Platforms optimise for engagement, and engagement is not a neutral thing to optimise for: it sets which ideas spread and which people rise, and those pressures reach into politics, into how people build a sense of themselves, and into what they end up finding worth doing. The difficulty is that almost everything that matters here gets asserted rather than measured, whether a conversation was any good, whether a culture is accumulating anything, what a platform is for, how a population's beliefs hang together. So a good deal of my time goes into building the instruments that would let us settle those questions, because the interventions I want to make depend on them.
My motivating belief is that better collective decision-making is possible — not merely an internet that avoids the harms and power imbalances of the current one, but a future in which the internet, and governance itself, can evolve to help groups think and decide better than they ever have.
My current home is the Complex Social & Computational Systems group at the University of Graz, where I work with Prof. Jana Lasser on DeSiRe. I also convene a working group on what social media platforms ought to be for, and take on freelance work.
I was born in Perth, Western Australia. I lived there until midway through high school, when I dropped out and fled home to live in Melbourne, Victoria.
While finishing my high school certificate, I found an interest in mathematical beauty. I was captivated by how mathematical thinking could offer piercing ways to understand the complexities of the world.
I self-studied mathematics using Khan Academy, and enrolled at whatever university would accept a student with no prerequisites and a low graduating score into a physics program. That happened to be Swinburne University of Technology.
During university I thrived. It was a place where I could chase my interests with little restriction. I worked across optical fibre physics, hydroacoustics, and social analytics, before realising theoretical studies is where my interests reside. Alongside this, I started to become more critical of the real world outside of physics and mathematics, and I realised there are problems with society that are far too frustrating and unfair to ignore. Complex systems was a natural path forward, where I could satisfy this frustration, contribute my abilities in physics and maths, and of course retain proximity to the mathematical beauty that still captivates me.
I completed my honours degree at Swinburne University, Melbourne, studying self-avoiding walk models under the supervision of Prof. Nathan Clisby. After that I was a visiting scholar at GSAIS, Kyoto University (a.k.a. 思修館), studying the entropy of complex systems under the supervision of Prof. Liang Zhao.
Then, as a PhD candidate at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna, I experienced and witnessed supervisor abuse. Moving quickly to a genuine academic path without cutting corners is something I'm proud of. This showed me academia's structural flaws — how short-term junior roles stifle collective advocacy, how institutions hold power over international students, and how incentives push rushed, less rigorous work.
Outside of work, I'm very into some specific subgenres of techno, philosophy, and activism.
If you're dealing with something like what I went through in Vienna, my inbox is always open: tim.book.RE@gmail.com. I can't promise solutions, but I can offer perspective, solidarity, and a listening ear.