Meditations on Moloch
A system nobody wants, that everyone keeps, because no one inside it can unilaterally stop. It gave me a name for the thing protocol design is actually for.
Alexander opens with Ginsberg’s Moloch section from Howl and then asks the question underneath it: if everyone hates the system, who keeps it running? His answer is not an ancient demon. It’s a structure with no one at the wheel — a multipolar trap.
The thought experiment that does the work: a country where every citizen must shock themselves eight hours a day, and anyone who refuses is killed by everyone else. Every single person hates it. Nobody can stop. There is no authority to appeal to, because the thing that enforces the rule is the rule.
Then a run of real examples — the prisoner’s dilemma, dollar auctions, a lake of fish farms that each quietly disconnects its filter and poisons the water for everyone including itself, the Malthusian trap. All of them the same shape: from a god’s-eye view there is an obviously better outcome; from inside, no individual can get there without great risk to themselves. Bostrom’s phrase for it is a dictatorless dystopia.
This is the essay I keep returning to because it is the problem I work on. A protocol is what you build when “everyone just stop” is not a mechanism — when you need the coordination itself to be the thing that holds, rather than everyone’s continued goodwill.