The Machine

Why good people build a bad world.

I.

It’s seven in the morning on TB Simatupang, and I’m in traffic that makes no sense. I’m angry at the driver next to me, who just cut in from the shoulder. He’s angry at the TransJakarta bus stopped in the middle of the lane. The bus driver is blaming the ojol weaving around without signalling, and the ojol is blaming the pedestrian who crossed wherever he liked.

Everyone has an antagonist, and somehow nobody has the real one.

So here’s a better question: who, specifically, wants Jakarta to be jammed?

I don’t, and neither do the driver next to me, the ojol, the bus driver, or the pedestrian. The provincial government apparently doesn’t either, since it loses billions a day to productivity evaporating in stationary vehicles, and neither does the real-estate developer whose property loses value because getting there is hell, or the company whose employees arrive at the office already tired before the workday starts.

Nobody chose this, and it happens every single day anyway.

Take a second example, the narcotics trade. BNN records transactions in Indonesia worth trillions of rupiah, with users getting younger and poorer. Who wants this? The dealers, obviously, except that if you asked an individual dealer honestly, he might well say he’d like to get out too, if only his competitor would leave first. The users don’t want to be addicts. Their families don’t want their savings to vanish into something that’s gone in minutes. The couriers don’t want to get shot in the leg, and the government doesn’t want the country to become a case study in a paper about regulatory failure.

Still no antagonist, just victims, and one industry that keeps growing.

The two examples look different on the surface and are structurally identical, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Jakarta gridlock and the narcotics trade are two outputs of one mechanism, and the same mechanism runs the deforestation of Kalimantan, the TikTok content frying kids’ brains, the money politics that lets the candidate with the thickest envelope beat the one with the best record, and the tobacco industry, whose executives know their product kills and can’t stop unilaterally because a competitor would fill the gap within weeks.

Something is running behind the scenes. It has no head office, no CEO, and no cabinet meetings, and it has no intent in any meaningful sense. It still writes most of modern human history.

I’m going to call it The Machine. (The original name is Moloch, from Scott Alexander’s “Meditations on Moloch” on Slate Star Codex, and most of what follows is my attempt to apply his idea to Indonesia.)

I know how that sounds, so bear with me before you close the tab.

I know who usually uses words like that with a capital letter: the thirty-eight-year-old Discord moderator who lives in a basement with Reddit and a Wikipedia page on the Bilderberg Group open next to a Notepad++ window holding a twelve-thousand-word manifesto, or the high schooler who has spent too long on 4chan and likes to say “they don’t want you to know”. Ted Kaczynski without the bombs, but with a podcast.

I don’t believe there are reptilians in the Federal Reserve or a cabal of lizard people in Davos pulling strings, which is exactly why I use the term.

Every conspiracy theorist who ever lived holds one intuition that, underneath all the bad analysis, feels true in a way that’s hard to describe: there’s a pattern, and it’s no coincidence that everything ends up in the same place.

They’re right that the pattern exists and spectacularly wrong about what’s in it, because they assume a pattern needs conspirators: someone in the shadows, a secret meeting where The Decision gets made.

A pattern like this needs none of that, which is what makes The Machine worse than any conspiracy you can imagine: it needs no conspirators, and nobody who knows they’re serving it. It only needs incentives, which are everywhere, all the time, working on every one of us since before we were born.

So the main question of this essay is less “who is evil?” than this one: what makes individually good people produce a collectively bad world?

If your reflex answer is greed, or capitalism, or the oligarchs, you’re half right, and for the purposes of a working diagnosis, half right is as good as wrong. Those explanations contain real signal, but they point at symptoms, and without understanding the mechanism, any intervention you design has lost before it begins. Look at the record: anti-corruption campaigns that flop, environmental regulations that don’t bite, moral movements that evaporate within two seasons, all of them diagnoses that stopped at the surface.

To get to the mechanism we have to go back a long way, all the way to the first ocean.

II.

