digestable and comprehensive way, especially because of all the complexities around our growing global and interconnected world.
As for your point about regulatory capture. I would push back a bit an say that it probably happens more often the larger the government gets. Anytime you have a regulatory regime that becomes bureacratically entrenched it is typically within the best interests of the biggest corporate players to capture those entities so they can create a rule set that benefits them at the expense of incumbents.
A few sources to get the best insight into this is to read the Austrian school economists (assuming you have not already), and their various theories on interventionism. Mises and Rothbard are both legit. If you are familiar with their take, I would love to discuss further. I also recommend following Balaji's work. His recent interview with Vivek was amazing. They discussed the FDA and its problems, which actually move a bit beyond capture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvWMcRRkuak
Thanks to people like you, I will continue writing about these subjects. The intersection of markets, agorism, and game theory truly fascinate me. Cheers!
You say that low exit costs pros are that:
1. Those at the top can’t maintain an organization that is “corrupt” if their peons can exit easily. But they are NOT necessarily corrupt. They are just trying to survive. Within global capitalism, it is not just that people could exit, they would have nowhere to go where the Mollochian dynamics don’t happen. At least nowhere where they still need basic human needs. They could escape to a video game, but that is an illusion. Also, totalitarian states have expensive exit strategies, and suppress Mollochian dynamics. Low exit strategies can lead to group (company, village, state, family, integrated individual, organ…) instability/disintegration, so you might have got this backwards, but I don’t know for sure.
2. They lead to more experimentation with governance. But how does this lead to governance which is non-Mollochian? Is crypto ultimately non-Mollochian, and if so, how? Does it lead to prioritizing other values besides profit? Does it lead to less AI risk? Less climate change? Less nuclear proliferation? Less loneliness? More connectedness?
The whole point of Molloch is that even well intentioned people have to choose nasty long-run choices, it is not at all about power seeking by evilly evil people seeking loopholes to increase their power, it is about survival by everyone in certain (Mollochian) environments.
Governance is NOT a game like a video game. It is about coordinating people so that they can do better together than alone, or in smaller groups. Ultimately it’s about human needs and how to achieve them in an optimal way.
Whether people can cheat at bitcoin I don’t know. But even if they can’t, we need governance which goes beyond currency, into other human needs. How can we generalize the anti-cheating aspects of bitcoin to other resources besides currency?
“My thesis is that the optimal conditions for arms races are generated in environments where power has accumulated—in other words, a highly centralized entity or bureaucratic monoculture devoid of creativity.”
No. Power accumulation is one possible result of Mollochian dynamics, not a cause. And it’s not even a necessary result. You can have decentralized races to the bottom, with lots of cheaters (I thought that was the actually meaning of the “multi” in polar, not multiple options as you thought). Actually, power accumulation is more of a deterrent of Molloch, as in Mollochian dynamics don’t happen as much in totalitarian states, they are punished and suppressed. Daniel S. Thus distinguishes between the totalitarian and the Mollochian (or chaos) attractors.
“Indeed, “gamification” should be the term we use to denote governance dynamics that ultimately reward the players without creating perverse incentive structures. Markets have the capability to do this, but markets must be balanced with evidence-informed decisions and a culture of inspired experimentation.”
Why, because you say so? What is your evidence for markets that don’t ALLOW for perverse incentives? I have some, like small village and tribe markets, where people get punished immediately for cheating, because it is simple enough to catch quickly, especially when they follow Ostrom Principles. Or markets with monopolies, where there is only one company in the market, and the company is internally totalitarian.
“It is also true that we probably have not discovered a solution to Moloch at all.” True, but nature has already figured it out. The key is nested levels with a small number of parts, done recursively, with abstraction between levels, and with subsidiarity. This is how multicellular organisms are structured, how brains are structured, and how SOME families within tribes or villages, within federations of these used to be structured before capitalism.
I would love to converse about this in good faith.
I love the idea of experimentation and iteration!
Inspiring read!