Bio

I am a sociology PhD candidate at Binghamton University writing a dissertation on the political economy of AI infrastructure. My work asks how the post-2008 financial expansion became embedded in compute, cloud, and semiconductor systems  and what that means for whether the current AI buildout can still be governed.

The dissertation traces a single circuit. At one end, platform economies extract and assetize human attention, producing what I theorize as "brain rot", a structural externality of a structural externality of platform architecture rather than an individual deficit. At the other end, the projected returns from that extraction underwrite the equity valuations, public subsidies, and infrastructure commitments that built the AI boom. Following the circuit reveals how speculative finance embeds in material systems too entangled to unwind, and how the resulting structure constrains regulators without requiring lobbying or persuasion.

My academic work is published in New Media & Society, with a manuscript under review at Economy and Society. My public-facing writing on AI infrastructure, antitrust, and financial regulation has appeared in ProMarket (Stigler Center, University of Chicago), Tech Policy Press, and The American Prospect. I have submitted expert public comments to the joint DOJ–FTC inquiries on competitor collaboration and premerger notification (Docket Nos. ATR-2026-0001, FTC-2026-0298), and to the European Commission's AI Office on AI Act transparency obligations.