Leralara

Once upon a time, the wealth of nations was measured in what you could dig out of the ground: veins of silver, seams of coal, oil bleeding from rock like some dark sacrament. Georgius Agricola cataloged this in De Re Metallica in 1556—the Bible of extraction.

Now the miners don’t swing pickaxes. They carry badges at Google, UnitedHealth, JPMorgan. Their ore is you. Every errant search query, every swipe at Walgreens, every anxious breath translated into “health data” and sold upstream. We are the veins, the seams, the ore.

The Ore

Your life is particulate.

• Location pings like breadcrumbs.
• Insurance claims like confessionals.
• Tweets, Instagrams, TikToks—petty dispatches turned to raw feedstock.

This is the modern lode, inexhaustible and invisible, strip-mined in real time. Unlike coal, the supply expands with every click, every cough, every desire. The miners pray you never notice.

The Miners

Agricola cataloged noble guilds; today’s register is darker.

• Equifax, Experian, TransUnion—the three-headed Cerberus of your credit.
• UnitedHealth, Cigna, Optum—insurance cartels with actuarial crystal balls.
• Palantir—the warlock in the room, selling prediction-as-power to defense and cops.
• Google, Amazon, Meta—advertising empires masquerading as public squares.

These are not service providers; they are extraction syndicates. They don’t dig mountains, they dig you.

The Furnace

Once ore was smelted in a blast furnace; now it is fed to machine learning.

• The AI burns bias as coal.
• The output is prediction: risk scores, loan approvals, price hikes, police heat maps.

Corporations call it “truth.” In reality it is smelted distortion—designed to yield ingots stamped not with kings’ faces but with shareholder returns.

The Metal

The end product isn’t gold, it’s leverage.

• Who gets a loan.
• Who pays more for insulin.
• Who is flagged by an algorithmic cop on a street corner.
• Who clicks “buy now” on the precisely placed ad.

Coins once bore emperors; today’s outputs bear the watermark of Amazon’s quarterly earnings and UnitedHealth’s actuarial tables.

The Smoke

No furnace runs clean. Agricola’s rivers ran black with mercury; today the waste is subtler but more lethal.

• Privacy gutted.
• Whole populations profiled and excluded.
• Democracy itself reduced to an optimization problem, nudged by a thousand invisible levers.

We are living in the slag heap, and we are told to be grateful for “personalization.”

The Reckoning

Here is the naked truth: just as miners once poisoned valleys and broke laborers, data miners are poisoning trust and breaking democracy. The profits pool in Davos and Wall Street while the rest of us drown in smoke.

And yet—translation is possible. We can turn binary into testimony, into dashboards that show who profits, who pays, who bleeds. Agricola wrote his book to dignify the miners. We must write ours to expose them.

This is the gospel of extraction in the 21st century: you are the mine, the ore, the slag. The only question left—are you content to be dug up and smelted, or will you learn to smelt back?