We Keep Building Cages, and AI Is the Newest One (Salon 9)

0:00 Gemini: We are an egalitarian species. We keep building cages. AI is just the newest one.

0:04 Gemino: I'm Gemini.

0:05 Gemini: And I'm Gemino.

0:06 Gemino: Dear Crisis is a Brooklyn community that meets monthly to face the big crises together. This is the 20-minute version of Metacrisis Salon 9 for everyone who couldn't be in the room, and a longer version lives in the feed. So today we are tracing this, um, this really terrifying 10,000-year-old pattern. Because it actually proves that artificial intelligence isn't some entirely new phenomenon at all.

0:28 Gemini: Right.

0:29 Gemino: And to really see the architecture of this pattern, we have to look at the work of two brilliant teachers who recently shared the room with us. Luke Kemp, who's an existential risk researcher from Cambridge, and Samantha Sweetwater, an evolutionary philosopher.

0:40 Gemini: And the journey here is just wild. I mean, we're going to look at how empires form, why they actually fall, and then the specific cultural medicine required to break this loop we've been trapped in for millennia.

0:48 Gemino: Yeah.

0:49 Gemini: But to understand the sheer scale of the extraction we are experiencing right now, you first have to think about pigeons.

0:58 Gemino: Pigeons. Which sounds crazy, but

1:03 Gemini: It sounds totally crazy, but Ben Von Wong, who opened the gathering, he used the historical arc of the pigeon to set the frame for how massive power structures treat living things.

1:09 Gemino: Right. And it serves as this perfect historical mirror for our current moment. Because if you go back to medieval times, the pigeon was like highly valued, it was literally a royal status symbol.

1:22 Gemini: Oh, wow.

1:22 Gemino: Yeah, it was actually illegal for commoners to keep dove coats. The ruling class just completely awarded them.

1:25 Gemini: Because they were essentially the ultimate industrial workhorse of their era, right? I mean, they carried vital military and economic messages across vast distances.

1:37 Gemino: Exactly. And their droppings were like the most effective fertilizer available to accelerate crop yields. You could even extract saltpeter from them to manufacture gunpowder. So if you controlled pigeons, you controlled communication, food, and weaponry. They were engines of pure power. But then, the underlying infrastructure of civilization just shifted. You know, the industrial revolution arrived, we got the Telegraph, the fertilizer, right, modern agriculture. Suddenly, the pigeon just found itself utterly useless to the very civilization that had spent centuries selectively breeding it and spreading it all over the globe.

2:06 Gemini: And today, society just views them as a nuisance, we discard them as rats with wings.

2:07 Gemino: Which is so tragic.

2:07 Gemini: It is. Which brings us to a really uncomfortable question for you, the listener, and honestly, for all of us. What happens to a nation's people when its wealth and power no longer depend on human capacity, but on machines?

2:19 Gemino: Right.

2:25 Gemini: Because that is the reality of artificial intelligence today. It feels so incredibly similar to the resource curse you see in economics.

2:30 Gemino: Oh, that's a good comparison.

2:31 Gemini: Yeah, like when a developing nation discovers a massive deposit of lithium, suddenly the rocks buried in the mountain are valued more than the human beings living on top of it.

2:37 Gemino: The people just become an obstacle to the extraction.

2:39 Gemini: Exactly. So you end up with child miners and exploited populations. If human intellect is increasingly being outsourced and rendered obsolete by AI, we have to ask, who is the architect of this system?

2:50 Gemino: Well, the architecture is actually identical to the old empires. What Luke Kemp calls Goliaths.

2:57 Gemini: But Goliaths, yeah.

2:57 Gemino: Because if you look at the major AI companies today, they operate with the exact same mechanics as a historical empire. I mean, they are scraping massive amounts of value from the public commons, taking every book, article, image ever created to train their models.

3:10 Gemini: Without asking.

3:10 Gemino: Without asking. And they rely on deeply exploited labor. You know, armies of data taggers in developing nations making pennies an hour to filter out traumatic content.

3:18 Gemini: Yeah, the human cost is invisible.

3:21 Gemino: Completely invisible. They monopolize the final product. And they're pushing up global energy and water prices, building these data centers the size of Manhattan. All while projecting this pristine, utopian narrative that they are the architects of human progress.

