Welcome to Beyond Avalon, and thank you for visiting. I am Mike Leavy, a writer, photographer and software engineer. I have worked in the software industry for decades, with engagements ranging from large name-brand corporations to tiny 2-person shops. Over the years, I have been both a participant in – and an observer of – how software and computing devices have made incursions into nearly every facet of our lives. And I am both drawn to and concerned by this incursion.
A Little More About This Blog
In his sonnet The World Is Too Much With Us, William Wordsworth observed that the (first) industrial revolution had resulted in a society consumed by materialism and disconnected from nature and the natural order of being.
This preoccupation with materialism and disconnect from our natural selves has, of course, continued to this day. In the modern world, however, material goods are augmented by virtual goods – e.g. the attention economy brought about by advertising-driven social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube. Our current reality of technology and information overload – accelerated by the advent of smartphones and social media – has helped to bring us to the brink of what we can rationally deal with, as is evidenced by how irrationally the world appears and operates today.
Beyond Avalon is an attempt to look at our current techno-social-political reality, and to evaluate it with an eye toward understanding it better, and mitigating the negative effects it can have on our lives.
I will be publishing essays weekly – and I hope you will follow along with my journey to sort out and better understand where we are, how we got here, and what positive steps we can take going forward.
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Thanks again!
