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Only in Albania could such a mythic gesture occur: appointing an algorithm as cabinet minister. Diella, we are told, will cleanse public procurement of corruption, that timeless Balkan disease. The government proclaims that, at last, software will succeed where generations of politicians failed.

Permit me some skepticism.

Public procurement remains the deepest vein of corruption not because ministers are uniquely wicked, but because the system demands it. Contracts worth billions hinge on opaque decisions. Bribes are not accidents; they are the lubricant that keeps political machines alive. To imagine an algorithm can sterilize this mistake mathematics for morality.

Worse, Diella may render corruption not weaker but stronger. Unlike a human minister who can be interrogated, shamed, toppled, an algorithm offers no face to confront. If a contract flows to the prime minister’s cousin’s company, the defense comes immediate and unassailable: the machine decided. How convenient.

Algorithms never impartial. Written, trained, tuned by people with interests. Corruption, once visible in smoky cafés and briefcases of cash, risks migrating invisibly into code—into criteria weighted here, data sets adjusted there. Easier to massage inputs than to bribe a minister. Harder to detect.

This does not resemble transparency. It resembles radical opacity dressed in the costume of objectivity.

So let us be clear: Albania’s experiment counts as bold. It may inspire imitators across a continent exhausted by graft. But boldness and danger travel as twins. Diella will either cleanse the bloodstream of public life or sanctify its toxins in digital armor.

Do not be fooled by rhetoric. If citizens cannot audit code, if journalists cannot interrogate criteria, if rivals cannot challenge outputs, Albania has not abolished corruption. It has automated it.

The irony cuts deep. A government that promises liberation from human vice may have just built the perfect machine for laundering it.

A tree is worth more dead than alive.
A river is worth more bottled than flowing.
A human is worth more as data than as flesh.

This is the arithmetic of a world that worships money.

We forget: money was not discovered like fire. It was invented, like a story. A story that once helped us trade and trust. But somewhere, we stopped treating it as a tool and crowned it as a god.

Now the god demands sacrifice.

Governments poison their people in the name of “growth.” Corporations shred forests for quarterly returns. Investors cheer layoffs as “efficiency.” Wars ignite not for survival, but because destruction is profitable.

We invented money then decided it was worth more than people. More than peace. More than the planet that sustains us.

Look closer: this logic is everywhere. A hospital measured not by how many lives it saves, but by its balance sheet. An education system where children are “cost centers” unless they can be monetized. Even friendships bent into “networks,” even love recast as “investments.”

When money is sacred, everything without a price tag is dismissed as worthless. Peace is too fragile for markets. The planet too slow for quarterly reports. People too alive to be reduced to numbers yet reduced we are.

And the tragedy is not just ecological or political. It is spiritual. We are the only species that created a story, then chose to live and die by it.

But stories can change.

So the question is not whether we need money. The question is how long we will kneel before it. How long we will trade forests for figures, silence for dividends, futures for balance sheets.

Because in the end, money is only ink and code. A ghost we agreed to believe in. The real question the one that should keep us awake is this:

How long before our own invention decides that none of us are worth anything at all?