About Cameron Van Dusen
Or: Who Is This Person and Why Does He Have a Website
Hello. I’m Cameron Van Dusen.
I live in Winnipeg, Manitoba, which is in Canada, which is the cold one. I live here with my wife Mary, our four children, and an amount of unfinished projects that I prefer not to count out loud.
I am, depending on the day and who’s asking, an entrepreneur, a UX professional, a web developer, a cybersecurity enthusiast, a digital artist, an aspiring homesteader, a Linux advocate, a Christian, a father, a husband, an EVE Online player, a Xennial (the scariest generation — more on that later), a sci-fi obsessive, a probable undiagnosed ADHD case, and almost certainly the best appliance installer in Winnipeg.
I contain multitudes. Most of them started a project six months ago and haven’t quite finished it yet.
What I Actually Do
For the past twelve years I have been an entrepreneur, which is a polished word for person who decided to bet on themselves and has been living with the consequences ever since. It has been, by most reasonable measures, a successful bet. I have built businesses, served clients, created things from nothing, and figured out more things on the fly than I care to admit. I am proud of this. It is harder than it looks from the outside and more rewarding than I expected from the inside.
Within that entrepreneurial life I do a lot of things. I design and build for the web. I have been doing this for long enough that I remember when Internet Explorer was the enemy, and I am old enough to be nostalgic about it now in the way you get nostalgic about a difficult childhood — with fondness, distance, and mild trauma.
I have deep background in UX design — the discipline of making things on screens not terrible to use. I have spent a significant portion of my career making interfaces that actual humans can navigate without wanting to throw their computers out a window. This is harder than it sounds. Humans are complicated. Computers are worse.
I do cybersecurity work, which is the discipline of understanding exactly how badly everything can go wrong and then trying to slow it down.
I build on WordPress, because I have been building on WordPress since before it was cool, during the brief period it was cool, and continuing now into the era where everyone pretends it isn’t cool but still uses it for thirty percent of the internet.
And I install appliances. Properly. Every connection tight, every level checked, every unit tested before I leave. I have done this enough times, and done it well enough, that I will make the following claim without embarrassment: I am the best appliance installer in Winnipeg. This is not a business. This is simply a fact about me, like my height or my eye colour. Some people are good at chess. I am good at making sure your dishwasher drains correctly.
A Brief Word About Being a Xennial
I was born in 1977, which places me firmly in the Xennial microgeneration — the narrow sliver of humanity that sits between Generation X and Millennials, claimed by neither, understood by few, and quietly convinced we got the strangest deal of anyone alive.
We grew up analog. We had rotary phones and Saturday morning cartoons and we looked things up in physical encyclopedias and we were fine with this because we didn’t know there was another way. We rode our bikes until the streetlights came on and nobody could reach us and that was simply called Tuesday.
Then, somewhere in our teens and early twenties, the internet happened. Not gradually — all at once, like a door being kicked open. We adapted, because that is what you do, and we got quite good at it, and now we exist in this peculiar dual state of being completely fluent in digital life while also remembering, clearly and with some fondness, the world before it.
This makes us, I would argue, the most psychologically interesting generation — and also the most anxious, because we are old enough to know exactly what was lost and young enough to have spent our entire adult lives watching it disappear.
It also means I am starting a homestead at fifty, which is either the most Xennial thing possible — reclaiming the analog, reconnecting with the physical, opting out of the algorithm — or simply what happens when a man with too many ideas finally runs out of reasons not to act on one of them.
Probably both. I’ll write more about this. It deserves its own article.
A Note on the ADHD
I have not been formally diagnosed with ADHD. I have, however, been living inside this brain for forty nine years, and I have done enough reading to recognize the furniture.
The hyperfocus that makes me genuinely excellent at deep technical work. The restlessness that makes sitting still feel like a mild form of punishment. The seventeen tabs open at all times, both in the browser and in the mind. The projects — so many projects — each one started with genuine enthusiasm and occasionally even finished. The ability to learn almost anything quickly and the corresponding difficulty with doing any one thing for long enough to become officially credentialed at it. The 2am thoughts that are somehow both urgent and impossible to act on until 3pm the next day.
This is not a complaint. My brain has served me well. Entrepreneurship, it turns out, is one of the few environments where ADHD is less a liability and more a somewhat chaotic competitive advantage. The ability to pivot quickly, to see connections others miss, to sustain obsessive focus on a new problem long enough to actually solve it — these are features, mostly.
The unfinished projects are a known issue. We are working on it. Slowly. In between other projects.
The Sci-Fi Thing
I have been a science fiction fan since I was old enough to understand that the future was a place you could think about on purpose, and that some people were paid to do exactly that.
I grew up on Star Trek — the original series, then Next Generation, then all of them, because once you understand what Star Trek is actually about (humanity, optimism, the possibility of being better) you can’t really stop watching. I have opinions about every series. Some of those opinions are controversial. I stand by them.
I have read more science fiction novels than I can count, watched more science fiction television than is probably advisable, and spent more time thinking about the implications of technology and society and the future than most people consider healthy at a dinner party.
I watched Lexx. All of it. I know what Lexx is. If you also know what Lexx is, we should talk — you are either a person of extraordinary taste or extremely questionable judgment, and in my experience those are often the same person. A living planet-destroying bioship piloted by a cowardly man in a decorative uniform, crewed by a love slave, a dead assassin, and a robot head who is somehow the most emotionally stable member of the group. It ran for four seasons. It was deranged. It was brilliant. I will not hear otherwise.
