Finn Brunton

After receiving my doctorate from the Centre for Modern Thought in 2009, I spent a year and a half as a postdoctoral researcher at New York University and two years as an assistant professor at the University of Michigan's School of Information. In 2013 I joined the faculty of the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU's Steinhardt School. I work on the history and theory of digital media technologies, with a focus on adoption: how computing and networking machinery gets adapted, abused, modified, hacked, and transformed. 

In 2013, my book Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet was published by MIT Press. It was reviewed in venues including the Wall St. Journal, the Guardian, Science, Scientific American, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. It won the 2013 PROSE Award in Computing & Information Sciences. My forthcoming book, *Obfuscation: A User's Guide for Privacy and Protest,* co-authored with Helen Nissenbaum, is forthcoming from MIT Press in 2015. I'm currently researching a book about the history of digital cash and the rise of cryptocurrencies.

I write semi-regularly for *Artforum,* on subjects like probability and forgery, device hacking, and Bitcoin culture, and for *Radical Philosophy* on the aesthetics of state surveillance, models of cybernetic utopianism, and Chris Marker's filmography. I continue to write about spam, as well, for venues including Le Monde Diplomatique, the Boston Globe, and a chapter in *Rethinking Trust in the Age of the Internet,* a forthcoming book from Sternberg (2015). I have a number of forthcoming pieces related to my cryptocurrency research -- the soonest being "Heat Exchanges," a chapter in *The MoneyLab Reader* from the Institute of Network Cultures (2015).