Universe-Cell

There comes a time when the Truth can’t really be contained any longer. When it shouldn’t, when doing so not only limits future outcomes, but the future in general. Our future here on Earth needs some modification, so I suggest all that come across this to share their own Truth. It is the greatest thing you can do for us all. Likewise, Understanding is the greatest transparency of all, and in it, selfish means that benefit a few at the expense of the many do not scale to a viable threat level. The World is now transparent, so its Understanding is inevitable. No one is suggesting there not be a disproportionate reward for hard work and talent, only that your hard work not intrinsically degrade the system to which you are but a single member. Thus, I suggest we deescalate the current threat level by telling the Truth. Mobilizing behind those unmistakably good trends/initiatives as indicated by their sheer, thoughtful support levels, and set sail for a different ‘law & order’ then is prescribed by our cro-magnon nostalgic counterparts. Relatively speaking, that divide-and-conquer, zer0-sum model is on its last hurrah, even if its practitioners are unaware. I suggest we mitigate their influence as quickly as possible, and remove their programmed insecurities at the same rate. It is not their fault explicitly, they are simply not capable of anything but what they are. Blending the old and new to one’s advantage is hardly a new trick, but those that look to the past in the web-enabled era are the digital fossils they cannot see. Let us use the current information tools to limit their reach upon the masses that know no better (soon they will), and build better ones that cannot be wielded like the Atom Bomb for all to see and fear. Or even the opposite, for few to know and most to not comprehend or recognize the scale of their blast radius. Public utilities/infrastructure are due for an upgrade…

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My story starts in Wilmington, NC. There was soccer and surf; there were Earth Cruisers and Super-Soakers; there was GI Joe, Transformers, and He-Man; there was Knight Rider, Airwolf, and the A-Team; there was The Goonies, Ghostbusters, and the Neverending Story [still looking for my luck-dragon]; there was 8th Grade Science class, AP Calculus, and Senior English Lit; there was Tu-Pac, Biggie, and Kurt Cobain; there was a lot of middle-class, sheltered, wholesome magic. I grew up in the Eighties, and I came of age in the Nineties. I came, I saw, I conquered; at least from an academic standpoint. ILM and neighboring Wrightsville Beach is a beautiful place physically, best known as the setting for Dawson’s Creek and Michael Jordan’s hometown. [If someone can send this to MJ, I would like to buy him a beverage of his choice at The Big 4 the next time he’s in town. DC Virgo and UNC holla back. I hope the Boys & Girls Club next door still has a pair of his old kicks for kids to imagine and awe over.] 

From Wilmywood I moved on to Chapel Hill, and like many, I fell in love. There were so many brilliant, talented, sharp people. I had never experienced anything like it. Attending our nation’s first public university was an honor, to the extent I didn’t even apply anywhere else once I got in. If you’re from North Carolina (and like basketball), it’s a no brainer. Yes, the sky is Carolina Blue for a reason. With that said, Princeton if you’re listening, and would like me to come pursue a doctorate in Web Anthropology, I kind of regret not at least applying to your school. Just to see. Instead of Indiana Jones, I think my ‘nom de plume’ would be Dakota Jack. And speaking of NJ, the University of New Jersey in Durham (a.k.a. Dook) will always remain the devil of an adversary we take great pride as Tar-Heels in defeating, over and over and over again. It’s our moral duty really, to make the World a better place and the like. 

