My Journey Through Privacy & Exiting the Oligarchy
Defining the next chapter of my journey has not been easy, and I know I'm not alone in this struggle. Doing it while simultaneously watching the world burn to the ground is a wild ass mind fuck. One insanely valuable aspect of the journalist’s mind is being able to “see” possible outcomes of a situation or decision and their impacts on society in a year, 5 years or a decade. And as a photojournalist, my “sight” into what’s coming is usually visual, supported by a healthy dose of dystopian tendencies.
I began paying attention to politics closely during the early Bush/Cheney years. I was in my mid to late 20s and I realized, much to my own shame, that my privileged ass had managed to make it this far in life with almost no deep understanding of politics, history or any inconvenient truth or reality that was deliberately avoided in my public school education of the colonizer.
Here’s the thing…once you “see” what’s coming or “see” how power really works in this world, you can’t unsee it. There’s no way to close your eyes and just ignore the world for a mind like mine. So, on an almost wintery afternoon on the Outer Banks, sitting at a coffeeshop processing the reality of 4 more years of Bush and Cheney, I knew I was at a crossroads. Stay, get educated on the skills I’m missing as a photojournalist, and fight. Leave, move to Canada and become an expat. Watch it all unravel from afar. Two options.
I chose to stay. And 21 years later the full scope of that decision is clear and I’m not sure if it was the right one. Well, I am sure. I would change nothing of the path that brought me to the present because the beautiful humans I’ve met, documented, and welcomed as family are the reason I stayed. I was raised to defend what matters, to protect those who can’t protect themselves and to be grateful at the end of the day.
In those 21 years, I traveled the world. I documented the beauty of humanity recovering from the worst human behaviors possible. I’ve sat with those who suffered at the hands of worst among us; Tibetan Nuns tortured in Chinese prisons, beaten with electric cattle prods for their beliefs, widows left with nothing after husbands were killed by an Army gone rogue, Palestinian mothers losing children to soldiers who deem them inhuman for no reason other than racism. I’ve listened to their stories. I’ve documented a tiny sliver of their life after the trauma.
After I exited the world of journalism, I fell directly into the world of technology. In 2014, I joined a community of hackers so I could better understand how the world was currently working and what direction we were all barreling towards. My education included understanding how hacking works, how to protect journalists and dissidents using privacy and, more personally, how to cultivate my own hacking skills and protect myself.
That aspect of my journey gave me a deep and powerful education on the world we were rapidly approaching at the hands of tech founders building God-like technology through the lens of flawed and destructive egos. We would often use our collective skills to tackle situations impacting our community. Human trafficking was a massive problem in our area and so was money laundering. South Carolina isn’t known for protecting it’s citizens in anyway, so it was (and still is) a free for all of organized crime. And the algorithms of the dominant social platforms and back alley craigslist posts were providing powerful tooling for trading humans and laundering money.
I applied my journalistic brain to OSINT and social engineering, trying to find email addresses and identifiers of Johns and mules. Once we had any possible clue of identity, we’d run it through software from the non-profits we worked with in DC. I don’t know the name of the software we were using, but it was intelligence grade and it was powerful. Terrifyingly so.
One email address or phone number run through that system, in 2016-17, would reveal a social graph of known associates and personal information that was very specific and wildly intrusive. Great for finding criminals. But absolutely devastating when turned on citizens by a corrupt government or nefarious private entity. This was all happening during the time of Snowden and Wikileaks. When I watched the first social graph pop up of a suspect we were tracking, I knew that the world as I understood it was done. And this new world would make us all connected and absolutely vulnerable in ways we couldn’t even comprehend yet.
The Surveillance Capitalism machine was about five years old then. Google lit the flame, Facebook poured the gasoline and weaponized algorithms took over most of the internet. Even with my limited technical abilities, I could see exactly where the ruling class was steering society and I wanted nothing to do with it.
My work in privacy was spawned from a desire to protect everyday people so we could use our voices liberally and protect our ideas from the specter of authoritarians and despot leaders. My hackers then taught me crypto. I already knew about Bitcoin and had used a peer to peer messaging platform that was built on a blockchain, so I understood it conceptually. But I never had someone to teach me how to actually use the tech.
So, in 2017, I learned how to create a currency, how to use a digital wallet, how to purchase the ugliest fucking digital cat imaginable and how to buy and trade different cryptocurrencies. Alternative economics and restoring the Commons had been on my radar since my time at UNC, so the idea of subverting the central banking system and removing power from the military industrial complex through alternative currencies was huge for me. Here's a technology who's premise was transparency, driven by a ledger that everyone could see, study and analyze designed to weaken centralized power. I was hooked.
I spent the next 9 years working in various aspects of the blockchain world and found myself at the heart of Ethereum infrastructure working for the very wallet I first used in 2017, MetaMask. After a whistleblowing-fueled exit, I then landed at another large infrastructure startup project. I spent almost two years engaged in powerful and rewarding community building while simultaneously drowning in the trauma of narcissistic leadership, profit over people strategies and white collar crime. My first foray into Corporate America was a flaming failure that wrecked my nervous system, but gave me a very clear look into the very systems I wanted to destroy.
Extractive, late-stage capitalism only works by destroying the very humans at the heart of the system. Squeeze out every ounce of creativity, innovation and humanity until the human buckles and then toss them aside to feed the never satiated monster of shareholder profits.
During those 2+ years, I gained a front row education in the people who build emergent technology. I know this isn’t the case for all tech startups and orgs, but 90% of what I witnessed were white men of privilege recreating the mechanisms of patriarchy and corruption through the tools we dedicated our time to building. Fueled by profit, ketamine, ego and corruption, I saw it all. And I now hold a much deeper understanding of how we, as a society, landed in a situation where we are all at the mercy of these billionaire founders playing God with technology that very few understand.
Fast forward to now. We’ve arrived in the worst case scenario. There is no clean answer or path forward at this point. Privacy is no longer optional, it’s a lifeline. And our privacy practice must also encompass everyone in our contact list and in our social media networks. We all now have a duty to protect everyone we are connected with by how we use technology and the privacy practices we implement, cultivate and deploy on a daily basis.
We have dwindling options for resistance as individuals, but we have endless opportunities as a collective. We've seen how removing our dollars from corporations like Disney and Target are powerful mechanisms of resistance. We've seen how millions of people in the street served as a wake up call that we are not going quietly into that dark night. We still have power and a voice, but that won't always be the case.
We now need to delete the Oligarchy. We need to remove our energy, engagement and our raw data from the mechanisms of surveillance and stop freely giving our data to the ruling class. They are destroying our communities and our futures with every Like, Share, Thread, Post & Livestream. If we don't remove ourselves from the Oligarchy's networks, they will always hold the power over us and continue to destroy the things we love in order to support their desire to hoard all the wealth and resources.
We must acknowledge our role in this game and remove our participation from the system all together.
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