I've recently designed systems that resist censorship from nation states and big corps:

I currently lead the P2P search engine research team at Tether. Earlier in life, I worked on similar ideas at Craig Newmark's CR Innovation Lab.

I architected the Lantern (aka 蓝灯) P2P volunteer proxy system, widely used for censorship circumvention in China, Russia, and Iran.

I was an early engineer at Rabbit, applying censorship circumvention techniques to help their AI agents defeat bot detectors.

Back in the day, I founded Weird Tools — a startup building "the network layer for movies." Our tech demo acquired 1M+ users and became kind of famous for abusing scraped Instagram content — Fast Company called it "delightfully disturbing," SFist called it "strangely fascinating," and Boing Boing called it "awesome."

In 2019, I was named a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio fellow in artificial intelligence.

I won Mozilla's $50,000 award for AI.

I won a Webby for Stealing Ur Feelings, an AI-powered interactive film which analyzes your face to reveal the threats to our liberty posed by emotional surveillance. It premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, exhibited at the Tate Modern, made the front page of Y Combinator's Hacker News, and was profiled by MIT, Scientific American, the Museum of the Moving Image, Engadget, CBC News, and many more. It's appeared on syllabi at Stanford University, the University of Washington, and the University of Hamburg.

(It was also somewhat notoriously plagiarized by the Financial Times. I wrote about that for The American Prospect.)

I invented a fake mobile app for chill dudes which confused a bunch of journalists.

I've spoken at institutions including NYU, Mila, and the Royal Society of Arts. I've appeared on the CBC, London's Resonance FM, and Italy's Rai3, among others.

I was born in Hell's Kitchen, New York City. I grew up in the last days of the underground BBS scene — hacking payphones, coding DOS demos, and writing Amazon bots in the basement of Generation Records.

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