WHATIS The Edge of Things

theEdgeOfThings.COM was born of the idea that the Digital Age was bringing the world democracy and peace. Back in 2014, I was finishing my thesis on the Cyberpunk aesthetic impact on the ethics of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011.

Somewhere along the way, I moved to the epicenter of it all, Silicon Valley, and shortly found myself a cyborg driving for Lyft. I use the word cyborg with its' full implications, especially their cyberpunk connotation when the company went public and my overlords became millionaires, but I made a decent living.

It was extremely sad to see how the dream of the Digital Age, the promise of a better world through social media, became less of a dream and more of a nightmare.

Midway, I found myself haunted by a violent past and a crumbling national identity, in a "soft exile", and plagued by the many ills of the mental health system.

The pandemic closed the circuit and in 2020, the world did seem to be ending for me.

Just a few hours ago it sure looked that way, but then, sometimes, I get a flash of fresh ideas and scribbled them down.

I am currently studying cyber security, Mandarin and American Literature. I also tend to drive for Lyft to get "some cash in my pocket".

This journal is my project to put into digestible words without the standarized SEO-enhanced lingo (most of the time) my reflections on technology, futurism (or futurology, a word that makes no etymological sense), science, science fictions, scientificism, language, the mind, philosophy, you get the idea.

My main goal is to put in a non-linear way the idea that the Internet can be much more than what it is, and that there is much more than Facebook, Twitter and Google to it, using my experience of traveling across this country and living in Silicon Valley for almost a decade, going through hackerspaces while dealing with mental health issues and the issues related to the system around it, to explain that the Cyberpunk Age is dead and gone (2010-2019 roughly) and we are indeed in a new epoch of the Internet, which is closer to Philip K. Dick than it is to William Gibson. Indeed, the epochs of the Internet define our real lives, and both are forever intertwined now.

I don't want to talk about TikTok and "digital trends". I don't want to tell you about the best Android Phone or the hottest app in the market. I don't want to bullshit you.

I want to tell you the experiences of one user who is trying to figure out how to use the absurd amount of tools he has at his disposal.

I don't know if we can feel hopeful about the Internet and Democracy and the Mental Health system, but we can for sure make a lot more than we were able to.

Technological democracy is growing, and so is the gap between humans and machines.

And so on, you get the idea.  

WHOIS edgeMute's Editor

A licensed Journalist from Universidad Catolica Andres Bello by the grace of the aforementioned paper.

Cybersecurity enthusiast.

WHOIS edgeMute

Distinctly drove more than 2000 souls across the Bay Area as a cyborg.

Honorably finished three books during the pandemic. Full books.

Gracefully likes ambient music. Noise music sometimes relaxes him.

Diligently plays videogames like he reads books. Both are great storytelling media.

Astonishingly wrote about cryptocurrencies when they were a fringe technology.

Bravely made one of the most obscure podcasts ever in 2010. He might try again.

I was in the 1337est Quake 2 clan in the world.

Shockingly once made a mod for Quake 2 changing a C++ source file and made it crash from explosions.

Adorably made his first website when he was 10 years old of age, a very long time ago. However, people had already made their own websites when they were 10 years old back then. Or maybe it was their newsgroup post? He forgets.