# /whoami Hi, I'm **Rae** (they/he). I'm a systems-minded generalist, synthesizer of ideas, occasional builder, and compulsive connector of things based in San Francisco. I like connecting ideas, people, cables, designs, words, worlds, dots—in technology, art, community, infrastructure, and everyday life. I tend to move between fields rather than stay inside one lane: learning enough to notice useful relationships, following those relationships toward the people, disciplines, and evidence that understand each part more deeply, and sometimes building something from what I find. **Synthesis isn't a substitute for expertise.** What interests me is what becomes visible when different kinds of knowledge can actually meet without being flattened into one thing. This site is a mesh of signals. A recursive self-description. A living document. **Not a brand.** ## $ right now - refining my homelab, network, and self-hosted tools - learning more about IT, networking, and security - writing, worldbuilding, and turning notes into connected projects - making, repairing, organizing, and occasionally finishing things ## $ what I care about I'm drawn to systems—technical, social, ecological, internal—and how they shape the ways we relate and live. I value curiosity, cooperation, thoughtful design, autonomy, connection, community, and humane approaches to technology. ## $ go deeper The short version above is still the whole answer. The rest is context, if you want it.
$ whatis generalist Generalist is the least-wrong shorthand I've found. **Synthesizer** may be closer to how I actually move through the world: I collect fragments from different domains, notice relationships between them, and try to make those relationships useful without pretending that broad curiosity makes me the specialist in every room. I move between IT systems, code, networks, and security; writing, zines, photography, sound, visual work, and speculative futures; and material practices like electronics, sewing, 3D printing, carpentry, bicycles, repair, and reuse. I don't really experience these as separate lanes. The borders feel more administrative than real. Each skill or medium is another way to understand and reshape how people, machines, ideas, and environments interact.
$ whatis systems-lens I tend to follow systems across their supposed boundaries: networks and infrastructure, communities and institutions, archives and everyday objects, ecology and political economy, art and speculative futures. I'm often as interested in the **relationships between things** as the things themselves: dependencies, interfaces, feedback loops, histories, translations, flows, constraints, and the many intricate, nuanced bridges between domains that are easy to miss. A lot of my work begins with some version of: **Why is it like this? What connects to what? What would this look like if it were more humane, cooperative, resilient, and liberatory?** I like making connections that were already there but easy to miss. Sometimes that's a server, a script, a diagram, a community system, an archive, a story, a zine, a website, or a half-finished note that eventually turns into three (or 30+) other projects.
$ whatis project-ecology These aren't really separate projects. There is overlap, nesting inside one another, and the constant exchanging of parts. - **[Root Sequence](https://rootsequence.systems/)** — the larger ecology: notes, frameworks, systems work, experiments, and projects about connection, care, infrastructure, liberation, and what else might be possible. - **No One Noticed / Coherent World** — speculative fiction and systems design in the same universe, exploring what happens when humans stop treating the present as the edge of possibility. - **[Museum of Ordinary Life](https://museumofordinarylife.org/)** — an archive for the objects, interfaces, spaces, routines, sounds, paperwork, stories, and invisible systems that make up ordinary life while they are still ordinary. - **Community Infrastructure** — modular, adaptable infrastructure for real communities: software, shared hardware, trusted local/ethical AI, governance, legal adaptability, mutual aid, and community discovery. - **Being Humane / Being Humane Atlas** — mapping cause and effect, power, accountability, vulnerability, responsibility, and more humane ways of structuring systems. - **[Liberation Mass](https://github.com/Root-Sequence/liberation-mass)** — experiments around ritual, solidarity, reflection, connection, and liberation without requiring hierarchy or dogma. - **Homelab + local infrastructure** — where a lot of the abstract ideas get stress-tested against actual computers, networks, failures, constraints, and maintenance. - **[raelog](https://raelog.net/)** — notes and writing that don't always belong inside a project repository.
$ whatis orientation - curiosity before certainty - cooperation over domination - community and mutual aid as infrastructure, not afterthoughts - technology that is understandable, adaptable, repairable, and locally controllable when useful - complexity without flattening everything into false binaries or neat categories - accountability that follows power and consequence instead of socializing vulnerability while privatizing responsibility - intelligence as something to cultivate and share, not merely own, rank, or extract from - nature as something with value beyond what humans can turn it into - liberation as an unfinished, relational, recursive direction incompatible with somebody else's domination - building small things that can connect into larger things without requiring a central authority to make them meaningful
$ why The medium changes; the underlying impulse usually doesn't. I'm interested in the gap between **the world we inherited** and **the worlds humans are demonstrably capable of making**. Most things here are unfinished on purpose: returning, revising, connecting, forking, and recombining are part of the practice.
## $ find rae - [dev11.systems](https://dev11.systems/) — a small, evolving studio space for ideas and technical experiments - [Root Sequence](https://rootsequence.systems/) - [GitHub](https://github.com/raelovejoy) - [Mastodon](https://kolektiva.social/@raelovejoy) - [Pixelfed](https://pixelfed.social/raelovejoy) - [raelog](https://raelog.net/) - [/contact](/contact) --- Last updated: September 28, 2026