The oceans are the only direct experience of endless frontiers most humans can access. When you view terrestrial realities from oceanic loci, terrestrial wildernesses too begin to feel like domesticated environments, bounded and contained.
The oceans create a figure-and-ground structure in the human psyche, playing the role of ground in ways we rarely recognize. In conflict, for example, as Alfred Thayer Mahan observed in The Influence of Sea Power upon History, oceans often determine the structure of the conflict even when naval action is limited or absent.
Imagine a world map with the landmasses punched out. You’d still be left with a single connected surface with holes. Punch out the oceans though, and you’re left with a scattering of disconnected shapes. Mathematically, a figure is often convex (or nearly so — constructing a convex hull doesn’t add much area), bounded, simply connected, and part of a foreground plurality. A ground, by contrast, is usually a singular, non-convex, unbounded, and non-simply connected shape. Though we speak of oceans in the plural, there is but one.
Grounds also induce infinite-horizon temporalities for the psyche. You can keep circling the earth on the oceans along a roughly “straight” great-circle line. On land, you can at best trace loops that never quite feel uncontained.
To view your life from aboard a ship, out of sight of land, is to experience something akin to the overview effect astronauts describe. The ocean is our budget version of outer space.
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One way to understand the spatio-temporal structure of oceans is as a canvas for the infinite game, in James Carse’s sense. There is only one infinite game. It features an endlessly retreating horizon and an imperative to continue play. There are no borders, only holes where the finite games of terrestriality abut the infinite game.
You cannot understand the infinite game of human civilization on the planet — what we might approximate as the cosmopolitan impulse — without centering the oceans. The story of the infinite game is the oceanic story of our species-nature.
To this basic understanding of oceans, we must add the material fact of salinity.
Life evolved in the oceans, and the evidence still resides in our blood chemistry. Terrestrial life must go to great lengths to seek salt to maintain itself.
Salt, as metaphor, points in two directions at once: to the subcellular level, where we connect to ourselves at a molecular scale, and to the most public level, where we connect to the vastness of the cosmos and our evolutionary history within it.
On the historical scale, if oceans embody the cosmopolitan infinite game, salt embodies the thread of commerce within that game.
Salt is the foundation of commerce metaphors. The word salary derives from salt, from the Roman practice of paying soldiers in salt allowances.
Jane Jacobs spoke of the guardian and commerce syndromes as two systems of the world; the landmasses and oceans of sociality. Kinship, liberally construed to include fictive kinship, is the freshwater of life. Commerce is the saltwater. History, written by the terrestrially rooted, valorizes the guardian and demonizes commerce. I have previously described the guardian syndrome as an economics of pricelessness. Lacking the material infinities of salty oceans, terrestrial life seeks infinities in spiritualized intimacies.
Idioms reflect salt’s importance. In India, “I have eaten your salt” protests loyalty when it is under suspicion. Elsewhere too, salt appears as the ersatz blood of commercial relationships.
In politics, salt arises where politics meets economics. Gandhi’s Salt March against the British tax is the most iconic example. Salt monopolies have long been levers of statecraft.
The divide between coastal and interior peoples is perhaps the most enduring in history. Coastal peoples cannot help but be at least somewhat cosmopolitan. Their lives, livelihoods, and outlooks are shaped by oceans — by the saltwater in their veins. This divide persists in the language of economics: “saltwater” vs. “freshwater” schools, Keynesianism on the coasts versus the Chicago School inland. The mapping is imperfect, but we can still suspect that Keynesian tastes for large-scale societal engineering owe something to the historical familiarity of coastal peoples with the complexities of ocean-borne trade. Economic modernity was built one ship at a time. Venice alone supplied a significant fraction of the conceptual machinery of modern commerce.
Salt is planetary. Deeply landlocked regions suffer endemic salt deficiencies. At the level of chemistry, salt is a visceral reminder of the connectedness of all life and matter. Salt-mining cultures of the interior treat it as an industrial trade, stripped of its aura. Oceanic cultures, by contrast, live in its spiritual presence.
At the far end of the spectrum we find outlaw seafaring cultures, as William Langewiesche described in The Outlaw Sea. These are sovereignties the size of ships, where piracy — sometimes described as a progenitor of democracy — carries a legitimacy absent in terrestrial criminalities. States have historically employed privateers; by contrast, organized crime on land, whether prohibition-era syndicates in the U.S. or the Yakuza in Japan, is usually treated as an unambiguous rival to state power.
Terrestrial notions of social contracts, legality, and purity falter before the corrosive grays of oceanic life. Salt wears down their black-and-white boundaries.
We might therefore coin memento salis as the discipline of staying aware of the centrality of salt in human life, analogous to memento mori. This is the great spiritual privilege of coastal life: you can never forget salt. It’s in the wind, in the undrinkability of seawater. Life is suffused with memento salis.
I grew up in a hilly inland region but have spent most of my adult life by the coast. I am temperamentally more suited to the coastal condition. Even when inland, rivers and lakes were my consolation, and visits to the sea, my highlights. Vacations tended toward islands and beaches. Mountains, though sublime, were never as significant.
