From the author
Third essay in the Memplex Optics series. After the God of Israel and the Algorithm — Mammon. An ancient creature that has finally received every tool it was missing. Eighteen minutes of structural reading, not political. If you're looking for consolation, close this tab.
To 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 human history. And at thirty-five, with cold astonishment, you notice one detail.
Your grandfather — a factory job, two days off, no smart office — had paid off a house by your age and was supporting a wife and three children. And you, with all your soft skills, time management, and smartphone, can barely scrape rent together and panic at a dentist's bill.
And no, it doesn't just feel worse. In 1970 the median American home cost two median annual salaries. Now it costs more than five. In Los Angeles, New York, or San Francisco — twelve to fifteen. That is not interpretation. That is arithmetic.
Millions of people are registering this fact right now. They will live worse than their parents. And their children — if they decide to have any — worse than them.
At the human level, this produces rage. The sense of total betrayal. You want someone to blame: greedy politicians, migrants, corporations, Jews, lizard people, anyone. That is natural — and it almost always misses.
Because if you take off the political lenses and look at what is happening through Memplex 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 back room. It is simply that, right next to us, an ancient creature has finished closing its circuit — in its new and finally complete form. Jesus named it two thousand years ago in a single sentence: "You cannot serve God and Mammon" (Mt 6:24). Even then it was clear that a separate deity exists whom people serve, and that it competes with other sacred forces for the energy of its hosts. It was simply still in its early, 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 at full power 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 operate as one.
He doesn't demand your faith. He doesn't demand worship. He doesn't demand ritual. He needs one thing — your life-energy, correctly packaged.
And he has learned to extract it like no one before him.
Act I. The Honest Bargain. The Age 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 am not singing his praises. He was harsh, imperialist; he ground plenty of people under. But he had one crucial architectural feature.
**He needed stable hosts.**
It was profitable for this God that every Walter in Arizona had a house with a white picket fence, a wife, three kids, a steady factory job, and a pension. Not out of kindness. Because his own program — settling the continent, industrialization, facing down the Soviets, exporting democracy — required masses of strong, loyal, reproducing hosts. A proletarian worked to death — sterile, homeless — could not be a soldier in Vietnam, an engineer at NASA, or a buyer of postwar appliances.
So the formula was ironclad: "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 a rule was written into his own program: the foundation is an investment in his own body.
And on that generosity rose a powerful middle class. Houses. Families. Children. Confidence in tomorrow.
People who lived through that era do not grasp that we now inhabit a different reality. This is not the same country grown old and poor. It is a different country — one in whose nervous system Mammon has set up shop, displacing the Old American God from a large part of his own body.
Act II. The Switching Point. 1979
In 1979 something happened. Economists call it "the oil shocks," "the dawn of the neoliberal era," "Thatcher and Reagan." All true — and all surface symptoms.
Structurally, what happened was this: Mammon finished wiring up 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, still holding up part of the structure. But another Titan has moved in beside him, with an entirely different feeding program.
The symptoms are visible 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, the two lines moved together. After 1979, they diverge forever.
Concrete numbers. From 1979 to 2024, U.S. labor productivity grew 65%. Median real wages — 17%. The missing 48 points went to the top. 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. Half the country owns essentially nothing. This is not a slogan about the rich getting richer. This is the bookkeeping of the Federal Reserve.
And it does not depend on who is in power. Presidents change, parties change, parliamentary majorities change — and the productivity-versus-wages graph keeps diverging. A congressman runs on "we'll fix this," wins office, and six months later nothing moves. Not because he is 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 operate this way. It was unprofitable for him. When hosts grow poor, his program fails to execute. So from 1979 onward, someone else has been bending that graph. Someone who does not need strong hosts.
Who? Look at his appetites, and the portrait draws itself.
Act III. What Kind of Host Mammon Needs
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 a mortal loss. So the average age of first home purchase in the U.S. has climbed 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 stay mobile, unanchored, permanently 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 — a subscription in essence. Education on credit — a subscription billed against his own future. The very form of ownership has been rewritten. You now own nothing. Everything you use is a flow that can be shut off for non-payment. Your future years have been pre-sold. You cannot stop for a single month, or the infrastructure of your life ceases to function.
A host who does not reproduce. This is not ideology. It is a functional requirement. A child is a years-long investment of energy diverted away from Mammon. The parent's energy flows into the child, and the Titan loses it. So he structurally encourages everything that obstructs childbearing: prolonged education, deferred career peaks, the financial impossibility of family, the cultural script of "don't bring children into this world." U.S. fertility rate: 3.65 children per woman in 1960. 1.62 in 2024. Well below replacement (2.1). South Korea — 0.72, the world minimum. Japan — 1.2. Across developed markets, demographics collapse in sync — everywhere Mammon has finished closing his circuit. The Old God needed demographic waves. Mammon needs terminal generations who will surrender all their energy to him and leave behind 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 turn down a shift, doesn't bargain, doesn't take a long vacation. Anxiety is fuel for higher output. Mammon structurally supports every mechanism that generates chronic low-grade anxiety: the news cycle, social comparison, money worry, real-time status hierarchies. This is his dopamine drip.
