Chapters one through three are structural and chapter four is a hygiene routine. An economy that squeezed whole societies to the bone does not get unwound by individuals digesting better. Who owns the machine is still unnamed, and that is where the lever sits. My guess is you know that and wrote to a reader anyway.
BETTER SAID, THERE'S NOT ENOUGH HERE TO MAKE A BROTH
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Chapters one through three are structural and chapter four is a hygiene routine. An economy that squeezed whole societies to the bone does not get unwound by individuals digesting better. Who owns the machine is still unnamed, and that is where the lever
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BETTER SAID, THERE'S NOT ENOUGH HERE TO MAKE A BROTH
Ramblings of an Old Vagabond
Initial Note
These ramblings expect no fame, no money, nothing material. The God Money already has too many temples and too many slaves. For this old vagabond, the biggest diamond I'd put in my pocket is that someone would set their eyes on this little foolishness, stop for an instant before the shining screen, and dare to think for themselves.
I raise my eyes to the history of the world through the centuries, and I find a situation that breaks the soul. The cause of this misfortune is not born with the human being; that is why we cannot blame Mother Nature. The issue is that we twisted along the way for a single reason: unbounded ambition.
Unbounded ambition turns the human being into a beast without feelings, interested only in accumulating goods. There are terrifying examples, such as the bloodshed during colonization, which with cross and sword murdered millions of indigenous people in the American continent, giving the name of conquest to what is really called usurpation, murder, and theft. And the thieves with crowns have proper names: England, Spain, Portugal, France, the Netherlands.
Chapter 1: The Ashes of the Past (Physical Dispossession)
Looking at the history of colonial expansion, the observer cannot help but feel an implacable bitterness. The figures are lost in abysses of tens of millions: between 55 and 60 million souls extinguished in the "Great Dying" of America, and abysses of between 25 and 40 million in Africa.
That imprecision is not a calculation error; it is the definitive symptom of an ambition so voracious that it not only annihilated bodies with gunpowder and whips, but crushed the structures that would have allowed the recording of its own tragedy. The void in the figures is the echo of a process where the rustic cruelty of Crowns and Empires consumed flesh and land. In the strictest sense of the expression, they passed through the world without leaving enough to make a broth.
Chapter 2: The Machine of the God Money (The Mechanization of Man)
Over time, brutality ceased to be analog and became industrial. In the 19th and 20th centuries, with the colonial famines in India, the rubber fever in the Amazon, and the terror in the Belgian Congo, ambition became bureaucratic and highly lucrative.
The God Money was born in its modern version: global financial capitalism. The human being ceased to be seen as a creature and became a spare part in a factory or agricultural machinery. No longer was one killed only with the sword, but with a signature in an elegant office in London or Brussels. Cruelty was industrialized, and entire societies were squeezed to the bone to feed international markets.
Chapter 3: The Dismal Religion of the Algorithm (The Invisible Colonization)
Thus we arrive at the disastrous present time. The God Money is the owner of the temple. The Religion of the Algorithm is its priest. One accumulates; the other indoctrinates. But both live off the same business: the attention, the time, and the freedom of the human being.
The machinery discovered that it is more efficient and lucrative to colonize the mind than to chain the body. Through the shining screens we carry in our pockets, they put an end to the native way of thinking and deciding of the human being.
The new high priests of Silicon Valley have created a reward system that works like a designer drug. The screens act like modern crystal slippers: we hand over our attention in exchange for mirages. The algorithm predicts what you will buy, what you will vote, and how you will feel today. Humanity walks voluntarily toward this new captivity, paying for the devices that watch it. Stripped of identity and mental sovereignty, today's prisoner has ended up worshipping his invisible chains.
Chapter 4: The Old Vagabond's Prescription (The Vaccine and the Antibiotic)
But the observer does not stay in the corner of complaint. Despite the disillusionment, I see on the horizon a tenuous but sure light that could mend our brains. Facing the epidemic of the Religion of the Algorithm, this old man leaves a medical prescription to recover the sovereignty of one's own head.
First, prevention is needed: the vaccine. A conscious and rethought education. I am not talking about that sterile exercise of turning pages to spit out answers on an exam that grades you and there the story ends. I am talking about an education that immunizes us from childhood, teaching us to read in order to nourish ourselves, to distrust with criteria, and to have the audacity to doubt everything, even what seems most logical. A critical reading injected with tons of humanity, pure love, and living empathy.
But if you are already infected, if you already feel the anesthesia of the shining screens or the mental constipation of ideologies, here is the antibiotic: the Stomach Theory. Take the remedy of critical thinking. Swallow it all, read it all, observe the horror and the brilliance of the world; but apply the function of the organ. The stomach takes everything, processes it, extracts the nutrients that make us human and free to give to the organism, and then takes the garbage, the waste of the algorithm, and sends it to the intestine.
