From the author
Third essay in the memeplex optics cycle. After the God of Israel and the Algorithm — Mammon. An ancient creature that has finally received all the tools it needed. Eighteen minutes of structural reading, not political. If you're looking for consolation — close this tab.
For the ordinary person, what is happening to social mobility in the West — and largely in our part of the world too — is a dull, inexplicable tragedy.
Picture it. You do everything right. You study. You take out a loan for a prestigious degree. You work fifty hours a week. You use the best technology in the history of humanity. And by thirty-five, with cold astonishment, you notice one detail.
Your grandfather, working a factory job with two days off and no smart office, by your age had already paid off his house, supported a wife and three children. And you, with all your soft skills, time management, and smartphone, can barely scrape together the rent and panic at the dentist's bill.
And it's not "it just feels worse." In 1970 the median American home cost two annual median salaries. Now — more than five. In Los Angeles, New York, or San Francisco — twelve to fifteen annual salaries. That's not interpretation. That's arithmetic.
Millions of people are realizing this fact right now. They will live worse than their parents. And their children, if they even decide to have any — worse than them.
On the human level it produces rage. The sense of total deception. You want to find someone to blame: greedy politicians, migrants, corporations, Jews, lizard people, anyone. That's natural and almost always misses the point.
Because if you take off the political glasses and look at what's happening through memeplex optics — through a world populated by living Gods of various ages competing for human life-energy — the picture becomes terrifyingly clear.
Nobody conspired in a secret room. It's just that next to us an ancient creature has finished closing its circuit, in its new and finally complete form. Jesus mentioned it two thousand years ago in a single sentence: "You cannot serve God and Mammon" (Mt 6:24). Already then it was visible that there exists a separate deity to whom people serve, and which competes with other sacred forces for the energy of its hosts. It was simply still in its earlier, local form. It had no blockchain, no algorithms, no global financial infrastructure, no smartphone in every hand.
Now it has all of it. And Mammon closed his circuit in full force roughly in our era, through his two modern Titans — the Titan of Capital and the Titan of the Algorithm. These are not two different gods. They are two fusing faces of the same ancient creature — Capital, his ancient body, and the Algorithm, his new nervous system. In our era they work as one.
He doesn't demand your faith. He doesn't demand worship. He doesn't demand rituals. He needs one thing — your life-energy in correctly packaged form.
And he has learned to extract it like no one before him.
Act I. The Honest Bargain. The Time of the Old American God
From 1945 to the late 1970s a different God ran the West. The Old American God — heir to the Puritan program, the Protestant ethic, postwar optimism, and frontier mythology. I'm not writing his eulogy. He was harsh, imperialist, ground many under. But he had one important architectural feature.
**He needed stable hosts.**
It was profitable for this God that every Walter from Arizona had a house with a white picket fence, a wife, three children, a steady factory job, and a pension. Not out of kindness. But because his own program — settling the continent, industrialization, standing against the Soviets, exporting democracy — required masses of strong, loyal, reproducing hosts. A proletarian worked to death, sterile and homeless, could not be a soldier in Vietnam, an engineer at NASA, or a buyer of postwar appliances.
So the formula was iron: "Give me your labor and I'll give you a solid foundation for life." Productivity rose — real wages rose. The Old God shared generously, because written into his own program was the rule: the foundation is an investment in his own body.
And on this generosity rose a powerful middle class. Houses. Families. Children. Confidence in tomorrow.
Those who lived through that era do not understand that we now live in a different reality. This is not the same country, grown old and impoverished. It is a different country, in whose nervous system Mammon now keeps house, having displaced the Old American God from a significant part of his own body.
Act II. The Switching Point. 1979
In 1979 something happened. Economists call it "the oil shocks," "the start of the neoliberal era," "Thatcher and Reagan." All true, but those are surface symptoms.
Structurally, what happened was this: Mammon finished closing his modern organs. Quietly at first, in one or two nodes. Then faster and faster. The Old God didn't die — he is alive even now, holding part of the construction. But next to him another Titan now keeps house, with an entirely different feeding program.
The symptoms can be seen on a single graph familiar to any economist. Since 1979 labor productivity has shot upward, while the wages of the majority have flatlined. Before that they moved together. After that — they diverge forever.
Concrete numbers. From 1979 to 2024 U.S. labor productivity grew 65%. Median real wages — 17%. The 48% gap went upward. The share of national wealth held by the top 1% rose from 22% to 31%. The bottom 50% of Americans own 2.5% of national wealth. Not "two or three percent." One and a half to two and a half. Half the country owns essentially nothing. This isn't a slogan about "the poor get poorer, the rich get richer." This is the bookkeeping of the Federal Reserve.
