About

I am an Internet Old.

My first blogging platform was emacs and a .plan file to be fingered. At one point I was on the receiving end of a link top nav link from Jorn Barger’s Robot Wisdom to machination.org (then an active linklog of my own).

I grew-up in the near literal shadow of General Electric in Upstate New York and studied computer science and electrical engineering for a little while at New Mexico Tech in Socorro, New Mexico. Retroactively I came to understand we might’ve overlapped in Socorro. If you’re of a certain age and disposition, you might have some idea of this place because of the novel or movie Contact. (FWIW, there is no large canyon right outside the Very Large Array as shown in at least one shot.)

I contributed to the technical administration of Indymedia Centers in the Hudson-Mohawk region and Washington, DC. I did about 18 months of intern-grade progressive news radio production through DC Indymedia, WPFW and the Institute for Public Accuracy. I was among hundreds falsely arrested during World Bank protests in 2002 (in my case targeted for documenting the protest and the police response), contributed to Pacifica’s Peace Watch and went on the air on Democracy Now during DC protests in response to our invasion of Iraq in 2003.

I coordinated all of the technology for Ralph Nader’s 2004 Presidential Campaign, I worked professionally as a web developer and at one of the first digital advocacy platforms and digital public affairs agencies, I helped build one of the first advocacy actions on Facebook. I also worked for the largest PR firm in the world on some of their dirtiest accounts. Some of my prouder moments include web development or project management work supporting Consumer Watchdog, Tobacco Free Kids, a mid-aughts campaign to revive Reading Rainbow, Greenpeace and the Invisible Institute. But I also fell into working for big oil and car manufacturers that misrepresented their products. I once photographed a cop pulling a gun at a snowball fight in Washington and I ran Information Systems and managed software engineers implementing cloud systems integration for the Polaris Project and the National Human Trafficking Hotline for 8 years.

I’m a husband and a dad. My son is a better person than I and my primary objective in life is to keep it that way.

DCDispat.ch is a corner from which I’m starting a bit of an indieweb reboot. We’ll see.

Last updated: May 31, 2024