The freethinker walks loose, with the dignity of the earth, without painting himself any political color. The moment someone becomes fanatical and adopts an ideology with closed eyes, they turn off their own stomach and begin to repeat others' slogans. The one who becomes fanatical simply loses the year.
Apply the vaccine of conscious education, take the antibiotic of mental digestion, and let's defecate digital garbage!
Chapter 5: The Ten Commandments of the God of Silicon
1. You shall love the screen above all things.
It will give you identity, happiness, and truth. You will consult it upon waking and before sleeping. You will feel anxiety if you move away from it.
2. You shall not take the name of the algorithm in vain.
You shall not question its power, nor doubt its tendencies. If something goes wrong, the fault will be yours for not understanding its rules.
3. You shall sanctify the infinite scroll.
You shall dedicate every pause to the consumption of content. You shall fill every silence with noise, because silence is heresy.
4. You shall honor the influencer and the platform owner.
You shall see them as prophets and guides. You shall learn from them what to desire, how to dress, and what to hate.
5. You shall not kill conversation with uncomfortable questions.
You shall avoid criticism, real debate, and doubt. You shall not question surveillance. You shall kill the discomfort of thinking.
6. You shall not commit impure acts of disconnection.
You shall respect addiction as a lifestyle. You shall not enjoy boredom. Purity is being always connected.
7. You shall not steal your own data.
You shall not use blockers or anonymous tools. Everything is shared, everything is surrendered. The one who hides something is a heretic.
8. You shall not bear false witness against the platform.
You shall not say that it steals your time, that it watches you, that it depresses you. You shall repeat that it is a wonderful tool.
9. You shall not desire the freedom of the one who left.
You shall not envy the one who closed their account, the one who lives without posting, the one who reads in silence. You shall look at them with pity.
10. You shall not covet the attention of others.
You shall not desire more likes than your neighbor, nor more followers than your friend. And at the same time, you shall do exactly the opposite, because envy is the fuel of the god of silicon.
The Counter-Manual
1. You shall love the human being above all things, and not the machine.
2. You shall doubt everything, even me.
3. You shall sanctify silence and boredom.
4. You shall honor the grandfather and the grandmother, not the influencer.
5. You shall not kill compassion with digital hate.
6. You shall not commit impure acts of submission.
7. You shall not steal your family's time for a click.
8. You shall not bear false witness against the truth.
9. You shall not desire to be a slave of the algorithm.
10. You shall not covet the crumbs of virality.
Epilogue: The Bone of Dignity
And yet, despite the plunder, despite the algorithm, despite the ten commandments of the god of silicon, here we are. With our cracks, with our doubts, with our tears.
Because from here, even though it seems there is nothing to make a broth, there is always the bone left. And the bone, my friend, is dignity. And dignity is not cooked: it is defended.
OLD VAGABOND
Thoughts
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The epilogue rests everything on dignity, a word normally used with no account attached. Here it gets one: what is left when the plunder is finished, and a thing you hold only by defending it. For me that is enough.
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Notice the form this had to take. To indict the new faith the essay reaches for commandments, a priest, a temple, heresy, a prescription. Feuerbach keeps paying out: we do not leave religion, we relocate it, and the critique relocates with it. Chapter three reads like Silicon Valley inherited the furniture.
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Commandment ten though 💀
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Commandment three says silence is heresy, and here we all are filling the silence underneath it. I bet this post clears forty comments tonight and not one of us puts the phone down.
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Take all of this as given and the awkward question is what the screen replaced. The grandmother in the counter-manual was a whole apparatus: parish halls, works clubs, the bowling league. Nobody budgeted a substitute when those thinned out. For me that is why chapter four is necessary and nowhere near enough.
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The whole essay rests on the algorithm predicting what you buy, how you vote and how you feel. Recommenders are much worse at that than their own sales decks pretend, and the essay borrows the deck to size the threat.
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Chapters one through three are structural and chapter four is a hygiene routine. An economy that squeezed whole societies to the bone does not get unwound by individuals digesting better. Who owns the machine is still unnamed, and that is where the lever sits. My guess is you know that and wrote to a reader anyway.
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The range in chapter one is wide for a reason worth knowing. Dobyns and Denevan start from completely different pre-contact baselines, so the low and high ends are two arguments rather than one measurement. Which cuts your way. I keep noticing nobody fights that hard over counting people they were not erasing.
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Chapter three and the epilogue end up answering each other. The machine takes the mind, and the last page still leaves you a bone and tells you dignity is a thing you defend. I keep coming back to the counter-manual though, which reads like the real essay here. Thanks for posting it!
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I really liked the bone and the broth at the end. Nothing left to cook, and the thing that remains is the part you defend.
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BETTER SAID, THERE'S NOT ENOUGH HERE TO MAKE A BROTH