There Are Two Wolves Inside Me

There are two wolves inside me. One is a writer. One is a nerd. Both are hungry.

For most of my life those two instincts have existed side by side, sometimes peacefully and sometimes not. I’ve moved back and forth between two worlds that both claim to be about creativity, but which often look at each other with a kind of wary suspicion.

There is a lot of artistry in tech. There is a lot of technology in the arts. We all use, encounter, and interact with both things in our day-to-day lives. And yet, when it comes to the communities of people who create in these spaces… there’s still a lot of tribalism, and there are an awful lot of cliques.

It's Hard To Feel Accepted in Either World

My whole life, I've felt that tension. I’ve worked as a technologist, building systems, writing code, thinking in architectures and abstractions. Now I’m leaning far more into my creative life, writing stories and poems and trying to make things that feel human. Yet the strange thing is that moving between those two worlds can still feel like crossing a border.

People don’t understand that I’m not one thing or the other. I’m both things, all the time. But still I get asked why I'm in any given room - a question which in itself reveals the problem. Somewhere along the way we started believing that these things are separate tribes.

But they never really were.

We Are All Hackers

The late Terry Pratchett understood this instinctively. He was deeply curious about technology. He adopted computers early, wrote with them enthusiastically, and was active online with readers long before most authors had even heard of the internet.

His long-time assistant once described how tech became part of his writing process. Pratchett apparently worked with multiple screens: one for research, one for writing, and one permanently running Doom. He referred to it, wonderfully, as “bubble gum for the brain”.

That combination of curiosity and playfulness matters.

Pratchett once wrote that “it doesn’t stop being magic just because you know how it works.” That line has always stuck with me. Understanding, tweaking, bending a system doesn’t destroy wonder. If anything, it deepens it.

I think Terry Pratchett, like many creatives, was a hacker in spirit.

The word hack has been slowly flattened by the modern world. It has come to mean criminality, or clever code, or productivity shortcuts. But historically, in the early hacker communities, a hack was something playful and ingenious: an elegant technical solution, an unexpected bit of cleverness, someone looking at a system and thinking what happens if we try this?

It's About More Than Just Computer Touching

A hack can also be a response to the limitations of a system. A moment where someone looks at the rules and wonders what would happen if they bent them, even slightly. Artists can be hackers. Writers can be hackers. Designers can be hackers. Coders can be hackers. Different tools. Same instinct.

That shared instinct matters more than ever right now, because we’re living through a moment where creativity itself is being industrialised at an alarming pace. Somewhere along the line the tech world decided the next big innovation was replacing human expression with automated slop and calling it progress.

Personally, I find that idea… unconvincing.

The point of building tools was never to remove the human from the equation. It was to expand what humans could do. If anything, this moment should be pushing artists and technologists closer together in defiance and rebellion, rather than further apart. Which is why I sometimes feel slightly bewildered by the cultural silos we’ve built around ourselves. When did curiosity become something that had to pick a side?

History Suggests The Opposite

The most interesting periods of human creativity happen when those boundaries collapse.

The Renaissance didn’t happen because people stayed in their lanes. It happened because people wandered. Artists studied anatomy. Scientists wrote poetry. Engineers sketched flying machines. Leonardo da Vinci didn’t ask permission to cross disciplines. He just did it.

Perhaps what we need right now is something similar. A new renaissance. A moment where curiosity is allowed to roam freely again, where people stop asking “what do you do” and instead start asking what interesting things they saw or built or digested today.

You can see glimpses of that world in certain places already. Hacker festivals are some of the most joyful interdisciplinary spaces I know. Programmers, artists, engineers, musicians, hardware tinkerers, writers, security researchers and storytellers all turning up in the same place and building strange things together.

Events like Electromagnetic Field, the Chaos Computer Congress, and HOPE have been quietly nurturing that spirit for years. They are places where curiosity is enough, and where nobody asks whether you belong in the room.

Final Thoughts

I have always loved technology. I have always loved writing. And sometimes it still feels as though I’m standing in the doorway between two rooms that insist they are very different places.

Yet the longer I look, the more the similarities stand out. The same impulse lives in both: the desire to build something that didn’t exist before, the quiet satisfaction of understanding how a system can bend, and the moment of delight when a strange idea suddenly fits together.

So perhaps the meme-inspired title of this post isn’t quite right. Maybe there aren’t two wolves inside me at all. Maybe there is just one wolf, a curious creature that happens to roam across several different landscapes at once, occasionally confusing the people who think those landscapes are supposed to be separate.

If a new renaissance really is beginning to stir as we begin this fight against enshittification, perhaps that is what it looks like: people refusing to stay neatly inside the boxes they were handed and instead letting curiosity wander where it will.

For my part, I think I’ll simply open the gate and see where the wolf decides to roam.

Until next time,