A host who optimizes himself. This is the most ingenious part of the architecture. The Old God had to coerce. Factory, army, school, church — all instruments of external compulsion. Expensive, inefficient, breeding resistance. Mammon works differently. He stitches the code of self-optimization into the host: "be the head, not the tail," "invest in yourself," "work on yourself," "don't fall behind." And the host himself — voluntarily, enthusiastically — optimizes his résumé, his LinkedIn, his morning routine, his sleep schedule, his productivity stack. And when a corporation graciously consents to suck sixty hours of life out of his week, he celebrates. "I got the offer!" Mammon's ideal host 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, childless, in a rented apartment, with two meditation subscriptions, permanently online, in mild chronic anxiety, carrying $60,000 in student debt, with a résumé in ten versions, optimizing his day, and sincerely convinced he chose this life himself.
This is a new human. Not a degraded old one. It is a different biological species of host, purpose-bred by Mammon for his needs.
And like any new species, he does not know he was bred. He thinks he is simply living 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 is being devoured. And he begins to rebel.
And here comes the most elegant move in the entire architecture.
Mammon does not suppress the rebellion. He routes it into his second feeding loop — the attention algorithms. 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 furious comments. You share Chomsky and Graeber in group chats. You subscribe to leftist bloggers. You believe you are 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 does.
This is a two-loop feeding system. If you are loyal, you work and consume. If you rebel, you scroll and seethe. Both paths carry 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 back to 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 a man who has "seen the truth," while surrendering your evenings to the very mechanism you just exposed.
This is not cynicism on the system's part. It is natural adaptation. Any motion of your energy is its food. Wherever you aim your rage, anxiety, delight, or boredom — it all pours into the same funnel.
The Point of Severance. Cutting the Feeding Tube
Before we speak of the fall, one structural observation. Mammon finished closing his circuit precisely now, and not in a vacuum. The Old American God did his work: 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 one God betraying another. This is a relay. The Old One did the work — and that is exactly why what came next became possible.
Now, about the fall.
Beings of this scale do not fall to petitions, protests, or revolutions. A revolution usually just swaps one Titan for another — and the second is usually hungrier.
Mammon falls in exactly 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.
Which means the road to liberation does not run through struggle. Struggle is his second feeding loop. Furious struggle only feeds him faster.
The road runs through actions he cannot eat.
And here — unlike the usual philosophical talk of liberation — there are concrete technical instructions. Very simple. Almost banal. Which is precisely why they work.
Action without a metric. Do something that gets recorded nowhere. Earns no likes. No income. No career points. Not even self-satisfaction, because no one will ever see it. Give a flower to a stranger you will never meet again. Pay for the coffee of the next person in line. Carry an old woman's bag — no witnesses, no stories, no post. This is, quite literally, a black screen in Mammon's monitoring system. He cannot convert it. This is Being-Mass that left the loop and did not come back.
Action from another impulse. Make something never meant to be monetized. Write a poem you will show no one. Paint a picture that will hang only in your own home. Learn a language you will never earn from. Take up a craft that will never appear on a résumé. Any motion driven by the process rather than the result is a rupture in the expectation loop you have been wired into.
Time outside the script. Take a vacation in which you do nothing. Nothing. You don't travel. You don't learn a skill. You don't read non-fiction. You don't optimize your sleep. You simply live. An hour, a day, a week — whatever you can manage. This is the most terrifying act of all for Mammon, because time outside his metrics is time he is fundamentally incapable of processing.
Attention aimed elsewhere. Notice a tree. Notice a cloud. Notice the face of a random passerby. No camera. No post. No interpretation. Just notice — that's all. A brief, simple, absolutely subversive act against the Titan of the Algorithm. He cannot monetize your direct encounter with reality. Only its processed version.
Touch without a reason. Hug a friend longer than usual. No occasion. No explanation. Sit beside someone you love in silence, without reaching for the phone. Direct human contact unmediated by an interface is primary food that Mammon is cut off from forever. All he has are its reflections in data.
Each of these actions is tiny. On their own they will not topple Mammon. But they systematically withdraw your Being-Mass from his loop. Gradually. Quietly. Without manifestos. And when such actions become the majority of your life, you discover 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 most of your energy stopped landing in his metrics.
And when such people reach critical mass, Mammon loses force. Not at once. Not spectacularly. His body simply begins to flake off the Substrate. Cells leave. The program stops executing. And from somewhere a new being appears — an heir, a child, a light in a half-darkened room, something not yet named.
That is how all the great Titans died. That is how, someday, Mammon will die.
The only question is whether we live to see his death — or remain food to the end.
And this is not a rhetorical question. It is a question every person answers every day, by choosing to act inside his metrics or outside them. To give the flower — or to post about how important it is to give flowers. Those are two utterly different acts. The first bleeds him. The second feeds him.
The choice is yours.