I’m Carson McKee

I’ve spent my life moving through every major shift in digital culture. I began on a Commodore Vic20 writing BASIC programs on loose-leaf paper. I discovered the early web through Netscape in art school, studying Intermedia when digital experimentation was still a fringe idea. I worked through the rise of social platforms, the marketing era of Web2, the speculative creativity of Web3, and I’ve now arrived in the AI era as an educator and media theorist trying to explain what all of this means.

My work focuses on the systems underneath contemporary digital life: how memes encode cultural behavior, how algorithms reorganize attention, how advertising collapses spatial boundaries, and how the underlying protocols of media shape what we believe, share, and understand.

I’m trying to map the deeper structures of digital culture. I focus more on trying to explain behaviors than I do about teaching people how to use tools.

My goal is to help people develop media literacy in an environment where culture is accelerating faster than most people can interpret.

I believe in what I’m talking about because I’ve been there to see it form:

A student in Web1.
A practitioner in Web2.
An educator in Web3.
A theorist in the AI era.

Everything I publish - essays, posts, talks, videos and digital projects is an attempt to make digital culture legible.