Musings

We went to Egypt last September. It is wrong to be drunk, gay, or a woman there. It was much like Liberty University. The only difference was the call to prayer was blasted through the loudspeakers for all to hear.

We're going to move soon. I was happy in Egypt. I had very little baggage. I didn't buy fancy new clothes. I brought myself.

But we can't move to Egypt. Or the parts of America that are too much like Egypt. There are tiny oasis-like places everywhere, sure. But the day-in, day-out, constant regressive banter is exhausting— let alone the world-view enforcement. Spare me the misplaced conclusions.

I lived in the heart of fake news for facism during my four years in Lynchburg, Virginia. It caused me to walk away from religion entirely; watching the spiritual solace I found in childhood be compromised by powerful people merging religion and politics into a winner take-all pledge to end civil rights— the exact opposite message I accepted from Jesus and my exact experience raised in an upper class church by a single mother from a lower class family, in hindsight.

You fucked my generation by not preparing for us. I had to move away from home to try and find my footing since many affordable housing projects were shot down by people protecting their real-estate interests. Supply and demand. The market decided, fewer homes means more valuable homes. I loved learning about this in church while watching my mother struggle to make ends meet, yet parroting our affluent oppressors. Kyriarchy.

Stunningly, the same people today complain about how no one wants to work anymore. The truth is: everyone that has any ambition to succeed in this life left your sorry ass at the gate to your suburb and never looked back. Everyone that remains are the people you, and your other wealthy friends, defeated that have become content in their station. Congratulations, here's your sign.

We're moving. Not far, but a move is enough to trigger a new round of reflections. Losing my job, getting married— thinking as a partner in a family now, what is my life going to look like?

Different than it is now. Different if we must keep moving.

I'm going to have less. I've held onto lots of little things over the years— just in case.

At this point, I've explored the things I want and the things I need. I've found the things I can repair and can live without the things I can't.

I know who I'm going to be and not just wondering about who I could be.

I just need to shut up and do it.

They say one bite at a time, but that's too easy to give up.

“I tried elephant once; I didn't like it.”

I don't want to speculate, but I will wager the meal wasn't prepared by Chef Ramsey.

So if eating an elephant one bite at a time is difficult and then even more difficult by choosing a quality cut and prep, how does one eat an elephant?

A lifestyle change. A new default.

“Elephants? Yeah, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

You don't eat anything except elephants. No need to provide estimates. You'll eat elephants like steady state cardio with practice.

Not only will you be great at eating elephants, you'll be great at identifying, tracking, hunting, cleaning, cooking, preserving, and conserving them.

Everything else in your life will suffer as a result though. Do not actually eat elephants. I knew this dude once that just saw pink elephants and tripped balls for weeks. Cannot imagine what eating one would do. I guess if you're going to eat elephants, just avoid the pink ones.

But yeah, one bite at a time will never cut it. Live and breathe eating those elephants. You need to want it. No one will force you to eat an elephant.

If you find that you need an elephant eaten, but don't want to commit yourself to the endeavor, hire me. Trust me, I'm a professional.

I wanted more than what Netflix had to offer me. I was trying to find my dream role and my strategy is to mountain test. Go big or go home.

I went home.

The truth is: I killed React.

A running joke in tech-circles is “the year of the linux desktop” is always this year because it is never this year. The truth is, it actually is every year for some people.

I didn't actually kill React though, I just killed it for me. Facing all the shortcomings of each version of the language with various supplemental packages for seven years now...

I decided I had enough.

I built something else. I built something simple. I built something to the point. I built something on the web.

I had a hill I was willing to die on. and I died.

I just wasn't having fun anymore, they're just a business: no roles I could find to transfer into. Time to go when downsizing.

I would highly recommend working at Netflix to a friend.

Your grandfather? In the year 2022?

That was a very spiritual year for him. Turned 33 years old.

That's how old Jesus was when he quit showing off and died and grew up and got a real job.

He definitely had some sort of existential crisis.

Started pirating music from lofi.co on his MiniDisc WalkMan.

Started opening clubs as DJ Warmup just to pass the time.

Said, “If the Titanic's sinking, who else will play jazz piano saxophone on the poop deck?”

As the sun blushes the sky, I promise to kiss you good morning and good night.

As the moon hugs the sea, my love for you withstands the phases and the tides.

As the stars meet the sands, my love for you crosses space and time.

With heart and mind, skin and soul, I will love you through life and death in this one and the next.

I promise to be your forever.

My great grandmother was a critical figure in my upbringing. She was the first woman that worked as a comptroller for Sears and Roebuck. They were the amazon.com of their day.

This was even a possibility due to women gaining access to civil rights. Since the dawn of time, man has held power over women. We live in a critical slice of time where men do not control women— at least in the United States. At least for now.

To keep fighting for the liberation of people everywhere— Ukraine. Palestine. The other places, like Africa. We need to stand up here. Online.

Centralized digital services are beginning to fracture. The world has been at war with propaganda. The ultimate culture war.

Yo. I cannot even tell you how many bots. Too many bots. “Good” bots and “evil” bots. Some that “work for” the centralized digital services. Some that “work for” the interests of their creators.

The solution is humanity. If we are going to survive a global digital awakening, we must be true.

We need no more “good” and we need no more “evil”. We only need to lay balance between the “superior” and the “inferior”. Yin and yang.

We need connection. Direct connection to one another.

This is an inevitability and the market is responding accordingly.

Some are disconnecting entirely. Others are seizing control for themselves. Many have no idea the undercurrent of digital society is shifting. Most don't even have access to information and communications.

We are at the beginning of another phase of the internet.

The future is highly uncertain: will our digital technology divide us or multiply us?

That depends on each and everyone of us.