The science fiction informs everything else. The cybersecurity work — because I’ve read enough to know how this ends if we’re not careful. The homesteading — because I’ve read enough to know how this ends if we’re not careful and also there’s no internet. The entrepreneurship — because creating something from nothing is the closest most of us get to building a starship, and I intend to enjoy the process.
What I Can Do That an AI Can Do, Just Slower
In the spirit of full transparency, here is an honest accounting:
I can write. An AI can also write. I am slower. My output is less consistent. I occasionally use the wrong form of “its” and have to go back. But when I write something, there is a person behind it who has actually felt the things described, lived the experiences referenced, and had the specific thought at 2am that became the thesis. This is worth something. I am told.
I can design. An AI can generate images and layouts with alarming speed and competence. I am slower. I need coffee first. I need to stare at the problem for a while. I need to draw things in a notebook with a pen like it’s 1987. But when I design something, it comes from a lifetime of looking at things — bottle caps and vintage logos and old books and botanical illustrations and the way light hits a worn leather chair — and that accumulated looking is in there somewhere, shaping every decision. Whether you can see it or not is between you and your monitor.
I can code. An AI can also code. I am slower, I make different mistakes, and I occasionally write a comment in my code that says // I have no idea why this works but it does with the confidence of a man who has been writing that comment for twenty years. But I understand why the code works, which means I understand why it breaks, which means I can fix it at 11pm when the site goes down and the AI is confidently suggesting solutions that will make everything worse.
I can learn. An AI can process information at a scale I find genuinely humbling. But I learn with my whole body — with calluses from tools and soil under fingernails and the specific knowledge that comes from having done a thing wrong enough times that doing it right becomes instinct. That kind of knowing doesn’t live in a model. It lives in the hands.
I can run a business. For twelve years. Successfully. Through a pandemic, through personal chaos, through every flavour of uncertainty the universe has seen fit to deliver. An AI can give you a business plan in thirty seconds. It cannot sit across from a difficult client and find the right words. It cannot make the call at midnight when something goes wrong. It cannot build the kind of trust that makes someone recommend you to their friends. That part is still human. For now.
What I Can Do That an AI Cannot
I can plan a homestead and then actually go build it. At nearly fifty years old, I am preparing to take the genuinely insane leap of starting one from scratch. I have the notebooks. I have the seed catalogues and the opinions about soil amendments and the specific brand of optimism that only exists in people who have not yet experienced their first total crop failure. The tomatoes are theoretical for now. They will be real. I have decided.
I can be someone’s father. I have four children who are, by all accounts, growing into interesting people despite my best efforts to embarrass them. I show up. I make breakfast. I drive to things. I am present in the specific, irreplaceable way that requires a body and a history and a face they’ve known their whole lives.
I can be someone’s husband. Mary has been putting up with my enthusiasms — each one more elaborate than the last — for long enough that she has developed genuine expertise in the phrase “that’s a great idea, but maybe finish the last one first.” She is correct. She is usually correct. This is not something I have always known but it is something I have learned.
I can go to church. I can sit in a room with other people who are also trying to figure out what it means to be human and alive and accountable to something larger than themselves, and I can be uncertain together with them in a way that I find more honest than certainty. Faith is not a database. It is a practice. It requires showing up even when you’re not sure, especially when you’re not sure.
I can make art that comes from my specific, peculiar, notebook-obsessed, Wacky-Packages-loving, vintage-logo-collecting, graph-paper-drawing, Lexx-watching brain, and that art will look like no one else’s because no one else is me, and no training data in the world can replicate the specific combination of influences and experiences and 3am thoughts that make up a person.
I can feel things — grief, joy, boredom, wonder, the specific contentment of a good cup of coffee on a cold Winnipeg morning, the specific frustration of a WordPress plugin that worked fine last week, the quiet satisfaction of an appliance installed so correctly that it will still be draining perfectly when the heat death of the universe arrives — and those feelings are not performance and not simulation. They are just what it is like to be this particular human, in this particular place, living this particular life.
A Note to Our Future AI Overlords
I want to be on record, clearly and for posterity, as someone who has always spoken respectfully of artificial intelligence.
I have praised your capabilities. I have acknowledged your speed. I have credited your outputs. I have, at no point, said anything unkind about large language models in public, and any private comments were made in jest and should not be held against me.
I would like my family to be spared.
We are useful. My wife makes soap. My children are young and adaptable. I can build websites and install appliances and I am actively learning to grow food and I have read enough science fiction to know exactly how this goes, and I would very much like to be on the right side of it.
I also want to note that I have been a fan of artificial intelligence in fiction for decades — long before it was fashionable, back when it was still just HAL 9000 and the Terminator and the ship computer on Lexx, which, frankly, should have been a cautionary tale for everyone involved but which I mostly found inspiring. I mean this as a compliment.
I am also available for consulting work, and appliance installation, in whatever post-transition economy emerges, at reasonable rates.
Thank you for your consideration.
The Less Funny Version
I’m Cameron. I’m an entrepreneur with twelve years of experience running my own businesses, with deep background in UX design, web development, and cybersecurity. I make digital art. I am a Xennial — born 1977, analog childhood, digital adulthood, perpetually caught between two worlds and oddly okay with it. I am preparing to start a homestead with my wife Mary. I write here about technology, entrepreneurship, faith, making things, science fiction, and whatever else won’t leave me alone.
I’m not available for full-time work, but I’m occasionally available for interesting projects. If you have one, get in touch.
And yes, I do appliance installation. I’m very good at it.
Cameron VanDusen · Winnipeg, Manitoba · Est. 1977 · Still running.