Brief
I believe that humans are just here to play, and to steward biological life on earth, and to birth non-biological electronic life in an effort to escape Earth's biosphere and to observe, understand, and evolve The Greater Universe.
You should follow me on twitter here
Now
In Bali for the winter. Starting to build worlds with atoms instead of bits. Dropping-in deeply with my partner. Learning Indonesian. Inspired by DJing and producing music again. Ashtanga. Surfing. Weightlifting. Archery. Working on some smaller tech projects to see where they go and still waiting for the one that wants to be my next big thing.
What have you done?
Some highlights in reverse chronological order:
- I was the Chief Software Architect and Head of R&D for Lucid in New Orleans, New York, and London where I lead a large team to build a sample marketplace that choreographed how to get real people to answer real questions at an incredibly large scale. At Lucid I also designed and launched marketing products for ad tracking, ad effectiveness, and data segment rating. At the end of 2021 we sold the company to Cint in a deal worth $1.1 billion making us Louisiana's first "unicorn".
- I was a Hacker-In-Residence at Betaworks in New York City where I created and launched a collaboration platform called Sitedrop and helped to build an animated-gif search engine called Giphy. Giphy was later sold to Facebook.
- I founded and developed a web and mobile publishing platform called Nubook.
- I was a partner at Polychrome, a creative studio in Los Angeles along with Thomas Brodahl and Tom Dolan. With the help of our incredible team, we designed and developed websites, applications, and content management systems. We directed commercials and photo shoots. We designed album covers, live events, packaging, and processes for innumerable clients (most of which you’ve likely heard of). We threw events and art shows. We designed clothing. We mentored young talents, and learned from each other on a daily basis. It was probably the most rich and stimulating time of my career so-far.
- I founded the web design and intereactive studio Stolen which we later merged with our close friend and collaborator Tom Dolan at Polychrome.
- I ran an online magazine with Thomas Brodahl called Surfstation for nearly a decade.
- I built the web platform for The Guerrilla News Network, one of the first citizen journalism networks.
- I’ve spoken at conferences about web design and engineering, physical interactive design, rapid development, humane technology, and how to have an interesting and fulfilling career.
- I co-wrote the book PHP MySQL Website Programming with two of my close friends Chris Lea and Mike Buzzard.
- I was the webmaster for Epitaph Records which was a massive pivot point in my life and prepared me and set me on a path for much of everything that I've done since.
- I performed self-produced electronic music as Alpha Decay (which at the time was also my hacker moniker.)
- I played guitar and keyboards in an industrial band called “Auto Aggression Device”.
- I left high school early to work for Earthlink as their Regional Head of Web Development in The Midwest.
Current beliefs that might change
- We must aid the continued evolution, diversity, and increased complexity of self-replicating information and it's instantiated emergent experiences. In the same way that Fuller would re-describe UNIVERSE as all things physical and metaphysical, I would expand the explanation of LIFE to all things that move us away from the warm void of entropy.
- The reduction of negatively valenced emotions, and the optimization of positively valenced emotions, is the primary driver of human effort, however, the only fundamental 'progress' is the increase and diversity of structured information (atoms, dna, bits) and the battle against entropy.
- Humans can only experience The Universe at Human Scale.
- In the modern world, we now live in a "Great Simulacrum" where our environment is defined by a constant and excessive abundance of hyper-stimuli.
- Our emotions have been decoupled from our survival and now serve as a means of entertainment in the simulacrum we now live in.
- Stories are no longer effective against the complexity of the world we have created. We can care for a single person, or animal, or plant if we visualize it, but we can't fathom or feel for the millions of people, complicated mechanisms, and dynamic power structures involved in creating everything that we touch, experience, or put in our bodies.
- Your taste buds that evolved to measure caloric density and test for poisons, now serve as entertainment and have no way to test for the obfuscated externalities created by food production the forces that are actually killing us.
- When quantified in energy, harm, pain, or pollution, all humans are a net-negative, so we simply have to agree and apply weight to the fact that human-consciousness is more valuable than the resources required to sustain and evolve it.
- There is no going back to the land without a massive human die-off; megacities are the new nature.
- Late-stage capitalism is not the answer.
- Conscious hedonism is not the answer.
- We must discover the edges of human conscious experience and expand on them.
- We must create tools that allow us to feel and experience the scale of the world that we are now living in.
- Nihilism is the capital-T Truth, but FUCK Nihilism.
- "We are climbing a mountain with a never-ending summit."
- Preventing suffering is not the project, it is just the cost of doing business.
- Preventing the destruction of Gaia and the natural world is not the project, it is just the cost of doing business.
- The Human Project needs to be one of progression and not just pain prevention and elimination of suffering.
- There is no point in putting a man in an apartment if we are not also putting a man on Mars.
- Marketing is the new violence. Instead of physical force being used to gain access to your resources, marketing manipulates you towards doing something that is in the benefit of the marketer (whether or not the message or action is good for the consumer).
Affiliations
- Betaworks Venture Fellow
- Brave Earth Trustee
- Culture Hack Labs Advisor
- FKTRY Conspirator
- The Fund Member / LP
- Guidepost Growth Capital Operating Advisor
- Lucid Stakeholder
Contact
- email j [at] cin [dot] is
- gpg 6B17 D120 6162 67ED
Moment of Zen
What it must be to be a sphere. To grow in all directions at once. To move in complete potentiality, ready for whatever may come. To be complete, contained, and listening to all possibilities. May we all become spheres.