K41R0N · device economies

Flying Cars all the way Down

When I was an 8-year old kid, I wanted to be an inventor.

I wanted to live in the space where magic and technology co-exist. Holograms, flying cars; solving every need through a gizmo or gadget, I would be celebrated for my inventiveness and figuring out things everyone else had failed at, or hadn't tried hard enough.

Every kid wishes for world peace, every kid believes they can cure cancer.

But when I became a teenager, I saw the nuance. Instead of building products and objects, if I wanted to help people, why not go for the root causes? Why build something that saves people money, when we could just be rid of money altogether? Utopia!

But "the real world doesn't work like that". I heard that phrase over and over as I kept asking questions. No one managed to give me a concrete answer as to how the real world actually works. They said I'd understand one day.

Then I went to design and engineering school. I was taught to build anything. Gizmos and gadgets galore! With enough money and time, I could at least settle for the flying cars and the holograms.

Marketing school taught me that it doesn't matter how good a product is, just whether there's someone willing to pay for it; and business school taught me that anything I brought into this world that wasn't quantified in the almighty dollar didn't count.

We couldn't live in a world without flying cars, and cancer, and money, and war; could we? Those things are the inevitable aspects of the human experience that we've all got to accept, right?

Some of these things are real and measurable, and they can be quantified. But just because they're tangible and quantified doesn't mean they need to be a part of our world.

The more I spoke with that 8-year old who thought he could solve the world with flying cars, the more I genuinely began to believe "flying cars" is really all there is. A dream. A beautiful dream coming from someone untethered to how "the world really works."

Money, and market, and every other named and measurable thing in our world are all made up by people who want to tell themselves they understand. This sounds blasphemous, I know.

But just because something is made up doesn't mean it doesn't hold power over our lives. Our belief in it is what makes it real and tangible and quantifiable. And such, I've decided to call them all "devices", because we've made them all up, and they're useful.

Since then, I've told that 8-year old kid that if he wants to save the world by making flying cars and holograms, he's gotta start by making people believe that cars can fly in the first place.

About me

My name is Alejandro "Kairon" Arango. I'm a martech consultant by day and creative technologist by night. I've got the soul of an artist, the mind of a scholar and the heart of a craftsman. And I know full well how pretentious that sounds.

I build my own tools while traveling from Medellin, to Berlin, to New York. And I hope to one day build something that tangibly improves someone's life.

In the meantime, I write essays, research the unified theory of devices that I expect to become my life's work. And wait eagerly for your DMs and comments to reply to.

Housework

There's no regular cadence to this publication, though I do push myself to publish at least monthly.

While I am knowledgeable in agentic tools, I make a conscious effort to keep them away from this pub out of love for my craft. All illustrations are hand-drawn by me, all text is written by me, LLM-isms in my writing are my fault and no one else's.

The best way to make my day is to make a question or leave your thoughts on my pieces.