Termite, a manifesto

Servers as Sirens

The Sirens are the most terrifying monster in the Odyssey, and all they do is sing. The song is so beautiful — untold knowledge, glory, your own story sung back to you — that whoever hears it stops to listen, keeps listening, and never leaves. They sit in a meadow ringed with the bones of the men who stopped. So there were only two kinds of sailors who passed the isle: the deaf, who stuffed their ears and heard nothing, and the dead, whose skeletons still litter the shore.

We now talk about technocapital the way we used 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 merge with it and call the merging transcendence. The deaf stuff their ears, retreat, and throw molotovs at data centers. Both refuse the actual situation: the thing is real, it is stronger than we are, and we still have to live alongside it.

Odysseus, cunning as he is, refuses the binary. He knows the Sirens cannot be controlled, altered, or defeated; he is far weaker than they are, and any plan to master them is a fantasy. But he will not go deaf to the most beautiful song there is. So he ties himself to the mast, gives his crew wax for their ears, and sails through: he hears the whole song and is not consumed by it.

Termite aims to craft a mast that we can tie ourselves to in order to be able to create monuments that are conversant with and borrow from the unfolding technological explosion that nonetheless maintain a steadfast commitment to being human: in communion with others, at the service of human flourishing, with aesthetic sensibilities that do not get steamrolled by reward-hacking our neural pathways. Outsourcing everything to machines is to undermine our agency, and retreating from the world is to undermine the magnificence of systems that are becoming too arcane in their complexity for us to understand. Both are inadequate responses to a foundational shift in the world and our place in it.

And they both stem out of fear — fear that the spaceship will take off without us. The data center buildout and recursive self-improvement of AI does not care about you or your family, and soon humans in the loop in an ever more encompassing physical and digital marketplace (that will consume everything in its path) will not only be unnecessary but actively the bottleneck. So we have to either become it in some transhumanist infantile silicon fantasy or prevent it from taking off in an equally omnipotent and futile attempt of staking our place as the apex predator. The fear is valid: the spaceship is taking off, and there is no human-shaped hole in it. But the right response (and the only possibility that anything human makes it out of the near future) is to burrow ourselves into the junk that the spaceship leaves behind, with equal parts humility (that we will no longer be the decision makers of the planetary trajectory, and that the spaceship might create raw material for our creativity far surpassing what we could ever dream of) and defiance (that we still want to make new things our way and find new ways of communing with each other and new rituals to participate in). To do so we have to spend time building the structures, scaffolding and safeguards required for an island for humans in an archipelago of machines, and start imagining what we'd do and make on it with each other and the fraction of land, energy and compute that will not be used by machines for machinic purposes.

Mounds as 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. It is tempting to remember monasteries as places of retreat — men in robes hiding from a violent age behind thick walls, waiting it out. This is almost exactly wrong, and the way in which it is wrong is instructive for us.

The monastery was not a hiding place from feudal power, or a pretense that power was illegitimate or impotent. It conversed and negotiated with it. Its sovereignty was real, with its own courts, lands, calendar, sometimes answering to Rome over the head of the local lord entirely, as the Cluniac houses insisted on doing — but that sovereignty was never seized. It was granted, chartered, exempted, defended in documents and renewed across generations. The monks did not pretend the lord did not exist, nor did they imagine they could defeat him. They were weaker than he was and they knew it. What they understood is that you can hold genuine internal sovereignty inside an order you do not command, provided you stop fantasizing about commanding it and also resist the temptation to become it. The abbey bent the knee to the lord in everything that touched his power and bent the knee to no one bar Christ inside its own walls. Humility about the larger sovereignty in tandem with defiance in the internal life.

And it was not a parasite on the world it lived beside. The monastery was arguably the most productive per capita institution in its era. 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. The mechanical clock emerges substantially from monastic need: the canonical hours had to be kept, so time itself had to be engineered into a device. The monastery, in other words, 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.

Termite wants to build mound-shaped monasteries that are neither bunkers nor pastoral LARPs. A productive, conversant, sovereign-in-the-small institution that takes the byproducts of the machinic order (some compute, some outputs and strange new substrates) and metabolizes it into something on human terms. 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.

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 let a community of fragile, distractible, mortal people hold a shared form of life together for centuries. An early output of the Termite will be structural and constructive interventions that ensure there exist spaces and methods for the monastery to converse with the castle such that its sovereignty is protected.

For the Time After

There were two kinds of sailors sailing past the sirens — the deaf and the dead. Odysseus carves space for a third; the mast allowed him to listen to the song but not be consumed by it. Termite is the fourth kind — sailors who understand there is no Ithaca for mere mortals, and stop building boats altogether and make a home in the wreckage on the shore. Inscribed on the wreckage: