On Beginning
There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from building systems designed to never be exhausted. I know—I’ve written the code. Optimized the queries. Sat in the meetings where we calculated exactly how to keep people scrolling just a little bit longer.
The machines don’t get tired. That’s what makes them useful. That’s also what makes them dangerous when we start thinking we should be more like them.
This project begins from a simple observation that took me years to accept: the body knows things that optimization culture wants us to forget.
What This Is
Silicon Philosophy is cultural criticism and philosophy of technology written from inside the machine. Not the metaphorical machine—the actual infrastructure of servers, databases, recommendation algorithms, and platform architectures that I’ve spent my career building.
But this isn’t a tech blog for programmers. It’s an examination of how we live now, using every artifact of contemporary culture as text worth reading closely: the structure of online communities, the anxieties in our superhero films, the logic embedded in our apps, the novels that try to imagine what comes after this.
Everything is text. Everything reveals something about the particular arrangement of technology, capital, and consciousness we’re living through. This blog examines the source code of our culture and attempts to debug it.
Why “Desert”
Though I write from the City of Lakes, I’m in a desert. Not literal, but conceptual. Our culture, our lives, our systems are built in a world of scarcity. What we see as abundance is a temporary situation built on accelerated extraction of resources accumulated in geological time. We will not be able to code ourselves out of scarcity.
The physical desert teaches this through water, heat, and distance. The epistemological desert teaches it through critical attention: looking closely enough at our systems, our stories, and our exhaustion that the elaborate narratives we tell ourselves begin to dissolve.
In the desert, you see the infrastructure. The pipelines, the power lines, the supply chains. You see what it actually takes to sustain the illusion of effortless abundance. You see that “the cloud” is warehouses full of servers drinking rivers of water and electricity.
You see that we were never separate, never self-sufficient, never discrete optimizable units. We were always metabolic flows embedded in larger systems. We just built cities comfortable enough to forget.
What’s Coming
Throughout 2026, essays will appear here examining:
Technology’s material reality: What the cloud actually is. How algorithms shape consciousness. Why “digital” is always physical. What programming teaches about limits and necessity.
Cultural diagnosis: What our films reveal about our anxieties. How platforms reconstruct community and intimacy. Where we see capitalism’s contradictions in our stories and memes and online behaviors.
The Mind and Body in the Digital Age: What 40 years of cyberpunk reveal about our self-conception in digital capitalism.
The body’s refusal: Why burnout is rebellion, not failure. How exhaustion carries information. What optimization culture costs us. Where the body draws lines the algorithm can’t see.
Living in collapse: Not as doom or resignation, but as the condition within which meaning and resistance become possible. Philosophy for the epistemological desert.
An Invitation
This work assumes only that you’re curious. It assumes no specialized knowledge. You don’t need to code. You don’t need graduate training in theory. You just need to be willing to look closely at the world we’re living in and ask what it reveals about how we understand ourselves, our technologies, and our possibilities.
The machine thinks we should optimize everything, including this introduction. Make it shorter. Add more hooks. Maximize engagement metrics.
But the body knows better. Some things need space to unfold. Some ideas resist compression. Some truths only become visible when you stop trying to make everything efficient.
Welcome to the epistemological desert. The illusions die here, but something else becomes visible in their place.