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Goliath’s curse: The history and future of societal collapse
Event Information
As humans congregated in the first farms and cities, inequality in resources quickly tipped over into inequality in power. We started to adopt more primal, hierarchical forms of organization. Goliath-like states and empires — with vast bureaucracies and militaries — carved up and dominated the globe.
What brought them down? Increasing inequality and concentrations of power, says Luke Kemp, research associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge.
According to Kemp, we now we live in a single global Goliath. Join us for this book talk, presented by BESI Climate, as Kemp explores the ways growth-obsessed, extractive institutions like the fossil fuel industry, big tech, and military-industrial complexes rule our world and produce new ways of annihilating our species, from climate change to nuclear war.
About the speaker
Luke Kemp is a research associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge. He has a background in human geography, international relations and economics, all of which he tutored or lectured in at the Australian National University (ANU). His research has been covered by media outlets such as The New York Times, BBC, and The New Yorker.