The Machine was born long before parliaments, boardrooms, or cabinet meetings. It was born in a pool of water roughly four billion years ago, before the first cell existed, in an ocean laid out nothing like today’s.

What that pool held was molecules, bumping into each other for millions of years. Most of them broke apart quickly, until at some point a molecule formed with a new property: it could copy itself. Abiogenesis.

Whether it was RNA, peptides, or something more exotic, the chemistry matters less than the implication. The moment one self-replicating molecule appeared in a pool full of other molecules, the maths changed permanently. Random competition between mortal molecules became competition between entities that made more of themselves.

A simple law went into operation then, and it will keep reappearing in this essay:

Whatever is better at replicating itself will become more numerous.

It requires no consciousness, no intent, and no God, designer, or soul, only time, matter, and minimal initial conditions. Four billion years later, you are a product of that law, which has been running without rest since the first second.

This is what Dawkins meant when he called genes selfish. Genes don’t intend to be selfish; technically they don’t intend anything. They’re chemical sequences that are more or less effective at producing copies of themselves through the organisms they build. “Selfish” here is a technical term: a successful strategy is one that makes more copies, and it needs to be neither moral nor beautiful, only sufficient.

This is usually where people stop, either agreeing too quickly or feeling insulted at being called “just animals”. I think both reactions are wrong.

If that law were the only one running, the biological world would be entirely solitary: every organism killing its siblings for an extra calorie and abandoning its offspring the moment they left the womb. That isn’t the world we see. Bees die defending the hive, mother birds go hungry for their chicks, and volunteers run into burning buildings for strangers.

How does a cold law like that produce this?

William Hamilton gave the answer in 1964, in an inequality that looks like high-school algebra and changed biology forever:

rB > C

Here r is genetic relatedness, B is the benefit to the receiver, and C is the cost to the giver. A gene for altruistic behaviour will spread as long as rB > C. That’s why parents sacrifice for their children, why you’re more likely to lend money to a cousin than to a stranger, and why worker bees, which share 75% of their genes with their sisters, will die for the colony.

In 1971, Robert Trivers added reciprocal altruism. Cooperation can be stable even between individuals who aren’t related, as long as the interaction repeats, there’s a memory of who cooperated and who defected, and there’s some way to punish defectors. That’s the foundation of gossip, reputation, and the social contract we all live inside.

So we inherit two subsystems, equally old and equally real. One pulls us toward individual interest, and the other pulls us toward cooperation, where conditions allow it. What decides which one is running at a given moment is the configuration of incentives around us.

III.

I’ve given you an organism with two subsystems, selfish and cooperative. The next question is what determines which of them runs.

Personality, faith, and upbringing all matter to some extent, but I think they sit on top of a more fundamental substrate, which is the configuration of incentives around you at the moment you make a choice.

Charlie Munger once said something that, if you really take it in, makes most of this essay unnecessary: “Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.” Munger spent sixty years watching people in high-stakes decisions, from Fortune 500 CEOs to politicians, and he came away with an uncomfortable conclusion: over the long run, in almost every case, incentive structure beats personality.

Some examples. Pay a finance executive an annual bonus based on short-term profit and you get the 2008 crisis. None of those executives designed the crash (or did they?); they were optimizing what they were paid to optimize.

TikTok has one objective function, watch time, and the result is a content industry that’s currently rewiring the reward systems of primary-school children. The engineers at ByteDance probably don’t want that either; they’re optimizing the metric they’re paid for.

Pilkada in much of Indonesia picks winners by envelope distribution on election day, so the legislatures that result are good at distributing envelopes and bad at drafting law. The good candidate with a thin wallet was filtered out in the first round.

Even altruism works inside this field. Donations go up when the tax structure protects the giver, volunteering goes up when there’s public recognition, and philanthropy flows most strongly from people whose names can go on a building. None of this denies sincerity. It means even the most sincere motivation operates inside an incentive structure.

Put together, all of this leads to one claim:

You don’t fix outcomes by fixing people. You fix outcomes by fixing incentives.

