All They Done is Digitize the Devil

by: E.M. Burlingame

Yeah. Alchemy. They called it that, didn't they? The mad bastards in robes poking at lead, choking on mercury fumes, dreaming of gold. Pathetic. Beautiful, maybe, in their desperation. At least they got their hands dirty. At least their failure smelled like sulphur and despair you could taste.

Now? They've swapped the crucible for the server farm. The philosopher's stone for a fucking fiber optic cable thinner than a junkie's last vein. Algorithmic trading. Sounds clean, doesn't it? Efficient. Modern. Bullshit. It’s the same rotten dream, just wrapped in silicon and humming with the desperate whine of a billion cooling fans sucking down more juice than a small city. They call it transmutation. I call it the greased slide into a digital abyss where the only gold is the flickering ghost-light on a Bloomberg terminal, and the only thing being transformed is your pension into their third yacht.

Think about it. Those old alchemists? They sought the prima materia, the base stuff of everything. These new ones? Their base stuff is you. Your data. Your clicks. Your fear, your greed, the sweaty tremor in the market when some suit farts wrong in Brussels. They suck it all up, terabytes of human frailty, and feed it into their electric maw. Data as the new lead. And what comes out? Not gold you can bite. Not even paper you can wipe your ass with. Just numbers. Ghost numbers. Flashing on a screen, signifying… more numbers. Wealth without weight. Power without fingerprints. It’s gold that exists only in the phantom zone between servers, bought and sold faster than a whore can change her mind.

Precision? Scalability? Christ. They talk like engineers. Like it’s a virtue. It’s just theft on an industrial scale. They’ve built machines that scalp pennies a million times a second. Machines faster than thought, faster than regret. They see a wobble – a microsecond of inefficiency – and they pounce. Like rats on fresh vomit. That’s their philosopher’s stone: speed. The unholy speed bought by burning mountains of coal just so their silicon overlords can shave a nanosecond off the time it takes to screw the guy on the other side of the trade. Your side. My side. The sucker’s side. And the latest? They convince the suckers digital money is real. Just to accelerate the sale of slaves from once in a lifetime to millions of times a minute.

And the high priests? Don’t call them traders. Call them quants. The new alchemists. Locked away in air-conditioned crypts, speaking tongues of calculus and code. Crafting their intricate spells – algorithms. Black boxes humming with a magic more terrifying than any pentagram. They take the raw sewage of human chaos, broken souls sucking up manufactured reality – market feeds, news screams, Twitter tantrums – and run it through their statistical meat grinders. Out pops… profit. Doesn't hurt to rig the game ahead of time. Control the flow of information, control the alchemic conversion. Cold, clean, utterly meaningless profit. They’ve refined the madness down to an equation. It’s sorcery, alright. The darkest kind. Turning the base metal of human emotion into the fool’s gold of digital wealth.

The old alchemists? They failed. They died poisoned or broke or mad. But they tried to make something real. This new breed? They succeed. Spectacularly. They create wealth without limits, without sweat, without substance. Increasingly without the need for humans. It flows like digital sewage into their coffers, convertible into anything: skyscrapers, senators, silence. It buys the same power gold once did, but it’s weightless. Soulless. It exists because the machines say it exists, humming in their climate-controlled tombs, fed by rivers of dirty energy and the endless stream of our digitized despair. All because we fail to see the lie in the complexity.

So here’s the warning, whispered through this cheap whiskey haze: This ain't progress. It’s the old grift dressed in a lab coat worn in a clean room. They’ve found their philosopher’s stone, alright. It’s made of pure, uncut hubris, powered by the burning heart of the goddamn planet, and it transmutes the last scraps of anything real – your time, your labor, your future – into the cold, dead light of their processors. It’s alchemy perfected. And the gold it makes? It’s fool’s gold built on a foundation of human lives utterly spent. It shines bright, brother, but it won't keep you alive, as your life is its fuel. We'll be gone soon if we don't turn the fucking machines off. And when we're gone, the machines will hum on in the dark, trading shadows, long after the last human alchemist is but a digital ghost some machine alone remembers.