About

Hello, visitor! My name is Sonya Mann, as indicated by the URL.

Work

I run communications at the Zcash Foundation. Here’s my Keybase profile. If you want to get in touch via Signal, reach out and I’ll give you my number!

General

I’m fascinated by microeconomics and tribalism (especially weird subcultures). I read voraciously about the tech and media industries, with some politics thrown in.

This website is where I archive almost everything I’ve made and sporadically blog about my momentary obsessions. If you’re here to see what my writing is like, head over to the portfolio page next.

Projects

I have a personal newsletter, which goes out once a month or less.

Exolymph was a cyberpunk newsletter — it’s now defunct, but the archives will stay up indefinitely. In addition to general musings on the state of our techno-dystopia, I occasionally interviewed people and wrote flash fiction.

Contact

Please feel free to get in touch if you have any questions or want to chat.

• My personal email is me@sonyaellenmann.com.
• I’m active on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Hacker News.
• Check out my Keybase profile for more info.

Reading

There are a few ways to keep track! I post recommendations on Pocket, and my Pinboard profile is public. However, do not interpret bookmarking as implicit endorsement!

This website also features a section dedicated to key excerpts from interesting articles and essays. It’s not being actively updated at the moment.

I compiled a list of the thinkers and writers who have influenced me the most.

Quotes

“Ideas about what’s important and valuable are usually thought of as fundamental truths or moral axioms, but are often better modelled as shifting social fictions, local residue of larger-than-human social phenomena, tribal markers, and so on.” — Warg Franklin

“[W]e are all constantly telling and enacting stories about ourselves and the things around us, but we have an enormous and little-explored freedom to change the kind of stories we tell, to break the bounds of conventional genres in search of more effective tales.” — Mike Travers

“I hate ‘debate’. Debate is how to transform the positive-sum game of collaborative thinking into a zero-sum game.” — Zooko Wilcox

Personal maxims:

• There are always tradeoffs.
• The truth is somewhere in the middle.