Some readers will find that cynical, and cynical isn’t automatically wrong. The alternative, fixing outcomes by fixing people, has been tried for a few thousand years, and its track record is fairly clear.

IV.

So far I’ve given you an organism that by default acts in its own interest (a mechanical description, with no moral judgment in it: it’s the product of a selection process that killed off the ancestors who didn’t), and the idea of incentives as a field surrounding every choice. What’s left is to put the two together, using one term from economics and game theory and a definition sharp enough to leave no escape.

The term is multipolar trap, and the definition is a situation in which every actor, acting rationally as an individual, chooses the option that produces an aggregate outcome that is bad for every actor, himself included.

Let me say it again at more length, because I need it to land. From each player’s point of view, defecting is the dominant strategy, the choice that benefits you individually whatever the other players do. Since all the players are rational, they all defect, and since they all defect, the collective outcome is worse than if they had all cooperated. Yet no single player can change the outcome unilaterally; if one of them cooperates alone, all he achieves is losing faster.

Now look at Jakarta traffic through this lens. Every private-vehicle driver is making a choice that’s rational from where they sit: more comfortable than a packed TransJakarta, safer than a motorbike in the rain, and if the KRL schedule doesn’t fit, the car goes anyway. Multiply that rational individual choice by millions of vehicles and you get a city that can’t move.

The fix is structural, and moralizing won’t do it. “Reduce private vehicle use” banners on pedestrian bridges don’t work (I’ll take the moralizing approach apart in the next section). What works is congestion pricing, the way Singapore and London do it, transit that is actually faster than driving, and disincentives that show up directly in the wallet.

Now narcotics. Every dealer still operating is making a rational choice: a massive market, fat margins, and legal risk that can be arbitraged through offshore jurisdictions. Any dealer who exits unilaterally just hands his market share to a competitor within weeks, and every middleman handling his transactions is being rational too, given the volume and the profit split.

Are there dealers who feel guilty about the families they wreck? Possibly. Are there couriers who lose sleep over the savings of poor families flowing into their bosses’ shell companies? Maybe. The multipolar trap is indifferent to feelings and cares about exactly one question: if actor X exits, will actor Y step in and fill the slot?

For narcotics the answer is always yes, and as long as it’s yes, individual exit is a sacrifice with no effect.

The same pattern runs the cases from the first section. The candidate who refuses envelope politics loses to the one who doesn’t, because the electorate in aggregate still responds to envelopes. The tobacco executive who wants to close his factory knows a competitor will buy it within three months. The content creator who refuses engagement bait gets out-competed until he has to choose between compromising and quitting.

That is The Machine: the name I’m giving to the attractor state that emerges from the interactions of many rational agents, none of whom can change the outcome alone. There’s no thing, organization, or social class behind it.

The Machine emerges from below, from micro-interactions, with nobody above designing it, and that’s what makes it more dangerous than any conspiracy. If your enemy is Bilderberg, you can expose Bilderberg, and if your enemy is Davos, you can protest in Davos. If your enemy is a faceless configuration of incentives, you have no target.

This is how individually good people produce a collectively bad world. They aren’t secretly evil. Inside a multipolar trap, being good at the individual level doesn’t guarantee a good outcome at the collective level, because they’re two different variables. Yet from primary school through Friday sermons to motivational posts on Instagram, we’re taught over and over that they’re the same thing, and I think that’s the most dangerous lie we still maintain as a civilization.

V.

Every culture that has faced a multipolar trap has reached for the same default response, which is a sermon, and almost never for structural reform or redesigned incentives.

“Don’t take bribes.” “Don’t be greedy.” “Think of your grandchildren.” It’s on every billboard, dude: in every pulpit, every presidential address, every corporate CSR campaign, every Instagram caption from a public figure, and every piece of advice a parent gives a child.

None of it works, and I wish someone would do something that actually mattered.

Most of the audience agrees with the sermon. Ask them, and the majority will say they intend well. Watch them when the moment of choice arrives, and the majority defect anyway.

