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“ Despite his size he was eventually brought down by David, who slung one smooth stone directly between his eyes ”
Goliath's Curse
Goliath’s Curse is that extractive institutions hold the seeds of their own demise. More inequality and extractive institutions both increased the vulnerability of societies (through counter-dominance intuitions, inequality, and elite competition) while oligarchy and weak control mechanisms hindered their response to disasters. All it then took was exposure to a threat, such as a sufficiently bad drought, disease outbreak, war, or rebellion, to break the hollowed-out society apart. This increasing risk of collapse due to extractive institutions is Goliath’s Curse.
The Rise & Fall of Goliath
Goliath: Goliath is a conceptual redefinition of "civilization" that strips away positive connotations of refinement to focus on power dynamics. Instead of a marker of progress, a Goliath is defined as a collection of dominance hierarchies where specific individuals or groups dominate others to control energy and labour. Unlike the egalitarian "fluid civilizations" of the Palaeolithic era, a Goliath relies on top-down obedience enforced through the threat of violence to maintain social order and resource extraction
Silicon Goliath: This represents the emerging, modern iteration of the Goliath structure, where control is maintained through mass surveillance and advanced algorithmic systems. In this model, the primary "Goliath fuel" shifts from physical grains or gold to data (a lootable resource), while mass surveillance systems serve as the mechanism for "caging" the population. It marks a transition where dominance is enforced not just by physical force, but by automated cognition, killer robots, and the centralization of information power.
Goliath Traps: Goliath traps are destructive competitive loops that dominance hierarchies inevitably fall into, where the pursuit of short-term elite advantage leads to long-term collective ruin. These traps manifest primarily in three forms: arms races (accumulating weapons for security), status races (conspicuous consumption to signal power), and races to the bottom (cutting standards to maximize profit). These dynamics lock societies into paths of "evolutionary suicide," preventing them from solving existential threats like climate change or nuclear proliferation.
Core Concepts from Goliath's Curse
The Endgame: describes the current, precarious phase of history where the "Global Goliath" faces a high probability of self-termination through existential risk. It is the stage where the cumulative pressure of Goliath traps (such as nuclear proliferation and ecological overshoot) creates a binary future: the system must either be fundamentally reformed to kill the Goliath structure, or it will suffer a deep, potentially permanent global collapse.
The Tree of Doom: is a visual metaphor for the causal chain of global catastrophic risk. It traces the origins of modern threats back to their deep roots: the combination of Goliath fuel (lootable resources) and human psychology (the "darker angels" of our nature). These roots grow into the trunk of Goliath (dominance hierarchies), which branches out into Goliath traps (competition), finally producing the toxic fruits of the Agents of Doom (entities like big tech and the military-industrial complex) and specific risks like AI and climate change
Hobbes' Delusion: This concept refutes the pessimistic philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, who argued that life without a centralized state is "nasty, brutish, and short". Kemp argues this is a myth used to justify hierarchy; archaeological and anthropological evidence suggests that for 99% of human history, people lived in "fluid civilizations" defined by egalitarianism, cooperation, and high mobility, rather than the chaotic war of all against all that Hobbes imagined.
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