Grandioso
A story about the creation of the future of technology.
Inspiration
Introduction
It is 2026, and the entire modern-day civilization revolves around the internet. It is incorporated into every single aspect of our lives, yet the vast majority of people are completely uneducated when it comes to technology. It has become far too common for an American to throw their hands up and say, "I don't know how to work this," rather than empowering themselves to say, "Let me figure this out". We live in a world full of DoorDash, Uber, streaming platforms, and TikTok, a world where people waste their time and money trapped in a fragmented ecosystem of digital apps downloaded from the top of the App Store. We are tied to subscription services we falsely believe we cannot live without, simply because they are constantly promoted to us.
My biggest challenge as an ambitious and innovative creative has always been having all the pieces I needed to succeed in the way I envisioned success. Life as a creator has, for the most part, been an intensely solo journey. I had no partner, no production crew, and no one to constantly run ideas by or build with. But the lack of outside support pushed me to learn more skills, empowering me to do it all myself. Making technology has become the most fulfilling thing I have ever done in my life. If you understand tech and can code a digital infrastructure, the possibilities of what you have at your disposal are truly endless. This book is the story of how I took those endless possibilities and created a digital empire.
Life After College
My journey to building this empire truly began after I graduated college in 2022. For a while, I was moving around, in and out of different jobs that never really stuck, though I was always seeking out creative opportunities. I put together festivals, and in 2023, I traveled to Africa to shoot a documentary. Up to this day, traveling to Africa and shooting that film remains one of the biggest projects I have ever done.
Eventually, this path led me to the non-profit world, a space I had been connected to since I was sixteen years old, having participated in mentorship programs and having film projects for non-profits all over the country. Last year, I found myself working for a non-profit that served as the perfect, tragic example of a broken system. It was an organization with all the money in the world and all the real estate you could imagine, yet they had absolutely zero impact. They worked with children but did not actually care about the kids; their only true priority was job stability and maintaining the flow of operations so everyone could keep their paychecks.
During my time there, I was doing my job exceptionally better than anyone who had held the position before me, a fact acknowledged by everyone on the team. However, the harsh reality of workplace politics crept in. They put me in a position where they made me feel unwanted, effectively pushing me out of my role simply because of those politics.
At the beginning of January, I quit. I found myself with no job, searching for my next move while working on three different websites simultaneously. Then, one day, my continuous cycle of learning opened up an entirely new gateway of what was possible. From that moment at the end of January up to today, I went down a deep rabbit hole of learning and applying technology. I went on a six month solo journey, locking myself in my room with no external communication, no help, no resources, and no guidance on how to do it. I just did it. And through that isolation, I built an entire technical empire.
History of Technology
Pre-Birth of Silicon Valley: Automation Vs. Augmentation
To understand what I am building, we must look at the history of technology and the philosophical battle that took place before the true birth of Silicon Valley. When we look at the origins of artificial intelligence and modern computing, it ultimately boils down to a fight between two visions: Doug Engelbart, the "Godfather of Augmentation," versus John McCarthy, the "Godfather of Artificial Intelligence and the Algorithm".
Silicon Valley grew in a vacuum that favored the algorithm. Since the dawn of the first social media giants like Facebook and YouTube, technology has been fundamentally designed around capitalistic greed. These platforms are engineered to drain your attention, constantly calculating the best ways to keep you hooked to their screens. They ask: how can we take the thought processes and smarts of humans and give them to technology so that the technology can ultimately replace us?
My mission is to rewrite history and redirect Silicon Valley back to Engelbart’s theory of augmentation. I want to give technology a new meaning and a new purpose, one that is for the people and by the people. Instead of handing all human power over to algorithms to replace us, I am empowering technology to be the ultimate assistant to humans. I want to use technology to make humans smarter, more efficient, and fundamentally better.
In recent years, I discovered a movie called "Idiocracy", which perfectly illustrates my fears for our current trajectory. It is a film about an average man put into cryosleep for 500 years, waking up in a future where the world got so "smart" and automated that human beings lost all basic intelligence and critical thinking. How do we stop this? How do we position people to remain critical thinkers and not rely on AI to seek out all their answers? We do it by shifting the paradigm from automation and replacement to true human augmentation.
The Vision
Sovereign Tech
When you hear the word "Sovereignty," what do you think of? What about Community? So, what exactly have I been building for the last six months? Sovereignty! Sovereignty is the ability to access the world of technology and build it all. I've been building a self-hosted, modular, event-driven ecosystem deliberately designed to replace enterprise SaaS monoliths for non-profit management. It leverages a "best-in-class" micro-services architecture hosted on a sovereign dedicated server. Bureaucracy is the reason all the tools we currently use are so fragmented. I have always had a natural skill for finding the void in whatever space I entered, and I creatively figured out how to fill that space.
