  Essays |
Essays
The archival home of essays I have written and published, mostly during 2025 and 2026, on Facebook and elsewhere. Each piece here is presented in browser-native typography and as a downloadable PDF set in EB Garamond. New essays appear simultaneously on tauzero.com, on Substack, and are also announced on Facebook. The PDF on tauzero.com is the best read, because Modern Library typography.
Start here
On “Cold-Eyed Rocket Man”
I unpack the phrase that runs through my work; a particular cast of mind anchored in John Aaron, Bowie and Hadfield, and Tom Godwin’s Cold Equations. Method, not temperament.
SpaceX IPO, Orbital Data Centers, and Three Card Monte: The Cloud Is Not Above the World
I take SpaceX’s IPO pitch for as many as a million orbital data-center satellites and run the phrase “data center in space” as three-card monte; the money card is the familiar industrial noun, and the familiarity does the cheating. What is sold as one cooled, serviced, depreciated plant is a swarm of separate spacecraft, each carrying its own thermal, power, aging, and disposal burden. I follow the costs the prospectus moves out of frame: radiators sized by Stefan-Boltzmann and exposed to debris; communications mass and weather-diverse ground stations; a dawn-dusk shell that saves battery and buys crowding; compute that ages on one clock while the spacecraft amortizes on another, with no in-orbit servicing and no secondary market; debris, near-Kessler traffic, Carrington-class common-cause risk, and overlapping sovereignty. Carried honestly, a five-year unit of useful compute costs three to five times its terrestrial equivalent. I did not invest in the IPO.
The Cook Does Not Want Pages
I begin at the stove, not in media theory; frying whole Hatch green chiles for a half-pound bison cheeseburger, built for two at 7,000 feet. Recipe sites were the purest product of the old search economy, which monetized the cook’s delay; conversational AI dissolves that by moving value from the static page to the answer trajectory, the tuned exchange that fits procedure to local conditions. Boyd’s OODA loop runs twice now, once in the cook and once in the machine, coupled; and Margulis’s symbiogenesis, not the dogfight, is the better analogy. The tuned recipe is appended as evidence.
The Cold Equation: Ejection
I ask coldly whether Challenger’s flight-deck crew could have lived: had the orbiter kept Columbia’s early command-deck ejection seats and SR-71 pressure suits, would escape have been possible? The Blackbird, M-21/D-21, and X-15 systems prove the flight conditions were survivable in principle; geometry, timing, and a crew of seven with two seats turn the handle into a knife. The cold equation is that escape was available only while it still looked premature, and morally available only after it was too late.
Banker’s Hours: Who Goes There?
A 40-fold spam flood hits my self-hosted mailbox in April 2026 and holds. Read as a control loop, the headers give it up: the machines are rented worldwide but the work keeps North American banker’s hours, the domains are dollar burners struck once and dropped, and nearly half the messages hide AI-written prose to poison the filter. A leaked generator prompt confirms the design. Why chasing domains is a losing loop, and why I still run my own iron.
Animism, Theory of Mind, and Participation
I trace a childhood rejection of explanations that did not constrain action through to a working distinction among objects, latent organized systems, and active entities. Animism, stripped of metaphysics, names a refusal to misclassify what one is dealing with; cybernetics later supplied the rigor; latency adds the warning that dormant is not dead. With exteriorized agents that now perceive, store, reactivate, and act, the stance returns as design practice.
Hormuz, Nixon’s Ghost, and President Jackson’s Old Machine
I argue that a real Hormuz crisis arrives in America as a racialized blame regime; Nixon, Jackson, and Manifest Destiny metabolized into a permission system that turns logistics failure into a loyalty test.
On Paul Ford’s “Moral AI Companies”
Reading Paul Ford’s NYTimes essay on AI ethics, I find him right that ethics do not scale inside a corporate boundary; but his Godzilla and electric-utility metaphors are too cute for the actual machinery. AI is a layered ecology of coupled OODA loops, where classification is governance.
The Shadow Organ
I trace the hidden services civilized orders grow to handle what daylight philosophy cannot absorb; from Bulgakov’s Woland through Trek’s Section 31 and Banks’s Culture to the platform age’s trust-and-safety queue.
What Kahn Got Wrong: On Escalation
I argue that Kahn’s escalation ladder did real work in 1965, when adversaries shared enough commensurability for signals to read across them. The current world has not earned that simplicity. Escalation is no longer ladder-shaped; it is a coupled-control-loop problem across minds, myths, factions, markets, and molecules.
Low Information Voters
I trace how a Hormuz disruption propagates through fertilizer, gasoline, groceries, cars, and electronics, and how that propagation closes the loop politically into the 2026 midterms. The repair interval exceeds the election interval.
Patrilines with Feedback; or, A Short Inquiry into the Y-Chromosome Bottleneck, Considered as a Control System
Post-Neolithic DNA sequencing shows a steep collapse in Y-chromosome diversity; mitochondrial DNA shows no parallel collapse. The standard narrative reaches for war. A succession of cybernetic models, escalating from scalar fields to partially coupled basins to nested internal admissibility, shows that massacre is not necessary to produce the broad compression pattern. Culture as the kybernetes of lineage. Code at github.com/robtow/Patrilines-with-Feedback.
The Steersman of Hormuz: Insurance as Control Surface
I look at the Strait of Hormuz tensions and find that shipping closes not with mines but with insurance circulars. The marine underwriter, not the admiral, holds the rudder of the modern shipping system; and has made himself visible.
The Parasite Inside the Parasite
I read a recent paper showing that deltaviruses can be packaged inside other virions, and find nested OODA loops in viral biology. The host cell runs metabolism; the helper virus exploits it; the deltavirus exploits the helper. A layered stack of replicators.
Dragonflies With Railguns
I sketch the realistic space-warship physics that The Expanse politely ignores. Stefan and Boltzmann demand radiator wings, heat-clock combat, directional emission. A dragonfly with a railgun, transformer-shaped between cruise and combat configurations.
The Kármán Line: Three WWII Aviators in Space
I trace three WWII military aviators, and only three, who personally crossed 100 km altitude: Glenn, Walker, Komarov. Working lives spanning fabric airplanes to orbital mechanics; an interval no training pipeline was ever designed to span.
Radar Love
1979 Northrop. An hour before a USAF general’s demo, a single ferrite core fails in the radar emulator. I fix it on the front-panel switches because the system was still legible to one person. The legibility is gone now.