The ‘cloud’ has a Kessler problem.
You know the riddle by now. Satellites crash into satellites, debris begets debris, and one day the sky remembers us as junk instead of journey. That was the first verse — Our Cathedral.
Then the highway. Platoons of autonomous trucks drafting too close, one glitch rippling backward at the speed of brake lights, pile-ups born from coordination itself. The second verse — Our Highway.
Now the third. The digital.
On July 19, 2024, a single misconfigured file — 40 kilobytes of bad logic — blue-screened 8.5 million Windows machines in 78 minutes. Not a hack. Not malware. A software update from a security vendor doing exactly what it was designed to do, in a world where everyone runs the same code at the same time.
The math didn’t change when the medium did.
N² doesn’t care if you’re counting satellites, trucks, or endpoints.
Shared dependencies, synchronized updates, monoculture by convenience — these are the orbital mechanics of the networked age. And when the cascade comes, it doesn’t degrade gracefully. It fails in chorus.
I call the aftermath trust debris: the slow erosion of confidence that persists long after the systems reboot. Delta is still in court. CrowdStrike is still explaining. The 911 centers that went dark for hours — they remember.
This paper is the third door in a trilogy I’ve been building in public:
- Our Gods Haven’t Fallen, Yet — orbital debris, Kessler cascades, the space we’re trashing
- Our Gods Haven’t Crashed, Yet — convoy collapse, fleet-scale correlation, asphalt consequences
- Our Gods Haven’t Computed, Yet — software monoculture, trust debris, the cloud we’re lacing with consequence
Three substrates. One pattern. Three verses of one warning song.
The structure is the same across all three: Breath for the poets and the worried, Logos for the engineers and the skeptical, Word for the executives who need the punchline before the proof.
Why this order? Because that’s the order God spoke creation: garden-hearted intuition first, then ordered logic, then incarnate action. You weren’t reading three papers. You were hearing one revelation in three modes.
The math is peer-reviewed. The tech exists. What’s missing is intention — the directed will to act on what we already know.
Our gods haven’t computed, yet.
The receipts are piling up. The question is what we choose to do with them.
This trilogy is the field report. Our next project — AI Mechanics — is the operating manual for the tools we used to write it.
Full Riddle: Our Gods Haven’t Computed Yet — A Neural Junkies’ Riddle — Our Cloud (1.7). O’Connor, T. (2025). | Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17925255
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