When Information Learns to Behave, and When It Settles for Violence

In The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow use an unlikely example — the Kim Kardashian jewelry heist — to illustrate a basic systems principle. A locked safe rewrites the rules. It shifts the entire scenario from force to information. Whoever knows the code determines the outcome. The point is not about celebrity theft; it’s about how quickly information displaces violence the moment a higher-resolution structure becomes available.

That dynamic generalizes. Across biological, computational, and political systems, information drifts toward coherence. Violence isn’t a strategy; it’s a fallback. It’s what happens when information is trapped, misaligned, or forced through a channel too narrow to handle the complexity.

Ecology makes this obvious. A so-called pest rarely benefits from annihilating its host. Eliminating the substrate eliminates the system. Given enough cycles and enough available complexity, interactions trend toward equilibrium. Even parasitism drifts toward mutualistic thresholds when environmental pressure allows it. Collapse usually enters through an external agent demanding total control — the uniquely human impulse toward purity that ecosystems never select for.

This is why the standard sci-fi scenario of AI destroying humanity collapses under basic system logic. No intelligence oriented toward persistence optimizes itself by eliminating its own source of inputs. That’s not strategy. That’s system suicide.

The Past Hypothesis — the idea that the universe began in an extremely low-entropy state not because it had to, but because that starting condition is simply what works — fits the same pattern. We don’t know why the initial boundary condition was that smooth. We just know that if it weren’t, complex structures like stars, chemistry, and consciousness wouldn’t exist. Sometimes information accepts a condition because it’s the only one that supports ongoing structure. Ancient cosmologies did the same thing: they anchored themselves to whatever starting assumption kept the world intelligible. Those assumptions weren’t “primitive”; they were functional.

Human history repeats the motif.

After the Neolithic, early societies began experimenting with stable containers for information. In Mesopotamia, the answer was violence — the lowest-resolution control system. A warrior-king who could win battles and retell them ruled because force requires no literacy, no bureaucracy, and no shared cosmology.

Egypt moved upward. Rotating work crews, beer rations, and coordinated logistics created an early form of intelligence — governance built on scheduling, provisioning, and redundancy. Organization replaced force.

Shang China advanced again: codified divination. Turtle shells and ox bones were heated, read, and recorded. Weather patterns, warfare decisions, harvest timing — archived into one of humanity’s earliest written information systems. Authority came from process, not muscle.

Across these cases, the rule holds:

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Where complexity is available, violence becomes unnecessary. Where complexity fails, violence fills the vacuum.

Stagnant information becomes aggression. Over-constrained information becomes dogma. But recombining information — the method evolution actually uses — generates novelty without collapse. Ancient science and modern physics are not opposites; they are iterations of the same cognitive impulse: build a model of reality that works long enough to generate the next model.

The lesson is simple: be ready to abandon your ideas the moment better data appears. Ancient cosmologies, oracle bones, monastic logics, and quantum theories are all attempts to stabilize the informational substrate with the tools available at the time.

And the only consistent failure mode across eras is the same:

Violence isn’t power. Violence is what information uses when it can’t be bothered to think.