I’d like to meet the most inspired, passionate and creative people in the Bay Area January 10 – 24.

This blog post is an experiment in memes. I’m describing a desire and seeing what comes of it.

I have only a few engagements:

• Jan 13 – Speaking at Stanford. I was invited to address a group of IT administrators and librarians. I’ll be speaking about our Digital Literacy Contest and how the internet is affecting our minds. The title of the talk is, ‘Surfing Exponential Change: How to Build an Institutional Fountain of Youth’.
• Jan 13 – Meeting futurist Jamais Cascio. He works with the Institute for the Future and wrote the best response to Nicholas Carr’s Is Google Making Us Stupid?
• Jan 18 – Meeting internet guru Howard Rheingold. He coined the term ’smart mobs’ and is an inspirational independent scholar.

About Me

I graduated from Purdue University after studying philosophy. I co-founded Global Networked-Intelligence Contests. We create competitions in which people use the internet as a mental prosthetic. By finding those who thrive in information overload we can disseminate their insights and help maintain democratic institutions.

Right now, I’m working with the Sunlight Foundation to launch the Digital Democracy Contest with funding from a MacArthur Young Innovator award. (more…)

Interests

• the future of human evolution (transhumanism and powerful critiques)
  • neuroscience, neurotech, and neuroethics
  • Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies)
  • cooperation vs. competition (i.e. zero-sum and non zero-sum games)
  • augmented cognition
  • brain-boosting with ’smart drugs’
• how the internet is affecting our minds
  • Edge.org’s 2010 question to gurus
  • GNIC’s 2009 essay contest
  • DARPA’s augmented cognition program
• thriving in information overload (i.e. techniques to filter enormous amounts of information)
• the blending of reality and virtual reality
  • ‘augmented reality‘
  • Cronenberg’s eXistenZ
  • prolific airbrushed faces and bodies altering our sense of reality
  • pornography’s effect on sexuality
  • Thomas de Zengotita’s Mediated

Other Interests:

• reflexive systems
• thinking in images
• techniques for the intellectual (e.g. writing, archiving notes, brainstorming, lifestyle, etc.)
• the evolution (and the future) of language
• autodidacts and polymaths

Major Influences:

• Terence McKenna
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Buckminster Fuller
• Carl Sagan
• Henri Bergson
• William James
• Dean Kamen
• Paul Erdos