Picture the scene. You’re at a massive sports event, the atmosphere is electric, and you’ve got a brilliant view from your seat. Everyone is sitting and everyone can see. Then, a nail-biting moment happens on the pitch, and a few eager fans in the very front row leap to their feet to get a slightly better look.

Instantly, the view for the row behind them is gone. So, what do they do? They stand up too, of course. It's the only rational move to see the action. And so it begins: a wave of people rising, not out of shared celebration, but out of individual necessity. A domino effect cascading up the stands, row by agonizing row, until thousands are standing to get the exact same view they had while sitting comfortably just minutes earlier. And there’s no quick way for any individual person to make everyone sit back down again, because it’s so loud and there are so many people to coordinate. So now everyone’s stuck standing for the rest of the game.

———

You've just met Moloch. The demon of coordination failure; the patron saint of lose-lose games.

Of course, Moloch isn’t a literal conscious being (as far as we know)... but he is a handy personification of the nebulous incentives that push us into selfish behaviours when we’d all be better off cooperating.

He’s the mechanism of “Even if I don’t do it, everyone else will do it anyway, so I might as well do it too”… an unhealthy competitive dynamic that traps everyone in a race-to-the-bottom spiral because no individual can easily escape from it. 

And this Moloch Trap is the mechanism behind most of our biggest problems:

• Like when nations get locked in expensive arms races to develop stockpiles of deadly weapons they hope never to use. 

• Or when social media companies race to build ever more addictive and rage-inducing algorithms, because that’s the easiest way to maintain market share in a highly competitive attention economy.

• Or the economic pressures driving the destruction of ancient forests, the overfishing of the oceans, the toxic chemicals in our food chain etc etc

In each of these, the individual competitor is doing what’s rational for them under the incentives of the system, but the collective result is a spectacular own-goal for civilization.

That’s Moloch’s Trap, and we urgently need to defeat it.

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