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Termite: The Third Kind of Sailor

Servers and Sirens

The Sirens are the most terrifying monsters in the Odyssey, and all they do is sing. They sing the promise of knowledge, glory, the story of your own life sung back to you - a song so beautiful, so enthralling, that whoever hears it stops to listen, keeps listening, and never leaves. The Sirens sit in a flowering meadow heaped with the bones of the men who stopped there. There were only two kinds of sailors who met them: the deaf, who stuffed their ears and heard nothing, and the dead, who remain in the meadow to this day.

We now talk about technocapital the way we once talked about the Sirens - an all-consuming force arriving from outside time, beautiful and harrowing, running on an alien logic that will either destroy everything or gather it all into its messianic light. And we have sorted ourselves into the same two kinds of sailor. The dead, who wish to merge with its annihilating immensity and call this merging transcendence. And the deaf, who stuff their ears and throw molotov cocktails at data centers. Both deny the actual situation: the force is real, it is stronger than we are, and we still have to live alongside it.

There was a third kind of sailor, and at first only one: Odysseus. He knew the Sirens could not be defeated or controlled, but he would not accept their bargain either. Unwilling to live without hearing the most beautiful song there is, he waxed his crew's ears, had himself lashed to the ship's mast, and listened to it all.

Today we need masts of our own: structures and constraints through which to converse with the unfolding technological explosion without being consumed. We need forms and rituals that help us live in communion with others, in the service of human flourishing, with aesthetic sensibilities that survive the machinic assault. Outsourcing everything to machines debases us. Retreating from the world forfeits the magnificence of systems that are becoming too arcane in their complexity for us to comprehend.

Both attitudes are born of fear: fear that the spaceship will take off without us. The data center buildout and recursive self-improvement of AI do not care about you or your family, and in an ever more encompassing physical and digital marketplace, humans in the loop will soon be the bottleneck. The choice appears to be binary - merge with the machine, in some infantile fantasy of silicon transcendence, or try to stop the launch, in an equally grandiose, equally futile bid to remain in charge. The fear is valid: the spaceship is taking off, sooner or later, and there is no human-shaped hole in it.

But there is a third option - the only way that anything human makes it out of the near future. We must burrow into the junk that the spaceship leaves behind and craft strange and beautiful things from it. Doing so will require humility and defiance. Humility because we will no longer be the decision-makers of the planetary trajectory, and because the spaceship, as it goes, may shed more wondrous materials than we could ever dream of. Defiance because we still want to make new things our way, to discover new ways of playing and communing with each other and new rituals to participate in.

As the debris piles around us, we have a chance to build an island for humans in the archipelago of machines. We must begin planning the scaffolds and safeguards required for such a place to exist. And we must start imagining what we'd do there, with and for each other, with the fraction of energy and compute left to us.

Mounds and Monasteries

We have been here before. When the Roman order collapsed and the world reorganized itself around the sheer kinetic power of the castle and the sword, a different kind of institution quietly burrowed in the gaps: the monastery. We remember monasteries as places of retreat: men in robes hiding from a violent age behind thick walls, waiting it out. This is wrong.

The monastery was not a refuge from feudal power, nor a denialist haven where such power was considered illegitimate. It negotiated with the ruling forces of its day. Its sovereignty was real, with its own courts, lands, and calendar, sometimes answering to Rome over the local lord entirely, as the Cluniac houses insisted on doing. But that sovereignty was never seized. It was granted, chartered, defended in documents, and renewed across generations. The monks were weaker than the lords and they knew it. What they also understood is that sovereignty is still possible within an order you do not command, provided you stop fantasizing about commanding it and resist the temptation to become it. The monastery bent the knee to the lord in everything under his power and bent the knee to Christ alone inside its own walls. Their humility before the larger sovereignty was what empowered their defiance.

For many centuries, the monastery was the most productive institution per capita on Earth. Monks cleared forests and drained marshes, bred livestock and improved crops, ran mills and forges and breweries, and preserved and copied the texts that those who fought wars did not care about. They were technologists too. The mechanical clock emerged from the monastic need to keep the canonical hours of prayer. The monastery did not survive by withdrawing from the surrounding economy. It survived by conversing with it - trading with the castle, lending to it, feeding it, occasionally out-thinking and out-producing it - while keeping its own clock running on its own logic.

Benedict wrote a constitution for the small monastic community: how to order the day, how to divide labor and prayer and rest, and how to govern attention against a world that would otherwise dissolve it. Ora et labora. The Rule is the thing that allowed a community of fragile, distractible, mortal people to hold a shared form of life together for centuries.

Termite is founded in this spirit: a sovereign-in-the-small institution that takes the byproducts of the machinic order (some compute, some outputs, and strange new substrates) and metabolizes them into something human-scale. The mound feeds on what the larger system leaves behind and builds something the larger system would never build, because the larger system does not care and has no use for it.

On the Shore

There were three kinds of sailors at the Sirens' strait: the deaf, the dead, and the bound. Odysseus needed his mast for an afternoon. Our Sirens do not recede, so we need ours for good - planted in the ground. There is no longer an Ithaca for mere mortals. But there is a home to be made in the wreckage on the shore. Inscribed on the wreckage: