I started publishing my memoir here on Litkicks 15 years ago. I wrote one new chapter a week for 53 weeks, covering the years 1993 to 2003 when I was a first-generation website developer participating in an amazing worldwide software revolution from inside the skyscrapers of Manhattan and my home in Queens. I called this collection of autobiographical blog posts Ten Years in Silicon Alley and I think it’s still one of the best things I’ve ever written.

My goal was to write a technological memoir, a coder’s quest, capturing my work life and my family life and my spiritual or creative life all in a single breath. By narrating a past decade of daily existence in deadpan real-time, I hoped to find threads of significance between personal changes in my life – new jobs, fast-growing children, financial windfalls, a stock market crash, a divorce – and the story of a whole planet that seemed to be suddenly bursting open with miraculous societal innovations and surges of unexpected cultural transformation.

The Internet changed all our lives from 1993 to 2003. People around the world met each other for the first time. Top-down media and education institutions had to compete with public creativity for the first time. We all knew we were living through explosive times, though a lot of people I talked to back then were more nervous about the cultural changes we were going through than I was. From my privileged vantage point in my cube at the Time-Life Building or my chic office in Chelsea I was sure the Internet revolution we were working hard to create was going to help the planet.

I still believe this. I still believe that people are good, and I still believe in free open source software, and I still believe the Internet helps people. The human connections made possible by the technological revolutions of the past 30 years are real in our lives, and cannot be denied.

Yet at the same time, when many of us look back on the progress of the last 30 years, we can’t escape the eerie sense that the revolutions we lived through have only left us stuck more stubbornly than ever in a broken past.

This is what I was thinking about when I spent a year spilling out the 53 blog posts that make up Ten Years in Silicon Alley. I was wondering if the work I’ve devoted my life to has done more good than damage. Today, I am still a workaholic web developer and my nearly full-time gig is World BEYOND War, a global small-donor-funded nonprofit. I still think the work I’m doing is helping the world, and maybe that’s why I found myself recently turning back to autobiography, and to the questions autobiography raises.

The first 53 chapters of my life story ended in 2003 with me broke and desperate (but hopeful, with good family and friends to help me through) in a New York City that still hadn’t gotten over September 11 2001.

My career was stalled, I was scrambling to learn new tech skills in a city that had shut all doors to website projects. The Internet revolution appeared to be dead in 2003 … but blogging and social media were about to blow up. Virtual servers and the cloud were about to happen, and AJAX and Drupal and WordPress and Node.js were about to emerge as amazing new paradigms for open source free web publishing, and the iPhone was soon to be invented. It’s funny that I and so many of my fellow techies truly worried, back in 2003, that the Internet revolution might be dead.

Someday I’ll tell some good stories about my adventures from 2003 to 2008, when I built music websites, worked for a television network and a legal search engine start-up, and watched my kids be teenagers, and ran a massively popular online poetry community that I had no idea what to do with. I have a lot of memories to share from these years. Some of these stories came out recently in a couple of recent blog posts about Judih Weinstein Haggai.

Skipping forward in the stories of my life, I just spent two intensive episodes of the World BEYOND War podcast talking about the six years I spent living and working in the Northern Virginia/Washington DC area from 2009 to 2015. This is what I felt I urgently needed to talk about right now – because the story of my disillusionment with the US federal government and the Obama administration feels relevant to my work today as a peace activist and technology director.

In January 2009, the same year that Barack Obama became President of the United States, I decided to try a major change in my own life, moving from New York City to the capital city of the country I lived in and (then) believed in, working first for an influential political magazine owned by the Washington Post, and then for several branches of the US federal government. As you’ll hear if you listen to the two podcast episodes listed below, I found myself quite a fish out of water in Washington DC.

