Never Show a Fool Your Work Until It’s Complete
It’s well established that I have a beef with social media. Like most beefs, it started from what was once a close relationship. Myspace, early Facebook, pre-acquisition Instagram, wild Tumblr and the original Twitter were all once places I called home and had a lot of fun on. Back then I wrote poetry, so I’d post the occasional bar or verse. I’d share screenshots of the music I was listening to at the time. I engaged in discussions about politics or social science and traded in the movie gossip of the day. It was truly fun. Then everything soured. The platforms grew, developed an appetite and soon consumed more of our attention and time than any other medium before it. Next thing I knew, rather than posting my random thoughts or about events of the day, I found myself trying to manicure a social media persona, and that wasn’t what I signed up for…well, not totally.
The persona wasn’t actually the problem. It was manicuring it to operate within a platform with rules and incentives that I didn’t choose. Though I could make the content for the platform, ultimately I wouldn’t have ownership of it. When social media was more akin to a game, I was delighted to oblige and participate in the tomdickery. Once the platforms flipped the game to a train, I tried to ride for a while but ultimately had to forfeit my ticket and bow out of the show. That was a lot of metaphors to say that after trying to participate in modern social media, I gave up. For me, the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze. I didn’t and don’t crave much attention. I don’t mind an occasional spotlight, and I do have a history of public performance. I don’t need the stage, but I am absolutely comfortable on it.
Unfortunately, trading in social media’s attention economy never really fired my engines. I’d post and obsess over the view and like count like most millennials, but I never truly caught the bug. I found more pleasure in viewing than creating content. Still do in the case of TikTok. Reckoning with my aversion to the modern social media landscape helped me be honest about what I wanted to experience online and how I wanted to present myself and my work. I didn’t and still don’t want to become some LinkedIn evangelist preaching about the benefits of AI or how to augment your blah blah blah with yadda yadda. I really can’t stand that crap. Still, I have to acknowledge the merits of the hustle: you’re in the conversation and people know your name.
Aside from the dystopic casino that is the attention economy, what has bothered me most about modern social media is that it’s all artificial. It’s fragile. It’s fickle, brittle, wispy and tricksy. As easy as it is to establish a profile and gain a little following, it’s even easier to watch it all go up in smoke. I’ve always thought it foolish to build a house on shifting sands, and that’s what I consider building a social media brand or following: foolish. The platforms provideth and the platforms taketh away, many times at their own discretion and by their own terms. Maybe it’s the Virgo in me, but you not gon’ run me.
I’ve held this position for years, and five years ago I couldn’t do anything about platform lock-in. In 2026, with the help of AI, I can not only build my own escape hatch but can grow that hatch into a pipeline and help others escape as well. First I had to prove it could work. I think I always knew it was possible; I just didn’t know if I could do it. I love movies and television. They have offered me some of my greatest lessons and chrisisms. Recently The Gentlemen, riffing on an old Scottish proverb, offered me a fabulous nugget that’s been central to my modus operandi for quite some time: never show a fool your work until it’s complete. Or more aptly, real G’s move in silence like lasagna. So I spent months toiling in secret, only sharing what I’m up to with a select few. First I built a personal learning tool, then created a data vault and dashboard to manage my progress, then designed a custom cyberdeck operating system. Once I had a few artifacts and tools worth showing, I needed a place to showcase them. Rather than reaching for the nearest LinkedIn or Instagram feed to post in like the evangelists, I decided to build my own platform.
With my background in website building via tools like WordPress, Wix and Weebly, I knew enough about web development to understand that I could use the Raspberry Pi running the home lab in my dining room as a server to host my website. I asked Claude what it would take to set up and build a website where I own the domain and pay no monthly subscription fee. It showed me that I could use the infrastructure I had already established (Tailscale VPN, sync scripts and the web server already running on the Pi) to stand up a website. The most essential question of all was what would go on it.
For sece.dev, I needed somewhere to show the Earthseed build: the cyberdeck, the operating system, everything running on that little Pi. I wanted it written so someone who has never used a terminal or built a home lab could follow along on my journey. Then there’s xophersean.com. It’s all about me and phase 1 of my escape hatch. It’s meant to showcase my essays, my work history and my consulting practice on a platform I run. It serves as a demonstration of what’s possible with a home lab and a proof point that it works. This is my answer to my LinkedIn beef: why pay $40 a month for LinkedIn Premium to show me who views my page when I can run a site where I hold the keys and manage the data?
Designing, coding and deploying each site to my home server took maybe an afternoon. Writing and reviewing the content took somewhere around 15 to 20 hours, and it could have been less. I’d already spent months creating workflows and procedures with the AI agents to build and run my home lab, so the code and the deploy were the easy part. I’ll share more about how I did it later, but I proved to myself that building a self-hosted website with little to no formal coding capability was possible.
The evolution is now. Everyone is freaking out about AI, and between the Hugging Face incident and Anthropic insiders warning that AI could kill us all, I understand why. Technology, specifically AI, will either be a tool you use for your salvation or the tool someone else will use for your destruction. I get that technical fluency alone can’t stop a superintelligence. What I believe is that our best bet for surviving a doomsday scenario is a superintelligence we actually control, or one that’s on our side. We can’t get there with our current levels of fluency and capability. Just as we should learn how to grow our own food, we also need to learn how to manage our own digital ecosystems. We’ve already seen the alternative in our food supply: processed foods, poor health outcomes, starving and failing farmers. The same outcomes await our digital lives and personas so long as we do nothing about it.
I have a vision that everyone will one day operate small to medium sized home labs or ecosystems that power and run the various services, applications and platforms they own. I believe the next chapter of human evolution is where we shape and harness technical advancements through a higher degree of technical fluency. What I see is a world where you run your own social site from infrastructure that you own and control. LinkedIn or other social media can be a means of amplification, but it’s not your digital home. A future where, rather than paying a monthly or annual subscription for cloud services, you run a cloud from your own infrastructure with encryption and security that you have the keys to. In my wildest dreams, I see a day where you can host and run a game on a closed network between your home lab and any device you authorize, instead of relying only on major providers for cloud gaming. It’s all still mostly vision and possibly some science fiction in the near term.
Which brings me back to doomsday. The first choice each of us has to make is whether to stay passive or do something about it. We need to upgrade, or AI will destroy us. I’m doing something about it, and I’m inviting you to join me. I’m building my escape hatch, and I’ll teach you how to build yours.
Also published at Middle Path Lab.