Elias Jackson

My name is Elias Jackson. I was born in San Francisco, lived in Orange County for most of my upbringing, and then moved to Portland in 2020 to work as a software engineer. I am a lifelong musician, and my ongoing interest is fusing together technology, music, and visual art to create amazing experiences. I have a bachelor's degree in Computer Science, and am currently earning an associate degree in Creative Coding and Immersive Technologies at Portland Community College.

I love computers. Ever since early childhood, computers have been my favorite tool for writing, learning, playing games, making websites, taking notes, and much more. I’ve used devices running Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, Chrome OS, and iOS, and become well-versed in all of them, eventually settling into the Apple ecosystem once Apple Silicon revolutionized mobile processing power.

Growing up with computers has deeply shaped how I view the world. The Internet is truly a miracle — an infinite digital space unbounded by physical constraints, where you can build anything and interact with anyone. Even the concept of software updates — the fact that developers are constantly listening to feedback, learning from their mistakes, and iterating — has been my model for how the world tends to improve and update over time.

I love music. I was classically trained on piano at an early age, which taught me the fundamentals of music theory and enabled me to develop perfect pitch. In my teenage years, partially thanks to the Rock Band games and my interest in metal, I fell in love with playing drums. Nowadays, my primary musical outlet is producing in Ableton.

Music is special to me because it maps onto my emotions in a way that language can’t. For every album or track in my collection, I have very specific emotional states that are represented by it, and my goal when discovering new music is to create as many of these mappings as possible. Not only does this help me process my emotions internally, but it also enables me to express them to others. This is my ongoing motivation to become an excellent music producer and DJ — so that I can express myself as vividly as possible.

I am an optimist. This means two things to me: one, that progress is possible. Life is not a zero-sum game of winners and losers. If the open-source community (which, by the way, runs all of our web servers) has taught us anything, it’s that contributions unmotivated by financial incentives can truly make everyone better off. Secondly, being an optimist means believing it’s likely that things are moving in the right direction. Within just a couple decades, digital technology has made the world’s knowledge accessible at our fingertips, connected communities across geographical barriers, provided invaluable resources for people in need of mental health, motivation, and life hacks, and provided virtual worlds for people to escape to whenever they need a break from day-to-day life. I believe that this technological progress will continue in ways that we can only dream of.

There are counterarguments to both of these types of optimism. The Internet, due to its anonymous, decentralized nature, has given rise to hate movements and echo chambers. Social media algorithms are controlled by a handful of mega-corporations that aren’t held accountable for the psychological damage that they often cause. Recent climate change progress has been threatened by the rise of massive data centers running crypto miners and AI models.

So why be an optimist when the world often looks so bleak? Well, for one, we live in a big world, and unless you are omniscient, it’s impossible to definitively say whether the bad outweighs the good (or vice-versa) without ultimately relying on cognitive biases and personal anecdotes. So given that we all have a choice in how we view the world, I choose the optimistic path because it is the most inspirational. To put it bluntly, complaining and doomscrolling all day does not get us anywhere. We all have a lot more power than we think we do, and having an optimistic mindset opens us up to new creative solutions and enables us to truly make a difference.