I work in technology leadership — the part of the job that's less about systems than about the people debating them. I live near Seattle.

I've been running some version of this site since the early 2000s, back when a personal site meant a page of links to your friends' blogs. That version is still here, in the archive, and I recommend it as an artifact.

This version is about one thing: the collision between philosophy and the technology I work with every day. Not "AI ethics" in the framework-and-principles sense — there's plenty of that, and most of it is written by people who have never had to enforce a policy. I'm interested in the harder and less tidy questions. What we owe systems we don't understand. What a governing document can actually do. What happens to human judgment when the most confident voice in the room isn't human.

I don't have credentials in philosophy. I have a philosophy habit and a job that keeps making the questions concrete.

Why "Existential Blues"

It's been the name for over twenty years, and if you don't get the existential blues from time to time, I recommend searching for them. I've kept this name because it's still accurate. Most of what's interesting here sits in the gap between a question that matters and an answer that hasn't been found.

Elsewhere

My Local Laws — a Washington State social purpose corporation I founded, focused on government transparency in the United States of America. A growing resource of the active federal, state and local laws that are in effect.  Legal data, not legal advice!

The 2005 link archive — the original WebLinks page, preserved.