Author: jmmccarthy2113dfcc4a7f
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Memory: Random Access and Experience
Memory: Random Access and Experience My goal with this blog is to take my education, my experiences, and open source it. Make my experiences available to whoever wants to consume it. Everyone who seeks to benefit from my understanding of culture, and computing and information technologies is welcome. I don’t wish to bore anyone, but…
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The Quiet Frequency: How to Listen Your Way to a Better World
We are drowning in noise. It’s not just the digital cacophony of alerts, hot takes, and curated outrage. It’s a deeper, more fundamental noise — the static of fractured narratives, the feedback loop of performative rebellion, the deafening silence where understanding used to be. Our modern ailment is a crisis of discernment. We have forgotten how to…
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It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me
Knowing too much doesn’t make you superior.It makes you restless. It makes you notice when systems rot behind clean interfaces.When progress is measured in graphs while people burn out quietly.When profit becomes a proxy for virtue. We live inside systems that demand constant growth, even when growth harms the very people sustaining it. This isn’t…
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The Two Cities: Building a Visible Future in an Age of Intelligent Machines
The Two Cities We live in the City of Gears. From the outside, it is a marvel, a shimmering metropolis of seamless convenience and smooth interfaces. Its machinery delivers what we ask for, often before we even ask. But its inner workings are a mystery. Great decisions are made behind polished walls. Processes whir and click…
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Beyond the Bubble: Reclaiming Our Minds in the Age of Algorithmic Echo Chambers
How the attention economy fragments our reality and what we must do to build a future of cognitive sovereignty. Imagine a vast, three-dimensional map of human belief. At its base lies the familiar political compass. But floating above it are not points or lines, but immense, iridescent bubbles — each a self-contained world. Step inside one, and…
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Angels, Aliens, and AI: How Each Era Reimagines the Unknown
Look at your phone for a moment. Think about the invisible systems behind it. The algorithms predicting your behavior, the artificial intelligence answering questions, the steady sense that the world is changing faster than anyone can fully grasp. Now imagine showing this device to someone from the Middle Ages. They wouldn’t call it technology. They’d…
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The Inheritance We Never Chose: On War, Legacy, and the Weight of Living
We are handed a script we did not write. The voices of the past… ancestral, societal, cultural. They whisper instructions for a ceremony we do not fully grasp. They invite us to partake in rituals of preparation, to don the old masks and grasp the recognizable tools, not for our understanding, but for our endurance.…
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Digital Interlopers: Finding Humanity in a Fragmented World
We move through the digital ether like visitors from another planet. We are all interlopers now. Our technology grants us a godlike privilege: to be a silent fly on the wall in a universe far from our own, in a home that belongs to someone else. We peek into kitchens in Kyiv, watch sunsets in…
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The Wasteland and the City: Finding Your Pace in an Age of Frenzy
We are all living in two places at once. The first is a wasteland. You know it intimately, even if you’ve never named it. It’s the feeling of being “all messed up with nowhere to go,” staring at a version of yourself in the mirror that seems faintly alien. It’s the existential fatigue that comes…
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Take the CAKE and eat it too
From Cultural Critique to Constructive Calling CAKE’s music has long been analyzed through the lens of irony and critique, but beneath its deadpan surface lies a surprisingly coherent, and radical, blueprint for individual agency in the face of systemic capture. The band doesn’t just diagnose our cultural sicknesses; their most popular songs, when viewed together,…