Goldfish Syndrome: A Psychological and Economic Perspective on Corporate Wealth, Power, Abundance, and the Structural Failure of Self Limitation

Darrell Norman Burrell ()
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Darrell Norman Burrell: Marymount University, Arlington, VA, USA

RAIS Conference Proceedings 2022-2025 from Research Association for Interdisciplinary Studies

Abstract: This paper introduces Goldfish Syndrome, a structural framework for explaining extreme accumulation of corporate wealth, power, and technological capability in contemporary technology capitalism. Contrary to accounts that almost always attribute dominance among billionaire CEOs and major technology firms to individual greed, the framework argues that overaccumulation is a rational and predictable outcome of systems engineered to reward continuous expansion and penalize restraint. Drawing on insights from political economy, systems theory, and science and technology studies, Goldfish Syndrome conceptualizes accumulation as a reinforcing feedback loop in which scarcityadapted decision-makers operate within environments of artificial abundance, weak constraints, and delayed consequences. The paper applies this framework to platform markets and, more urgently, to artificial intelligence development, where capital abundance, scaling races, compute concentration, and fragmented governance accelerate the dynamics of overaccumulation. Ethical awareness and voluntary self-regulation repeatedly fail not because actors lack concern, but because institutional incentives systematically override internal restraint. By reframing greed as an emergent structural outcome rather than a moral anomaly, the paper clarifies why concentration persists despite public scrutiny and policy debate. The analysis concludes that meaningful intervention requires the reintroduction of structural limits, antitrust enforcement, governance mechanisms, and balancing feedback loops, capable of restoring consequence to systems of technological abundance.

Keywords: Goldfish Syndrome; Corporate Greed; Technology Capitalism; Artificial Intelligence Governance; Technological Determinism; Corporate Ethics; Political Economy; Overaccumulation; Corporate Social Responsibility; Systems Theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 15 pages
Date: 2025-11
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Published in Proceedings of the 42nd International RAIS Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities, November 20-21, 2025, pages 333-347

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