Jesse has been designing web applications since Yahoo! was a text file; he's been a Linux systems administrator and coder for more than a decade. As a student at Columbia, he worked with an extensive network of SunOS-based computers and a cabal of old-time UNIX engineers complete with long, unkempt beards, uncontrollable passions for clean code and obsessions with tools like grep, sed and awk. Responsible for training and managing the staff of sixty students who provided support in the campus labs, Jesse was well-known both for his ability to help non-techies relate to technical knowledge as well as his egalitarian management style. After college, as IT director of still-successful financial news startup Tower Media (now Money Media), he oversaw the development of the startup's first managed IT and support infrastructure, establishing and maintaining support functions during the startup's critical first two years on the web as well as designing the Linux-based infrastructure that delivered mission-critical daily newsletters and joined in-house databases to the firm's websites. His consulting clients have included half a dozen major non-profit organizations and the government of Estonia.

"Computer engineering problems require abstraction and careful, patient analytical thought," Jesse recently observed; "making them much easier to solve than human problems." As a cultural anthropologist, Jesse studies the history of technology and surveillance, exploring techniques of sociotechnical governance which he reinterprets and investigates in a wide variety of media. Jesse's writing has appeared in more than two dozen publications on three continents and he is currently producing an independent film, Paper Angels. He has been a practitioner of Buddhist meditation since he was 14.