I’ve never been very good at explaining how all of my work fits together, mostly because I didn’t experience it as a plan. It happened as motion. As curiosity. As a series of questions I kept carrying from one place, medium, or experiment into the next.

Looking back over the last couple of decades, I don’t see a résumé. I see a trajectory — pulses moving through travel, books, art, technology, philosophy, and lived spaces. Different forms, same underlying inquiry: how do we live more fully, more honestly, more creatively inside systems that are often extractive, siloed, or quietly hostile to human dignity?

Travel came first. Not as escape, but as method.

Years of moving through the world — much of it documented at https://www.vagobond.com — taught me how systems behave when you’re inside them. Walking streets instead of theorizing. Staying with strangers. Paying attention to the unmarked rules that govern daily life. Seeing how different cultures wrestle with the same human problems using very different stories and compromises.

That way of seeing eventually became Liminal Travel, the book. It’s about thresholds and in-between spaces — cultural, geographic, spiritual. The argument is simple: most of what matters doesn’t happen at the start or the finish. It happens in the crossing.

The books that followed weren’t sequels. They were conversations.

Petshitter (https://www.indignified.com/books) came from living inside the startup and tech world and watching how greed, growth, and self-mythology get normalized as virtue.

Rough Living pushed back against the idea that we are never enough — that survival requires constant striving inside systems designed to keep us anxious.

Keys to the Riad  turned inward, using Tarot not as mysticism but as a symbolic language for pattern recognition and personal transformation.

Future World 2323 looked forward, using speculative futures to diagnose present power structures.

Notes from Nowhere imagined a pure utopia in Hawaii three hundred years from now — not as fantasy, but as a way of revealing where we fail and where we quietly succeed. And it was a successful experiment in collaborative world building and non-traditional publishing.

None of these books were meant to deliver answers. They’re lenses. Artifacts of questioning. Ways of interrupting ordinary thinking long enough for something more honest to surface.

Art is the connective tissue in all of this. I don’t separate art from life. For me, art is a technology of becoming — a way to interrupt habitual narratives and reveal new ways of seeing, feeling, and acting. Writing, sound, place-making, participation — they’re all media for the same function: helping people move closer to who they’re meant to be, rather than who they’re rewarded for performing as.

That sensibility runs directly into Baoism (https://www.baoism.org), a philosophy I created to sit in the gap where organized religion often fails but the human need for ritual, symbolism, and orientation persists. Baoism doesn’t ask for belief. It asks for practice. It treats meaning as something you engage with, not something you submit to. Orientation, not obedience.

Those same questions inevitably pulled me into technology.

Long before “Web3” hardened into a buzzword, I was asking why digital spaces are so extractive — why attention is sold, identity flattened, and creativity treated as raw material. 

Litether was one of my early attempts to explore permanence, ownership, and creator autonomy. That work directly led to collaboration and eventually to becoming a co-founding member of PageDAO (https://www.pagedao.org), built around collective governance and IP ownership instead of extraction.

Other experiments followed.

VoiceMarkr (https://www.voicemarkr.com) lets people leave voice memories or recommendations on a map. Voice carries presence in a way text can’t, and when paired with geography it creates a different kind of human connection.

ZguideZ explored how tourism storytelling could be decentralized through user-created, geogated audio guides.

MicroVictoryArmy (https://www.microvictoryarmy.com), which I started back in 2011, focused on something quieter: helping people feel good about small, human accomplishments in a culture obsessed with scale.

All of these projects circle the same question: how do we make digital life feel more human instead of more consumptive?/

That question is most alive for me now in Xcrol  (https://www.xcrol.com).

Xcrol isn’t just another app. It’s the clearest convergence point of everything I’ve been exploring — travel, art, collaboration, philosophy, and connection. It’s an attempt to rethink how we relate online, away from metrics and abstract feeds and back toward context, place, and intention.

Xcrol treats connection as something cultivated rather than mined. It brings geography back into communication. It centers human agency instead of optimizing for attention extraction. In the arc of my work, it’s not an endpoint — it’s an axis. A living system where these ideas can be explored together, in public.

There’s a physical counterpart to all of this too.

Satoshi Manor — an abandoned house in rural Japan I bought with Bitcoin profits — isn’t a retreat or a brand. It’s a collaborative, living artwork. Part home, part open invitation. Travelers from more than twenty countries have stayed there. They’ve cooked with the old pans left behind. Written on the walls. Added layers instead of erasing them.

It’s a place that treats ownership as stewardship and home as something that can still be shared.

When I step back and try to name what holds all of this together, it isn’t a master plan. It’s a set of preferences that keep repeating:

Inquiry over answers.
Participation over performance.
Belonging over extraction.
Presence over consumption.
Connection over metrics.

The last 28 years haven’t been about building a portfolio. They’ve been about staying in motion long enough to notice what actually matters.

Right now, Xcrol sits at the center of that motion. Not as a conclusion — but as an opening.