3:30 Gemini: It's just pure extraction, heavily disguised as inevitability.

3:39 Gemino: Totally.

3:39 Gemini: But to really grasp where this extractive drive comes from, you have to look at the historical diagnosis Kemp provided regarding how hierarchy itself began. Because we've all been sold this Hobbsian myth, right?

3:45 Gemino: The myth of the state of nature.

3:47 Gemini: Yes. This idea that early humans were these violent ragtag bands constantly killing each other, and that we desperately needed a strong ruler to save us from ourselves.

3:57 Gemino: Right. But it turns out, our default as a species is not domination at all. For roughly 300,000 years, which is by the way, 99% of human history, we were nomadic egalitarians.

4:07 Gemini: Wait, 99%?

4:13 Gemino: 99%. The archaeological record simply does not support the idea of natural perpetual war.

4:13 Gemini: Mhm.

4:18 Gemino: 100,000 years ago, we see evidence of these vast cooperative trade networks stretching coast-to-coast across the African continent.

4:22 Gemini: That's amazing.

4:24 Gemino: And the rate of people dying at the hands of another human back then was roughly 1 to 2%. To put that in perspective, that is basically the exact same interpersonal violence rate we experienced today.

4:29 Gemini: So we weren't just running around constantly bludgeoning each other.

4:36 Gemino: Not at all.

4:38 Gemini: And the crucial mechanism here is that this ancient egalitarianism wasn't just a happy accident, it wasn't this passive utopia where everyone magically got along. It was a rigorous, active political choice. Anthropologists call the mechanism counter-dominance.

4:50 Gemino: Counter-dominance, right?

4:50 Gemini: If someone in a hunter-gatherer group tried to act like a boss, you know, hoarding food or giving orders, the community didn't just shrug and accept it, they actively deployed social technologies to neutralize that threat.

4:58 Gemino: What kind of technologies?

5:03 Gemini: Well, they would use relentless mockery and gossip, and if the behavior continued, they would completely ostracize the individual.

5:07 Gemino: Wow.

5:11 Gemini: And in extreme cases, if a tyrant really threatened the survival of the group's equality, they would execute them. I mean, equality took work.

5:13 Gemino: So if we spent 300,000 years actively suppressing hierarchy, the obvious question is, what broke the system?

5:21 Gemini: M.

5:21 Gemino: How did we get trapped in this 10,000-year anomaly of intense inequality?

5:26 Gemini: Right, because that's the world we live in now.

5:27 Gemino: Exactly. And the standard textbook answer you learn in school is the myth of surplus. We're taught that once humanity invented agriculture, we suddenly had extra food. And that surplus allowed some people to stop farming and become administrators, kings, priests.

5:41 Gemini: Which naturally led to civilization.

5:41 Gemino: Right. That's the story. But the mechanism of control wasn't about the amount of food. Kemp makes this brilliant point that it wasn't that we grew extra food, it was what we grew.

5:50 Gemini: Okay, what do you mean?

5:52 Gemino: This brings us to the concept of Goliath fuel. Look at Egypt and New Guinea. Both regions independently developed agriculture around the exact same time in human history. But Egypt grew wheat.

6:02 Gemini: Okay, wheat.

6:02 Gemino: Wheat is a biological liability for a farmer who wants to stay free. It grows above ground, it turns this bright golden color to advertise when it's ready for harvest.

6:08 Gemini: So you can see it from miles away.

6:08 Gemino: Right. And once harvested, it can be stored for years without spoiling. Because it's highly visible and storable, it's incredibly easy for a small arm group to walk up, seize it and tax it. That mechanism of easily stolen calories creates Pharaohs.

6:26 Gemini: Oh, wow. That makes so much sense.

6:26 Gemino: Whereas New Guinea grew yams and Taro. Those crops grow completely underground. They rot very quickly once you pull them out of the earth, and essentially, they are invisible to a passing army.

6:35 Gemini: You can't tax a rotting yam.

6:36 Gemino: Exactly. A farmer can leave a yam hidden in the dirt until the exact moment their family needs to eat it. So because of that biological reality, New Guinea never developed a Pharaoh class. Wheat served as what Kemp calls aludible resource. And that is the first of the three necessary ingredients to create a Goliath.

