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).