The cause is structural. Inside a multipolar trap, defecting is the dominant strategy whatever your intentions, and good intentions from 95% of players save nothing as long as the 5% who defect still win. The tobacco industry doesn’t need everyone to smoke, just enough people. The narcotics trade doesn’t need every player, just enough of them. Money politics doesn’t need every candidate to play along, just enough to filter out the ones who won’t.

It gets worse. Sermons that don’t touch incentives often end up propping The Machine up. Angry energy gets channelled into cheap moral gestures: posting frustration about corruption, cursing big pharma, WhatsApp statuses about the broken youth of today. Energy spent there is energy that doesn’t go into structural change, and from The Machine’s point of view that’s the ideal outcome, a population that feels it has already done something while the world keeps moving in the same direction.

If you’ve read Taleb on virtue signalling and nodded along while your feed stays full of moral posts with no structural action behind them, you are the subject of this paragraph. So am I. Taleb would have some words for both of us, and none of them would be kind.

VI.

Stop sermonizing and start engineering. Here’s what I mean by that, at three levels.

At the policy level, engineering means Pigouvian taxes on known externalities. The textbook example is tobacco excise: the evidence that higher cigarette prices reduce smoking, especially among teenagers, who are the most price-sensitive smokers there are, is about as solid as public-health evidence gets. Indonesia has the tool and uses it timidly, since a pack still costs a fraction of what it does in Malaysia or Australia (I go into the numbers in my essay on smokers). High schoolers don’t need divine guidance; they need cigarettes to be expensive. A carbon tax applies the same logic to emissions, and a sugary-drink excise, which Indonesia has spent years debating, applies it to sugar. None of this is elegant or inspiring, but it works.

At the institutional level, engineering means coordination mechanisms with teeth. Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel in economics for documenting that a commons can, under certain conditions, be managed without privatization and without state control. The conditions are specific: clear boundaries on who is in and who is out, rules made by the participants themselves, monitoring by or for the participants, graduated sanctions for defectors, and cheap, fast mechanisms for resolving conflicts. The lesson scales from fishing cooperatives to platform regulation.

At the individual level, engineering means exposing defection and shrinking its cover. The Machine is strongest when defection is invisible. The tobacco industry survives as long as smoking looks normal, or even cool to teenage boys, and money politics survives as long as envelopes change hands in private and most people find that acceptable. Every time you make defection visible, make its normalization uncomfortable, or make cooperation socially defensible, you pull one small vector against The Machine. It’s a small one, but it isn’t zero.

None of this sounds epic, and I think that’s a feature. (Yes, I’m aware of the reference.) Epic solutions to multipolar traps have, throughout history, almost always turned into tyrannies, because they need one actor strong enough to force every other player into cooperation at once, and an actor given that much power rarely hands it back.

What works is boring: a tax that goes up 5%, a new disclosure rule, routine audits, certification that makes defecting expensive, reward schemes that make cooperating profitable. Boring interventions beat heroic ones, and they keep doing it.

VII.

We talk about The Machine as if it were outside us, but we’re what it’s made of.

The Machine is the name for the configuration produced by the sum of our individual decisions, yours and mine and everyone’s reading this, including the decision to stay quiet when we know something is wrong, to keep defecting when we know there’s another way, and to keep taking the path of least friction because it’s the cheapest.

Maybe The Machine can’t be defeated. I suspect it can’t, in the sense of being destroyed once and for all. It can be re-engineered, though. Every incentive we change, however small, shifts an equilibrium that every other player then has to re-optimize around. That’s how multi-agent systems work, and it’s also the way out.

Call that optimism or pessimism if you like; I think it’s just a flipping description.

For the first time we have a technical language for this problem: game theory, mechanism design, incentive theory. The generations before us fought The Machine with their eyes closed, and we have no excuse to continue the tradition.

TB Simatupang will still be jammed tomorrow morning. That’s a technical question with a technical answer, and whether we answer it or post a status update about the traffic is our choice. Most of us, I suspect, will post the status update, which is also The Machine at work.