Mike English
04 · Writing · since 2018

Field notes.

Long-form essays on protocol design, climate economics, and the unglamorous middle where engineering meets incentive.

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Featured · Apr 18 · 2026 · 8 min

Why we replaced the booking funnel with a swarm

For thirty years online travel meant ten tabs and a coupon code. We thought we could do better — eight specialists arranged in a ring, talking to each other, paid from commission, retiring a tonne of carbon every time someone slept somewhere.

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05 / Archive
All dispatches.
Mar 22 · 202612 min
Carbon as a first-class data type
On building runtime systems where every value carries its own emissions debt.
Feb 14 · 20266 min
The economics of a tonne
Why $1 of commission and $1 of subsidy do not retire the same kind of CO₂.
Jan 30 · 202614 min
Notes from the second decade of climate tech
A founder’s field report after seven years.
Dec 09 · 20255 min
Quiet protocols
In praise of software that doesn’t announce itself.
Nov 22 · 20259 min
Hotels are operating systems
And the booking funnel is a dialect of FTP. We can do better.
Oct 14 · 202511 min
On building agents that resign
A small treatise on humility in autonomous software.
Sep 02 · 20257 min
Receipts, ledgers, & trust
Why every climate claim should be public, parseable, and dull.
Verified knowledge profile → · Press