The One True Path

[The following text was discovered in 2023 on an unlabeled thumb drive in the office of Professor Harmond Ellis (1943-2021), who held the Gordon J. Laing Distinguished Service Professor position in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. Its metadata indicates it was written in 2017, although it affects the diction of an earlier era. Despite its modern composition, Ellis's notes suggest he intended it as a pastiche of Jorge Luis Borges, though he never published it. The text is reproduced here in full. —Ed.]

“Veritas in circulo infinito iacet; quod quaerimus est quod fugimus.”

- Marcus Whitley, unpublished correspondence, 1954

Among the numerous solutions proposed to resolve the paradox first articulated by Enrico Fermi during a lunchtime conversation in the summer of 1950¹, there exists one possibility that has been curiously overlooked by the cosmologists, physicists, and philosophers who have dedicated their intellectual energies to this question.

The oversight is perhaps understandable. Those who contemplate the stars are rarely those who concern themselves with the mundane mechanics of commerce. Yet it is precisely in this unlikely intersection that I believe the answer resides.

In the vast library of possible universes—each with its own physical laws and evolutionary pathways—I propose that we inhabit the lone universe in which every intelligence discovers what terrestrial corporations have termed “Business-to-Business Software as a Service” before they develop the capacity for interstellar travel. This is not mere coincidence but rather the inevitable consequence of information technology's natural evolution within any sufficiently advanced civilization.

I was first alerted to this possibility when consulting obscure texts in the special collections of the University of Chicago Library.

There, I found a forgotten monograph housed in the archives of the Fermi Institute. The document, authored by Dr. Marcus Whitley³, a mathematician and occasional collaborator with Fermi himself, had earned brief notoriety before vanishing into academic obscurity.

His writings, dismissed by physicists as the indulgence of an otherwise rational mind, contained a curious theorem proposing that any system of sufficient complexity would inevitably turn inward upon itself rather than expand outward—a direct counterpoint to the expansionist assumptions underlying Fermi's famous paradox.

Consider the nature of civilization's advancement. From the moment a species develops digital technology, it begins creating increasingly complex systems to organize itself.

The trajectory from simple recordkeeping to vast networks of data management solutions appears to be universal. What begins as liberation inevitably gives rise to new forms of bureaucracy.

In a pattern strikingly similar to what economists would later dub the productivity paradox², these systems consume ever more resources while yielding proportionally less benefit. The purchase of 100 enterprise software subscriptions triggers the necessity for a software license management system, which itself requires three additional management tools to operate effectively⁴.

Fig. 2 — Topology of Subscription Dependencies

Even before the digital age, we can trace the drift toward administrative self‑absorption.

Ballistic Research Laboratory memorandum, 18 August 1947: “Effective this date, ENIAC computing time is reassigned from lunar‑ballistics trials to Ordnance stockpile accounting (Run A‑127).”⁵

Four years later, in London, LEO I ran the world's first routine payroll for a chain of teashops, not a space program.⁶ By the early 1960s, IBM's “Model T” computer, the 1401, was printing 230 paychecks a minute while optimizing retail inventories instead of plotting interstellar trajectories.⁷

Each watershed repeats the pattern: machines built to conquer the unknown are repurposed to reconcile ledgers, exactly as Dr Whitley—who would die mysteriously in 1965⁸—foretold.

I recall a dream in which I witnessed an advanced alien civilization. Their vast serⅴer farms hummed beneath purple skies, tended by beings whose neural pathways had evolved to mirror database architectures. Formerly preoccupied with the nature of being, their philosophers now wrestled with the Ontological Versioning Problem: could ancestral minds, archived in deprecated data formats, still be considered the same entities after system migrations? Theologians debated for millennia whether consciousness was merely a temporary cache of a universal intelligence—one slated for purging in an inevitable cosmic garbage-collection event.

This universal appeal of such systems is not difficult to comprehend. They provide order in a chaotic universe. They offer the illusion of control. Most importantly, they redirect the aggressive expansionist tendencies that might otherwise lead a species to venture beyond their home system. Why expend vast resources on interstellar travel when there remains an infinite landscape of organizational optimization to explore?

