Bio

I study how the AI buildout is financed, and what that financing does to the possibility of governing it.

At one end, platforms extract human attention and hold it as collateral against their valuations. The condition that produces, which has entered ordinary speech as brain rot, is a structural feature of that arrangement rather than a personal failing, and it is distributed along lines of class and occupation. At the other end, the returns projected from that extraction underwrite the equity valuations, subsidies, and long-dated infrastructure commitments financing the current buildout. Following the circuit shows how speculative finance becomes embedded in physical systems too entangled to unwind, and how the resulting structure constrains regulators without anyone having to lobby them.

My research appears in Fortune, New Media & Society, with further work under review in Big Data and Science, Technology, & Human Values and elsewhere. 

I treat regulatory practice as part of the research. In June 2026 I petitioned the Securities and Exchange Commission for rulemaking on disaggregated disclosure of cloud revenue and unrealized gains from commercially entangled entities in the AI infrastructure sector. I have filed comments with the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission and with the European Commission's AI Office, and I prepared an independent briefing on AI valuation exposure for a major US public pension fund.

I write for general audiences in ProMarket, published by the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago, and in Tech Policy Press, Media@LSE and The American Prospect.