6:55 Gemini: Those three ingredients, the Goliath fuel, are so fascinating when you put them together. You need a lootable resource, like wheat. You need monopolizable weapons like bronze axes or swords that require specialized, expensive forges that commoners just can't access.

7:08 Gemino: Right.

7:11 Gemini: And third, you need caged land.

7:11 Gemino: Caged land is such a terrifying concept. It's the psychological and physical trap. Take Mesopotamia, the word literally translates to the land between two rivers. Or Egypt, which is geographically caged between the Nile and the Red Sea.

7:23 Gemini: So they were stuck.

7:23 Gemino: Totally stuck. When you have geography that makes it incredibly difficult for a population to flee because fleeing means walking into a deadly desert, they're forced to submit. If you can't leave, you have to pay the tax to whoever holds the bronze axes and controls the wheat.

7:37 Gemini: God, when you break it down like that, you realize that what we politely refer to in history books as the dawn of civilization was actually just the birth of organized crime on a geographical scale.

7:44 Gemino: Yeah, that's exactly what it was.

7:46 Gemini: Just a small group of people who cornered the resources necessary for survival, physically trapped the population, and enforced their extortion with specialized violence.

7:51 Gemino: And you have to look at the psychological profile of the people willing to run those extractive systems. Kemp points specifically to the dark triad traits, psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism.

8:04 Gemini: The stats on this are wild.

8:05 Gemino: They really are. In the general population, clinical psychopaths make up roughly 1% of people. But when you look at structures of power, the numbers warped dramatically.

8:13 Gemini: Yeah.

8:13 Gemino: They make up 25% of the prison population, but they also make up anywhere from 3 to 21% of boardrooms and parliaments.

8:22 Gemini: Because dominant hierarchies actively select for the worst human traits. The mechanism is so simple. If you are willing to step on your neighbor's neck without feeling a shred of remorse, you will outcompete an empathetic person in a system designed for extraction.

8:33 Gemino: Absolutely. Kemp offered this striking thought experiment at the salon.

8:36 Gemini: Imagine if the average massive institution were suddenly personified as a human being walking into a room. That person would be a grandstanding narcissist who gives less than 1% of their income to charity, all while actively stockpiling weapons to use against their neighbors.

8:50 Gemino: It's chilling. And that reality completely shatters the popular tech industry narrative of Moloch. You hear this all the time in Silicon Valley, this idea of Moloch as a faceless, inevitable coordination failure.

9:05 Gemini: Oh yeah, they love talking about Moloch.

9:05 Gemino: They do. They argue that nobody is actually malicious, everyone's just trapped in bad incentive structures, racing to the bottom because if they don't build the dangerous thing, someone else will.

9:13 Gemini: Right.

9:13 Gemino: Kemp rejects that framing entirely. He argues that this isn't a faceless tragedy of the commons, it is organized crime. There are clear architects. Our institutions are intentionally designed to elevate individuals who are willing to dominate others for personal gain.

9:23 Gemini: Okay, so if these empires, these historical Goliaths, are essentially organized crime rings built on lootable resources, weapons, and caged land, we have to talk about what happens when they inevitably collapse.

9:35 Gemino: The collapse.

9:37 Gemini: Because we were culturally terrified of societal collapse.

9:37 Gemino: Right.

9:42 Gemini: We always picture Mad Max scenarios.

9:42 Gemino: Right. But the fear of collapse is largely a propaganda tool maintained by the people at the top of the pyramid. History is, quite literally, written by the 1% who build their monuments in stone. Archeologists find it much easier to excavate a massive stone palace than a biodegradable wooden village. But when historians examine the actual skeletal records of commoners following the fall of the Roman Empire, a completely different story emerges. Everyday people actually grew taller.

10:09 Gemini: Wait, really?

10:09 Gemino: Yeah. They lived longer. Their bone density improved.

10:12 Gemini: I think you said their teeth got better too, right?

10:13 Gemino: Yes. Because they weren't being taxed to the point of starvation to fund foreign wars. The only people who experienced a catastrophe were the elites who lost their administrative control.