In my office at the university, among the many volumes that crowd my shelves, I keep a first edition of Fermi's collected papers, and beside it, a transcript of that fateful lunchtime conversation in Los Alamos where he first posed his famous question: “Where is everybody?” The paradox that bears his name assumes that intelligent life should be common, yet we observe no evidence of it elsewhere in the cosmos. What Fermi—brilliant in both theory and experiment, a rarity among physicists—could not have foreseen was how his own legacy would provide a clue to the answer.

Last month, I attended a technology conference where I recorded a conversation with Morgan Eisenhardt, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who had amassed a fortune funding subscription-based enterprise software startups. “The universe of possible features is infinite,” she told me with the fervor of a quantum physicist describing parallel worlds. “We could spend millennia just optimizing workflows for various industries.” I wonder now if her words contained more cosmic truth than either of us realized at the time.

Perhaps the true destiny of intelligent life is not to spread among the stars but to perfect the art of selling software to one another until the heat death of their respective suns renders such concerns moot. On December 2, 1942, beneath the abandoned squash courts of the University of Chicago's Stagg Field, Fermi succeeded in initiating the first controlled nuclear chain reaction—a moment that could have been the first step toward the stars. Instead, I propose it was unwittingly the first step toward our cosmic introversion. With each technological advance, we turn further inward, creating ever more complex systems to manage our affairs rather than exploring the vast unknown that surrounds us.

The One True Path, then, is circular—an endless return to the point of origin. Civilizations develop networks of astounding complexity merely to document and manage themselves, creating perfect models of their own bureaucracies. The map becomes the territory. The system becomes its own justification. And the stars grow ever more distant.

Fermi's paradox resolves itself not with a bang of mutual destruction nor with the whimper of civilizational collapse, but with the soft, persistent clicking of millions of beings updating their enterprise resource planning systems, forever sabotaging their interstellar ambitions through increasingly elaborate forms of organizational efficiency, oblivious to the silent worlds that surround them, equally engrossed in their own digital labyrinths.

The only trace they leave behind as evidence of their existence: intermittent electromagnetic signals of enterprise software demonstrations, drifting endlessly across the void—fractal echoes of a universe-wide subscription to cosmic irrelevance.

1. The exact date of this conversation is disputed. Historian Herbert York places it in July 1950, while Edward Teller, in his 1979 memoirs, insists it occurred the previous summer. Fermi himself left no written record of the event.
2. The “productivity paradox,” first identified by economist Robert Solow in 1987, observes that despite massive investments in information technology, organizations often experience diminishing returns. Solow famously wrote: “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”
3. Dr. Marcus Whitley (1912-1968) reportedly collaborated with Fermi on several theoretical projects. While mainstream history has largely forgotten him, his monograph “Recursive Organizational Systems and Spatial Exploration: A Theoretical Framework” (University of Chicago Press, 1953) anticipated many of the organizational challenges that would later plague NASA during the Apollo program.
4. Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon theorized that organizations inherently grow more complex over time, eventually reaching a point where maintaining internal coherence consumes more resources than pursuing external objectives—a phenomenon that would obviously inhibit interstellar ambitions.
5. BRL Progress Report No. 17, “ENIAC Re‑Activation and Utilization,” Aberdeen Proving Ground Archives, Box 214‑B. A later, heavily redacted version (1959) omits any reference to the supply‑chain simulations.
6. According to records at the University of Oxford's Institute for Advanced Computation, Whitley died in 1965 after submitting a paper on “Subscription-Based Organizational Frameworks as Existential Barriers to Interspecies Contact.” The circumstances of his death remain unexplained.
7. IBM Archives, “The IBM 1401,” IBM Corporation, accessed 18 April 2025, https://www.ibm.com/history/1401.
8. Institute for Advanced Computation, University of Oxford, personnel file “Whitley, M.,” accession 3586, folio 44 (“Subscription‑Based Organizational Frameworks…,” 1965).
9. The unusual character in “serⅴer” appears to be a glitch in the original file. Close examination suggests it resembles a logogram from the ternary mathematical notation system Whitley developed in his later years.