Vienna Waltz in a Burning Room

❝ You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world.

And you have to do it all the time.❞

—Angela Davis.

The Viennese ballroom remains gilded, but the chandeliers flicker. The music of a bygone era still plays, yet the scent of burning drapes lingers in the air. That’s what it feels like to stand in an outsourced America—watching a nation waltz through a grand hall as the walls crumble, and the air thickens with smoke and flame.

Once, I was part of the old dance, a polymath software engineer who spent years optimizing databases, APIs and cloud bound deployments. I spent my working days chasing the promise of infinite scalability. But the illusion shattered, and I stepped away from the ballroom and into the workshop. Now, I’m a Senior Mechanical Technician at Terraform Industries, an ambitious energy startup building the future from the smoldering ashes of the old world.

For decades, I bought into the software-first dream—the idea that code could solve anything, that problems existed in abstraction, that real progress came from elegant algorithms and clever cloud architectures. My peers and I were sold the fantasy of a world that didn’t need factories, turbines, or steel foundries—just cloud computing, VC-backed disruption, and ever-expanding digital platforms. The Instagram Nirvana. But when I looked around, I saw that the infrastructure holding everything together was crumbling. If you’ve ever driven the freeways winding their way through the heart of the Los Angeles Megalopolis, you’ve felt it.

Once these concrete ribbons were marvels of the 1950s American Dream. Masterpieces of massive civil engineering, now just battered, neglected, and cratered with potholes that rattle both my spirit and the suspension of my stock, unrestored 1962 Mercedes-Benz with its 4 wheel disc brakes, independent suspension, and 40mpg consumption on home-made bio fuels.

The American decay isn’t just cosmetic; it’s a symptom of a nation coasting on its past achievements while failing to maintain the motive forces that keep it moving. Energy grids buckle under increasing demand, supply chains suffer, and the physical world reveals itself as the unshakable foundation of all things digital falls away. In Southern California, this failure isn’t theoretical—it’s apocalyptic. A power grid stretched beyond capacity, neglected and vulnerable, has ignited disaster after disaster. The same complacency and corruption that led to rolling blackouts and unreliable energy delivery has also fueled wildfires that consumed entire communities, reducing thousands of homes to ash and turning the city’s skyline into a dystopian haze. When aging transmission lines, battered by deferred maintenance and corporate greed, spark infernos across drought-ravaged terrain, the result is a hellscape born not just of climate change but of a system unwilling to address the rot at its core. We are not merely watching the collapse—we are inhaling it, sifting through its embers, driving through its charred remains.

It’s not that I ever thought hardware was unimportant—far from it. I built and ran a successful side hustle that grew into an internationally recognized leader in vintage analog and digital electronic music repair and upgrades: Synthesizer.repair. Through that work, I spent years deep in the guts of legendary instruments, made by American companies like MOOG and ARP. First wave Silicon Valley companies, like Sequential Circuits, and E-mu Systems.

It has been decades since most of these great companies went bankrupt or were subject to corporate acquisitions and mergers. In two of those past decades I’ve been restoring and enhancing this legacy hardware. Hardware that was built to last, often with craftsmanship and design principles that today’s disposable tech culture has long since abandoned. I saw firsthand how technological hardware, when designed with clear purpose and longevity in mind, could outlive the businesses and engineers that designed and manufactured it. I learned that no amount of software optimization could compensate for de-valued components or bad engineering decisions at the physical level.

But despite this, the industry I was primarily working in—the world of high-tech software—continued to sideline hardware, treating it as a necessary but inconvenient layer beneath the real world work of “abstraction and digital scalability”. We let financialization gut domestic manufacturing, let critical systems fall into obsolescence, and convinced ourselves that software could replace physics. But physics doesn’t care about abstractions! The age of hyper-growth SaaS models and platform monopolies is fading, and what remains is a new industrial reality. It’s not enough to engineer software that moves money around. We need to move molecules, build infrastructure, and reclaim what was lost!

That’s why I left the waltz. That’s why I joined Terraform Industries. We’re not here to optimize ad delivery algorithms or streamline subscription funnels. We’re here to reengineer energy itself—to take carbon from the air, turn it into synthetic natural fuels, and rewrite the relationship between civilization and its fossil fuel legacy. It’s not a ‘neat problem’. It’s not infinitely scalable in the way software pretends to be. It’s messy, ugly, physical, and constrained by real-world limitations. And that’s exactly why it matters.

We aren’t chasing fleeting trends or digital virality; we’re engineering permanence. The next wave of innovation won’t be measured in clicks or ad impressions but in megawatts, molecules, and matter brought to order with blood, sweat, and mathematics! While the old guard clings desperately to spectacle, we are designing the future with our hands—wiring circuits, welding frames, and forging solutions from the raw elements of reality itself. This isn’t a game of abstractions; it’s a battle of physics, precision, and perseverance. And we will win!

The transition isn’t seamless. The old system refuses to acknowledge its obsolescence. But I can see it happening—an exodus of software minds moving toward hardware, manufacturing, and deep tech. We were told for years that the future was virtual, that the next frontier was a digital metaverse where we’d transcend the physical world. Neal Stephenson imagined it as speculative fiction; Mark Zuckerberg tried to brute-force it into reality. But the truth is, no one wants to live in a headset, strapped into an abstraction while the real world crumbles. The metaverse was never a vision of the future. It was a coping mechanism for a civilization unwilling to maintain its foundations.

Now, we see reality, and we know the real frontier isn’t a simulated one. The future isn’t in escapism; it’s in infrastructure, in power grids and carbon and calcium loops, in the material mastery of energy and entropy. We aren’t here to build digital theme parks for billionaires; we’re here to rewire the physical economy, to re-engineer the molecular flows that civilization depends on. Carbon capture isn’t a buzzword—it’s a thermodynamic necessity. Calcium looping isn’t a theory—it’s an industrial imperative. The future will be built by those who understand chemistry, metallurgy, and physics, not those trying to sell us a pixelated escape from reality. Mark my words: The future is industrial!

If you’re out there—if you feel this shift deep in your bones, if you see the writing on the wall and are looking for a way to put your skills to work—join us. The world doesn’t need another app, another algorithm, another digital metaverse. It needs hands-on minds, polymaths who aren’t afraid to think across disciplines and build real, lasting solutions. Send Terraform Industries a one page introduction. The future isn’t waiting for permission, and neither should you.

As the ballroom of the old world continues to burn, I no longer feel the need to do that dance. Instead I’m dancing in the lab. I’m out on the workshop floor. I’m designing and building. And that’s where the real future begins.