In Animist beliefs, life and death are non-binary; Ancestor Spirits carry a presence as nodes in the Superorganism network, the spirit in all things. Communing with the dead is a natural and spiritual practice.
Termina is not that.
Termina is to Anima as Undead is to the Living.
It is the Null-Spirit, the Gestört, the Nihilist Supra-Organism. A collection of things without parsimony, collectively less than the sum of its parts.
A radiation, a waste product of rampant expansion towards meaningless ends. An inefficiency, the churn of capitalistic profiteering.
A linear extrapolation of a spirit at its end. Ambulating without change or purpose, an Undead Cancer.
An Anti-Mutation, a hungry abomination monopolizing future potentialities.
The miracle of Anima, the self-organization of a universe in a low-entropy state, is its improbability. Termina are the creeping tendrils of entropy— eldritch enzymes unraveling proteins, molecules, and ideas, leaving behind a high-probability, undifferentiated state where everything equals nothing.
Broad Categories of Termina
- The imagined idea of another person, and parasocial relationships.
- Inert bureaucracies.
- "Content" generated solely to be consumed.
- "Solutions" in search of a problem.
- Advertisement per se.
- Generative AI as weaponized by capitalists or consumed by those who neither understand nor care to learn ML.
- Christianity as weaponized by colonizers to genocide peoples and ideas, or the shibboleths of religion.
- Unconscientious artifice.
- Measures in violation of Goodhart's law.
- Weapons of warfare and state violence.
Termina is also not this, but it'll look good in the thumbnail.
The Sleeping
Necromancers of Termina, in contrast to The Dreaming.
Their power comes from striving for power; auto-catalytic; the shrewdness of a single-minded predator; weaponized ignorance self-replicating.
The Relationships between The Sleeping and Termina are of a transactional nature, thoughtless, coercive, and isolating.
Example Termina
- Forged painting.
- Smartphone with designed obsolescence.
- Snake oil.
- Homeopathic water.
- Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition.
- NFT Bored Ape.
- E-Meter.
- Reproduction of the original Colt Revolver.
- Property deed of stolen lands.
- Private Equity LLC.
One day I'll actually properly write up this setting, but for now it'll just keep coming out piecemeal...
This is fucking brilliant.
ReplyDeleteI want to relay a situation in which I saw the rise of a Termina in my own life. About 12-13 years ago I started working for a company that numbered about 90-100 people. Everyone knew each other. Everyone was engaged, everyone helped each other. Employees were incredibly well-treated, and as a result, everyone was willing to work really hard. All this led almost perforce to the overwhelming success and then incredibly rapid growth of the company.
For a long time, the culture held in spite of the growth. But somewhere around 500-600 people, it began to slip. A number of the things you mention here - inert bureaucracy, “Solutions” in search of a problem, and measures in violation of Goodheart’s law began to creep in. A number of us started to raise the alarm, but it was already too late, and totally unstoppable at that point. Still, there were elements of the original culture in place. Enough so that I didn’t see the rise of the Termina.
Your comparison of Termina to an undead cancer is what made me think of this experience originally. Another few years later, we had doubled in size again, and then again. I had ben there for over ten years and we numbered about 2500 people when a Private Equity firm bought a significant portion of us, enough to have a say in policy. The scales fell from my eyes not long after that, and I got the fuck out. That December, shortly before Christmas, this was one of the companies that laid off a significant percentage of their workforce over a zoom meeting. Even though I had left because I saw exactly this kind of thing in our future, it still surprised me somehow and made me incredibly sad.
Anyway, reading this, it made me think about that experience – I have tried to encapsulate and describe it for people before, but the concept of Termina condenses it to a single word without reducing it in any way. That’s so cool. I think it’s incredibly effective and even truly frightening as a force recognized in gameplay and could lead to some very intense play indeed. Really nice work, Max.
One thought - I would expand #7 to include all religions. I’m not saying all religions are bad but as useful and benevolent a force as they can be, they are all open to this kind of abuse by radicals or the self-interested and I can think of real-world examples of this in the case of all the Abrahamic religions at the very least.
Ya stuff like that is exactly what I'm talking about!
DeleteWrt #7, it wasn't really intended as Christianity or Abrahamic religions specifically, that was just the most salient and pervasive specific example of religious institutions as a form of Termina.
yeah haha especially because israel's the big genocider/colonizer these days
DeleteThe hyperlink in the second part of 7 is, if not directly about that, very much about the ways that happens.
DeleteAlso, I want to observe that almost all of the best posts on these blogs make me scurry to other parts of the internet looking stuff up that I never knew about and that happened several times in this post!
ReplyDeleteThanks :). Ya sometimes it's intentional, like I know some things I reference are likely going to require further investigation and that's the point; admittedly other times I've just forgotten what is common knowledge vs. something I learned through some specific avenue along the way.
DeleteI've mentioned this on the Discord, but I love the Termina/Anima stuff. I think your further discussion on the Discord has made it even more compelling to me. The idea of Free Motion vs Circular Motion, harmonious balance vs self-destructive extremity, that all is supremely realistic.
ReplyDelete