About

As an artist and a technologist, I have spent the past fifteen years asking: how do we build technology that serves humans and humanity?

My journey started with a project in Alabama designing solutions to tackle problems associated with poverty. I quickly learned that technology could not counterbalance centuries-old structural inequity.

The more I worked across the US Senate, startups, investing, and big tech, each space revealed the same truth. I was tackling what bell hooks named clearly, imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

Technology alone cannot solve systemic issues. Because they are actually predicaments, not problems. According to Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, problems "can actually or potentially be fixed" whereas predicaments "must be constantly dealt with, won't be solved and won't go away."

Complex predicaments require a different lens. They are not bugs to be patched. And they must be tended to with different tools than built them. We must work with the emergence of systems rather than against them, tending, adapting, staying in relationship with what is changing.

Similar to working with clay, you can't force the material. You have to understand it, move with it, apply pressure gently and with intention. You learn when to push and when to wait. That is the practice. That is the only way I know how to build, as an act of love.

Building technology as an act of love means we stop asking "how do we solve this?" and start asking "how do we tend to this?" It means bringing technologists into the room with sociologists, ecologists, and the wisdom of the living world around us. The trees, the plants, the systems that have adapted for millennia. Not as metaphor. As actual collaborators in how we think and build.

Building technology as an act of love is revolutionary.