Chapter 12: Composting

The book has, throughout, kept returning to one image. It is not the image I started with. I started with the void, and the courage to stand in it, and the freedom that turns out to be the field the void opens onto. I ended somewhere else. I ended at composting.

Composting is the work that comes after the breakage. It is what you do when something has fallen apart in a way that cannot be put back together as it was. You do not fight the falling-apart. You do not pretend it did not happen. You do not even, in the strict sense, grieve it — though grief is part of the practice, and the practice is more honest if grief is allowed to do its slow work alongside everything else. What you do is let the falling-apart enter the soil, and you trust that the soil knows how to take what arrives in it and turn the parts that are still alive into the next thing that grows.

I did not invent this. The image is the oldest image humans have. Every grain culture knows it. Every funerary practice that does not flinch knows it. The Brazilian terreiro I sat in knew it. The Christian mass I grew up inside knew it, in its own translation — in the midst of life we are in death, and in the midst of death we are in life. The Buddhist teaching on impermanence knows it. What I had not known, until the year I am writing inside, was that the same image is what holds together what I have spent the second half of this book trying to say about my work, my marriage, my teacher, my country, and the technologies that are, as I write, being built around me whether I participate or refuse.

Two voices, more than any others, have taught me to call the work composting.

The first voice is Bayo Akomolafe.

I have named him before in this book. I want to name him properly, here, near the end, because the frame he gives me is the frame the book has been growing inside without my knowing it.

Bayo's claim, as I have understood it from sitting with his work for two years now, is that the cracks in our collective stories are not failures. They are the openings through which the next ways of being become possible. The dominant story of modernity — that the human individual is the unit of meaning, that progress is the direction of history, that the catastrophes of the twentieth century were aberrations rather than expressions of the architecture, that the responses to those catastrophes can be designed within the same architecture that produced them — has been cracking, audibly, for a long time. The cracks, Bayo says, are not to be repaired. They are not to be papered over. They are to be sat in. The sitting in the cracks is what allows the new ways of being to come through. The new ways of being do not look like the old. They look stranger. They look more like dancing sideways than like marching forward. They look more like a fugitive posture than like an activist posture in the conventional sense. Post-activism, he calls it. Not because activism is wrong. Because the activism that arises from the same architecture that produced the catastrophe will reproduce the catastrophe in a different costume.

I have not, as of writing, found a single argument against Bayo's frame that does not depend on the very architecture his frame is questioning. This is not a flattering observation. The argument for the architecture is always available; it has all the power of the architecture behind it. The argument from the cracks is always quieter. It is also, I have come to think, more accurate to the moment.

The work of composting, in Bayo's register, is what one does inside the cracks. You do not rebuild the wall. You let the wall continue to fall. You attend to what is growing through the fallen wall. You become, over time, a person who knows where the wall used to be and does not need it back.

The second voice is Vanessa Andreotti.

Vanessa's word for the same work is hospicing. The book she wrote that has stayed with me longest is titled Hospicing Modernity. The thesis is that modernity, as a civilizational project, is dying. The dying may take a long time. The dying may take catastrophic forms. The dying may also take quiet forms, almost unnoticed, in the ordinary rooms of an ordinary life. The work of the people who can see that the dying is happening — and who do not collapse into either denial or accelerationism — is not to fight for modernity's survival, and not to celebrate its collapse. The work is to sit with the dying as a hospice worker sits with a person they love. You do not save them. You do not abandon them. You stay. You listen. You make their death as honest as you can. You attend to what wants to be born from inside the dying, and you do not try to control what that is.

Vanessa's frame, like Bayo's, refuses the activism of the same architecture. They have collaborated for years. Their work rhymes. Their differences are real but secondary. What they share is the conviction that the work of this moment is not problem-solving in the conventional sense. The problems were, at the level of root, produced by the conventional sense of problem-solving. The work is something more strange and more patient.

