Selected Essays
True-ish Grit // Real Life Magazine – Rust Belt cities are turning years of neglect and decay into a soundstage for social media.
Podcast Out // The New Inquiry – A sense of ennui and overdetermination binds the audience of NPR podcasts together in a bloc of obnoxious explainerism.
Engineered for Dystopia // The Baffler – Engineering is full of authoritarians who, predictably, take all the wrong lessons from pop culture.
Meat Market // The New Inquiry (With Britney Summit-Gil) – Anthony Bourdain’s planned market in Chelsea will sell food as authenticity. That leaves little room for the democratization of cuisine he promises.
The Authoritarian Surround // Real Life Magazine – The suburbs have incubated authoritarian sympathies as well as revolutionary restlessness
The Edifice Complex // Real Life Magazine – If a house is a machine to live in, then a machine to rule in is Empire State Plaza
Community Slander // The New Inquiry – How voting and ranking in apps allows groups to harass groups.
Very Serious Populists // The New Inquiry – Voting systems like Reddit enforce hegemony more than highlight good ideas.
Make Conversation Great Again // Cyborgology – Sherry Turkle's selective deployment of her own theories reveals a dedication to traditional authority figures.
Towards a Politics of Delight and Desire // The Baffler – A call for technologies and services that are as fun as they are socially just.
You Won't Believe What This Site Does to the Liberal Left! // Cyborgology – Upworthy organizes ignorance while it promotes feel-good stories.
The Power of a Decentralized Left // Tikkun Magazine – The role of technology in knitting together a coalition leftist movement.
Peer Reviewed Articles
Engineered Violence: Confronting the Neutrality Problem and Violence in Engineering (with Michael Lachney) We situate nuanced understandings of violence—as understood by 21st century social movements—into the larger goal of reorienting engineering ethics for a more peaceful and socially just world.
Anti-Authoritarian Metrics: Recursivity as a strategy for post-capitalism- Here I argue that those seeking to build counter-power institutions and communities learn to think in terms of what I call “recursivity.” Recursivity is an anti-authoritarian metric that helps bring about a sensitivity to feedback loops at multiple levels of organization.
Lines of power: Availability to networks as a social phenomenon- I propose that rather than an individual binary status; online/offline distinctions are more accurately described as a communal social relationship.
I Have Seen the Future! Ethics, Progress, and the Grand Challenges of Engineering (with Joe Herkert)- A study in the cycle of constructed futures, perceived risks, and the funding of STEM.
Recursive Depth in Generative Spaces: Democratization in Three Dimensions of Technosocial Self-Organization (with Ron Eglash)- We expand on Chris Kelty's concept of the recursive public (PDF) by developing a three dimensional continuum of what we call recursive depth.
Creative Writing
Dungeon Guide for Administrative Assistant Quest- McSweeney's Internet Tendency
House Plant- Cyborgology
Claim the Life You Want- Cyborgology