I'm a Korean/American writer, philosopher, and technologist. I used to be a poet, active in the Seattle poetry scene from 2018 to 2020 through Kundiman, Hugo House, and LitCrawl. I don’t write poems anymore, but After Easter is still my favorite collection.
These days I write fiction—currently working on God and Cola, a cyberpunk, black comedy, satirical webnovel.
Of all the titles I’ve gone by, “philosopher” still feels the most accurate. I think about racial capitalism, language, time, computation, and the divine. My core question: If the world were computation, what meaning could we still squeeze out of it? I don’t necessarily believe the premise—but I’m interested in what happens when we limit ourselves to something that bleak, that reductive. What meaning can we find, starting from this premise? A lot, I think.
How to Solve Moral Conundrums with Computability Theory is my cleanest attempt to build a moral framework from that premise. Acceleration and Time links that framework to Black radical thought and Marxist theory.
Then there’s The End of the World Has Already Happened, a collection of notes from when I lost my mind around 2021. I was insane for a year or two. I’m stabilized now, but that period was, strangely, the most productive time of my life. The notes map out a world I built during that time—complete with “Goblin Theory,” my chaotic stab at abolishing racial capitalism.
I studied computer science and philosophy at UC Berkeley, where I founded Philosophy of Computation at Berkeley and taught a course called The Poetry of Computer Science. The course notes became a book: The Poetry of Computer Science, the Computer Science of Poetry.
From 2018 to 2020, I worked at Microsoft as a software engineer. When COVID hit, I changed my gender and quit. After that, I got paid for posting philosophical Twitter threads about “event-faithful currency” for the Ethereum community, where I was appointed as an “Independent Ethvestigator.”
Now I’m CTO at a startup in Korea.
Programming’s always been more than a job for me. I started at age 9. At 16, I released an indie game, 6180 the moon. Code has always been personal—it's shaped how I think about the world.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about translation:
To explore this, I’m building a webnovel platform that uses LLMs to translate fiction at 99% less cost—and then converts that fiction into visual and auditory media.
Names I’ve published under: Jongmin Jerome Baek, Min Baek, Mina Baek, Miara Baek, Miara S Bekho, and Miara Shirokō.
Get in touch: miaras@pm.me