Most people know me because of a YouTube channel I have. This, of course, is highly ironic because the core message of the channel is to divest from technological life. Here is some biographical information that is more or less public.
I’m an American born and raised in Atlanta. I did university work in economics and linguistics, but I was always principally interested in cybernetics—that doesn’t mean robots or transhumanism, but how complex systems interact. I seriously pursued academic work with the eyes on that as a career. In a more sane world, this would’ve certainly been my vocation. I quickly became disenchanted with the state of mainstream economics, went into historical linguistics: I had learned Latin and Greek as a teenager and was interested prehistoric language reconstruction and other theoretical issues, but in grad school, I went into the more cognitive and generative side of things (mostly, as I viewed it, to fix absurd problems with the field).
This of course was naïvety about the state of institutionalized science, and I wasted a couple more years in academia before cutting my losses. I became more interested in technology and GNU/Linux around this time (starting “late” in my mid to upper 20’s). This is when I started the YouTube channel, originally covering LaTeX and vim things I was learning, just to put up videos for friends originally.
Any talk about high technology has to come with talk about the implications of it in our world, and as time went on, more of my public presentation became heuristics and lifestyle as I myself moved out for a rural lifestyle. For a brief period in early 2018, I had left by career and was living in cheap appartment doing about a YouTube video a day while working in a cabinet workshop to recover from life in academia. I found property in a rural place.
I also became highly interested in what could be called epistemology or philosophy of science, which when I was younger I would’ve thought of as being silly word games. However, my experience in academia, especially with the philosophical bankrupcy of out post-logical positivist assumptions of basically all modern people (especially academics) makes me recognize that all institutionalized science is not only prey to external interests, but is built to be philosophically blind, which means it must be scientifically so.
Most crucially, I have become and Orthodox Christian. That in itself was one of the most mysterious developments, but certainly the most important. I won’t belabor it here because I had the mind of an atheist for years and I remember how the eyes glaze over at the very mention of religion, but nonetheless, that is the pinnacle of it all. Now my objective is to work out my salvation with fear and trembling.
I have learned a lot as time has gone on, mostly how to correct errors. If you ever hear me say something that hurts your feelings, don’t worry—I never really intend to attack others, only my own past sins and misunderstandings. The most important thing is not to be emotionally attached to what might be what habits, ideas or dispositions are causing you harm.