How I engage when systems fail people
Design doesn't end with creation. Sometimes, it begins with rupture.
Academic Publishing Oligopoly
The £25 Billion Problem
Traditional academic publishing operates as one of the original iterations of platform capitalism—but it's a very bad platform. This £25 billion industry creates barriers rather than facilitating knowledge circulation, misallocating philanthropic capital while keeping transformative ideas locked behind paywalls
The Broken Economics.
Open Access models force scholars to pay £5,000-£10,000 per article, diverting millions in funding from medical aid, crisis response, and education to journal fees. We academics turn to philanthropic foundations to cover costs that should never exist.
We don't just critique — we build the replacement.
Uncommon Future Press demonstrates that knowledge can circulate freely while paying creators fairly, proving the current system's obsolescence through superior alternatives.
Institutional Accountability Victories
Strategic Complaint Architecture in Action
When faced with systemic discrimination, I developed methodology that transforms individual grievances into institutional pressure campaigns, resulting in policy changes that protect future individuals.
The Method
Multi-channel escalation using legally sophisticated documentation, regulatory framework navigation, and strategic media coordination. The complaint becomes a surgical instrument for systematic change.
Impact
Not just personal vindication — the victory created precedent and procedural changes that benefit others facing similar challenges.
Approach
Combined regulatory knowledge with strategic pressure application, proving that well-architected individual challenges can reshape institutional behavior.
Emirates Accessibility Challenge
Successfully challenged discriminatory practices through escalation blueprint development, demonstrating how to turn corporate accountability failures into policy revisions.
Diplomatic System Reformation
Challenging Traditional Negotiation Frameworks
During international negotiations, I introduced heterodox approaches that disrupted conventional diplomatic assumptions, particularly around economic development and climate finance.
Innovation
Instead of accepting existing bilateral agreement templates, I developed frameworks that actually served Global South interests, challenging the structural inequities built into traditional diplomatic instruments.
Methodology
Combines legal analysis with strategic coalition building, ensuring historically marginalized voices can effectively challenge established space law hierarchies.
UN Space Policy Intervention
Currently training Global South negotiators to challenge existing space governance frameworks that favor spacefaring nations, developing strategies to enhance bargaining power for equitable space resource distribution.
Data Fundamentalism Critique
"The Revolution Will Not Be Statistically Derived"
My comprehensive critique of data-driven orthodoxy reveals how contemporary innovation culture's obsession with validation stifles genuine transformation.
The Argument
Data can optimize existing reality but cannot invent new ones. By insisting revolutionary ideas submit to focus groups before being permitted to exist, we've created a tyranny of the measurable that makes real innovation impossible.
Cultural Impact
This piece challenges the fundamental assumptions of startup culture, academic methodology, and policy development, offering alternative frameworks for engaging genuine novelty.
Traditional Academic Format Disruption
Beyond Papers:
The Form Revolution
My teaching and Uncommon Future Press work challenges academia's 580-year addiction to linear text as the only "rigorous" knowledge format, proving that voice, image, gesture, and emotion can transmit complex ideas more effectively than traditional papers.
The Problem
The world is burning, but academics respond by writing more papers. When urgent challenges require immediate action, our first instinct shouldn't be to produce more theoretical analysis in formats nobody outside universities can access.
The Solution
Expand imaginative possibilities for knowledge artifacts — capstone projects, policy campaigns, activism, institutions, multimedia experiences that close the gap between breakthrough ideas and real-world impact.
Planetary Prototyping
and Legal Worldmaking
Challenging Westphalian Sovereignty
My PhD work systematically challenges 400-year-old assumptions about legitimate authority, demonstrating how techno-utopian experiments reveal the limits of external validation models.
The Intervention
Proving that emerging technological communities construct legitimate authority through self-ratification rather than external recognition, fundamentally destabilizing traditional sovereignty concepts.
Through analysis of seasteading communities, cryptodemocracies, and virtual worlds, I demonstrate how contemporary conditions enable entirely new forms of legitimacy that operate beyond inside/outside distinctions.
School of Rhetorical
Self-Defense
Teachable Frameworks for Institutional Challenge
I teach this methodology as a core practice within the School of Rhetorical Self-Defense — a new literacy for systemic challenge. Rhetorical self-defense is the legal fluency you were never taught, but always needed.
Core Methodologies
Strategic complaint architecture for discrimination cases
Escalation blueprint development for policy challenges
Multi-actor coordination for systemic pressure campaigns
Legal thinking for non-lawyers facing institutional gaslighting
Transforming Grievances into Power
The School teaches people how to move from reactive complaints to proactive advocacy. Using legally sophisticated documentation combined with strategic pressure application, individual challenges become surgical instruments for systematic change.
Don't just fight the system. Understand its pressure points well enough to make it transform itself.
Coalition Building for System Change
My approach combines grassroots organizing with institutional analysis, creating pressure campaigns that operate simultaneously across multiple levels—individual, organizational, and systemic.
Don't just fight the system. Build alternatives that make the broken system obsolete.
When you're building or breaking at scale, and the world resists — this is the work I do.
Ready to explore what becomes possible when you refuse to accept impossible?
Occasionally available for strategic collaboration with brilliant people working on challenges that require new ways of seeing.