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A meeting is a room.
So is a group chat.
So is a dinner table, a comment section, an entire industry. Anything that decides before you’ve finished thinking.
In Her Orbit is one room at a time. Every other week I take a room I’m actually in and write it down while I’m still in it: what happened, how fast the room decided, and what I thought before it did.
A room doesn’t need walls. What makes it a room is the pressure it puts on your thinking before you’ve formed a thought.
Sometimes the room is a technology room: AI, space, automation, the things being built faster than anyone can decide whether they should be. Sometimes it’s a dinner table. The scale changes. The mechanism doesn’t.
Not technical reporting. Not commentary from a distance. I’m less interested in what’s being decided than in how fast everyone agrees, how quickly “obviously” gets said out loud, and what happens to the person who isn’t sure yet.
Some weeks there’s a tool at the end. Most weeks there’s a question, because I usually don’t know how the room ends either.
Start Here
Three rooms to start with: a crowd, an industry, and a ballroom that wanted to live forever.
Why I Hope We Never Find Life on Mars The aliens question isn’t the one you think it is. On a room that answers before it thinks, and what it takes to stop agreeing long enough to think it through.
The Real Story About Data Centers in Space Worth a trillion dollars or worth nothing, depending on who held the microphone. On an industry deciding what’s true before the evidence arrives.
Should We Cure Aging? Five days in a room that wanted to live forever. On a longevity conference, the question nobody asked, and why test pilots widen the envelope one step at a time.
The latest rooms
One essay every other week. Eight hundred to twelve hundred words.
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If you’ve ever gone quiet in a room and spent the drive home wondering why, this is for you.
Critics called the Impressionists unfinished and hid Duchamp's Fountain. What we miss when we call something just AI before we look at it.