In Salt-Seeking, I described freshwater media as walled gardens — environments that induce a subtle hunger, like salt-deficiency diseases. Links from outside function as salt licks. Platforms police external links for the same reason states monopolize salt. Life in freshwater media resembles life inland: a precarious struggle against endemic deficiency.
Saltwater media present the opposite problem: the dangers of survival at sea. The ocean has no domesticated built environment. It is hostile by default: sharks, jellyfish, storms, waves. Even the largest cruise ship or aircraft carrier is a frontier town, always vulnerable.
The natural human habitat may be the coastal city, buzzing with trade, with Lovecraftian horrors lurking a riptide away. Confidence in identity wavers as exotic flavors and alien tongues mingle with familiar motifs. Mongrelizing mirrors reveal that everything “ours” has partially foreign origins. The oceans are the medium of contamination, dissolving the fragile purity conceits of interiors.
Living by this hostile yet intimate planetary reality, you cannot sustain parochial insularity. You barely manage cosmopolitanism. Seafaring peoples fall easily into what interiors call corruption, but oceans recognize as planetary homecoming.
The digital counterpart of the ocean is the open internet. To live in saltspace is to live with continuous memento salis.
Its phenomenology maps cleanly: trolls, bots, content farms as marine life; hacker groups as pirates; states as navies; outages as storms; DDoS attacks as monster waves. Saltspace is not safe, but the salt calls to us.
What defines saltspace? Not simply minimal governance. Mechanics matter — self-hosted servers, anonymity, decentralized infrastructures — but infrastructure is not ethos. A self-hosted blog is not the ocean. A carefully engineered site on IPFS may still be a maritime museum floating in a landlocked lake.
Saltspace is not defined by lawlessness or conflict either. It is defined by indifference to purity. The only way to exist in saltspace is as a mongrel. There are no insiders or outsiders. No parochial mythologies can be defended on the open seas.
Too many decentralization ideologues mistake shipbuilding for voyaging on the ocean, fingers for the moon. Shipbuilding is necessary, but not sufficient. The yearning for the sea must be followed by actual voyages.
If you want to build a ship, Saint-Exupéry wrote, don’t drum up men to gather wood and give orders. Teach them to yearn for the endless sea. True enough, but yearning is not the sea.
Memento salis is the call of the ocean. It is the impulse with which the voyage of becoming human begins.
Protocol for Memento Salis
1. Foundational Text First
You began by drafting a complete rough essay in your own voice, with structure, sequencing, and much of the phrasing already in place.
Unlike past sessions, where you often started with an outline, conceptual scaffolding, or a fragmented set of notes, here you gave me a single continuous draft.
Difference: Instead of co-authoring structure and flow from scratch, the task was surgical refinement — smoothing, patching, bridging — while preserving nearly all original language.
2. Surgical Rewrite Rather than Generative Drafting
The explicit instruction was: retain as much of my original language, mood, and sequencing as possible.
I performed a line-by-line smoothing pass, focusing on:
Transitions between sections.
Filling gaps (e.g., piracy vs. terrestrial organized crime examples).
Tightening redundancies (e.g., memento salis refrain).
Ensuring mathematical and metaphorical passages tied back to argument.
Difference: Past articles often required me to co-generate significant blocks of new prose. Here, new writing was minimal — almost all additions were bridging or repair sentences.
3. Two-Pass Workflow
Pass 1: Full rewrite into a clean version.
Pass 2: Commentary layer explaining every edit, showing where and why surgery occurred.
Difference: Previously, we’ve often alternated between outline → draft → revisions. This time, it was draft → rewrite → annotated surgery notes. A more surgical editorial protocol, less of a generative partnership.
4. Visual Companion Development
After text was stabilized, we developed cartographic images to extend the metaphor:
First prompt (isometric punched-out landmasses).
Iterative refinement (flat view, then Spilhaus projection).
The visual workflow was iterative prompt design → generate → adjust projection → regenerate.
Difference: Earlier articles sometimes included image prompts for metaphoric support (e.g. color swatches, Gunn-style comps), but here the imagery was integrated as a direct conceptual extension of the text (figure-ground of oceans/land). The image wasn’t decorative but argumentative.
5. Conceptual Anchoring
You anchored Memento Salis explicitly to two prior essays (Salt-Seeking, Pricelessness).
This gave the process a recursive quality: building on existing conceptual “salts” rather than opening new thematic terrain.
Difference: In past essays, we often started by excavating new metaphors/frameworks. Here, the metaphor was already established; the work was about extension and deepening.
Key Distinctions from Past Protocols
From generative to editorial: Much less invention, much more preservation and refinement.
From scaffolding to surgery: We skipped outlines and scaffolds, starting with a full draft.
From decoration to argumentation in visuals: Imagery played a structural role, not just stylistic accompaniment.
From open-ended co-development to bounded discipline: You constrained the process tightly, requiring me to work within your voice, rather than alongside it.
I love the salt posts. I prompted GPT-5 with “memento salis” and got back the story of Sodom and Lot’s wife, which is tangentially related to your cosmopolitan threads https://chatgpt.com/share/68c50edb-f4a4-8008-960e-2d8654af980d