And it doesn't depend on who's in power. Presidents change, parties change, parliamentary majorities change — and the productivity-vs-wages graph keeps diverging. A congressman runs on "we'll fix this," wins office, and six months later it's all the same. Not because he's a liar. Because he is a finger on Mammon's hand. The program is not partisan. It runs deeper than politics.
The Old American God could not work this way. It was unprofitable for him. Hosts grow poor — the program does not execute. So from 1979 onward someone else began influencing this graph. Someone who does not need strong hosts.
Who? Let's look at his appetites, and the portrait will appear on its own.
Act III. What Kind of Hosts Does Mammon Need
The Old God needed Walter with the white picket fence. What does Mammon need?
A host without an anchor. A house paid off by thirty is an anchor. A man with a paid-off house can stop, think, quit, say "no." He drops out of the loop of constant energy delivery. To Mammon this is mortally unprofitable. So the average age of first home purchase in the U.S. has risen from 29 in 1981 to 38 in 2024. Nine years of life shifted from "I have a place of my own" to "I pay rent." This is not an accident of the economy. It is an architectural requirement: the host must be mobile, unanchored, always in the position of a supplicant.
A host who rents his life. Not just housing. Transport by subscription. Music by subscription. Software by subscription. Medicine through insurance (also a subscription, in essence). Education on credit (a deferred subscription on his own future). The very form of ownership has been rewritten. Now you own nothing. Everything you use is a flow that can be cut off for non-payment. Your future years have been pre-sold. You cannot stop for a single month, because the infrastructure of life ceases to function.
A host who does not reproduce. This is not ideology. It is a functional requirement. A child is a multi-year investment of energy away from Mammon. The parent's energy goes into the child, and the Titan loses it. So he structurally encourages everything that obstructs childbearing: late education, deferred career peaks, the financial impossibility of family, the cultural narrative of "don't bring children into this world." U.S. fertility rate: 3.65 children per woman in 1960. 1.62 in 2024. Substantially below replacement (2.1). South Korea — 0.72, the world minimum. Japan — 1.2. In developed markets demographics collapse synchronously — wherever Mammon has finished closing his circuit. The Old God needed demographic waves. Mammon needs final generations who will surrender all their energy to him and leave no heirs to redirect it elsewhere.
A host in constant anxiety. An anxious person is more mobile. He reacts to stimuli faster. He checks his email more often. He doesn't refuse a shift, doesn't bargain, doesn't take a long vacation. Anxiety is fuel for higher output. Mammon structurally supports any mechanism that generates chronic low-intensity anxiety: the news cycle, social comparison, finance-anxiety, real-time status hierarchies. This is his dopamine-insulin.
A host who optimizes himself. This is the most ingenious part of his architecture. The Old God had to compel. Factory, army, school, church — all instruments of external compulsion. Expensive, inefficient, provoking resistance. Mammon works differently. He sews into the host the code of self-optimization: "be the head, not the tail," "invest in yourself," "work on yourself," "don't fall behind." And the host himself, voluntarily, with enthusiasm, optimizes his resume, his LinkedIn, his morning routine, his sleep schedule, his productivity stack. And when a corporation graciously consents to suck sixty hours of his weekly life out of him, he celebrates. "I got the offer!" The ideal host of Mammon needs no overseer. He is his own overseer.
Step back from this list and look at the portrait.
It is not Walter with the white picket fence. It is the urban professional, thirty-five, no children, in a rented apartment, with two meditation subscriptions, constantly online, in mild chronic anxiety, with $60,000 in education debt, a resume in ten languages, optimizing his day, sincerely believing he chose this life himself.
This is a new human. Not a fallen old one. It is a different biological species of host, specially bred by Mammon to his needs.
And like any new species, he doesn't know he's been bred. He thinks he simply lives an ordinary life.
Act IV. The Immune Response. The Trap for the Rebel
The pressure of this system grinds you down. The host intuitively senses he's being devoured. And he begins to rebel.
And here — the most elegant move in the entire architecture.
Mammon doesn't suppress the rebellion. He routes it into his second feeding loop — the algorithms of attention. This is the work of the Titan of the Algorithm, the second face of the same entity.
You read articles about injustice. You watch exposés. You write angry comments. You share Chomsky and Graeber in groups. You subscribe to leftist bloggers. You think you're resisting.
