Alchemy is Local

Alchemy and the Heretics

Every time we scale something, we lose something. Scale demands commonality. It requires that all those little parts of us that aren't easily accommodated into a common whole be either eliminated or ignored. Alchemy requires the opposite. Alchemy requires all of us, all that we think and all that we are; the half-formed thoughts, the ideas we are afraid that other people might think are daft and the things that we notice that other people don't: the idiosyncrasies.

Alchemy requires diversity of every sort, from the individual to the collective.

Historically, while alchemy was not a heresy in itself, it often drew the ire of the Church because the pursuit of 'perfecting nature' seemed to trespass on divine territory. The secretive, coded language used by practitioners only fuelled suspicions of forbidden magic and spiritual rebellion. A classic example is the 13th-century friar Roger Bacon; though a dedicated man of faith, his pioneering work in alchemy and 'novel' scientific experiments led to his imprisonment by the Franciscan Order. His career illustrates the era's narrow divide between being a visionary seeker of God's natural laws and being branded a dangerous disruptor of religious orthodoxy. Today, we have a different religion whose version of divine territory is profit maximisation in pursuit of shareholder value, where espousing other values puts us in the same territory as Roger Bacon.

Where we are today demands heretics and alchemists. Capitalism, as we're currently practising it, has allowed us to perfect the wrong thing. That said, we're not exactly sure what the right thing is, so our challenge is to distil what we have learned, test it against what we want, and find new ways of working and living.

Paradoxically, the thing that many of us fear may well be the crucible we need to achieve what we want. We have given it a name in "artificial intelligence" that seems calculated to frighten us, when what we are dealing with is neither artificial nor intelligent, as I wrote in my last Reflections post.

A "Gutenberg Moment"

Before Gutenberg, the Church held something close to a monopoly on the written word. Manuscripts were copied in monasteries, literacy was concentrated among the clergy, and the laity's relationship with scripture was essentially oral, mediated by priests who controlled not only access but also interpretation. The printing press fractured that arrangement; Bibles appeared in vernacular languages, pamphlets circulated beyond ecclesiastical control, and literate laypeople began drawing their own conclusions from texts they could now read for themselves. The Church fought back through licensing and censorship, but these were rearguard actions. By the time Luther's theses were reprinted across Germany within weeks of their posting, the information monopoly had been broken.

It is worth noting that the conflict was not simply "Church versus laity" as neat opposing blocs; many clergy enthusiastically embraced printing. The deeper tension was structural, between centralised interpretive authority and distributed access to knowledge. It is a pattern we might recognise in our own time, where the concentration of AI capability in very few hands mirrors the old monopoly on the written word.

I had a small taste of what it feels like when that monopoly fractures. As I described in my Reflections post, I had a breakthrough moment when I stopped reading about what AI could do and started doing it: using Claude to build an application that leveraged my own thinking, simply by writing clearly about what I wanted. The bigger challenge was overcoming my self-doubt about "coding." It turns out that AI has not made coding skills redundant, just much more selective and specialised. What has changed, profoundly, is who gets to create.

What I built will not scale, nor do I want it to. What it does is amplify potential by harnessing all those things, in my clients and me, that scale cannot cope with. Things that will not be reduced to the doctrine of metrics. That is the Gutenberg parallel. Not a new technology replacing an old one, but a structural shift in who gets to make things, who gets to interpret, and who gets to participate.

Alchemy and Autonomy

The fragile nature of a workplace increasingly focused on efficiency and productivity is what it doesn't use. The employees who turn up deploy only a fraction of their capabilities, imagination, and enthusiasm in delivering increasingly rote work, designed algorithmically. It feels a little like putting Leonardo da Vinci on a production line. If we were to measure the waste of human potential in the way that we measure material waste, we would be deeply embarrassed.

But what if we can use the technology capabilities we're being offered to change that? Not to become more efficient at the things that waste us, but to exercise the parts of ourselves the workplace doesn't use. To build our own resilience and find some inspiration along the way. What if our "Sod-it Fund" isn't just financial, but potential? All those capabilities, experiences, and instincts that are inconvenient for scalable corporations could become a unique point of differentiation. Not a deficit to be managed, but an asset waiting for the right conditions.

So, in my own small way, I'm going to put myself in the service of that. Having started experimenting, I will continue. The risks for me are tiny. I have no business to protect, no monthly income to risk, and no obligations that require them. I have the opportunity, and perhaps the duty, to play and share.

The Alchemists Workshop

Here on The Athanor, you'll find a workshop tab, and I'm going to put in there the experiments that I'm running: the ones that work, the ones that don't, and what I'm learning along the way. I will look to cover my costs by putting it behind a modest paywall for paid subscribers. I will also look to put together small groups that can gather around what I'm finding to share what they are learning. My mental model for this is the Lunar Society, those 18th-century industrialists, scientists and thinkers who met monthly to share discoveries and push each other's thinking. No intellectual property. No hierarchy. Just people committed to learning together in a time of extraordinary change. As with the Lunar Society, anything we learn, we learn together.

I'm going to use Claude, and probably Notebook LM, as I do. Between now and the end of March, I will work with Claude to build an independent site where I can write about Outside the Walls and New Artisans, rather than relying on Substack. I really like Substack, but I share others' concern that when we write on other people's platforms, we are tenants, not owners. And, to an extent that could make me weep, the USA is rapidly becoming a place where digital landlords find themselves being shaped in pursuit of a minority agenda, rather than shaping through their extraordinary creativity.

Gutenberg created havoc for the established church, not least when he enabled Martin Luther to post his 95 theses on the church door in Wittenberg. I rather like the idea of AI doing the same for us as individuals.

Not havoc for its own sake, but the quiet, determined fracturing of monopolies that have held for too long.

Because Monopolies are never on our side...