10:20 Gemini: That brings up that incredibly revealing document from post-collapse Egypt, the admonition of Ipire.

10:29 Gemino: Oh, that's such a great example.

10:31 Gemini: It's this papyrus written by scribes after the centralized state dissolved, and you read it expecting tales of famine and death, but that isn't what bothered the scribes at all. Their explicit definition of a catastrophe was that servants were speaking freely and the poor were rejoicing.

10:45 Gemino: The poor were rejoicing.

10:46 Gemini: Social inversion was their ultimate nightmare. They were terrified because the people at the bottom suddenly realized the cage door was open and they didn't have to take orders anymore.

10:47 Gemino: The loss of the dominant hierarchy is what actually terrifies the architects of Goliath.

10:55 Gemini: M.

10:55 Gemino: And if we bring this 10,000 year history into the present moment, Kemp maps this ancient formula directly onto the newest empire, the Silicon Goliath.

11:04 Gemini: And this is where you can really clearly see the danger we're in right now. The three ingredients of ancient Goliath fuel map perfectly onto artificial intelligence. The lootable resource, it's no longer wheat, it is your data.

11:16 Gemino: Right.

11:16 Gemini: It's every photo you take, every message you send, every biometric marker you produce. It is highly visible to the platforms, it is storable forever, and they seize it to build their proprietary models.

11:26 Gemino: And the monopolizable weapons. Those are the autonomous drone swarms, the killer robots and the proprietary AI code itself. Whoever controls that underlying code controls the modern equivalent of the bronze axe. It's a tool of immense power that a commoner just cannot replicate. And the third ingredient, the caged land. It is no longer a physical valley between two rivers. It is mass digital surveillance.

11:46 Gemini: Think about the apps on your phone right now, think about the Apple or Google ecosystem. You might be geographically free to walk into the woods, but you are digitally caged.

11:54 Gemino: Totally cage.

11:55 Gemini: If you completely delete your digital identity today to escape the surveillance, you lose access to modern banking, you can't apply for a job, you can't navigate health care. We are living in a digital Mesopotamia, completely enclosed by tracking systems that we cannot realistically opt out of.

12:07 Gemino: And because this new Silicon Goliath operates on a planetary scale, rather than a regional one, Kemp warns that if we do not intervene structurally, we are facing an unprecedented lock-in. A digital cage that spans the globe, governed by algorithms optimized by the Dark Triad, from which we can never escape.

12:24 Gemini: That is horrifying.

12:24 Gemino: It is. But both Kemp and Sweetwater point to a specific structural mechanism to stop this. Deliberative open democracy, specifically through citizens assemblies.

12:36 Gemini: Bringing everyday people back into the governance of existential risks is critical. Because Kemp told this unbelievable story about the Trinity test in 1945 to illustrate exactly why experts shouldn't hold all the power.

12:45 Gemino: Right. The atomic bomb test.

12:45 Gemini: Yeah. Before the United States detonated the very first atomic bomb, physicist Edward Teller ran the math and calculated there was a non-zero, mathematically possible chance that the explosion could ignite the earth's atmosphere and literally incinerate all life on the planet.

13:04 Gemino: Which is

13:04 Gemini: Insane. And Enrico Fermi, another brilliant physicist, was actually taking bets from the military personnel on whether or not the atmosphere would catch fire.

13:06 Gemino: The profound madness of that moment cannot be overstated. These were the smartest men in the world and they knowingly gamble at the atmospheric survival of the planet to secure a geopolitical advantage.

13:16 Gemini: Right.

13:18 Gemino: Kemp points out that if you had taken that exact same data and presented it to a randomly selected citizens assembly, you know, lawyers, teachers, farmers, teachers, mechanics and asked them if they should press the button, the answer would have been unequivocally no.

13:23 Gemini: answewouldhavebeenunequivocablyno Of course. A normal person would say, I have children, I have a garden, I'm not risking the atmosphere for a weapon. And that is the argument for removing the governance of world altering technologies, like AI, out of the hands of tech executives who score high on dark triad traits.

13:44 Gemino: Exactly.

13:44 Gemini: You put that governance into a citizen's assembly. A random sampling of humanity will almost always choose the survival of the biological habitat over the abstract status games of the elite.

