I grew up making short films with my friends (childhood 2009 to 2014-ish) and we shot lots of action scenes (inspired by Corridor Digital and FreddieW). I taught myself simple visual effects - muzzle flashes in iMovie, compositing in After Effects, and then 3D modeling and animation in Autodesk Maya at a 5th grade afterschool program. I was extremely lucky to do that class with my friends, it opened up a whole world for me, Autodesk Maya was my gateway drug into creative tech.
For me, technology and software has always been for having fun and making things. So any way it distracts, extracts, or otherwise takes away from my creative energy as an individual I believe is fundamentally wrong and opposed to what matters in life.
I believe that technology should be built to expand human agency, play, and well-being - not to extract the energies that fuel them.
The scarce resource is attention
Everything you experience is downstream of attention. It is the substrate of a life and what modern platforms are built to obtain. What I've come to think of as the monetization and exploitation of our nervous systems. Today there are unfortunately physical wars, but there is also a psychological war to capture and sway people. It feels as if the frontline of this war is our foreheads.
These are some rabbit holes that have inspired me:
- Working for and being around environments that - instead of building technology to improve people's lives, seem more to be using people to improve their technology. A focus on growing an empire rather than innovating for the benefit of the people.
- Watching my generation drown in distraction. Craving connection, riddled with anxiety and depression, when by every metric things are better than ever.
- John Vervaeke's Awakening from the Meaning Crisis and the foundational western ideas that ground a clearer understanding of meaning, wisdom, the mind, and the lost times we live in today.
- Ian McGilchrist's ideas related to The Master and His Emissary and how our culture is so rationality obsessed that we often lose sight of the most important aspects of human experience.
- John Cleese's ideas on creativity (absolute gems) - some videos here and here.
- Tristan Harris and the "race to the bottom of the brainstem"
- The advertising business model and "boiling the frog"
My personal struggles with algo-addiction, existential dread, and anxiety have brought me to these ideas and thinkers. It feels like I've only scratched the surface.
Defensive AI
So I care about building technology that supports you, your attention, and your memory. Defensive, not offensive.
Defensive systems that:
- Supports attention and memory, not "productivity"
- Creates genuine choice, not compulsion
- Aims at connection, agency, and a self-authored life
- Is private, not meant to sell your behavioral patterns in order to game you later
MISC
Creation over consumption. Agency over convenience. Every project I care about is a version of the same idea: the most valuable thing to build is a person more capable of thinking, playing, and building strong community.
So much of SV is focused on building empires, new drugs to addict people, and new tools to increase productvity.