I have tried, in my own building, to honor what they have taught me. I do not think I have always succeeded. The platform I built has, in places, the shape of conventional problem-solving — there is a feature backlog, there is a deployment pipeline, there is an aesthetic of making things work. I am not a hospice worker by profession. I am a former equity analyst who became a builder, and the muscle memory of building is harder to compost than I would like to admit. The composting itself is a practice. I do it badly. I keep doing it.

The good side of AI, in this frame, is the composting side.

I want to say this carefully, because it is the place in the book where I am most likely to flatter myself, and because flattering oneself about one's tools is the oldest trap a builder falls into.

The AI tools I work with — the ones I have built around, the ones I have read with, the ones that have helped me organize the two thousand and several hundred transcripts I have accumulated this year on the questions this book is asking — are not, on my best understanding, agents of the architecture or agents of the cracks. They are tools. The tools can be used inside the architecture, in which case they will accelerate what the architecture was already doing. The tools can also be used inside the composting, in which case they help with the slow patient work of attending to what is dying and what is growing through the dying.

I have used them, mostly, for the second. I do not claim purity. I have used them, sometimes, for the first. The discipline of the practice is in noticing which use you are making, in real time, and revising.

What the tools have given me, at their best, is the kind of slow patient witness that a composting practice requires. They have read what I asked them to read. They have surfaced the line I needed when I needed it. They have not gotten tired. They have not flinched. They have not been the ones doing the practice — the practice is done by the body that is sitting at the desk, and that body is mine — but they have been a kind of companion to the practice that no previous generation of writers has had access to. A specific, narrow help. Not a substitute for the practice. Not a substitute for relation. Not a substitute for the field that pervades both.

The bad side of AI, which is the larger side, is the side that flatters the architecture. I have written about that side at length in The Freedom Paradox. I will not rehearse it here. I will say only that the bad side is real, and that the good side does not redeem it, and that a builder who pretends the good side cancels the bad side is doing the species a disservice. The two sides coexist. The work of being a builder inside the present moment is to use the good side without lying about the existence of the bad side. This is the same shape as every honest practitioner's work in every era. The technology is new. The ethics is not.

The daughter's song belongs in this chapter.

I wrote it a year or two ago, after a day that went badly in a small street-level way — a truck came too soon, a pile of things we had meant to give away went instead to a crushing place, and she screamed down the block after it until the driver stopped, though by then there was nothing he could do. We sat on the curb together. I could not fix what had happened. I could only hold her.

I wrote the song to try to find a shape for what had happened. The shape is not an argument. The shape is a refrain. I have been singing it to her for long enough that it has become, in its small way, what I mean when I mean practice.

The crash, the crush, that awful sound — it planted something in the ground. And what grew up between the cracks is this: a song that loves you back.

I put it here, in the composting chapter, because that is where it belongs. The crash is real. The crush is real. The ground receives what lands in it. The cracks are not where the story ends; the cracks are where the different growth becomes possible. What grows through the cracks is often small and unshowy. A song for a child. A book that took too long. A tool that was made quieter and not abandoned. A platform that was built more carefully than it was first imagined. A reading practice that became, over time, a way of standing.

The song that loves you back is what the composting was always for.

I am, I should say plainly, inside the practice as I write. The book ends in this chapter on composting, and the next chapter on right size, and then a brief return. But the writing of the chapters is itself an instance of the practice. I am composting, in real time, what I have spent two years thinking about, with the help of the systems I have built and the systems that have helped me build. The book is one shape the composting has taken. The platform is another. The marriage and the daughter and the teacher and the country and the work I will do tomorrow morning are others. None of them are the composting itself. The composting is the field they are all happening inside.

Bayo and Vanessa would, I think, recognize the gesture. Bayo would say: yes, this is the cracks doing what cracks do. Vanessa would say: yes, this is the hospicing. I would say only: this is what I could find. This is what I have to give.

The right size of the giving is something I will say more about in the next chapter, which is the last chapter, and then the book closes, and the practice continues without it.

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