About Metascale
I’m Nathan Simpson — writer, independent researcher, and software engineer in Amsterdam. I take reality apart with essays and theory, then put it back together as fiction and games: Attention. Reality. Structure. Emergence. Aesthetics.
My core perspective is attention-economic: attention is a conserved resource: every mind (not only humans!) fully spends a bounded budget at every instant. Most of what we call social reality (everything from truth, money, and institutions to polarization and meaning) emerges from competition for these bounded budgets that determine what we build, maintain, and lose. What started as an observation has become an obsession, and a loose collection of papers is now becoming a program.
Start anywhere: theory (CAT, Parechoia — on SocArXiv and PsyArXiv respectively), essays, fiction, or games (PINTERCEPT, with more coming).
As an undergraduate, I did three years of BFA training in painting, drawing, and design while pursuing a sociology degree. I received my master’s degree in network sociology and knowledge media design at the University of Toronto in 2003. I proposed a doctoral project that year analyzing how musicians were making use of the internet for their businesses; it was rejected as too speculative the year the iTunes store opened and a few months before MySpace and GarageBand changed the music business landscape. While my direct involvement in academia ended, my fascination with the underlying question of how attention is captured, routed, and converted to capital survived, and by 2008 the roots of what would become Metascale were waking up and stretching out tendrils.
Since then, I’ve spent two decades building software across management consulting, fintech, and specialized development and academic projects: a livestock-market data system for ILRI in Kenya; a training platform for water conservation in Chinese textile factories; a randomized multi-trial survey tool for the University of Michigan’s School of Social Work. I’ve served as a founder/CTO for three startups in fintech, business software, and most recently in AI-driven learning.
Outside of software, I have ten years of martial arts training and a first-dan black belt in taekwondo. I’ve built a number of games, released an album’s worth of electronica, published short stories, and finished three novels and a short webcomic about small aliens who break things.
If you subscribe: I write about attention scarcity, so I’m not going to drown your inbox in empty attention-grabbers. You’ll get substantial pieces when I finish them, and useful smaller notes here and there. If you feel I’m squandering your attention, unsubscribe freely. It’s the most precious resource you have.