From Carolina I went to Alaska. My degree in Environmental Science & Engineering led me to the Arctic to study primary productivity in lakes (Limnology), but at a larger scale it was to see first-hand how Climate Change was beginning to show its face. (Our planetary [energy] system needs our full attention if we value it remaining a hospitable environment for not only the human masses, but a critical mass of species to sustain life on Earth as we know it.) The field station is named Toolik, it’s above the Arctic Circle, a relative few clicks North of the last mountain range … it would be Beyond the Wall in GOT terms. Wildling I was, and after one successful field season, I was selected to potentially pursue a doctorate right out of undergrad. I was into the satellite-phone, helicopter-supported field work; I couldn’t tolerate the endlessly monotonous lab time. My interest was in DC, specifically WRI (World Resources Institute). Sustainable Enterprise, where art’ thou? After a brief stint as a bar-tender at the ever-so-legendary Soapbox in downtown Wilmington, I moved to the District to see what I could see. And [wo]man, did I start to ‘see’ a lot. As it turns out, there are a lot of would-be Save-the-World types that flock to our Nation’s Capital to try and do their part, what people don’t tell you is that many of their livelihoods are subsidized (#TrueStory). I was pretty interested in the novel idea of actually being able to afford to live, on my own, in the City. So, who has money in DC? I got a job at a law firm. It took one day.  

Spriggs & Hollingsworth taught me that the best lawyers don’t have to talk very much, a fact that applies pretty well across most professions. Mr. Berger, if you’re listening, I believe the World is a better place having your Practice. What people fail to recognize when they talk sh!t about attorneys is that the alternative is being shot in the face. I like a good Western as much as the next guy, but the Rule of Law is a marked improvement in the Evolution of Man. If you cannot see or appreciate that, you’ve never visited a place where it doesn’t exist. That is not to say an improvement and its price-point cannot be taken too far however; our lawyer-up, hyper-capitalistic model is testing those boundaries as we speak. But alas (or nonetheless), they couldn’t convince me to take the LSAT, WRI was looking for someone with a business or economics background to complement the environmental expertise, so I started taking GMAT practice exams after work in the This-is-where-we-impress-potential-clients Conference Room. It overlooked Franklin Square at 14th & I, four blocks from the White House. I became a sponge [with a view]. You can learn a lot about business at a law firm. You can learn a lot about the other sex as well. 

[The one side-story I will care to share involves Angelina (yes, that Angelina) and Off The Record in the Hay-Adams. Ms. Jolie, we almost met one fine evening circa 2005. I was supposed to meet a housemate that worked in the White House, she couldn’t leave the office though, so I arrived solo. Off the Record was literally full save the two-top immediately to your right. I didn’t recognize you the first time I walked thru, but after realizing the only available seat was next to you, I noticed you were holding Maddox and the ‘wow’ set in. I did in fact ask “Is this seat taken?” to which you looked up, smiled, and began to move your coat. Your too-cool-for-school political consultant guy interjected however with “we’re expecting someone”, and true enough, the Brad-ster came down momentarily. A seat had opened up at the bar by this time, and I couldn’t help but feel that Ol’ Fashioned was well worth the effort. Now that you’ve shed that dead-weight off to pursue his dreams of pretending he could beat-up Bruce Lee [I mean really!?], I would like to invite you to that dinner party at the Big 4 as well. And if you could invite Bono to come too, I think we could have a good conversation. It would be more like the Big 3 + 1 happenstance catalyst, but I’ve been called far, far worse things. In all sincerity, if you have any interest in bridging Silicon Valley proficiency into your next trip to the UN, I have some thoughts on how we can counter the Cambridge Analytica’s in a way to serve the humanitarian interests you champion so well. With the help of a Christopher Wylie, a couple other select developers, a few cycles in a particular datacenter outside DC, and the blessing of certain Satoshi types, who knows what’s possible? ‘From Off the Record at the Hay-Adams in DC post-9/11, to The Big 4 at The Huntington in SF post-Election 2016’ sums it up nicely.]

