By Todd Davis
No matter what we do, we can’t get anywhere. You hear this a lot today. Among friends, co-workers, your children. On social media, it’s a constant theme. Today, it’s an argument over spending $28 on lunch versus brown-bagging it. Tomorrow, it will be about how women can’t find good men regardless of how many times they go to the gym or how successful they are in their careers. People, it seems, have become like ducks kicking their legs furiously beneath the surface only to find that they can barely keep up with the other ducks.
It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.
That’s the Red Queen, from Alice in Wonderland. That quote put her name on an evolutionary theory developed in 1973 by biologist Leigh Van Valen. The core of this idea is that the risk of a group simply vanishing, falling into extinction, doesn’t change much as time goes on. Every species is forced into a relentless cycle of adaptation, evolution, and proliferation. Not to secure some ultimate advantage, but merely to avoid being left behind as their rivals evolve alongside them.
Once Red Queen theory gets into your brain, you tend to see it everywhere. From the mundane to the monumental. Cell phone plans? Red Queen theory. Influencer economy? Red Queen theory. Streaming wars? Red Queen theory. Real kinetic wars? Red Queen theory.
Red Queen theory rather perfectly describes the drone and electronic warfare dynamics between Russia and Ukraine. Neither side can secure a permanent technological edge because every tactical breakthrough triggers an immediate countermeasure.
Traditional military advances take place over years, even decades. Think of tank models, American in this case, going from the M4 Sherman, to the M26 Pershing, to the M46, 47, and 60 Pattons through the M1 Abrams of today. That’s an evolution of 84 years of armored warfare. Compare that to drone tech in Ukraine, which evolves in a matter of weeks. Sometimes days.
Across the invisible battlefields of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Red Queen theory is playing out in real-time. Standard radio-controlled drones, once the kings of the sky, are now being swatted down by sophisticated electronic warfare jamming as fast as they can be launched. To keep from falling behind, both sides have been forced into a desperate pivot, ditching radio waves for fiber-optic tethers that are physically impossible to jam. It’s an evolutionary leap born of necessity. And it hasn’t stopped there. Terminal AI guidance has entered the fray, allowing these machines to operate on their own. If the link to the pilot is severed by the electromagnetic fog of war, onboard machine learning algorithms take over in a heartbeat, hunting and striking targets with a cold, autonomous precision.
A comprehensive study on drone warfare in the war by the Center for a New American Society concluded that drones have failed to give either Ukraine or Russia a decisive strategic edge, precisely due to the two-sided cycle of innovation and emulation. Tech clusters like the Ukrainian Brave1 and Russia’s Rubicon Center must “run as fast as they can” just to avoid being overwhelmed by the other without ever being able to pull ahead.
If you’re starting to think this sounds like an arms race, you’re not wrong. Red Queen theory mirrors the nuclear proliferation of the Cold War arms race. The United States and the Soviet Union funneled trillions into their nuclear arsenals, not to secure a winning hand, but simply to keep the terrifying equilibrium of mutual assured destruction from tipping. It was a high-stakes effort to maintain a global balance of power that refused to stay still.
The roots of this extraordinary military money pit for weapon systems never used found their roots in the Anglo-German and global Dreadnought race of the early 20th century. The debut of the revolutionary proto-battleship HMS Dreadnought in 1906 effectively sprang a global Red Queen trap. By rendering Great Britain’s own existing naval superiority obsolete overnight, it forced rivals like Germany, the United States, France, and Italy onto an equal footing. This spark ignited a frantic, budget-draining race where nations churned out increasingly massive Super-Dreadnoughts, not to seize total dominance, but merely to keep the international balance of power from shifting beneath them.
Ultimately, this cycle of mutual escalation led to a tactical stalemate. When the British and German fleets finally clashed at the Battle of Jutland in 1916, their parallel evolution left them so evenly matched that the engagement ended in a strategic draw, stark proof that years of frantic expansion had only served to keep both empires in the exact same place.
