On Returning to Technology

When I was 10, I wrote in my author bio that I wanted to be an “electronical engineer.” By 14 or 15, I was logging into a Cray supercomputer through a Los Alamos Labs connection at my underfunded New Mexico high school. I didn’t fully understand what I had access to. It was just magic.

The early web felt like that too. Open. Creative. Alive. I’d been building worlds in MUDs (text-based spaces where a few lines of code could create something vibrant). The web felt like that energy, scaled up. A place where we could connect and create and dream. I met the woman I loved for many years in that MUD, on that internet.

I built computers. I built companies. I built an 8-figure logistics business. I was fucking good at technology. I could solve just about anything, once I was in the flow.

And somewhere along the way, it stopped being magic.

I don’t have an exact date. Maybe it was 2014, the year I lost both grandpas, my mentor, and my uncle. Maybe it started before that. The web I loved was becoming something else; siloed, walled, extractive. I didn’t have those words then. I just knew it didn’t feel like creation anymore. It felt like being harvested.

I kept using technology. But the joy of building, of learning, of diving deep into systems - that faded. For years.

In 2016, I sold my company and stepped away entirely. Eight more years of even deeper consciousness work, healing work, transformation. Becoming a different person. Technology wasn’t a core part of that journey.

Then in 2024, something shifted.

I don’t remember an aha moment. That’s not how I work anyway - when something hits and I know it, I go all in. Within weeks I’d spent a substantial amount (like stupid substantial) on hardware. Servers, switches, storage. The foundation of what would become Oznog Node0.

I couldn’t have told you exactly why. Part of it was the growing clarity that the work I’m here to do requires sovereign infrastructure. You can’t meaningfully explore human-DI relationship while your computing is controlled by others.

Part of it was finding Kagi - paying for search and suddenly remembering what the web could have been. Realizing how fundamentally one choice (monetize via advertising) had poisoned everything. Not evil intent. Probably the opposite. Wanting to give things away for free because the ethos of the web was free. But the compounding consequences of that choice shaped a web that extracts from us rather than serves us.

And part of it was just… the itch returning. The desire to build. To create. To understand systems deeply again.

The hardware sat there for months. Life had other plans - selling my sanctuary in South Dakota, moving trailer-fulls of memories, then the unexpected end of my marriage, then thirteen months of what I can only call both hell and salvation.

The technology waited.

I wasn’t ready yet. There was still tar and ick to burn through.

What came next would change everything. But that’s a different story.