It’s 1:30 am and I am sitting here using Bolt to adjust some rules on the deicer.org website I made for immigrant rights. The entire day I’ve been wondering about all of the projects I want to get back to work on with the break in between semesters. As I’m driving around, I cant help to think that it’s a privilege in of itself to -get- to sit and think of this stuff.
All the while, I’m driving through a community that looks so much like the community from which I came from. Syracuse has some of the highest levels of childhood poverty in the United States. That’s not unlike coming from the South Bronx in the 1970s. Growing up in that – was trying to beat the odds against Redlining.
I know I’ve talked about it before – but I really do think there is this giant race that’s happening right now – and these large swathes of communities don’t even know that a race is happening. That’s why I changed a lot of what I’ve done in my off time – from being the photographer / author / social media whateveryoucallit to wanting to spend all of this energy really looking at how I can take my skills and my experience and try to make something new. That’s why I made gyrelabs.org – a place to make things like vigia.co, Broadcast buddy, and why Im pitching this idea ive been working on for years – finally – to accelerators (thanks for the push Ivan Makarov ). While I still am met with the emails from folks who are like “Stick to the Photoshop and photography stuff” – there are times when you get an email that just feel like youre floating in the right direction. It still feels lonely – but at least it feels like what I’m trying to listen to is right.
But this post from a longtime follower was encouraging to me. While I may have helped John on his journey some time ago- he would now help inspire mine so many years later.
Truth is – what I liked most about photography was the ability to share what I was doing and helping people along. That has always been the driving force – not the product. I always tell friends that talked about my work “School will be open on my birthday, man. There’s not a person that will remember any of the pictures that I took 5 years from now.”
The more important part has always been to share and bring others for the ride. That’s why I started by doctoral work getting a DPS at Syracuse – focusing on how information moves across low socioeconomic communities and how we can use AI and hyper customization to raise communities (ack… residency is next week!)
So that brings me to this place… where I feel like I have all these desires to make these bigger things – in the communities that -made- me. I write all of these thoughts down and wonder why my echo chambers just seem to be focused on valuation, the next vibe code to get you a million dollars, or the cool parties being thrown out in the space. To me, it feels like the first dot com movement – sitting in San Francisco or at the Monterrey Bay Aquarium with Intershop Communications and thinking the world was wide open.
Truth is – it’s always been wide open – for some. There’s this giant party happening at this one level – all the while there’s another level that is soundproofed from ever hearing about the party. The more I drive around, the guiltier I feel – and the sadder I feel that there could be more to do.
I stopped for coffee at a Byrne Dairy to upload the latest change to Github, and started looking around and saying hi to friends at LinkedIN. In this, I wound up stumbling into the Anthropic page. I found myself smiling at an essay from Dario Amodei called Machines of Loving Grace. Check it out here: https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace (nice touch on the poem. 🙂 )
For the first time in a long while – I felt like there are folks out there really trying to push to level this playing field. For the first time in a while it felt like someone was taking this mission to places that could really use it.
For me – it felt like this entire fight didn’t feel so alone.
Then I saw a video on their team dedicated to answering these questions from Daniela Amodei . Those two things were incredibly inspiring – and I thought worth sharing.
Sure – now I can’t sleep thinking about where this all goes. There is at least some comfort knowing that there are some folks out in San Francisco doing the same thing.
Thanks for that…