Hello fellow web traveler! My name is Wes Chow. This page is a semi-professional place where I brag about stuff.
I'm a co-founder of Filament, a realtime chat and AI company that's still in stealth.
I'm a research affiliate at MIT. I was formerly a research lead at the MIT Center for Constructive Communication, based at the MIT Media Lab. I still advise students and lead projects, but my focus is elsewhere.
I work on social networks, what I broadly call cooperation systems, media theory, AI, and channel my snark and hot takes into tweets.
Places you can find me:
What I think about:
- I'm developing the Cooperation Action Lab, a new style of institution inspired by the MIT Media Lab, DARPA, and centered on cooperation technology and systems. It's still a twinkle in my eye.
- Community run social infrastructure. The notion of self soverign data doesn't make sense in a social setting. Are your messages in a group chat really your data? With federated systems really hitting their stride, we should be able to build better systems for community sovereignty. This would allow finer granularity governance, and reduce the dependence on centralized services.
- Data archival and integrity. We need to archive the world's knowledge along with verifiable timestamps as generative AI ramps up. A post-truth world is a scary one.
- AI generality. We have a far ways to go before approaching human level generality. Hell, even rat level generality would pretty awesome. Can we do this within reasonable compute bounds in silicone?
- I've proposed creating a new religion based on the Mertonian norms. I don't anticipate it will involve ritual sacrifice but never say never.
What I have done:
- Got a EECS degree from UC Berkeley. Go bears!
- Built some of the earliest HFT systems, before HFT was even an acronym.
- Built some tech for Amie Street and Songza.
- CTO at Chartbeat, which dominated the news measurement space when I was there, natch. I did strategic stuff as an exec and led development on the data platform with a focus on warehousing and big realtime streaming systems.
- CTO at Cortico, the 501c3 deployment arm and action lab for MIT CCC. I did strategy and worked on lots of tech, from IoT to NLP.
- Served The Tank arts space in NY over the years as beer slinger, fire marshall, radio variety show writer/director/producer, board member, and now advisor. Thousands of artists have done their time there, including Oscar winning screenwriters and Broadway directors.
- Won Twitter Bluesky's Satellite competition with Devigny, a scheme that uses zero knowledge cryptography to link accounts to a single person.
- Developed a framework for a pluralistic social network, which is supposed to solve everything you think is wrong about social media.
- Co-taught a 4 week seminar at MIT (IAP 2024) with Manon Revel on decentralized society and plurality.
What I would support (someone please steal these ideas):
- Futures We Deserve series of essays and stories, where we take an optimistic vision of the future and turn it into a positive sci-fi story that illustrates its ideas. We need more Star Trek, less Westworld.
- Open Source University. If you think of a traditional university as a place that teaches and supports research, where the money-making ability of the institution is generally measured by the quality of the research, which incidentally attracts talent, then it should be the case that you could create a university in which you swap out research for open source software development. Instead of high reputation academics teaching classes, you would have high reputation open source developers. A university crossed with open source is one formulation, but you could also experiment with other revenue schemes such as ISAs, patent buyouts, philanthropic prizes, and retroactive public goods funding.
- Coworking cooperatives. Coworking spaces such as WeWork are just random collections of people, and my impression is that they really struggle to build community and are seen as a commodity or stepping stone on the way to a larger office. We can do better, especially now that remote work is a thing. Coalitions of remote only companies should pool together to make lots of small office spaces. For example, companies X & Y might share lots of small office spaces in New York, San Francisco, Boulder, Austin, Raleigh, etc. This would be especially effective combined with a radical-ish idea -- companies should allow their employees to go on sabbatical with each other. Imagine if Mozilla and Wikipedia employees had close collaborative ties.
Some essays I've written recently: