Digitalization is often described as a technological evolution, sometimes as an economic inevitability. Rarely is it understood as a cultural inheritance. Yet the human relationship to wealth has never been purely material. Long before money, markets, or algorithms, societies learned to associate value with what was set apart, protected, and revered. Gold was not desired because it was useful, but because it appeared timeless, incorruptible, and unlike ordinary matter. It shimmered with otherness. It was, in a very literal sense, sacred.
What mattered was not the object itself, but what it represented: proximity to something enduring, elevated, and beyond the everyday. Possession was never merely ownership; it was participation. To hold what was considered holy was to stand closer to permanence, order, and meaning.
I learned this when I visited Nepal a few years ago. The people there told me how the rich and powerful back then hid their wealth not in safes, or hidden caves, but in the center of the village by building a temple around it and calling it sacred. Never again would villagers dare to touch it afterward, or even steal it out of fear from godly interventions.
Then as societies secularized, this symbolic structure did not disappear. It migrated. Wealth was abstracted from objects into ideas, from gold into money, from material possession into legal and institutional form. In this process, the sacred returned – not as ritual or myth, but as structure. The longing once directed toward holy objects resurfaced as a desire for security, control, and permanence, now mediated through systems that promised stability without transcendence.
Digitalization is the latest expression of this long movement. It does not invent a new desire; it reorganizes an ancient one. To understand digital systems as mere tools is to miss their deeper role. They are not only efficient infrastructures, but symbolic environments in which value, legitimacy, and belonging are once again defined.
Digital systems increasingly perform the same structural role that temples once did. They protect wealth through abstraction, legitimize asymmetries through shared belief, and render certain forms of access unquestionable by embedding them in systems that appear neutral, inevitable, and rational. What was once guarded by temples is now guarded by code – not because we planned it so, but because we have always sought to stand in possession of what we consider untouchable.
The permanent problem of wealth
Across cultures and epochs, societies have faced a recurring dilemma: how to protect value in a world of uncertainty. Wealth, when it is physical and visible, invites appropriation. Gold can be stolen. Land can be occupied. Goods can be destroyed. In small-scale societies, secrecy offers but limited protection, because everyone knows everyone else’s business. Violence is costly and destabilizing. Pure coercion rarely produces durable order.
Historically, one of the most effective solutions was symbolic elevation. Wealth was placed inside institutions that transcended ordinary social relations. Temples, shrines, monasteries, and sacred precincts became repositories of value – not because they were hidden, but because they were untouchable. Their protection derived from meaning rather than force.
When gold was placed in a temple, it ceased to be merely gold. It became part of a moral universe. Stealing it was no longer theft alone; it was sacrilege. The consequences were not limited to punishment but extended to shame, exclusion, and existential fear. In this way, religion transformed private wealth into a public, collectively guarded asset.
The key mechanism was legitimacy. The temple worked because belief was shared. The social order accepted that certain spaces, objects, and rules lay beyond ordinary contestation. The protection of wealth was achieved not by hiding it, but by embedding it in a structure that organized meaning itself.
Abstraction as a civilizational strategy
Our modern societies did not discard this logic; they translated and perpetuated it. As populations grew, trade expanded, and political systems became more complex, religious sacralization lost its monopoly on legitimacy. But the underlying strategy – protecting value by removing it from immediate physical contestation – remained.
The modern answer was abstraction. Land became titles. Gold became money, then credit. Enterprises became corporations, shares, and balance sheets. Ownership was separated from use, control from possession, and value from location. Wealth could now be defended through legal systems rather than walls, contracts rather than guards.
Abstraction proved extraordinarily powerful. It allowed wealth to scale beyond local communities, to survive political upheavals, and to move across borders. The more abstract the asset, the harder it was to seize. A factory could be nationalized; a share could be relocated. A warehouse could be looted; a claim could be enforced elsewhere.
This process was not primarily ideological, it was pragmatic. Abstraction solved real problems. It reduced risk, increased mobility, and stabilized accumulation. Over time, it became the dominant mode of organizing economic life.
Digitalization as the apex of abstraction
Digitalization represents the culmination of this long movement. It does not merely abstract value further; it transforms the very nature of ownership.
In digital systems, the central distinction is no longer between owning and not owning, but between having access and being excluded. Software licenses, platforms, cloud services, financial accounts, and data-driven infrastructures all operate on this principle. What matters is authorization, not possession.
This shift has profound consequences. Enforcement becomes automatic. Rules are embedded in code. Sanctions are immediate and impersonal. There is no need for public trials or visible coercion; access is simply withdrawn. The system does not punish – it deactivates.
Digital systems possess features that make them uniquely suited to this role. They are non-local, lacking a single point of attack. They are opaque, rendering value invisible without credentials. They are reversible, allowing rights to be granted and revoked instantaneously. And they present themselves as neutral, technical, and objective.
In this sense, digital infrastructures function as new sacred architectures. They define what is permitted and what is not, who belongs and who does not, what counts as legitimate action and what falls outside the system. Their authority does not rest on divine command, but on functional necessity.
Efficiency as secular theology
Every sacred order requires a legitimizing narrative. In premodern societies, this narrative was theological. In modern digital societies, it is efficiency.
Efficiency is more than a technical metric, it's almost a moral argument. Faster is better. Simpler is superior. Friction is waste. Once these assumptions are accepted, systems that deliver efficiency acquire an aura of inevitability. Participation becomes rational. Resistance appears irrational or nostalgic.
This mirrors the logic of earlier religious systems. Just as divine order once rendered social arrangements unquestionable, technical optimization now frames existing systems as the natural outcome of rational progress. The system does not need to justify itself ethically; it just needs to work.
The result is a subtle depoliticization. Decisions are no longer debated as matters of power or interest, but presented as technical necessities. Code replaces doctrine, and optimization replaces salvation.
Asymmetry in capital and sacral allocation
This order is not experienced equally. Those with substantial capital benefit disproportionately from abstraction. Digital systems allow wealth to be distributed across jurisdictions, shielded by layers of legal and technical insulation. Risk is externalized; mobility is maximized.
For ordinary users, the experience is different. Digital life often entails dependence on platforms one does not control, rules one cannot inspect, and decisions one cannot appeal. Access becomes conditional, and participation revocable. The system feels omnipresent yet unreachable.
Importantly, this asymmetry does not require intentional design, it emerges from structural incentives. Systems optimized for scale, stability, and efficiency will naturally favor those who can operate at high levels of abstraction. Those whose lives remain anchored in the material world experience the system as constraint rather than protection.
No hidden coordination is necessary for this to work, as some conspiracy theories might have you believe. Instead, digital systems prevail because they outperform the alternatives. They are adopted because they solve real problems. Their side effects are not planned so much as tolerated.
The question of legitimacy
Yet no system is beyond challenge. Temples fell when belief eroded. Digital systems will be no different. Their authority depends on trust – trust in fairness, neutrality, and continuity. When that trust weakens, resistance emerges in new forms: regulation, politicization, technological circumvention, or the creation of parallel infrastructures.
Unlike physical temples, digital systems cannot be stormed. They are contested through law, standards, and competing abstractions. Their fragility lies not in their code, but in their legitimacy.
Recognizing this is crucial. Digitalization is not destiny. It is a historically contingent arrangement, sustained by collective acceptance. Understanding its sacred logic does not require rejection, but awareness.
Seeing the system clearly
Digitalization has not abolished the ancient problem of protecting wealth. It has solved it in a new way. What was once guarded by gods is now guarded by systems. What was once enforced by belief is now enforced by code. The form has changed, while the function remains.
This continuity does not diminish the achievements of modern technology, it places them in context. Digital systems are not neutral tools operating outside history. They are institutional environments that organize value, power, and legitimacy.
To see this clearly is not at all a call for a return to temples or to deny the benefits of abstraction. It is to recognize that efficiency is never merely technical, that systems always embody values, and that access is the new site of power.
Only by understanding digitalization as part of a long civilizational strategy – one that sacralizes value through abstraction – can we begin to ask the questions that matter: who defines the rules, who controls access, and how legitimacy can be maintained in a world where the temple has quietly become a system.
The future of abstraction
If digitalization represents the apex of abstraction, it is unlikely to be its final form. History suggests that value continues to migrate upward – away from objects, away from ownership, away even from access. What follows is not greater dematerialization, but a more radical transformation: wealth without a thing, power without possession, security without visibility.
The next abstraction of wealth is already emerging in the form of system relevance. Value no longer resides primarily in what one owns or even what one controls, but in whether one has become indispensable. The highest form of wealth is no longer an asset, but a position – being embedded so deeply within infrastructures, standards, models, or expectations that one cannot be removed without destabilizing the system itself.
In such a world, power does not announce itself. It does not accumulate. It conditions. It defines the categories by which value is measured, the metrics by which risk is assessed, and the futures that appear plausible. Relevance replaces possession. Unavoidability replaces ownership.
This represents the most complete abstraction of all: a form of wealth that has shed not only materiality, but symbolism itself. The sacred does not vanish, instead it dissolves into structure. What was once embodied in gold, then in money, then in systems, now resides in the invisible logic that determines what counts, what persists, and what can be ignored - think "interest media" which has already taken over "social media".
The question that remains is not whether this development is good or bad. It is whether it remains intelligible. Every sacred order depends on recognition. When meaning becomes too abstract to name, legitimacy becomes fragile. And when legitimacy fails, systems – no matter how efficient – begin to fracture.
To understand digitalization as part of this longer human pattern is not to reject it, but to reclaim perspective. We have always protected what we deemed holy by lifting it beyond reach. Just look at how we increasingly rely on ever more complex AI systems that we understand less and less – the black box becoming a feature rather than a flaw. The forms change. The impulse does not. What matters now is whether we can still recognize where the sacred has gone – and whether we retain the ability to question those who claim to guard it.
by mario