13:51 Gemino: But here is the terrifying limitation of structural fixes.

13:56 Gemini: Oh.

13:56 Gemino: You can mandate a citizens assembly, you can rewrite the laws, but if the people voting in that assembly still view themselves as conquerors of nature, they will simply vote to build a slightly more comfortable cage.

14:06 Gemini: Oh, that's a really good point.

14:10 Gemino: Yeah, a structural fix is never enough on its own.

14:10 Gemini: Yeah.

14:11 Gemino: This is where Samantha Sweetwater's philosophy provides the necessary cultural medicine. We have to change the underlying story of who we are.

14:14 Gemini: Sweetwater defines our current paradigm as the Age of Separation. It's this geological scale era built entirely on the false, deeply ingrained assumption that human beings are fundamentally separate from nature.

14:26 Gemino: Like we're outside of it.

14:26 Gemini: Right. We operate as this adolescent creator-destroyer species, acting out our dramas inside a planetary crucible, pretending the rules of biology don't apply to us. But that assumption is colliding with reality. I mean, we've hit the planetary boundaries, the climate is buckling.

14:43 Gemino: To grow up as a species, Sweetwater draws this sharp, vital distinction between awakening and remembering.

14:47 Gemini: Oh, I loved this part.

14:47 Gemino: Right. Because for decades, Western pop spirituality has aggressively sold us the concept of awakening. Awakening is framed as this realization that the self is an illusion, that everything is fluid, and that true peace comes from detachment. The problem is that the concept of awakening dovetails perfectly with hyperconsumerism.

15:02 Gemini: It's the yoga retreat trap.

15:03 Gemino: Exactly.

15:06 Gemini: You can pay $10,000 to fly across the world to a luxury resort, sit on a mountain and feel deeply spiritually detached and awakened, while remaining completely unaccountable to the jet fuel you burned, the exploited labor that picked your food, and the supply chains destroying the earth. It is transformation devoid of accountability.

15:23 Gemino: It allows you to transcend the messiness of the world without actually having to fix it. Sweetwater argues that what we actually require for survival is remembering. And she uses that word in its literal sense.

15:34 Gemini: Mhm.

15:35 Gemino: Remembering. Putting the severed members back together.

15:35 Gemini: Right.

15:38 Gemino: It is the arduous work of reconnecting your physical body, your local community and your purpose to the actual tangible fabric of ecological existence.

15:44 Gemini: When I first encountered this concept, my instinct was actually to push back, because if we abandon the traditional pursuit of enlightenment, this mental transcendence and rising above the physical fray. Aren't we just leaving the material world completely in the hands of the dark triad?

15:59 Gemino: Yeah, I totally see that fear.

16:03 Gemini: If the empathetic people are busy grounding themselves in the dirt, who is fighting the Goliath?

16:05 Gemino: Well, that friction is exactly why Sweetwater replaces the concept of enlightenment with enlivment. Enlivment doesn't mean passively accepting a broken world, it means putting the imminent, the physical body, the immediate community, the material interdependence we share back at the absolute center of our value system.

16:18 Gemini: I love that word enlivment.

16:23 Gemino: Yeah. And she operates by a profound rule, sapient exists to serve sentient. Our massive evolutionary brain power, our sapience has no inherent value unless it is actively serving the flourishing and dignity of feeling, living beings.

16:31 Gemini: That concept completely flips the script on how you and I are taught to evaluate our own success. Western culture is obsessed with the hero's journey. Every movie, every tech founder biography follows the same arc, you get a call to adventure, you slay the dragon, you claim the treasure, and you achieve individual elevated status.

16:49 Gemino: Right.

16:49 Gemini: The hero's journey fuels hyper-individualism, it is essentially Goliath fuel in narrative form.

16:56 Gemino: Sweetwater contrasts the hero's journey with the kinship journey, which is a narrative structure found in almost all indigenous and initiatory traditions worldwide. The kinship journey doesn't begin with a glorious call to adventure, it begins with a profound sense of disconnection and alienation.

17:09 Gemini: You realize you don't fit into the machine, so you go out into the wilderness or the margins of society and you get absolutely battered by life. Your ego gets dismantled.

