I don’t have too many regrets as I enter the second half of my life. I am pretty confident in who I am and that my journey was worthwhile. I am a good and hardworking person. However, when it comes to Internet technology I have a couple of serious regrets, or more appropriately regerts. To help me deal with these regerts I went and got a tattoo on my arm to help me repent, but also not lose sight of what matters in the future—here are my regerts.
- I let my kid spend so much time online as a youth and teen.
- Believed in that libertarian manifest horseshit from John Perry Barlow.
- Believed the startup founders when they said they wouldn’t sell out.
- Believed VCs when they said they were selling the same product as me.
- Believed that y’all wanted to understand the system and do the work.
- Being complicit and playing a role in the rise and enablement of fascism.
I feel like I’ve dropped the ball when it comes to Internet technology whispering bullshit into my ear. Getting a tattoo at age 52 was no minor shift for me. Not because of the pain, but because of the decisions I’ve made in my life. I have never gotten it because when I was younger I was a criminal that sold drugs. The first time I was arrested was at 18 years old on the corner of Haight Ashbury in San Francisco, and when they took me in they took pictures of the scars on my body and asked if I had any tattoos—I didn’t. This occurred three more times over the next couple of years, leaving me resolute that I would never get a tattoo—despite having an image of several tattoos that I wanted.
Getting photographed naked holding your privates in a wet and cold jail cell leaves an imprint on you. At 52, while still a criminal I worry less about getting photographed naked. I get why police do it now-—to humiliate and belittle you. I have a pretty big scar on my left leg from a chainsaw accident cutting firewood, which is what the photographer always focused on taking from several angles, because I didn’t have any tattoos. So, getting a tattoo is a big deal for me, and the artwork I’ve chosen has a lot of meaning for me at many different levels—-providing me with a piece of artwork I can use to guide me forward in my work with technology. I can’t understate the importance of this moment in technology right now. I know that many people are willfully ignorant of what is happening, but we’ve been working on the fascist Maggie’s farm for the last 25 years, and we are complicit in standing up some fucked up shit.
I will be rubbing my shoulder every time I talk to startup founders and VCs. I will be rubbing my shoulder with every post I publish to API Evangelist, and every Algorotoscope image I produce and publish. I won’t be getting out of the tech game, and I will never be retiring. I will work on continuing to make the machine visible from the outside-in until the day I die. I am confident in my mission as the API Evangelist in balancing power between the producer and the consumer. I will just keep doing the work, reading, writing, and connecting with human beings in my community. There is no turning back and fixing the mistakes I have made, but I can definitely do the work to push back on what I’ve helped set in motion, throwing myself on the machine and resisting becoming an ignorant part of the system.
