It is a curious thing, the way man is forever boasting of his grand march of progress when all he has done is exchange an old master for a brand-new driver with a shinier whip. We look back with a shudder at the poor, ignorant savages who fell under the spell of the poppy and the leaf, yet we walk the streets today with our noses glued to a little glass brick, entirely convinced that we are the very pinnacle of creation.
For thousands of years, the devil had to rely on the soil to brew his mischief. A man had to go out and cultivate the earth, waiting on the rain and the sun just to coax a few nitrogenous organic compounds out of a plant that was only trying to keep from being eaten by bugs. These alkaloids were a clever defense for the weed, but they proved a downright catastrophe for the human creature, who discovered that a mouthful of smoke or a bitter swallow could bypass the brain’s natural watch-guards and set off a glorious, artificial jubilee in his skull.
The brain, being a lazy sort of organ, would look at this flood of joy, decide its own daily labor was no longer required, and simply shut down the local factory. It was a localized business, this old-fashioned ruin, limited by the speed of a horse or the capacity of a sailing ship. But look how far we have come. We have outgrown the tedious labor of farming. We have migrated from the plantation to the laboratory of the mind, replacing the raw chemistry of the field with the architecture of the algorithm.
We do not need to harvest the juice of the bulb anymore when we can process data alkaloids, which are highly refined, computationally optimized units of information engineered specifically to pick the locks of human nature. The modern peddler does not deal in physical contraband; he deals in a variable reward schedule, a little red badge of notification, or a clever snippet of moving picture that catches the eye and holds it fast.
The clever engineers in their clean offices take the raw observations of human weakness and refine them into synthesized engagement, producing a product so potent it makes the old-time opium dens look like Sunday schools. The ancient, simple machinery inside a man’s head cannot tell the difference between the thrill of an honest meal and the phantom whistle of an anonymous approval from three thousand miles away.
The true beauty of this modern ruin, however, lies in its marvelous efficiency of distribution. In the old days, if a man took a notion to ruin his life with a chemical, he generally had to find some low companion to show him the way, and the infection spread no faster than a body could walk down an alley.
Today, we have perfected the peer-to-peer transmission of our afflictions. A man sits alone in his room, catches a digital fever for frantic speculation or despairing thoughts, and before he can even blink, the machine has used his very breath to infect a thousand strangers in Ohio and Japan. We have turned the victim into the drummer, making every consumer an active distributor in a vast, invisible network of contagion.
When you strip away the high-sounding language of the technicians, you find that the ledger balances out exactly where it always did. The human nervous system is an old, analog instrument playing a tune it never practiced, and it cares nothing for the pedigree of the thing that strikes the keys.
Whether a man destroys his peace by chewing on a leaf grown in the dirt or by staring into a glowing box that feeds him a calculated sequence of numbers, the internal bonfire burns the same wood. The fuel changes from carbon to code, but the fire is identical. We have merely emancipated our vices from the clumsy limitations of matter, turning them into pure, weightless information that flies around the globe at the speed of light, leaving the lonely, primitive soul to settle the bill.