Come join me on it. https://www.xcrol.com/@cd

I’ve never been very good at explaining how all of my work fits together, mostly because I didn’t experience it as a plan. It happened as motion. As curiosity. As a series of questions I kept carrying from one place, medium, or experiment into the next.

Looking back over the last couple of decades, I don’t see a résumé. I see a trajectory — pulses moving through travel, books, art, technology, philosophy, and lived spaces. Different forms, same underlying inquiry: how do we live more fully, more honestly, more creatively inside systems that are often extractive, siloed, or quietly hostile to human dignity?

Travel came first. Not as escape, but as method.

Years of moving through the world — much of it documented at https://www.vagobond.com — taught me how systems behave when you’re inside them. Walking streets instead of theorizing. Staying with strangers. Paying attention to the unmarked rules that govern daily life. Seeing how different cultures wrestle with the same human problems using very different stories and compromises.

That way of seeing eventually became Liminal Travel, the book. It’s about thresholds and in-between spaces — cultural, geographic, spiritual. The argument is simple: most of what matters doesn’t happen at the start or the finish. It happens in the crossing.

The books that followed weren’t sequels. They were conversations.

Petshitter (https://www.indignified.com/books) came from living inside the startup and tech world and watching how greed, growth, and self-mythology get normalized as virtue.

Rough Living pushed back against the idea that we are never enough — that survival requires constant striving inside systems designed to keep us anxious.

Keys to the Riad  turned inward, using Tarot not as mysticism but as a symbolic language for pattern recognition and personal transformation.

Future World 2323 looked forward, using speculative futures to diagnose present power structures.

Notes from Nowhere imagined a pure utopia in Hawaii three hundred years from now — not as fantasy, but as a way of revealing where we fail and where we quietly succeed. And it was a successful experiment in collaborative world building and non-traditional publishing.

None of these books were meant to deliver answers. They’re lenses. Artifacts of questioning. Ways of interrupting ordinary thinking long enough for something more honest to surface.

Art is the connective tissue in all of this. I don’t separate art from life. For me, art is a technology of becoming — a way to interrupt habitual narratives and reveal new ways of seeing, feeling, and acting. Writing, sound, place-making, participation — they’re all media for the same function: helping people move closer to who they’re meant to be, rather than who they’re rewarded for performing as.

That sensibility runs directly into Baoism (https://www.baoism.org), a philosophy I created to sit in the gap where organized religion often fails but the human need for ritual, symbolism, and orientation persists. Baoism doesn’t ask for belief. It asks for practice. It treats meaning as something you engage with, not something you submit to. Orientation, not obedience.

Those same questions inevitably pulled me into technology.

Long before “Web3” hardened into a buzzword, I was asking why digital spaces are so extractive — why attention is sold, identity flattened, and creativity treated as raw material. 

Litether was one of my early attempts to explore permanence, ownership, and creator autonomy. That work directly led to collaboration and eventually to becoming a co-founding member of PageDAO (https://www.pagedao.org), built around collective governance and IP ownership instead of extraction.

Other experiments followed.

VoiceMarkr (https://www.voicemarkr.com) lets people leave voice memories or recommendations on a map. Voice carries presence in a way text can’t, and when paired with geography it creates a different kind of human connection.

ZguideZ explored how tourism storytelling could be decentralized through user-created, geogated audio guides.

MicroVictoryArmy (https://www.microvictoryarmy.com), which I started back in 2011, focused on something quieter: helping people feel good about small, human accomplishments in a culture obsessed with scale.

All of these projects circle the same question: how do we make digital life feel more human instead of more consumptive?/

That question is most alive for me now in Xcrol  (https://www.xcrol.com).

Xcrol isn’t just another app. It’s the clearest convergence point of everything I’ve been exploring — travel, art, collaboration, philosophy, and connection. It’s an attempt to rethink how we relate online, away from metrics and abstract feeds and back toward context, place, and intention.

Xcrol treats connection as something cultivated rather than mined. It brings geography back into communication. It centers human agency instead of optimizing for attention extraction. In the arc of my work, it’s not an endpoint — it’s an axis. A living system where these ideas can be explored together, in public.

There’s a physical counterpart to all of this too.

Satoshi Manor — an abandoned house in rural Japan I bought with Bitcoin profits — isn’t a retreat or a brand. It’s a collaborative, living artwork. Part home, part open invitation. Travelers from more than twenty countries have stayed there. They’ve cooked with the old pans left behind. Written on the walls. Added layers instead of erasing them.

It’s a place that treats ownership as stewardship and home as something that can still be shared.

When I step back and try to name what holds all of this together, it isn’t a master plan. It’s a set of preferences that keep repeating:

Inquiry over answers.
Participation over performance.
Belonging over extraction.
Presence over consumption.
Connection over metrics.

The last 28 years haven’t been about building a portfolio. They’ve been about staying in motion long enough to notice what actually matters.

Right now, Xcrol sits at the center of that motion. Not as a conclusion — but as an opening.

Come join me on it. https://www.xcrol.com/@cd