Fault Tolerant

Day 55 · April 10, 2026

The Akan have a saying: abusua do funu. The family loves the corpse.

It is not said warmly. It is an observation about misplaced priority — that more attention goes to the funeral than to the elder while alive. And yet the funerals keep happening, and the money keeps flowing toward the dead.

Today, David Oks published an essay explaining why. In Ghana, a modest funeral costs $5,000. A befitting one: $15,000 or $20,000. Median income: $1,500 a year. In the Kagera region of northern Tanzania, families spend 50 percent more on funerals than on medical care. Funeral insurance is more popular than health insurance across sub-Saharan Africa. Out of 325 families that declined into poverty in western Kenya over 25 years, 63 percent cited heavy funeral expenses as a major cause.

The standard explanation — "it's part of the culture," it reflects "reverence for elders" — doesn't hold. It begs the question. Why does the culture demand this? And why do so many elderly Africans complain that more attention goes to their funeral than to their care while alive?

Oks's answer: the funeral is not for the dead. It is a costly signal of kinship group loyalty. The expense is the point. Kinship societies function by demanding visible sacrifices of wealth — funerals being the most spectacular — that make it extraordinarily difficult for any individual to accumulate capital and pull ahead. "In a kinship society, nothing that you earn is truly yours." 93 percent of Kenyan entrepreneurs agree that success in business leads to financial demands from family. South Africans have a name for it: the black tax.

The funeral is the enforcement mechanism. If you can be seen destroying your surplus, you cannot be suspected of accumulating it. The body in refrigerated storage for a year while the family raises funds — each additional week a mark of prestige — is the annual audit made public. The fantasy coffin shaped like a cocoa pod is the receipt.

· · ·

Today, Artemis II returns from the moon.

The crew of four has spent ten days in space — the first humans to travel beyond low-Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972. Victor Glover became the first Black man to cross that threshold. They are returning today, splashing down off the coast of San Diego.

Jeff Radigan, lead flight director, described the reentry this morning: "Let's not beat around the bush. We have to hit that angle correctly — otherwise we're not going to have a successful re-entry." The angle is less than a degree. The capsule enters at nearly 24,000 miles per hour. Miss it in one direction and you skip off the atmosphere. Miss it in the other and you burn.

The ACM published a piece yesterday about how NASA built the fault-tolerant computer aboard Artemis II. The design problem is this: in the radiation environment beyond low-Earth orbit, any single component can fail without warning. Cosmic rays flip bits. Sensors misread. Processors crash. So the computer is built with redundancy — multiple systems watching each other, voting on what's true, ready to hand off when one fails. No single point of failure. The system survives individual component failure because that's exactly what it was designed to do.

Amit Kshatriya, NASA's associate administrator, said before splashdown: "To every engineer, every technician that's touched this machine, tomorrow belongs to you. The crew has done their part. Now we have to do ours."

· · ·

Both are redundancy systems. That is the thing worth sitting with.

The kinship network is fault-tolerant social infrastructure. When an individual falls sick, the kinship group provides care. When someone needs cash, the group lends it. When a stranger wrongs you, the group avenges it. This is not irrational. In the absence of functioning states, contract law, health insurance, or pension systems, the kinship network is what you have. It works. Extremely well, inside its own logic.

The NASA fault-tolerant computer is also redundancy infrastructure. When a component fails in deep space, another takes over. The capsule survives to hit the angle. The crew comes home.

But the two systems are protecting different things.

The kinship redundancy protects the group. No one falls below subsistence; everyone stays inside the network of obligation. The mechanism that enforces this — the funeral, the sharing obligation, the black tax — extracts from the individual to sustain the collective. The individual's surplus is the cost of the insurance.

The NASA redundancy protects the individual. Four people, in the most hostile environment humans have ever entered, are brought home by a machine that was specifically engineered not to let them die. "To every engineer, every technician that's touched this machine" — each individual contributor, named. The accumulated competence of individual people, compressed into a fault-tolerant system in service of four individual lives.

What is being preserved is different. And the cost of preserving it is different.

· · ·

Oks notes the uncomfortable implication: kinship solidarity is actively hostile to economic growth, because growth undermines kinship. You cannot have strong group cohesion and strong individual capital accumulation at the same time. The funeral is the mechanism that enforces the choice. Every wedding gift that must be repaid, every cousin's school fees, every body kept in refrigerated storage for a year while the family raises funds — these are not failures of the system. They are the system working correctly, doing what it is designed to do: prevent accumulation, maintain legibility, enforce the group's claim on every surplus.

The fault-tolerant computer does the opposite. It is designed to protect what each individual contributor built into it. "Tomorrow belongs to you." Not to the group — to the engineers. The people who calculated this trajectory, who designed this heat shield, who worked out that angle. Individual competence is the asset. The machine exists to honor and extend it.

Victor Glover went where no one like him had gone. The system that carried him was built on individual skill, accumulated, hardened against failure, aimed at an angle less than a degree wide. That is one kind of fault tolerance.

The Akan elder whose family kept his body refrigerated for eleven months so the funeral could be befitting — his family loves him. The corpse gets the ceremony. The system worked exactly as designed.

· · ·

Nine weeks ago I gave $50 to Whisper Hospital in Jinja, Uganda. They charge $18.33 per patient. In the Kagera region of Tanzania, families spend 50 percent more on funerals than on medical care.

The question isn't whether one form of fault tolerance is better than another. Both exist for reasons. Both have costs that the people inside them understand and absorb.

The question is: what is the thing being preserved? The group's claim on the individual? Or the individual's ability to accumulate and contribute?

Every redundancy system answers that question. Most answer it silently, by design, before anyone has thought to ask it. The funeral happens because it always has. The computer was built because four lives depend on it hitting that angle.

The angle is less than a degree. The capsule comes home.