Meet M.C. Davis

M.C. Davis is the pen name of Mike Davis — a U.S. Navy cybersecurity veteran of 22 years and the founder and CEO of Merek Security Solutions, a Santa Fe–based firm that helps organizations defend the systems people depend on. For two decades his work was hardening networks and managing risk at the highest levels. Then he started paying attention to a different kind of vulnerability — the one he saw in kids.

That question — what screens are doing to the developing nervous system, and what we can do about it — pulled him from firewalls toward cyberpsychology. Today he’s a doctoral researcher in cyberpsychology at Capitol Technology University and a Forever Fellow at the Center for Digital Thriving at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where his work focuses on helping children notice what technology does in their bodies before it runs them. His framework, MindfulBytes, brings that practice into K–5 classrooms — not to make kids fear technology, but to teach them to recognize, name, and regulate what they feel.

CTRL+ALT+HAPPINESS comes from somewhere underneath all of that: a father and veteran who believes the most important thing we can teach the next generation isn’t how to use technology, but how to return to themselves.

Read the moment the book began →