Looking back at my decision of business schools is an interesting exercise. I had all-but decided on either a school in Boston or one in LA, when one in the middle of PA made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. I would be a Graduate Assistant at the Farrell Center for Corporate Innovation & Entrepreneurship with a small fund donated by a more-than-generous alum with which to place $25K investments in undergrads. I was hooked immediately. I interviewed from Rome the summer prior, life was good. And having spent 4 years at Chapel Hill, I could handle a college town right? Holy sh!t Happy Valley can drink. Now I had some happy-hour chops after 2 years in DC, but I was a true feather-weight in the Fall of 2006 at State College. We are … drunk. I was a fall on your TAIL right out of the GATE at my first White Out game. I don’t remember it aside from being dumbstruck at seeing/hearing 106,000+ people so grandly unified. Gives me chills even now. (I have to say, it was up there with my first Carolina/Dook game at the Dean Dome. #GoHeels) And to be in the middle of nowhere, we got to interact w/ our share of execs. From GE C-levels flying in on company helicopters [are you picking up on the chopper theme?], to motivational keynotes hitting the mark, to personal invites to Private Equity confs in Philly; say what you will about MBA programs, it worked for me. I lived across the street from Bill Pickles, and Zeno’s was a weekly routine. Soon enough a classmate led me to a contact at Sun’s Boston office, and before too long it was Menlo Park here I come. 

My world would change forever, but not before I secured an invite for some of us to go out to Omaha and meet its Oracle. What a kind, decent, humble person. If there is a way to extend life appreciably further, please hook up Mr. Buffett. I think he makes the whole World feel more comfortable, if not at Home. He even gave one of our party a ride in his Cadillac between Berkshire’s office and the restaurant where he treated us to lunch. I have to say, I prefer Nebraska’s Oracle to the one that swooped Sun out of IBM’s hands. No one should own a Hawaiian island. But let’s not get side-tracked. Or let’s … one more side-note that must be mentioned is that PSU led me to know NYC. There was a light, quiet snow, and she was beautiful. 

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I was there when James Gosling got his first iPhone. If you need a moment to fully appreciate the significance of that moment, go ahead, take as many as you need. If I fell in love at UNC-Chapel Hill, I transformed in Silicon Valley. Who knew that I would come work for Sun, and a few years later I would meet mine? Who also knew so much was actually possible? That it wasn’t just Forbes, and HBS, and the Financial Times, this sh!t was being done by people you could not only meet on University Ave, but party with in the City. Game on. And forget reading about it, that means it’s already old anyway. People were building and testing things that the rest of the country/world won’t know about for years. Time starts to get weird in Tech. Particularly when you didn’t grow up in a major urban area, but pretty much regardless I think. You think NYC doesn’t sleep, the Internet is what doesn’t sleep, and therefore international teams as a whole don’t either. Forget 5 o’clock, it’s 8 am somewhere.

I had visibility into more people’s lives in more places than ever before. I could now see clearly that SF was a World Capital, if not The. That it was so far ahead of the other major city I lived in, our Nation’s Capital, that one couldn’t help but question the traditional governance model. I wish I had thought more about what the consequences of that anomalous discontinuity would inevitably be. Think the now-retired Senator Hatch’s now [in]famous questioning when they finally got Zuck- on the Hill. The much older Senator was made to look and sound like a juvenile by the one that appears to be so because … well, in this World he is. It was an extreme showcase, but that’s where we are. Only in many cases in the real world, the Zuckerbergs of the World actually work for the Hatches. Both scenarios leave someone feeling uncomfortable, and I can't help but laugh at the absurdness of it all. Power is such an illusionary destination/objective. It CAN change overnight, and quite often does. We tend to retract back to bankable currency as an ultimate means/measure, but even that stands to be strongly questioned in the years to come. Which is worth what where? All worth the same everywhere? Or worth less quicker always? Traditionalists retreat to time passed because what else can they do? People are scared. The unknown seems insanely formidable when paired with our current rate of change. A known fraudulent, inadequate criminal is exactly that, known. So what should you do? 

Extract the components you understand, and slow them down to a pace you’re comfortable with. If you play along with the media-induced screen-time projected upon you constantly, you’re toast, more like mush really. Like that concoction of an oatmeal the rebels eat in the Matrix, only the opposite.

