The Blue Gorilla Introduction🔵🦍👋
Explore🔭🔬 and Create💡✏.
Hi there! 👋
My name’s Christian and I’m an aspiring foresight consultant, writer, and technology enthusiast.
I grew up in the suburbs of Pennsylvania, about 45 minutes outside of Philadelphia.
I went to The Pennsylvania State University and majored in Civil Engineering.
While I was there, I spent a few summers at an architectural engineering construction firm, one summer at a design-build firm, and when I graduated I joined an engineering software company as a Product Sales Engineer.
I spent about two years there before I felt myself being drawn to a new field. One of my best skills is abstract problem solving. I love peering into the future to try and picture the unknown.
About a year ago I started immersing myself in the world of exponential technologies, -that is, disruptive, pervasive technologies of the 21st century. And I started to realize just how important it was to pay attention to this.
The world is speeding up, and new age technology is the engine.
Currently, I curate videos and offer commentary on some of the most important technologies being developed today. Check out my Tiktok, the_bluegorilla, to see more! My goal is to bring awareness to the rate and extent of changing technologies and build a community of curious people that want to learn more about them.
Some of my friends have told me that the technology they see on my channel scares them. They don’t understand it. I don’t blame them.
Living in the year 2021 is a strange time.
Whether we like it or not, the world🌎 is getting bigger. We are more connected than ever before.
By most metrics the world is getting better. One of the best examples of this is that in 1990, nearly 2 billion people lived in extreme poverty. Today that number is down to almost half a billion.
And yet, in the middle of a global pandemic that never seems to end… it feels like the world is turning upside down. In a way, the pandemic has offered everyone a pause to breathe, —to look around. It’s revealed some disturbing realities for all of us.
With all this progress and an extended era of peace, it’s brought with it a whole new world of challenges.
Just to name a few…
Technology companies are hacking the reward centers of our brain to manipulate our attention.
Privacy is moving closer and closer to non-existent.
The nutritional quality of food is declining.
Microplastic is infesting the food chain.
The world is “on fire”.
And automation and inequality trends are offering some big questions for society as a whole.
How do we know what’s truthful information? How do we protect ourselves when government oversight fails? And how do we make sure technology is working for all of us, instead of just a few of us?
Peter Lunenfeld, a professor of design, media arts and digital humanities at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine, predicted:
“We will use technology to solve the problems the use of technology creates, but the new fixes will bring new issues.”
I think this sums up the reality well.
Kevin Kelly, the co-founder of Wired magazine, has a beautiful quote that I think captures the essence of the day. When describing the future in his most recent book, The Inevitable, Kelly puts it this way:
“neither dystopia nor utopia is our destination. Rather, technology is taking us to protopia,”
“Protopia is a state of becoming, rather than a destination. It is a process. In the protopian mode, things are better today than they were yesterday, although only a little better. It is incremental improvement or mild progress.”
I think the first step to incremental progress is awareness.
This is what I want to dedicate The Blue Gorilla and BAMBOO to in pursuit of helping others. It’s really at the heart of what I’m trying to do here.
Technology is continuously solving and creating new problems in pursuit of an incrementally better world.
All of these questions were just part of the reason I started looking for answers. And I started finding them.
But it takes widespread support and powerful leaders to drive adoption.
This is what I feel called to.