Hello, World.

A reformed technologist's quest to help his family become technonymous in a world designed to hold their attention hostage

This is my first blog post, the first thing I've written for public consumption in the better part of a decade. So I'm feeling a little rusty and more than a little self-conscious, but I'm hoping you'll bear with me.

I am many things, but most importantly, I am a father to boys who are growing up in a world that doesn't resemble the one I knew. And I'm trying hard to figure out how to shepherd them through an environment increasingly designed to monitor and manipulate us.

Next week, I'll turn 41—an "Elder Millennial" from that narrow window of people who came of age alongside personal computing and the early internet. And boy, did I ever dive in headfirst.

We got our first home computer, a Mac Classic, in 1991, when I was six. I was hooked immediately. I spent hours creating art in KidPix, traveling the world to find Carmen Sandiego, exploring physics in Cannon Fodder. Entire afternoons were lost to picking the perfect alert sound. (Side note: if you're unfamiliar with the history behind the Mac's "Sosumi" chime, it's worth looking up.)

Later that year, I discovered HyperCard, and my seven-year-old mind exploded. HyperCard looked like a multimedia tool—you could create digital cards with text, images, and buttons—but underneath, it was a full programming environment. I, a child who controlled almost nothing else in my life, suddenly had complete command over this machine. I could build my own games, create animations, link cards together into interactive stories. I was in charge.

It was liberating, and it defined my life. HyperCard taught me that if I could dream it, I could create it. It taught me how to stay calm when things broke. It taught me persistence—my program doesn't work? Let's see how far into the code we can get before it fails. Hours and hours, over and over, bit by bit.

By eleven, I had accrued far more than Gladwell's 10,000 hours. My middle school called me on weekends to troubleshoot their network. I was addicted to solving problems. I dropped out of high school senior year to pursue my first startup. Unsure how to raise capital, I'd drive four hours every Friday night to the nearest casino and play poker for 36 hours straight—just to make payroll.

After that company failed (unsustainable business model, not poker skills), I wandered for a few years. Subway Sandwich Artist. Whitewater raft guide in Colorado. But technology kept calling me back. I started a web development consulting business and found my niche—solving problems other consultants couldn't. They'd promise the world, discover they couldn't deliver, then hire me to save their bacon.

In 2012, this work led me to build a security platform that spread like wildfire—hundreds of users our first week, thousands our first month, hundreds of thousands our first year. Within ten months, I'd sold to a major player and was suddenly running teams pushing code daily to the highest-traffic sites in the world.

Later, I built another startup using technology to help people on probation and parole break the cycle of recidivism. We had fantastic impact until our venture capitalists realized they could make more money being part of the problem than part of the solution. Valuable lesson on the power of a few bucks.

Anyway, I share this background to show I'm not a Luddite. Quite the opposite.

But when my firstborn turned five, I started to panic. How was I going to introduce him to technology? As a baby, it had been easy—no screens, no problem. Maybe an episode of Daniel Tiger now and then, but I was righteous. I looked down my nose at families with iPads in strollers, playing Paw Patrol on drop-down screens during preschool drop off.

Over time, we tiptoed into touchscreens—an iPad for long flights and road trips. I'd carefully curated his options: Khan Academy Kids, PBS Kids, a few Disney movies. But I saw a dynamic that felt totally foreign from my childhood experience. He'd stare at the screen like a zombie, touching brightly colored buttons like a chimpanzee in a casino, melting down when things didn't work as expected. Unlike my experience, he was a passive participant.

One evening, I relayed this to my oldest friend Melih—a brilliant technologist whose kids are a few years older than mine. "You know what's really fucked up?" he said. "My 12-year-old still asks me for help with tech."

This was unfathomable to us. At twelve, we knew more about technology than our parents, our teachers—more than almost anyone. How are our children so helpless?

I started thinking about the difference between my son’s device and mine. About how his device can't be used to create the software that runs on it. About the dopamine triggers that are training my now-eight-year-old to crave more and melt down when frustrated. As a progressive technologist, I thought I understood algorithmic feeds and data privacy. I'd deactivated social media years earlier.

Yet when my children said, "Dad, can you put your phone down and pay attention to me?" I'd protest: "Don't you understand? There's a very important message I must reply to!" All while knowing I was just chasing that dopamine hit of approval—sharing a story with a friend, issuing a directive to a colleague. The feeling of being needed. Right now. Which my children quickly learned meant they ranked below my pocket computer.

As an early adopter, I'd experienced everything: three-pound cell phones with sixty-minute batteries, instant messaging, email, SMS, Napster, Google, the iPod, BlackBerry, PalmPilot, social media, the iPhone. The path to my addiction felt gradual. But looking back, I realized there was actually a "Big Bang" moment—2009, when everything changed in a single year.

Push notifications. Algorithmic social feeds. In-app purchases. Real-time ad bidding. In the wake of 2008's financial crisis, desperate companies introduced technologies that would increase profitability. In doing so, they discovered these four innovations could invert us from customer to product. I call this "The Great Inversion."

My goal now is to become what I call "technonymous"—using technology without being used by it. To reclaim the anonymous relationship I had with my Mac Classic, where I was the user, not the product. Where technology served my creativity and curiosity instead of harvesting my attention and data.

So what am I doing about it? Why am I writing this?

Three things:

This blog. I'm documenting my journey to become technonymous and help my boys develop healthy relationships with technology. Every week, I'll share what I'm learning, where I'm failing, and what seems to help.

A book. I'm writing "The Great Inversion" to help people understand what really changed in 2009 and offer frameworks for technologists building the next wave—especially AI—to avoid repeating these mistakes.

An operating system. I'm building a new OS launching next year, designed to give kids the same sense of wonder, problem-solving, and tinkering that defined computing in the '90s. Technology as a tool for creation, not consumption. The tool I want my boys to have.

I hope you'll join me on this journey to become technonymous—not as someone who fears technology, but as someone old enough to remember when it served us better. Throughout my life, I've found that the best way to learn something is to teach it. So I'm here to learn and share those discoveries with you, one week at a time.

Hopefully, my ADHD brain will stick with it long enough to create something worthwhile.

As I sit in this coffee shop drafting this post, enjoying some of my adopted home state's famous green chile, I notice a sticker on the laptop across from me: "Midwives Help People Out."

I chuckle, then wonder: Could I be a digital midwife?

Let's find out.