Episode 60 is the story of my first year in Washington DC when I was director of web development for Foreign Policy magazine, which was part of Slate and Washington Post, and I interacted with folks like Susan Glasser, Peter Baker, Blake Hounshell, Annie Lowrey, Blaine Sheldon, Jacob Weisberg, David Rothkopf, Christian Brose, Amer Yaqub and many more. This was a very mainstream/centrist Washington DC insider crowd, and back then I was hopeful about Obama’s presidency and eager to embrace centrist points of view. There’s really no moral to the story I tell in Episode 60 except this: things happened the way they happened. This was a very personal episode for me, an attempt at healing through confessional (which is, really, the essence of memoir).

The wheels really start to come off the crazy car in Episode 61, when I narrate three farcical consulting gigs I held with three different branches of the Obama administration: first the Department of Labor, then the Postal Regulatory Commission, then the Center for Disease Control. I’ve been lucky to have an exciting career working for many clients, but I have rarely had three really bad projects in a row. That’s what I experienced when I worked for the federal government from 2010 to 2015. Each gig was a comedy and a tragedy and a revelation.

Each of these gigs was bad in a distinctly different way. For the Department of Labor, my team built a great website that could really help people, if only anyone could find it.

For the Postal Regulatory Commission, we had a solid marketing plan, but the website was technically impossible to build.

The Center for Disease Control project was the worst failure of all, because it looked like a great project at first, and I was thrilled to be tech lead for an innovative public health website. But the Center for Disease Control hired me through Price Waterhouse Coopers, a stuffy and expensive management firm, and PWC not only hired me but also another tech architect whose job was to look over my shoulder. When this person and I disagreed on everything, the project fell apart. This is the story I tell in episode 61, and it ends with me on the edge of despair, out of ideas, returning home to New York City with my second marriage now ended too. These stories are about as personal as I ever get on the World BEYOND War podcast (on which I usually interview other people). If you want to know how I ended up finding a new direction as a full-time peace activist at the great organization World BEYOND War, you’ll just have to listen to both of these episodes, which are about an hour each. You can listen using the links on this page, but the best way to enjoy a podcast is on your phone using any podcast app or iTunes or Spotify.

Episode 60: A Long Road to Peace Activism

Episode 61: How Six Years in Washington DC Changed Me

Literary Kicks has always been a quest for me. The site is thirty years old this week. I was absolutely on a literary quest the month I launched it. I spent the summer of 1994 fuming through texts by Jack Kerouac, Arthur Rimbaud, Anton Chekhov, Henry David Thoreau – mostly in the reading time I got on my E train subway rides and at lunch hour every day. Back home, my youngest child was a few months away from being born – and she is now turning thirty soon too! 

I’m still on a literary quest, though it’s been a circular quest and I’m still stuck in the European 19th century. I’ve lately been rereading Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Delmore Schwartz and James Joyce. Rereading is a great thing to do. I also recently enjoyed “Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson” by James Marcus, and Roxana Robinson’s latest novel “Leaving”, which has the taut power of a Puccini opera.

My literary quest has been a circular one, but my coder’s quest has taken me into the exciting new intellectual territory of LLM’s, or large language models. There are many controversial ethical questions surrounding artificial intelligence and the amazing capabilities of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini or Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Of course I am concerned about the societal implications of this new technology. Like many of my fellow software developers, I’m also simply blown away by how well these new systems work. The success of the Transformer plus Attention model for generative language systems has been a great scientific discovery, and no amount of societal controversy or legal dispute changes the fact that this is a real innovation – a stunning invention comparable to the discovery of DNA. It’s certainly too soon to say much about LLMs and artificial general intelligence, but all I know at this point is that I’m going to be spending more time delving into word embeddings and n-dimensional matrices. Because my literary quest has always been a coder’s quest.

It’s a funny twist to the story I tell in the podcast Episode 61 about my tumultuous Center for Disease Control project: back then in 2014 we were trying to develop a public health website that could process english language search queries, which (it turns out) is exactly the kind of task an LLM is great at. But all we had back in 2014 was Solr with its poky Bayesian inferences. I wrote my first artificial intelligence program back in college. I’ve been suffering on my coder’s quest for a long, long time.

Thanks for checking out the latest two installments in the memoir of my life – such as it is.