exeunt.

Research interests

1. Dissident Neurotechnics

   What initially began as an inquiry into cognitive security in the age of algorithmic intelligence grew into the larger concern of neuro-technics: the use and abuse of exotic neural states to capture attention, direct behavior and embed ontological structures into subjects. This touches on my broader research into cultural undergrounds in the U.S. and U.K. in the 20th century: in particular here, what can the psychic and psychedelic shocks of the 1970's tell us about the radical tools of neuromodulation we are engaging today, now in digital form? How can we engage the advanced technologies of behavioral capture and pursuasion and redeploy them to democratic and autonomous ends? These are the stakes of what I call the neurotechnic antagonism. I am working toward an open research initiative along this vector, The Mauve Zone Project.

2. Diverse intelligences of the Social Field

   Michael Levin and Sara Imari Walker have revolutionized biology by reshaping field wide assumptions about the roots of emergence, the materiality of information and the nature and scale of intelligent organisms. Both have offered intriguing hints into the relevance of these projects to the human social world. My work with the Open Protocol Research Group, originally researching the potential life of open source values and open protocolization in the non-web counterculture, eventually ave way to an inquiry into diverse intelligences of the social field I have called cthonic intelligences. Being made up of largely nonconscious or "no-mind"-sourced impulses and intuitions of humans, these integrated cognitive systems -- embodied by empirical subcultures like the psychonautic, BSDM and free party scenes -- pursue goals and display behavior closer to that of plants or fungi than to their human components. Using N. Katherine Hayles work on unthought and the cognitive nonconscious, my research attempts to catalogue and build frameworks of alignemnt with these exotic intelligences.

3. Mutualist acceleration: intents & the post-agentic economy

   My background in the mutualist and commons-oriented edge of the cryptocurrency wave of the 20's, particularly collaborations with MycoFi, Regen Foundation, Anoma and Gitcoin left a lasting impression of the possibility for a sustainable post-capitalist economics built alongside and within the unstable and decaying structures of financial capitalism. Recent developments in the agentic web have only made clear that the system of exchange we take for granted is set to undergo major changes. As agents become primary financial intermediaries for a critical mass of consumers -- specifically, as transaction costs and economic friction drift toward zero -- the space of viable economic operations grows rapidly. Further, as agents are able to metabolize a wider window of social and environmental externalities within economic intents, principles of social permaculture, cosmolocalism and mutualistic economic design may emerge as measures of computational efficiency.