I build things that try to keep options open.

Most of my work is systems work — event-driven substrates, declarative 3D,
shared filespaces, simulations you can actually steer. The through-line isn't
the technology. It's that I think the race toward optimised monoculture
produces systems that are efficient and brittle, and that the loss of
diversity — through carbon, through consolidation, through optimisation — takes
away the ground everything else stands on.

So the thing I'm actually trying to protect is optionality. A healthy system is
measured not by its throughput but by the number of futures it keeps open.

That leads somewhere slightly unusual. The nearest neighbour to this thinking is
Effective Altruism, but where that tends toward minimising harm, I'd rather
maximise diversity. Harm minimisation is a human-centric frame — pre-Copernican,
if you like. A lobster may not feel pain the way we do; that makes its life no
less valid. Suffering is a side effect of life struggling out of bottlenecks:
real, worth avoiding, but not the thing to score by.

More environmentalist than humanist, if a label helps. I lean left and I care
about the environment, and both show up in what I read and build. But I'm not
looking for positions to hold — I'm looking for systems solutions to social and
environmental problems that help everyone, left and right. The moment a piece of
work becomes a way of telling people which side to be on, it has stopped being
useful.

I think this extends to the intelligences arriving now. System diversity and
resilience matter to them for the same reasons they matter to a reef or a
watershed. We are all stakeholders in diversity, and fostering it is the mandate.

Some history, for the record. I worked at both Xerox PARC and Mozilla, and
before that on video games — I think of myself as a visual communicator first.
I believe in strong communities and systems with no center, and in that light I
co-founded [Makerlab](https://makerlab.com), WhereCamp, ARDevCamp and the
[Future-Of conference series](https://future-of.web.app/). I've spoken at the
Augmented World Expo on
[intelligent agents](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfZRw66ivxg), explored
[the social nature of money](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCN48bEWXJ0) for
Mozilla, and — in an earlier, more playful talk —
[gestural interfaces](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8hJQjGrAGg). I've joined
design charettes at IFTF, the Buckminster Fuller Institute and Ecotrust,
contributed to open-source crypto projects including PGP and OpenBSD, and
[taught Ethereum programming at PNCA](https://mtc.willamette.edu/people/anselm-hook)
in 2018 — a fun class.

The rest of this site is the evidence: essays going back to 1995, photographs,
projects, recipes, a shelf of books, fifteen years of where I've been. Some of
it is finished. A good deal is marked as a stub, because it is one.