I’m looking for work. Can you help?
Or do you know someone in a position to hire someone with my skills and experience? Please drop me a line through my contact form if so! Read on for more details, and I’ll be happy to share my CV on request. Thank you in advance. (This post also serves I think as an interesting autobiographical self-portrait as a blogger, if nothing else.)
I’m a lot of things, but professionally the most recognized is probably that I have 5+ years experience as a product manager in software development (and before that a little while as an Agile product owner). I’m a certified Scrum Master, for whatever that is worth, but I’ve mostly just worked in a more loose Agile capacity. To give context of the scale of work I’ve done, I’ve successfully product managed what I would describe as a very complex software project whose budget was in the millions of dollars (which, sadly, did not all go to me, or perhaps I would not need to be asking for work here on my blog of all places). I’ve also done countless small creative projects with dedicated friend groups, and most recently project managed the translation and publication of one of my books in France.
Encompassing the above professional product work, for the past decade now, my specialization has been in what we call Trust & Safety in the industry. That basically means identifying and hopefully mitigating harms which might or actually do arise as a result of new socio-technical assemblages and their misuse. In addition to Trust & Safety product roles (i.e., writing specs for apps and managing them from concept through to completion with teams of designers and engineers), I’ve also worked extensively in content moderation for a large well-known online platform, writing policy, handling complaints and legal requests, and in privacy/data protection (I have a professional certification in GDPR compliance).
Most of my product experience has been working crypto/blockchain for fairly major coin, and all of the product work I’ve done has been related to filtering: from keyword & fuzzy matching to hashing and integrating third party systems to augment custom filtering software. I’ve also had an opportunity to use quite a few of the major commercially-available filtering systems that are based on machine-learning back when I was doing hands-on content monitoring for a platform.
Alongside that, I’ve also done some collaborative work with a few of non-profits working in the fields of information integrity & credibility, and the detection and countering of disinformation, especially where it may lead to violent extremism (unfortunately, as evidenced by our current political situation, those efforts were clearly not enough). That work has been focused around developing voluntary industry standards, definitions, and practices related to Trust & Safety, with an eye to encouraging platforms, protocols, and providers of other technological systems to improve their offerings in these areas.
This is getting long (and for that I apologize – I am in verbose-mode right now and can’t help it), but if you’re still reading, you might have first come to this website because of my AI-assisted books, of which I have now produced some 125 volumes, and which have received massive global media coverage as I have conscientiously documented on this site. Because of that, I’ve amassed a huge amount of experience (3 years now) using off-the-shelf AI tools for creative production purposes, mostly LLMs (ChatGPT, Mistral, Llama, Deepseek, etc.) and various image diffusion models (Dalle, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Recraft, Ideogram, etc.).
As an artist and “certified Trust & Safety weirdo” (they don’t actually offer that certification, but if they did I would have the highest level, I can assure you), I have always approached my use of generative AI tools from what might be thought of as a “red team” perspective, where I try to push the boundaries of the capabilities and limitations of these models and the products/UI through which they are offered, and also to try to break them and identify where they fail or where they are able to do things that they clearly should not. (I’ve often sent my findings to the companies responsible, sometimes with favorable results, and sometimes not.)
Before getting into tech as a job, I was traveling and working on very small organic farms and homesteads, before setting up one myself with my family. A decade ago now, I ran a small farm business as my main thing for a season, absolutely worked my butt off to only just break even, and then discovered that working in tech was a much better way to support my farm & garden habits. Now I run a large garden (around 60,000 sq. ft.) dedicated to perennial herbs, wildflowers, fast growing trees (especially basket willow), with the central focus being to provide wildlife habitat. My grounding idea is that biodiversity can (should) be a primary farm product, and I’m completely dedicated to that.
Tech has been good to me – even if my focus within it has, unfortunately, primarily been having to look after the “bad” side of things. But really I approach it and everything else as an artist first and foremost. That’s why I’ve been so drawn to problems related to expression and creativity, and figuring out what to do when those things inevitably go sour. I’m a painter (acrylics), digital artist, sculptor who makes low tech human-powered robots and drawing machines out of natural materials, and lately a basket-maker and green woodworker (that is, building things with freshly cut ‘green’ wood).
I am an art school drop-out, and spent another six or so years working in basically every part of professional technical theatre: designing and building sets (a.k.a. scenography), lighting & electrics, stage management, technical direction, etc. Apart from working in Trust & Safety – which I have loved even though it can be absolutely maddening – working in tech theatre was one of the most fun periods of my life professionally. I was lucky enough to be able to work in a couple dozen different theaters and wood shops up and down the North Eastern US and into Montreal, and carry all of that still close to my heart.
I’ve also been a blogger since time immemorial. I think I got my start around 2003 or so, and have stuck with it through many ups and downs, and hold fast to it being perhaps the ideal internet-native art form that I can wholeheartedly still :100: get behind (unlike social media, which I have come to revile). I’m obviously a writer, by pretty much any definition. I write because I have to. I’m someone who has that need. I’ve done tons of documentation professionally, technical writing, setting up help centers & macros for help desks, stuff like that. That’s a thing I can offer.
As far as job conditions go, I’m looking primarily for remote contract work, which is how I’ve been employed for the past decade very happily (unless you’re an international company with payroll & benefits already set up in Canada, then maybe we could talk employment, but I’d prefer a provisional clearly defined project to start off and try things out first).
I should note that I’ve almost exclusively worked for San Francisco companies at SF rates (with the exception of one non-profit out of London), and strongly prefer being paid monthly in USD (would also consider € or £ – but not interested in getting paid purely in crypto or stock options or what-have-you. I need real today-money not maybe-someday-future-money). Rates are somewhat flexible depending on the nature of the work and opportunity, and the size of the organization, and how much I like the people involved. Actually, liking the people involved is absolutely not optional for me: it’s a primary requirement. You have to be cool, dedicated, smart, funny, down to earth & human-first, realistic yet idealistic, and working on something that hopefully really benefits humanity, and isn’t just figuring out a better way to trick users into clicking a bunch of ads and fritter their lives and attention away while awaiting the heat death of the universe. Not that I’m jaded or anything – but I’m jaded because so much of tech nowadays sucks so bad.
I think ideally, I’d like to work in generative AI, with a focus that is either safety or creative production & problem solving – or preferably some intriguing combination of both. As to crypto/blockchain, I’m open to discussion on it if the project and team are exceptional, but will put forward that I probably don’t want to work in crypto any more. I find it frustratingly complicated without usually offering much of any win for humanity (there are exceptions, perhaps, but they are few and far between). Also, since what I’m into spans the gamut it doesn’t have to be software product management or even necessarily adjacent to that – it could be working on some kind of creative project. But it needs to be paying work, if you “catch my drift!”
Anyway, if you are both (1) still reading this (I applaud you) and (2) are someone in a position to hire someone like me, or can forward all of this on to someone who is, I would be really happy to discuss in more detail. You/they can reach out to me using the contact form on my book publishing site here. I don’t expect this kind of gambit to work, but you never know who’s reading!
Thanks again.