What do I know? I know Zuck’s not the villain he’s being portrayed as. I was there to shake hands at the first F8 when the band came on, I was there to ask if he ever imagined all this. He was as wide-eyed as the rest of us. Well, let’s be honest, maybe a bit more$o. So what if he’s a bit robotic, if you spent that much time inside the web and people’s heads, you would be too. Yea, he built something in college to meet women. So what? And yea, turns out A LOT of people like it to connect with all kinds of other people. [We can argue the intricacies of ‘connection’ ad nauseam, but the reality is that roughly a third of the World’s population now have a page/profile.] FB took off, it makes a lot of money, it’s now been weaponized, and yea, it still makes a lot of money. What would you have them do? Turn it off? Look, I’m as concerned if not angry as the next person, but programmed manipulators of the World are par for the course. Social media can be used to do so, but so has television, so has radio, so has the written word type-faced. The question is what are we going to do about it? Are we going to stand by and let degenerate detractors facilitate another war/atrocity in the Middle East to further destabilize the region and Europe? So that racist, defeatist politics will play well among the uneducated masses? No, we must not.

OUR WORLD IS NOW GLOBALIZED. Our economy, our citizens, our people. There’s no going back, but backwards is a different probability set. So what are we going to do as a collective is the question? The current trajectory doesn’t appear too promising to me. The Great Chinese Firewall dispatching its Russian counterpart and so on. So Country-Wide-Webs to replace the World’s, is that it? What a scary, ugly, small view. No, CWW just doesn’t have the same ring to it. You do not make something secure by diminishing it, you make it weak. WEAK. What happens to the weak? It gets replaced.

One Ring to rule them all … and in the Darkness bind them. Exactly. No thanks. 

We’re going to have our hands full with automated surveillance and drones as is, information at least must remain open and free. And my fellow Global Citizens, it is being threatened as we speak. No one believes [in] anything anymore ... that’s how it feels. The truth is being fabricated in real-time, customized to your cookies and psychological profile. People confuse ‘research’ for what they read online. It’s not productive contributions that are being rewarded, but instantaneous ego strokes. Emotional (and predictable) click-bait to lure our collective conscious towards something so far from what matters that once the show does break down, you won’t know who you are. What if that ‘mirror, mirror, on the wall’ you carry around in your pocket/purse wasn’t there tomorrow? What would you do? Better yet, who would you be?

We need to bring the adults back to the table, actually, more like the global conference rooms. To use our information technologies to find the Einstein’s among us, not breed its would-be Hitler’s. The Genomic Revolution is only beginning to take root by way of the compute it requires, it would be preferable to not have violent uprisings shadow entire regions/demographics of the planet wouldn’t you say? Pocket aristocracies don’t paint a pretty picture. Some will say I live in one, some will say I’m naive, some will think I’m crazy, some will never know. Don’t know, that’s ok, but don’t not act. I read somewhere it’s better to burn out than to fade away, but I don’t subscribe to simple dualities like I once did. I think a calculated burn to fade away when I choose sounds about right. I have friends that now live in Japan, the Caribbean, Switzerland … all over the World. I would wager before this is all over for me, I’ll even have one that lives on a Space Station [she's an amazing human being, and I wish her the very best]. Just sayin’. Jet packs? It’s about ?￥?k?n' time. This is the way. This is the way we adjust for globalization, we make the opportunity for the best and brightest to help improve our World more probable, not less so. We have the tools to find them, so let’s not allow ancient, selfish antics diminish their potential return. Dictator-prone status quo-ers do so out of ease, not because it’s better. There have been investments made that they have the means to control. Not because they are still relevant, because of a legacy power structure. But latency is a dying phenomenon...

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I once had the privilege to open for Elon Musk at an event I sponsored. He wasn’t as famous as he is now, but Iron Man 2 had already been released, so I mean … In any case, I arrived drunk on ego and preoccupied self-absorption to the extent I don’t even remember the details. I was already planning for that night. I didn’t even take the time, that moment, to make the most of what it could have been. It was more like, of course this is happening, this is the Dance, and I happen to be good at it. Oh the confusion amongst intrinsic and circumstantial. I do have to admit I've heard it's hard working at Tesla, but who knows, I could have planted the genesis to a matching Space-Red Roadster parked in the garage I don’t have. The point is you have to find a Polaris other than yourself or this game/simulation we call Life doesn’t mean sh!t.  