The overall vision is to provide a comprehensive solution for both non-profits and businesses. From my years of experience, I have seen the ins and outs of non-profits all over the country, and the truth is, they are struggling. Beyond just struggling for money, they lack the infrastructure to navigate and run their organizations from top to bottom. I have broken down the necessary infrastructure of non-profits into my 6 Pillars:
It is incredibly hard to navigate all 6 pillars if an organization lacks adequate funding, a fully equipped staff, or the technical literacy to maneuver through dozens of fragmented apps. For example, data operations are vital, collecting data points is the number one way non-profits prove their impact to receive grants and donations. But you cannot do that if you do not have the proper systems set in place.
While there are apps out there, none of them are truly catered specifically to non-profit infrastructure, and all of them come with a steep learning curve. You are forced to learn the tool, figure out how to make it work for you, and adapt it to your capacity. My technology provides an immediate solution for all 6 pillars in one contextualized system. Organizations will effortlessly fall in line with this ecosystem, here are some real time examples to my sovereign creations:
These are 3 minuscule parts of my ecosystem. Sovereign Video Conference is a replacement to Zoom. If you are a filmmaker or artist, you have plenty of experience searching on your web browser "Youtube to mp3" to download audio or video files from Youtube. y2mp3 is a interface I've created to for my own downloads, only now, the download reach goes way beyond just Youtube. Professional Card Test is a super resume builder. Only, it's also for cover letters, business cards, email signatures and creating branding kits. These are all just a small dosage of what is in store with the entire Auteur Directory.
The Director’s Law
Moral Code
Since my sophomore year of college, I realized that I am a director at heart. I am building an ecosystem called the "Auteur Directory". For those who don't know, an "Auteur" is a film director, like Quentin Tarantino, Christopher Nolan, or Spike Lee, who acts as the absolute author of the film. When you watch their movies, you can recognize their signature within 30 minutes because their exact DNA is in the entire process. Usually, a scriptwriter writes a film, a producer buys it, and a director is hired just to direct. But an auteur director co-writes the film, handpicks the actors, directs it, sits in on the edit, and sells the final product.
My entire life has been guerrilla-style filmmaking. I never had a crew; everything I have done has been a solo journey of taking on a boatload of work myself. Because I am naturally good at doing everything, I am now creating the technology to give other people every single piece, tool, and resource they will ever need to be their own Auteur Director.
However, with this capability comes the Director's Law: The Moral Code. We are creating the Operating System for AIPTS. The moral code serves as the guardrails around the technology I am building, designed specifically to protect people, and most importantly, to protect children.
While most of the tech world is designed to drain attention and act demonically toward users, my system is different. Yes, it features a gamified experience designed to be joyful and keep you coming back, but it is meant to drive you toward your mission, accomplish your goals, and position you to be successful. Many organizations senselessly track data from children and do things behind the scenes that are not in the child's best interest. My technology is built to forever protect and shield children from the negative forces in the world. We will only collect the data that is absolutely necessary, refusing to pull extra data points just for the sake of it. We are here to protect people through the future of technology.
How... & Why?
How... & Why? The Self Taught Millionarie
People absolutely love the idea of the "self-made millionaire". But I want to flip that idea on its head and introduce you to the "self-taught millionaire". The "How" is simple but grueling: I taught myself everything possible about the internet. I learned coding, security, design, infrastructure building, and marketing. Halfway through my six-month isolation, a tech friend told me that I was actively doing the job of an entire 10-person startup tech company all by myself. In a normal company, there are layers: one person handles security, another designs, a whole team codes, someone else markets, and another person worries about the text. I am doing all of those layers by myself, reverting back to the ultimate idea of the Auteur Directory. Because I know I can code everything, the possibilities are completely endless, and I never stop thinking of ideas.
And the "Why?" Literally, God called me to do this. He told me that this was the exact mission I was supposed to be on, and I completed it. When I started this journey at the beginning of January, I had so much enthusiasm for the possibilities of what I could create. Now, at the end of June, I have that exact same excitement, but now it is tangible. The reality is real. I can finally see, touch, and use everything I envisioned from day one. I am serving an underserved market, feeling the incredible joy of creating technology, and showing the world exactly why I believe technology is important and how I am using it to change the world.