Meditations on Moloch

Moloch, the demon in Allen Ginsberg's poem, serves as a metaphor for "multipolar traps," systems where everyone hates the outcome but no individual can coordinate a change. The demon is powerful less because it literally causes these problems than because it shows how the system behaves like an agent even though no one controls it. Bostrom's hypothetical dictatorless dystopia, in which citizens shock themselves for eight hours daily out of fear of being killed by others, illustrates the trap. A fish farm example, with a thousand farms on one lake, shows how a shared pollution filter collapses as farmers individually stop paying for it.