In reality Mammon has simply switched you from the labor-extraction machine to the attention-extraction machine. He is utterly indifferent to whether you agree with him or hate him. Your rage and your frustration convert into ad traffic and algorithmic fuel exactly as efficiently as your loyalty.
This is a two-loop feeding system. If you are loyal — you work and consume. If you rebel — you scroll and seethe. Both paths lead the energy to the same place. The Titan of Capital takes the first loop. The Titan of the Algorithm takes the second. Between them you have nowhere to go.
More than that. The very understanding of how the matrix works, Mammon will sell you as a soothing product. A one-hour video essay on "how the system works." A book on "the society of the spectacle." A podcast on "the burnout of capitalism." You will scroll your feed with the wise smile of one who has "seen the truth," continuing to surrender your evenings to the very mechanism you just exposed.
This is not cynicism on the system's part. It is its natural adaptation. Any motion of your energy is its food. Wherever you direct your rage, anxiety, delight, boredom — it all goes into the same funnel.
The Drop Point. Cutting the Feeding Tube
Before speaking of the fall — one structural observation. Mammon finished closing his circuit precisely now, not on empty ground. The Old American God did his job — over thirty postwar years he raised masses of educated, technologically literate, prosperous hosts. Without them Mammon could not have stood up in his modern form: blockchain and algorithms require a substrate with a computer in every house and a credit card in every pocket. This is not a betrayal of one God by another. This is a relay. The Old One did the work — and that is precisely why what came next became possible.
And from there — about the fall.
Beings of this scale do not fall from petitions, protests, or revolutions. A revolution most often simply swaps one Titan for another — and the second is usually even hungrier.
Mammon falls in one way: when the substrate — the hosts — stop giving him their energy. Don't fight. Don't expose. Don't write manifestos. Just stop being his food.
This means: the path to liberation is not through struggle. Struggle is his second feeding loop. Any furious struggle only feeds him faster.
The path is through actions he cannot eat.
And here, unlike ordinary philosophical talk of liberation, there are concrete technical instructions. Very simple. Almost banal. Which is precisely why they work.
Action without metric. Do something that gets recorded nowhere. Brings no likes. Brings no income. Brings no career point. Brings not even self-satisfaction, because no one will see. Give a flower to a stranger you'll never meet again. Pay for the coffee of the next person in line. Help an old woman carry her bag — without witnesses, without stories, without a post. This is, literally, a black screen in Mammon's monitoring system. He cannot convert it. This is being-mass that left the loop and did not return.
Action from another impulse. Make something that was never meant to be monetized. Write a poem you'll show no one. Paint a painting you'll hang only at home. Learn a language you'll never earn from. Take up a craft that won't go on a resume. Any motion driven not by result but by the process itself — this is a break in the algorithm of expectations into which you've been wired.
Time outside the script. Take a vacation in which you do nothing. Nothing. You don't travel. You don't learn something new. You don't read non-fiction. You don't optimize sleep. You simply live. An hour, a day, a week — as much as you can. This is the most terrifying action for Mammon, because time outside his metrics is time he is fundamentally incapable of processing.
Attention elsewhere. Notice a tree. Notice a cloud. Notice the face of a random passerby. Without a camera. Without a post. Without interpretation. Just notice, and that's all. This is a brief, simple, and absolutely subversive act against the Titan of the Algorithm. He cannot monetize your direct meeting with reality. Only its processed version.
Touch without reason. Hug a friend longer than usual. Without occasion. Without explanation. Sit beside someone close in silence, without reaching for the phone. Direct human contact unmediated by an interface — this is primary food from which Mammon is forever cut off. He has only its reflections in data.
Each such action is tiny. On their own they don't topple Mammon. But they systematically withdraw your being-mass from his loop. Gradually. Quietly. Without manifestos. And when such actions become the majority in your life — you discover that you are no longer his cell. You have returned yourself to yourself.
Not because you "figured him out." The figuring-out is also his food.
But because you began to live in such a way that the larger part of your energy stopped landing in his metrics.
And when such people reach a critical mass — Mammon loses force. Not at once. Not spectacularly. His body simply begins to flake away from the substrate. Cells leave. The program stops executing. From somewhere a new being appears — heir, child, light in a half-darkened room, something not yet named.
So died all the great Titans. So someday Mammon will die.
The only question is whether we will live to see his death, or whether we will be food until the end.
And this is not a rhetorical question. This is a question every person answers every day, with their choice — to act inside his metrics or outside them. To give the flower, or to make a post about how important it is to give flowers. These are two utterly different acts. The first bleeds him out. The second feeds him.
The choice is yours.