Merhaba esteemed knowledge tourists,
I’m Eireann, a risk by way of cyber crime researcher.
It’s hard to fit in these boxes, but I see all the rest of you trying to explain your past, and it gives me courage to try.
I was a early entrant poison ivy school dropout in Psychology and Philosophy in the 90s. I tried my best, but ran out of money for education in Bush’s America. So I drifted in the ‘You can’t win’ tradition across the USA as a dishwasher and landscaper, through the rust belt and my twenties.
I got a grip and a rucksack and tried my British (European at the time) passport on for size with a move to Scotland (maybe again?) at the turn of the millenium. There I retrained in Engineering and AI, with a focus on security for energy systems. I have a deep love of distributed and highly resilient infrastructure that tempts me to be an incanter, but I am probably on the border of augur and theorist.
I am an armchair economist because studying hacking and cyber crime have forced me to be. I have not yet turned my hand to writing fiction, but I do write essays and academic papers, and once a book on cyber risk.
I will be keen to think about alternative models of infrastructure provision and economics. How can citizens run and fix and innovate their own infrastructures? Electricity, water, sanitation, telecommunications, transport…all so centralised, and often non-participatory, fragile, opaque, invisible. How could it be different, and funded differently?
In my spare time I worry about the environment, forage, work an allotment, and practice natural navigation and hiking. I’m a parent of a SEN child, and a bilingual toddler, so let’s be honest: I don’t have spare time.
I am still learning.