Meditations on Moloch (2014)

This was a mostly entertaining read, if a bit all over the place. I do have one point to offer -- I noticed this article quotes liberally from Bostrom, Nick, but misses another thinker who has relevant ideas about avoiding what this author refers to as "multipolar traps" -- Ostrom, Elinor. I recommend those who are interested in resources for the fight against Moloch to look into her book Governing the Commons, as she devised a set of principles for…

My favorite thing he’s ever wrote. I think the Moloch metaphor is really powerful for thinking about accelerationism and is in fact the metaphor of our age. Look at climate change, student debt, housing, or basically any other issue on which we’re kicking the can down the road and you can see a certain Molochian bargain: we sacrifice our children for sake of the status quo.

> What’s always impressed me about this poem is its conception of civilization as an individual entity. You can almost see him, with his fingers of armies and his skyscraper-window eyes. Ancient Greek had a term for the concept of this kind of entity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore

This was referenced in the recent discussion of ad-blockers. The title isn't terribly informative if you don't already know what the article is about, so I'll explain. Moloch (the name of an ancient Near Eastern god, to whom children were allegedly sacrificed) is used in one of Alan Ginsberg's poems as a metaphor for, well, actually it's not entirely clear, but something responsible for all kinds of societal failures. Scott Alexander (author of the article linked here) riffs off this…