This website was archived on July 21, 2019. It is frozen in time on that date.

Sonya Mann's active website is Sonya, Supposedly.

About

Hello, visitor! My name is Sonya Mann, as indicated by the URL. For work, I run communications at the Zcash Foundation and occasionally write articles.

rabbit illustration by PolyDucks
Avatar created by my friend Polyducks. Rabbits are my favorite animal (followed by beluga whales).

The abiding question that drives my curiosity: “How and why do people organize themselves in the ways that they do?” I’m fascinated by microeconomics and tribalism (especially weird subcultures).

This website is where I archive almost everything that 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

Subscribe to my newsletter! It’s supposed to be monthly, but realistically goes out quarterly-ish.

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.

Instructions Unclear is a zine about rituals.

Contact

Please feel free to get in touch if you have any questions or want to chat. Twitter DMs are the fastest way to get to me.

  • I’m active on TwitterReddit, and Hacker News.
  • My personal email is me@sonyaellenmann.com. I do not respond to that address quickly; sonya@zfnd.org is better for time-sensitive inquiries or anything to do with work.
  • If you want to get in touch via Signal, reach out and I’ll give you my number! Or I’m @sonyaellenmann on Wire.
  • Check out my Keybase profile for more info.

Worldview

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

Personal heuristics:

  • There are always tradeoffs.
  • Things are not uncorrelated.
Sonya Mann's personal emblem via Emojimoji.
Another personal emblem, this time via Emojimoji.

“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

“sorry but if sincerely defending your beliefs is clearly and easily distinguishable from trolling then your beliefs are basic” — @literalbanana

(Unfortunately, my beliefs are easily distinguishable from trolling. I’m working on it!)

left: people are not capable of making good decisions as individuals right: people are not capable of making good decisions as collectives authoritarian: and yet some people do make better decisions than others libertarian: and yet I still insist on making my own decisions
Dan Garfield

2 thoughts on “About

    1. It’s not just about who I might find, for me. It’s also about who my creations will find. You never know until you put it out there. Although, finding a good supportive audience can be a tough road until one’s gained some traction or gotten lucky publishing.

      There’s so much content out there, it can be hard to stand out in the crowd.

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