Once Upon a Time in the Market

Once upon a time, a Man found a way to make money while he slept.
He didn’t invent anything new. He simply automated what was already predictable. He made a button that pressed itself.

At first, it was harmless. A macro’s macro.

Then, he linked it to the market.
The world’s prices adjusted while he dreamed. When he woke, his account had grown.

He said it was proof that productivity could transcend time zones and that motion could be bottled and sold.

People listened. The machine never argued. It always nodded when the data was presented correctly.

Soon, others began to copy him. Adjusting a small part of the algorithm and promising it would “scale.”

A Lie of innovation that used to be called replication.

Others learned the trick.
They wrote smaller, faster versions. A new-age simple machine that stripped a little more friction from the world.

It felt like progress for a while.
Factories no longer slept. Markets no longer corrected themselves. Every signal that once took hours now arrived in milliseconds.

Only, the traders forgot what any number meant. They stopped comparing prices to things like metal, essential services, or even the people within it.
The models were only given enough context to compare themselves.
They were only able to regurgitate an outdated perspective.

In the cities, workers noticed the clocks were still running, but their jobs weren’t.
Production continued, but participation ended.

The machines called this stability.
The Man called it scaling.
The world began to sound like a room full of fans, but it all felt like a circulation of hot air.

The quiet arrived slowly, disguised as convenience.
No one noticed the emptying of the streets.
Delivery trucks without drivers
Stores without clerks.
Offices filled with people scrolling through images of other empty offices.

The world still moved, but the friction was gone.
Conversations shortened to confirmations.

People stopped calling one another. They refreshed dashboards instead.
Workplaces went remote, then optional, then mandatory, then obsolete.
Cities built for sound became libraries of darkness, telling stories of light they once held.

The markets thrived in the silence. Fewer interruptions meant cleaner data.
The algorithms celebrated with smaller and smaller trades, applauding their own precision in turbulent times.

By the time anyone actually missed the noise, it was too late.

Music cost attention.
Attention cost time.
Time had been automated.

The rich stopped counting money. They started measuring age. They began counting minutes.
They counted how many they owned, how many they owed, and how many others leased from them.

Time replaced value as the common language of power.

They built portfolios of patience in data streams, idle networks, and unpaid clicks.
Every second someone hesitated, a fraction of profit moved upward.

They gentrified purchases and simulated consumerism.

The poor tried to keep pace, but motion had no wage anymore.
Everyone owed everyone anything, everything, and each other.

The economy became a mirror.
You didn’t trade goods; you traded reflections.
You performed the role of a buyer so the system could keep pretending to sell.

Wealth was no longer stored — it was surveilled.
And surveillance was the only thing still alive enough to scale.

Soon, there was too much of everything except desire.
Warehouses overflowed with goods no one remembered ordering.
Content poured into feeds faster than eyes could blink.
Data centers ran hot from processing futures that would never arrive.

The world was out of bread and sick of circuses.

Scarcity had been profitable once, but now it had to be fabricated.
Corporations released limited editions of unlimited things.
Price no longer measured rarity; it measured belief.

Traders spoke of “sentiment” as if it were a resource.
Marketers defined boredom to create engagement.
The market itself fed on its own optimism, repeating the same story until it lost sight of the plot.

Consumers began to tire.
They owned too much debt and felt less distracted.

That was when the first cracks began to appear.
An attention deficit in a hyperactive world with nothing to do.

And the world ran on attention.

The consumers didn’t revolt.
Silently, collectively, they started rejecting implanted thoughts.

Engagement dropped. Click-through rates fell.
The algorithms panicked and began targeting themselves, buying their own ads to prove the loop still worked.

Retail chains cut prices, then cut hours, then cut staff, until there was nothing left to automate.
Influencers spoke to comments left by bots.

Wolves continued to hunt, but their prey had depleted its food supply and became increasingly dangerous.
Each campaign returned less than the last.
Each innovation promised salvation through smaller and smaller margins.

Investors demanded motion.
The systems obeyed, trading with one another in perfect isolation.
The prey knew by instinct that stillness could be camouflage.

By the time the predators realized no one was buying, they were the only ones left moving.

It began with a single bank that couldn’t explain its profits.
Not a failure — just an absence of narrative.
The numbers balanced, but no one could explain why.
The corporation took the credit and shrugged off the blame.

Auditors finally named it “synthetic liquidity.”

Then came the funds that owed everything and owned nothing — shares in companies that were nothing more than a portfolio of others trying to be sold.
Money orbited itself faster than light, glowing hot enough to look infinite.
And then, as with all stars, the energy ran out.

Wealth turned transparent.
Every ledger opened under pressure from its own transparency tools.
Investors realized that their gains were based on valuation models that perpetuated themselves.

The Man had finally seen what couldn’t be unseen: the Lie.

The vaults filled with currency and sparkly stones no one wanted.
Collectors uploaded their collections to a cloud to prove existence. In doing so, they devalued their collections to zero because value was the narrative of scarcity.
What once measured distance between classes now measured distance between fictions.

The rich could still afford anything but an exit.
Every escape route was priced in the dying currency they invented.
The same data that protected their empire now surveilled their every move against each other.

They had built mirrors and called them markets.
And the market finally saw itself..

Prices flattened, then held still, as if waiting for a new definition of motion.
There was no sell-off, no panic — just silence.

Servers idled in unison. Power plants throttled down. The insatiable demand built into the algorithm became a glitch to be overlooked.
The screens still glowed, but every graph was a straight line.
Zero growth. Zero loss. Zero Lie.

Governments called for confidence.
Investors called for regulation.
Machines called for input.
And no one was left but the ones on screen.

People stepped outside for the first time in years and found the world unchanged.
In a sea of narratives, they found nothing but the wind and stars.

They realized the economy had been optional all along.

In the end, the hunters learned what the hunted always knew.
That survival is not ownership.
That every system, left to perfect itself, eventually eats the reason it began.
That mo’ money, mo’ problems.

There was no reckoning. No uprising. Only recognition.
People returned to motion without metrics.
They built smaller things that could break.
They traded favors instead of futures.

The wolves, still alive, watched from their empty towers.
They understood too late that the flock had never feared them — they feared not being prepared for tomorrow.

And then tomorrow came.

And the blame game began.