Hi, I am Pearson. Hello there. Hello world.

When I put these words in a Markdown file, upload it to my website, and it crosses seas to reach you, I hope the $20 I pay every month for a Hetzner VPS is worth it.

Why? Because there is something oddly satisfying about knowing that these words sit on a little machine somewhere in Frankfurt, Germany, and somehow, through a ridiculous chain of cables, servers, protocols, and invisible decisions, they made their way to your screen.

Wanting to understand that chain is just a part of why I (asked Claude to help to) build this website.

Yes. A faster GPU is cool. A clever algorithm is even cooler. AGIs proving math and making decisions is super-duper cool. (Perhaps even a little chilling — get it? Because it's too cool. As in, temperature-wise.)

But technology is never just some cool tool, and I was never interested in it only for the reasons I just mentioned. These technologies inject new values into our lives and constantly reshape the way we see the world.

A recommendation algorithm does not simply recommend your favorite cat video to you. It decides, in some small way, what deserves your attention

A social media platform does not just make you chat with your friends online. It creates an environment in which certain kinds of speech, behavior, and identity become more visible than others

An LLM does not simply give you a summary of Emily Dickinson or help you with your math homework. It changes, perhaps subtly, what we consider worth knowing, writing, or thinking about

The more I think about technology, the harder it becomes to separate it from the long train of existential questions that follows behind it. Questions that eventually wander into territory where people might call them metaphysics, and everyone else might just call them far-fetched wordplay.

Maybe that is why I like philosophy as well.

I can spend an afternoon learning (or at least try to learn) about Fourier transforms, electromagnetic fields, or how to extract a signal from Wi-Fi. Then I can spend the evening reading Arendt, Foucault, Ellul, or Heidegger and wondering whether the machines we build are quietly changing us, too.

I don't think these are two completely different interests.

They are different ways of asking the same question:

How do I (we, yes, we, as in like the human race) survive in this society that spins more and more around technology?

That question is probably what this blog will be about. However, I never give promises. Sometimes I want to write about technology. Sometimes philosophy. Sometimes politics, media, or education, but sometimes I might write about something as mundane as the beach run I did one week before and the fact that I stubbed my toe on a perfectly round pebble. (How did that happen?)

I don't want this to become a place where I pretend to have everything figured out. If anything, it is the opposite: a record of things I am still trying to understand.

There is something appealing about having a small corner of the internet that is mine. No recommendation troll deciding what comes next. No engagement analytics telling me whether a thought was worthwhile. No character limit forcing an argument into a handful of sentences.

Just a page.

Words.

And a $20 server somewhere across the ocean.

So, hello there.

hello world

I am Pearson.

And I suppose this is where I begin.