Francis Tseng
Writing
| Inside-Out Phenomenal World | Renewable energy, the future of mining, and the re-localization of harm |
| Covid-19 made 'unthinkable' reforms a reality in the US – now make them stick The Guardian | On Covid-19 emergency responses that point towards long-standing radical demands |
| The Art of the Meta-Scam Rhizome | Can the momentum of institutional scams be used against them? |
| Decentralize What? Phenomenal World | What do technologists mean by decentralization? |
| Who Owns the Stars: The Trouble with Urbit Distributed Web of Care | A look at p2p, ownership, sovereignty, and a troubling political philosopher |
| The World Any Other Way: Simulation and the Expansion of Political Possibility The V-A-C Foundation: Time, Forward!, 58th Venice Biennale | The counterfactual politics of simulation, inspired by radical cartography |
| Monkeywrenching the Machine Logic | Sabotage in the age of machine learning |
| Particular Universals The New Inquiry | An interview with Helen Hester on Xenofeminism |
Recent Posts
Past Clients
Projects
| Half-Earth Socialism | A planning game accompanying the book, Half-Earth Socialism, by Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettesse. Play as a planetary planner and guide the world into ecological utopia...or nightmarish ruin. Includes a simple planetary economic model which calculates resource impacts and GHG emissions from production. View the trailer; See here for a full list of credits. | game, simulation |
| Pinko Magazine | The magazine of gay communism. I help with their site and tech infrastructure. | publishing |
| dust | A terminal application for assisted chord progression composition. Helps with "blank canvas syndrome". Outputs MIDI so can be used to drive a DAW (tested with Live 11). | music, composition, tool |
| Journalism Ecosystem Model | A model of journalism and social media, considering publisher motivations, attention, media literacy, and values. Developed as part of a project with The New School's Journalism+Design program. | journalism, simulation |
| News Desert Model | A model of how "news deserts" can form, based on publisher motivations, wealth distribution, bankruptices, consolidation, and subsidies. Developed as part of a project with The New School's Journalism+Design program. | journalism, simulation |
| "The Hate Store: Amazon’s Self-Publishing Arm Is a Haven for White Supremacists" | Research and analysis for a piece for The Atlantic & ProPublica by Ava Kofman & Moira Weigel on Amazon's use as a publishing platform for white supremacists. | research, data collection, data analysis |
| matter.farm | An automated system for the public discovery of new drugs, created with Sean Raspet. We built a computational drug discovery system that would continuously attempt to identify new molecules which potential therapeutic application and then publish those results to a public website, which, in the case those molecules are indeed useful, would then serve as prior art to make patenting them difficult. | pharmaceuticals, machine learning, patent law |
| doma.play | A game and simulation of housing markets in fictional cities. The cities can be designed with an included web tool. This is a multiplayer experience to contrast how housing affordability evolves with the dominant landlord model vs a proposed co-ownership alternative. Made for DOMA. | housing markets, game, simulation |
| hyperdocs | A proof-of-concept for p2p collaborative text editing using the Dat protocol, so groups can work together without relying on Google. Currently only supports plain text editing; rich text support is experimental/unstable. | tool, p2p |
| cell.farm | A whitepaper describing a collective computing project for the atomic simulation of a single human cell and distributing subsequent medical research revenue, w/ Sean Raspet for Rhizome's Seven-on-Seven (2018, NYC). | blockchain, simulation |
| Transit Demand Simulation | A transit demand model for the Institute for Applied Economic Research, part of the PolicySpace model. Simulates public transit and private vehicle usage given a city's GTFS feed and available OpenStreetMap data. | transit, simulation |
| PolicySpace | An open agent-based model with three markets and a tax scheme that empirically simulates 46 Brazilian metropolitan regions, developed with Bernardo Furtado at the Institute for Applied Economic Research. | economics, geospatial, simulation |
| Bail Bloc | A Monero miner for using excess computing power and crypto-speculation to collectively post bail for low-income people, developed with Grayson Earle, Maya Binyam, JB Rubinovitz, Sam Lavigne, Rachel Rosenfelt, Madeleine Varner, Devin Kenny, and the rest of Dark Inquiry. | crypto, blockchain |
| Cybernetics Conference | A conference and library in NYC, 11/18/2017, on cybernetics, informatic systems, and social organization; organized with Sam Hart, Melanie Hoff, Sarah Hamerman, David Isaac Hecht, Dan Taeyoung, Charles Eppley, and Alexis Convento. | conference |
| White Collar Crime Risk Zones | A "predictive policing app" for white collar crime. "Unlike typical predictive policing apps which criminalize poverty, White Collar Crime Risk Zones criminalizes wealth." Collab w/ Sam Lavigne & Brian Clifton for The New Inquiry. | prediction, crime |
| Speculating Futures | A reading list around speculative fiction, technology, and politics. | reading list |
| Humans of Simulated New York | A participative agent-based economic simulation for speculating alternative economies, w/ Fei Liu. | simulation |
| The Founder | A dystopian business simulator - found a startup, pursue unbounded growth, and accidentally dystopia. | video game |
| AI Notes | A large set of notes introducing people with modest math backgrounds to artificial intelligence. | notes |
| Designing Digital Communities | Digital community design notes for the Coral Project and taught as a New School Journalism+Design course. | notes, teaching |
| News Automata | A New School Journalism+Design course on journalism, algorithms, and automation. | teaching |
| Serve the People | The video for Handsome Furs' "Serve the People", from their album Sound Kapital (Sub Pop). | music video |