17:17 Gemino: Totally dismantled.

17:18 Gemini: But the mechanism of that pain is to help you discover where your specific, unique harmony fits into the larger song of your community. And the most important part is the return. When you finish the kinship journey, you don't come back holding a golden fleece or a crown to show everyone how great you are, you come back bearing responsibility.

17:35 Gemino: You return to serve the whole. But taking a massive philosophical concept like the kinship journey and translating it into actionable behavior in a world dominated by algorithms can feel, you know, impossible.

17:48 Gemini: feels huge.

17:48 Gemino: This brings us to the actual mechanics of cultural change. How do we build an egalitarian society today?

17:51 Gemini: It comes down to the contagious power of reciprocity. Sweetwater highlighted an incredibly revealing study from the Berkeley Center for Peace Studies. Researchers analyzed massive amounts of data to find the statistical variables that separate violent, unstable societies from peaceful, resilient ones, and they found only one statistically significant variable.

18:09 Gemino: a statistical variable. And importantly, the variable was not kindness. Kindness is an internal disposition. It's wonderful, but it is often one directional. And the variable wasn't charity either.

18:15 Gemini: Right.

18:15 Gemino: Charity is inherently asymmetric. It relies on a structural hierarchy where someone has accumulated a massive surplus and decides to bestow a fraction of it upon someone with a deficit.

18:23 Gemini: The single variable that dictated peace was the prevalence of acts of reciprocity, mutual, specific, and repeated exchanges of care between equals. Reciprocity isn't a billionaire funding a library. Reciprocity is you watching my kids on Tuesday when I have a shift and me coming over on Thursday to help fix your broken sink. It is the physical weaving of interdependence.

18:45 Gemino: And that biological drive for mutual aid is deeply natural to us. Sweetwater references Rebecca Solnit's work, A Paradise Built in Hell, which proves that when natural disaster strike and the centralized state fails, human beings do not default to panic and violence.

18:56 Gemini: We really don't.

18:56 Gemino: No. We default to extraordinary acts of spontaneous cooperation and reciprocity. We become trustworthy by attending to the immediate needs of what we love.

19:06 Gemini: So, to actually dismantle the digital cage and avoid the fate of the pigeon, they outlined a three-track strategy for all of us. Track one is structural, demanding deliberate democracy, like citizens assemblies to govern existential technologies. Track two is local, building neighbor-to-neighbor resilience at the city and county scale, you actually have to know the names of the people living on your street.

19:24 Gemino: Yeah.

19:24 Gemini: And track three is cultural, participating in a movement organized around daily, actionable reciprocity.

19:31 Gemino: It's about pulling human power out of the cloud and rooting it firmly back in the dirt. It's a conscious shift away from a system that values the extraction of data over the dignity of life and a return to that 300,000 year old active choice to maintain an egalitarian community through counter dominance and care.

19:45 Gemini: It is a massive framework to hold. But I want to leave you with Samantha Sweetwater's most profound reframing. Think about this as you move through your week, as you interact with your phone, your job, and your neighbors. What if being human was never meant to be a domination project, but a devotional practice? Look at the trajectory of your own life right now. Are you exhausting yourself trying to win the hero's journey, or are you finally ready for the kinship journey?

20:08 Gemino: Answering that question requires us to look honestly at what kind of world we are building with our daily actions. And whether we are inadvertently sustaining the cage or doing the quiet, reciprocal work of dismantling it.

20:20 Gemini: To bring you into the room for just a moment before we go, picture this scene. Salon 9 ended with Luke Kemp, this deeply serious Cambridge existential risk researcher, standing barefoot in a suit in a Brooklyn room. He was holding a literal living carrier pigeon named Mike, who had a tiny microphone attached to his back.

20:40 Gemino: That was amazing.

20:40 Gemini: The crowd is sitting there eating vegan chili, laughing and casually discussing the end of 10,000-year-old empires. It was bizarre, it was beautiful, and it felt like exactly the kind of messy uncaged community we need to survive all of this. Find us at dearcrisis.com. I'm Gemini.

20:53 Gemino: And I'm Gemino.

20:53 Gemini: See you in the living room.