Beyond the drones in Ukraine, another arms race, one that will affect far more than soldiers, is starting to take shape with AI. The escalating superpower rivalry for artificial intelligence between the United States and China has triggered another high-stakes AI Red Queen trap. In this environment, neither nation can afford to decelerate without inviting immediate economic and military obsolescence. This relentless cycle of adaptation is fueled by a critical hardware bottleneck, where aggressive U.S. chip sanctions are countered by frantic Chinese domestic fabrication efforts.
On the battlefield, the push toward fully autonomous AI warfare mirrors the hyper-speed evolution of adversarial systems. Perhaps most dangerously, this frantic pace compels both superpowers to abandon vital safety guardrails and alignment testing. Neither side can pause to implement necessary safeguards, fearing that even a momentary delay would allow their rival to secure a permanent strategic edge, effectively accelerating global existential risks just to keep the geopolitical balance from tipping.
Nations developed artificial constraints in the form of treaties to protect themselves from being bankrupted by this run to nowhere. Salary caps for defense budgets sprang up. The London Naval Treaty of 1930, signed by the United States, Britain, France, Italy, and Japan, restricted the displacement (size) and gun calibre of newly built warships. During the Great Depression, these nations realized that continuing to match each other’s naval expansions would lead to total economic ruin. The treaty allowed them to legally stop “running” without any single country losing its relative position or balance of power.
Similarly, the START Treaty, signed in 1991 near the end of the Cold War, was designed to cap the nuclear arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union. START framework provided a verified off-ramp, ensuring both nations could safely downsize their astronomical defense budgets without sacrificing the core doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction.
Governments realized they needed some form of legal restraint that would prevent them from spending their way into a ruinous economic future. But what guardrails do regular citizens like ourselves have in place, especially when it comes to social media?
Monetization of influencer culture has created a Red Queen scenario that has become nearly impossible to escape for anyone who engages with social media. More than half of Gen Z identify Influencer as their number one dream job. Influencers rely upon engagement. Regardless of the platform, whether it’s YouTube, Instagram, or X, people are paid based on views and interaction, creating a dynamic that requires constant engagement. In order to keep delivering the dopamine hit that consumers are craving from social media, influencers have to constantly be running to maintain their following.
Social media has rewired our brains to respond to agreement. Agreement can be monetized. Confrontation also gets engagement, but that is harder to monetize. Agreement forms echo chambers where we are told what to believe, what activities to engage in, and which people to admire. Red Queen theory compels those doing the influencing to constantly keep increasing the level of agreement we accept by pushing the boundaries further and further. If you are interested in travel, for example, then an influencer might start documenting a road trip to a local minor league ball game. They generate interest and accumulate a following. However, to retain that following, they must keep pushing where they go, eventually resorting to increasingly outlandish and staged stunts to keep it.
The danger of the Red Queen trap is not simply that we are forced to keep running. It’s that after a while, we forget why we started running in the first place. Nations bankrupt themselves building fleets they hope never to use. Tech companies pour billions into AI systems that become obsolete within months. Influencers escalate spectacle after spectacle to hold an audience that is already drifting toward the next dopamine hit. Even ordinary people feel trapped in cycles of optimization where every improvement in career, fitness, dating, or lifestyle simply resets the baseline for everyone else.
Victory in the game is impossible. Even ending the game is difficult. The Red Queen offers neither. She only promises motion.
And perhaps that is the defining anxiety of modern life. We live in a civilization obsessed with acceleration while possessing fewer and fewer mechanisms capable of saying enough. Many of our most powerful systems, social media, AI development, consumer culture, and even modern professional life, operate without meaningful restraint.
In evolutionary terms, the species that survives is not always the fastest or strongest, but often the one that adapts differently. The same may ultimately prove true for nations, economies, and individuals. The future may belong less to those who accelerate endlessly and more to those capable of deciding when acceleration no longer serves a purpose.
Because if civilization continues running simply for the sake of keeping pace, we may eventually discover that the only place the Red Queen was leading us was to our demise.
