About

The Project

Silicon Philosophy examines how we live now—through technology, culture, bodies, and the stories we tell ourselves about all three.

This is philosophy of technology that reads Reddit threads as archaeological artifacts. Cultural criticism grounded in material reality: the servers, the rare earths, the labor, the exhaustion. Literary analysis that asks what our films and novels reveal about living under algorithmic capitalism. Critical theory written by someone who built the systems being critiqued.

I spent years as a computer engineer writing code designed to optimize everything. Then my body taught me what the algorithms couldn’t: that we are not discrete systems with stable boundaries. That optimization culture is killing us. That the epistemological desert—the place where illusions are stripped away—can exist even in the City of Lakes.

What You’ll Find Here

Silicon Philosophy treats everything as text worth reading closely: a recommendation algorithm, a viral tweet, a science fiction novel, a programming paradigm, a fitness app, a meme format, a database architecture.

The writing moves freely between:

  • Philosophy of technology: What does it mean that we’ve outsourced memory to machines? How does the architecture of social media platforms shape consciousness itself? Why does “the cloud” conceal its own materiality?

  • Cultural criticism: What anxieties do our superhero films reveal about power and precarity? How do dating apps reconstruct intimacy as optimization problem? What does “hustle culture” on social media tell us about capitalism’s colonization of rest?

  • Literary analysis: How does contemporary fiction grapple with climate collapse? What does cyberpunk’s failure to imagine beyond capitalism reveal? Where do we see metabolic alienation in the novel?

  • Critical theory: How does surveillance capitalism reconstruct subjectivity? What is the relationship between algorithmic thinking and fascism? Why does optimization culture demand we treat ourselves as machines?

  • Material demystification: Every technology is physical infrastructure. Every platform is labor. Every “disruption” has winners and losers. This work follows the material threads.

The Approach

Everything is text. A social media trend, a programming language, a self-help book, a venture capital pitch deck, online community norms—all are readable artifacts of how we understand ourselves and our possibilities under this particular arrangement of technology and capital.

Technology is never neutral. Code embeds political choices. Platforms shape behavior. Algorithms encode values. The “tech industry” is not separate from culture—it is actively producing culture, consciousness, and ways of being.

The body refuses. Burnout isn’t personal failure—it’s the body’s rebellion against demands that violate metabolic limits. Anxiety isn’t individual pathology—it’s correct perception of systemic unsustainability. The body knows what optimization culture wants us to forget.

The epistemological desert. This work comes from the epistemological desert in the City of Lakes—the conceptual space where scarcity of illusion reveals what abundance of comfort conceals. Not a geographic desert, but the cleared ground where we can see our condition without the elaborate stories we tell to avoid it.

The Perspective

This is critique from inside the machine. I’ve written the code, designed the systems, sat in the product meetings where “user engagement” meant “addiction by design.” I understand the technical architecture and can name exactly how it fails to be what it claims.

But this isn’t just tech criticism. It’s cultural criticism that takes technology seriously as culture-producing infrastructure. It’s philosophy that engages with how algorithmic thinking reshapes consciousness. It’s literary analysis that asks what our stories reveal about living in collapse.

The framework draws on:

  • Marxist materialism (follow the infrastructure, the labor, the capital)
  • Frankfurt School critical theory (culture industry, instrumental reason, administered life)
  • Poststructuralism (power, discourse, the constructed nature of subjectivity)
  • Phenomenology (embodied experience, being-in-the-world)
  • Ecological materialism (we are metabolic flows, not discrete individuals)
  • Nietzschean affirmation (scarcity as prerequisite for meaning)

Who This Is For

You might find something here if you:

  • Feel the cognitive dissonance between how we’re told to live and what seems sustainable
  • Are interested in what our culture reveals about itself through its anxieties and fantasies
  • Want rigorous analysis of technology that doesn’t ignore political economy or embodied experience
  • Wonder why everything feels like it needs to be optimized
  • Are exhausted by the demand to perform productivity, wellness, and selfhood online
  • Care about how narrative, platform architecture, and ideology intersect
  • Suspect that online communities and prestige TV are both worthy of serious reading
  • Want philosophy that engages with actual contemporary life, not just canonical texts

You don’t need to be a programmer. You don’t need theory background. You just need to be curious about the world we’re living in and willing to look closely at it.

The Writer

I’m a computer engineer turned philosopher and cultural critic, writing from the epistemological desert in the City of Lakes. I build systems and then write about why they can’t work the way they promise. I read novels, watch films, scroll feeds, and ask what they reveal about the particular kind of madness we’re living through.

This work is part of a larger project called Desert Existentialism, which synthesizes Marxist materialism, existential philosophy, and ecological embeddedness into a philosophy for living through collapse. Silicon Philosophy is where that framework meets contemporary culture in all its contradictions.

What’s Coming

Essays throughout 2026, ranging across:

  • What debugging teaches about accepting necessity
  • The materialist’s guide to cloud computing
  • Burnout as the body’s sabotage of optimization
  • How algorithms reconstruct memory and self
  • Surveillance capitalism in contemporary fiction
  • What online communities reveal about platform logic
  • The anxieties embedded in our cultural fantasies
  • Why tech won’t save us (from someone who knows how it works)

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Contact

[Email/social media links]

The machine thinks in binaries. The body knows otherwise. The epistemological desert reveals what comfort conceals.

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