Detention Center Tracker
73,000 people detained · 32+ deaths in 2025 · 528 facilities · $45B in new funding · 79 deportation destinations
As a filmmaker, musician, podcaster, and AI tinkerer, I'm drawn to the places where storytelling, technology, and political imagination overlap. This blog is where those threads come together — original articles on degrowth economics and Latin American sovereignty, podcast episodes on U.S. intervention and migration, music I'm working on, documentary updates, and interactive tools I've built using AI to track geopolitics and explore ideas in new ways. Whether it's a critique of neoliberal free markets, an experiment in AI-driven design, or a deep dive into decolonial thought, I hope something here sparks your curiosity too.
73,000 people detained · 32+ deaths in 2025 · 528 facilities · $45B in new funding · 79 deportation destinations
The complete, maximalist version of the astronaut-philosopher concept. Where The Philosopher Astronaut (above) streamlines for mobile usability, this version goes deep — every philosophical concept gets its full visual expression, every governance decision includes detailed scenario descriptions, every alien transmission is an extended meditation on existence, and every internal debate runs four full rounds of back-and-forth argument.
Iran War Tracker is an interactive tool that maps the ongoing 2026 Iran conflict day by day. It pulls publicly reported events from multiple news sources — liveuamap, Al Jazeera, Wikipedia, CENTCOM, CBS, NPR, and others — and organizes them into a filterable timeline with geolocated strike data, casualty estimates, and country-by-country breakdowns.
This paper explores how animistic rituals—specifically the ovoo offering in Inner Mongolia—can serve as embodied engagements with what Roy Bhaskar (1975) calls the “real”: a deeper layer of reality shaped by unseen causal and spiritual forces. By acknowledging the ’inhabitants’ of this deeper layer, we contribute to the broader post-humanist, or more-than-human, turn in the social sciences and humanities. Using a sensory collaborative autoethnographic approach, we take the ovoo encounter as a point of departure to examine our own ontoepistemic assumptions and to build a conceptual bridge for Western-trained audiences to loosen the grip of empirical-positivist habits of thought. We show how these practices enact a relational ontology that disrupts capitalist modernity’s extractivist, anthropocentric, and dualistic assumptions. We argue that, for those embedded in Western knowledge systems, openness to such place-based spiritual practices can foster the unlearning of dominant colonial-capitalist ways of being. The paper’s contribution is twofold: first, it demonstrates how engaging with the ovoo offering nurtures reciprocal, embodied connections that unsettle anthropocentric and dualistic worldviews; and second, it highlights how animistic traditions can counter the mechanistic cosmologies underlying extractivism. Such encounters can help reawaken suppressed spiritual lineages within Western thought, expanding the ethical and affective horizons of sustainability. At the same time, we remain attentive to the risks of co-optation through commodification, tourism, or detached New Age reinterpretations. We conclude by situating these reflections within wider debates on sustainability, ecological justice, and relational ethics.
I am excited to announce that I am working on amazing documentary featuring Mamie Van Doren, an icon of an era with incredible stories to tell. I'll be working out of LA , enjoying a familiar landscape of production and palm trees. Find out more about the doc here in this article by Variety.
Neoliberal free market agendas claim to champion individual freedom and economic empowerment, but these promises often mask deeper systemic flaws. By externalizing costs, redistributing responsibility, and fostering an illusion of consumer empowerment, this framework burdens individuals—both workers and consumers—while absolving businesses of accountability. This paper critiques the neoliberal free market paradigm, arguing that it undermines true freedom by prioritizing profit over collective well-being.
Great Podcast highlighting how US intervention is directly responsible for migration in the Americas.
Post-growth cities are urban areas that have shifted their focus from traditional economic growth models, which emphasize continuous increases in gross domestic product (GDP) and physical expansion, to more sustainable, resilient, and quality-of-life-oriented goals. This concept challenges the conventional wisdom that cities must constantly grow in size and wealth to be considered successful. Instead, post-growth cities prioritize:
The imperial mode of living, entrenched in the infrastructure of global powers like the United States and other Global North nations, thrives on an exploitative dynamic. This approach necessitates an "elsewhere" – regions designated for exploitation and bearing the aftermath of disasters (Brand and Wissen, 2021). Cloaked in the language of growth and progress, this inherently imbalanced mode is underpinned by a colonial power matrix, emerging from a superiority complex and enforced through centralized power structures (Mignolo, 2011). This epistemology, neglecting a critical examination of objectivity, inadvertently limits inter-epistemic dialogues, endorsing a singular, imperial truth.
Border Management Solutions
Creating a roadmap for transitioning to degrowth economies in the Global North and fostering decolonial cultures in Latin America requires a nuanced approach that addresses historical inequalities and promotes equitable resource distribution. The following outline suggests steps to achieve these goals, emphasizing the redistribution of wealth and resources to the Global South and the empowerment of local communities to develop decolonial practices.