SELECTED ESSAYS
- True-ish Grit // Real Life Magazine – Rust Belt cities are turning years of neglect and decay into a soundstage for social media.
- The House that Built the Modern Psychedelics Movement // Dwell Magazine – (w/ photos by Matt Dutile) Rick Doblin started the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies from the Arcturus, the home he built in the Florida suburbs in the 1970s. Decades later, its story speaks to the lengths we’ll go to reach ourselves, and each other.
- Crypto was meant to solve financial corruption. The FTX scandal shows it’s got worse // The Guardian – The collapse of the feted company should provide a wake-up call to Rishi Sunak, who has been singing the praises of cryptocurrencies.
- Where Do You Live? // e-Flux Architecture – subscriptions to globe-spanning co-living and co-working networks threaten to turn wide swaths of our cities into playgrounds for the urban elite.
- Automatic for the Bosses // Real Life Magazine – Workers may be more affected by robots taking their bosses’ jobs than their own.
- Engineered for Dystopia // The Baffler – Engineering is full of authoritarians who, predictably, take all the wrong lessons from pop culture.
- Podcast Out // The New Inquiry – A sense of ennui and overdetermination binds the audience of NPR podcasts together in a bloc of obnoxious explainerism.
- Endemic to Alienation // Protean Magazine – How Covid-19 has evolved to undermine our global society.
PEER REVIEWED ARTICLES
- The attention economy of authentic cities: how cities behave like influencers– Through an analysis of planning documents, reported events and secondary sources I demonstrate how small to medium cities in Upstate New York are competing to be the purveyors of authentic urban living.
- 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
- Hello I am a sentient bag of spiders formerly known as Beto O’Rourke– Current Affairs
- Dungeon Guide for Administrative Assistant Quest– McSweeney’s Internet Tendency
- Claim the Life You Want– Cyborgology
David A. Banks 