Hi, I’m Sam—a writer & strategist whose thoughts on technology, art and culture have appeared in places like The Guardian, The New Republic, Spike Art Magazine, Playboy, The Point, Document Journal, and many others.

Currently, I’m working on a book called Pirate Kingdoms, about the network state movement and the people trying to reimagine the nation-state in the 21st century. Pirate Kingdoms will be published by Farrar, Strauss, and available some time in 2028. I’m represented by Toby Mundy from Aevitas Creative Management.

I live in Brooklyn where you can find me espousing hot takes on philosophy, autofiction, geopolitics, and the internet. I love shooting street photography and attending the theatre, but, really, I’d rather be touching grass.

Background

I started my career doing strategic foresight at a design firm where my job was to help companies think intelligently about the future. Then I jumped into the startup world and built a 30-person marketing agency called Acquire that helped hundreds of startups, SMBs and large organizations scale.

After a few years of freelance consulting, I moved to New York and got a degree in cultural reporting & criticism at NYU. 

My writing attempts to bring all of these elements together—the rigor and style of New Journalism with an insider-outsiders view on the startup world.

Journalism &
Other Writing

I write a Substack called Technical Personae, and I also write reported features, op-eds, and reviews on a freelance basis. Among other venues, this work has appeared in The Guardian, The New Republic, Spike Art Magazine, Document Journal, Playboy Magazine, The Point, Airmail, The Mars Review of Books, and many others.

Sometimes I describe myself as a tech journalist, but I see reporting as only a single (particularly useful) toolkit for observing and describing the world. All of us are taking part in a civilization-level transformation of social system, largely precipitated by the internet and what Benjamin Bratton calls “the stack.” My work obsesses over the strange, unexpected, and bizarre collisions between these changing systems and the people building them. Particularly as it relates to new models of governance, finance, ideology, media, and design.

I also write personal essays and memoir, and I’m currently at work on a play about the Quebecois separatist movement in 1976 Montreal.