How CD’s Work All Fits Together

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Artist Statement:

My work doesn’t resolve into a single discipline, industry, or mission statement—and it isn’t trying to. Across nearly three decades, the books, travel, platforms, philosophies, art, and experiments form something closer to a continuous inquiry: an ongoing attempt to understand how humans live, connect, and create meaning inside systems that are often incomplete, extractive, or misaligned with who we actually are.

What connects it all isn’t scale or success. It’s attention to the spaces in between. The liminal gaps between ideas, between people, between who we are told to be and who we sense we might become.

Travel as Inquiry

Travel has always been less about movement and more about perception. Through my years of lived experience documented at Vagobond.com, travel became a way to observe systems from the inside— how culture, economy, belief, and behavior intersect on the ground.

That perspective became explicit in my book  Liminal Travel, which explores how thresholds and borderlands—geographic, cultural, spiritual—often reveal more truth than destinations ever do. The liminal isn’t a pause; it’s where understanding actually forms. That idea quietly threads through everything I have made since.

Books as Artifacts of Questioning

My books aren’t chapters in a linear argument; they’re probes.

• Petshitter examines the tech startup world and American society’s fixation on growth, greed, and self-mythology—written from inside the machine rather than at a safe distance.
• Rough Living challenges scarcity narratives and the belief that survival requires perpetual striving, offering both practical and philosophical ways to step outside those constraints.
• Keys to the Riad turns inward, using Tarot as a symbolic system for reflection and personal transformation—not prediction, but pattern recognition.
• Future World 2323 looks forward, using speculative futures to examine present anxieties around power, technology, and control. It’s also an example of collective literary ventures, shared vision, and collaborative world building.
• Notes from Nowhere imagines a pure utopia in Hawaii three hundred years from now, not as escapism, but as a mirror: what would we need to change, preserve, or finally understand to arrive there? An interesting note is that all the profits from this book were donated to the mutual aid organizations that were helping the victims of the tragic Lahaina fires. Literally putting my money where my words were.

Taken together, these works are less about answers and more about orientation—art that creates space for readers to reconsider what they accept as normal.

Art as a Technology of Becoming

Art runs through everything I do—not as ornament, but as function. As lens for viewing reality. As mirror.

Art, in this context, is a technology that helps people move closer to who they are meant to be. It disrupts habit. It slows certainty. It creates reflective surfaces where identity, desire, and belief can be examined without being flattened.

Not just visual art but also writing, place-making, sound, platforms, the use of AI, and participation all become artistic media when the goal is not output, but transformation.

Baoism: Meaning Without Dogma

Baoism, a philosophy I created, exists in the space where organized religion often fails but the human need for ritual, symbolism, and shared meaning remains.

Baoism doesn’t demand belief or obedience. It acknowledges that humans need structure and ceremony, and asks how those needs can be met without hierarchy, coercion, or absolutes. It’s about practice rather than faith—orientation rather than salvation.

This philosophical current quietly informs everything I do: how communities are formed, how tools are designed, how collaboration is prioritized over authority.

Building More Human Digital Spaces

While not a skilled coder, I have still tackled massive technology projects. These have emerged from the same questions that animate my writing and travel: Who benefits? Who owns meaning? Who gets erased?

Litether explored permanence, ownership, and creator autonomy—and directly led to collaboration with others who shared those values, culminating in the co-founding of PageDAO, which challenges extractive publishing by centering collective governance and IP ownership for creators.

Other projects extended this thinking:

• VoiceMarkr, which lets people leave voice memories or recommendations on a map—because voice carries intimacy text can’t, and when paired with geography creates a powerful layer of human connection.
• ZguideZ, in its first iteration enabled travelers and locals to build their own geogated audio guides, decentralizing storytelling in tourism.
• MicroVictoryArmy, started in 2011, focused on helping people feel good about the small things they accomplish in a culture obsessed with scale and comparison.

Each project has resists turning people into products, favoring participation over extraction.

Xcrol: Where It All Converges

Xcrol is not just another platform—it’s the clearest convergence point of everything that came before.

At its core, Xcrol is an attempt to fix the broken ways we are connected. It questions why modern digital life reduces human presence to metrics, scrolls, and signals divorced from context. It brings place, meaning, and intentional connection back into how people relate to one another.

Xcrol reflects lessons learned from academic degrees in cultural anthropology, working in tech, developing theories of digital anthropology before there was such a thing, travel, from art, from collaborative systems, from philosophy. It treats connection as something to be cultivated, not mined—and positions users as participants rather than inventory.

In the arc of my work, Xcrol isn’t an endpoint. It’s a living system—one that continues the inquiry in public, with others.

Xcrol is important.

Satoshi Manor: A Living Artwork

That same ethos exists physically at Satoshi Manor, the abandoned house in rural Japan that I purchased with Bitcoin profits and transformed into a collaborative, living artwork.

Part home, part art project, part open invitation, Satoshi Manor has hosted travelers from more than twenty countries—friends and strangers alike. People cook using the old dishes and pans left behind by previous owners. They write on the walls. They leave traces.

The house doesn’t erase history; it layers it.

Satoshi Manor asks a simple, radical question: What if ownership didn’t mean exclusion? What if home could also be a commons?

Still in Motion

Seen together, my work isn’t a career path (and neither is my career history) —they are practice.

• Travel as inquiry
• Art as transformation
• Technology as correction
• Philosophy as orientation
• Collaboration as foundation

For nearly 28 years, I haven’t been trying to arrive anywhere. I’ve been building conditions—spaces where people can connect more honestly, create more freely, and live a little closer to who they already are.

My work is not finished.

That’s intentional.

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