At the end of the day, we all just want to save it. On a very personal note, that is why being let go from Pivotal [Labs] hit so hard. The Pivotal Labs I knew was who you called to #SavetheDay. From defeating Dorsey’s #FailWhale, to GOOG’s private installation of Tracker, I very much liked being part of that. And when I was blindsided w/ ‘you’re not worthy’, well … I didn't take it very well. I have since apologized, and to say I have grown since Summer ‘14 is like saying the Sun is hot. She is. I have had to. I now have Platinum in my spine and a third-grader that can tell me all she needs to without speaking. It’s like magic, the time we live in. And we’re just getting started, says the billionaire, original online-banker type changing the business landscape of my hometown. And he’s right. I can see my daughter thinking things into existence, at the very least her generation will be able to speak them so. Imagine that: saying something, and it appearing a few minutes/hours later. This is what the oh-so-horrifying machines/systems amount to, magic. The question is who will be deemed worthy to wear Mickey’s magician hat in Fantasia? 

I haven’t really had to work to be included with the best up until now, and now I’m going to work to see how close to becoming the best at something I can get. So what is that something going to be? Preferably one where I don’t have to talk much. :) I’m looking for a role where all of the above factors. Where those steps and this path disproportionately prepares me to deliver for the organization that allows me to serve. It would be an honor, and preferably one that sees the culminating advantages of the South, the Arctic, DC legal, and Silicon Valley as worth the investment in a hard skill-set (GOAL: hard skill-set w/ inherent soft advantages). I want to train, and little more. I have eliminated unhealthy distractions in my life. And at this stage, the constructive variety amount to 1) what I can do for my daughter and 2) mustering the energy to exercise to gain energy. What an interesting feedback loop fitness is [not to mention parenthood]. It’s the same for the mind though. You think/work about something long enough to the point that the drain converts to a net gain. If you have any experience in making such a transition successful, or if perhaps you find the narrative particularly amusing, if not intriguing; whatever the interest, I am looking for my spot/shot. Once upon a time I tested pretty well.

It’s true, I function well as a lobe wolf, I mean lone. I think it’s my construct, but I yearn for a pack. I want to be part of a team again, to be part of something much bigger than me, something I am fortunate to be a part of. I know what it feels like. On the work side of the equation I would like to thank S????￥, A?′≈, & J?˙?. You gave me a shot, brought me up, and taught me a great deal. I believe the fourth name added to that list will be rewarded disproportionately, but it will be all that contributed who can take credit. I’m no foreigner to long or strange hours, to traveling or remoteness, but I am rooted in SF and the Bay Area. There is an 8 yr-old named A that I’m fortunate enough to call Home. She lives here, and so do I. 

My story started in SE NC, but now it streams from atop Nob Hill. And I can’t help but wonder how all this has come together. I want to give back, to contribute if even a morsel to the Global [Food] Web. There are some necessary upgrades coming, but we don’t have to replace the entire system, we need only turn the tide; and preferably before the full-moon, high-water mark takes more of our Civilization back into the Sea. Look at Venice, it's just the beginning. And whereas some of our past is destined to be washed away, some of our future will inevitably shine brighter than any can predict/forecast. [Mrs. Merkel, you are appreciated even more than you know, and there are more that have your back in that category as well. #NATOstrong #HumanityStrong]

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So let’s make the most of 2020, it’s an important year as far as recent history is concerned. And to close in good form with my helicopter theme, I once had the opportunity to skydive out of one in Switzerland. Sound of music? Sort of. It was more like a hyper-free sense of humanity. That is what we need more of now. If you succumb to the reptilian traps that are being set, consider yourself manipulated. You’re better than that. We all are. So set aside at least a half-hour of your free time a day without a screen. The apple is optional, but still advised. ??

Dear Universe, Galaxy, Solar System - Web - Atom, Molecule, Cell,

There comes a time. 

Gratefully,

-J