When we reach for out beyond the sixth sense, will we seek truth or will we deal in fear?

I'm not trying to defend other people or their views or diminish how terrible the news is.

I've gone through immense pain to become who I am today. I'm happy, even though I've left the only life I've ever known behind.

I am fundamentally ostracized from a sizeable portion of my entire upbringing. I was ostracized then too. I do not miss it, but I do still have some good memories that exist outside the intersection of me and a sociological experiment.

I have a hard time staying positive when I am reminded of what I've been through. Liberty University is a literal re-education camp, basically founded to sway cultural influence enough to overturn the Civil Rights movement and Roe vs Wade.

Religion and politics are deeply foundational in how I was raised and why my family was never able to afford a house and why I can't either, despite how hard I've worked and how lucky I've been.

My blog outlines in vivid detail why the combination of Liberty University, Donald Trump, the King James Version, Cambridge Analytica, and closed-platforms getting mixed together is terrifying to me.

I've been watching the world unravel in slow motion since leaving that place.

But my blog doesn't do a great job explaining the Stanford Experiment I lived through. It doesn't capture the psychological abuse.

I'm sorry I wasn't more comforting tonight. I was working on something that gives me hope for the future and I did not want to be dragged back into the past.

Same as you.

I've been trying to re-org myself internally at work. It was going well until it wasn't.

I've been out of office for a week or so while my mom and sister were visiting and took time to reflect. My manager asked what life after Netflix would look like for me.

I'm not ready to go yet. The pickle I'm in is that: I'm good at my job, but I'm not flexing the skillset I'm passionate about in it.

I wrote this email to myself and since I'm at a pivotal moment, it is worth documenting this publicly.

---

I choose to work at Netflix because we:

• Entertain the world versus entertain ourselves.
• Express ourselves versus repress others.
• Overshare versus gossip or blackmail.

If I were to no longer be a member of the dream team tomorrow, my personal agenda is to:

1. Reconnect with my former colleagues that are now at Disney
   • Inquire about their design technology division.
2. Author “The Greatest 404 Page Ever Found: An Overview of Silly'z Computer”
   • Silly'z entire computer fits inside the 404 page.
3. Partner with Epic Games, Valve, Roblox, Deno, Inrupt, Vans, Raspberry Pi
   • Market directly with artists, students, and educators
4. Reach out to VC contacts
   • Leverage first-hand experience with semantic web technologies, decentralization, permacomputing, virtual worlds, live performance, and broadcasting.
5. Relentlessly kickstart https://hackclub.com/ locations around the world.
   • Perpetual motion with a positive feedback loop.

---

Growing up I always wanted to be an Imagineer at Disney. However, I shelved that thought since my perception is that true imagineering died along with Walt. Selfishly, my former colleagues that are now there does change my calculus. Collaborating with them again would alleviate the burden I've been carrying at work— not having the agency to solve problems concisely at the intersection of design and engineering directly on the web platform.

Which brings us to Silly'z Computer. I've devised a wholistic approach for a web based operating system that I can teach to children. Unlike the alternative approaches to “The Metaverse”, I do not want to exploit the future children of the world. I want to empower them to liberate themselves. I've completed the initial proof of concept, now it just needs to be a book.

My total addressable market is not limited to just children though. Anyone that wants to have more fundamental control of technology without going through an entire slog of “back in my day” should be interested in my work. As Silly'z Computer was written to be loosely coupled with Solid Project, anyone that hates cookie banners or loves the spirit of the GDPR should be excited.

I've always been wary of Venture Capital. In my eyes, it is too easy to take a great idea and water it down until it is only a sad reflection of what could have been. The middle-out nature of Silly'z Computer also changes my calculus on this. The value to society is the transparency of the system. The value to the market is how it will make it easier to build harder, better, faster, stronger applications on top of the web.

And finally, my life changed dramatically at age 17. I learned Macromedia Flash and Hyper-Text Markup Language (HTML). Flash was some proprietary technology that died in a corporate flame war. HTML is still the bread to my butter. In the past 15 years, I've gone from making $7.25/hour to making over half a million dollars a year (before paying more taxes than some presidents).

Silly'z Computer is a crucial demonstration of the modular system I always thought the web promised to be. I built this for myself at age 17, but I cannot go back in time. I can only pass it on to the next generation. I've also built it for myself at age 70. When my dementia sets in, I'll need a secure place to hang my hat in the digital world.

The only way I can ensure that I will grow old and die in a bright and optimistic future is to help build it.

We're gonna spin up an end-to-end service for developing, delivering, and distributing Netflix-grade products on any legally compliant internet device. That is to say, a device capable of loading a webview of any engager's choice. This project is then able to be remixed and redistributed from within itself to anyone else running this project.

Root access may be legally demanded for devices where this functionality is not readily accessible. 2077 rules may apply.

The Raspberry Pi 400 is capable of running Netflix.

To demonstrate the power of such a system, a proof-of-concept was produced.

This project originated on behalf of Netflix in collaboration with an individual contributor. As such, the public version is CC BY-SA 4.0. This grants the flexibility for the business to evaluate their position in relation to the commons and the market and the individual and the project.

Netflix retains the rights to a private internal copy under the MIT license. The explicit implication is that any modifications to community generated content will be disclosed publicly as the community will be protected by the CC BY-SA 4.0 terms, while internal modifications may be held proprietarily.

To satisfy the mutually nimble requirements of modularity in a public private partnership, this project has been designed accordingly.

A PERSONAL NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:

It has been two years since my office closed. When I brought work into my home, I could only then bring my whole self into my work. My only ambition is to continue to do the same upon return.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the author of The Little Prince, shows us the way in The Netflix Culture Memo

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.