Darius Kazemi (born 1983) is an American computer programmer and artist. Kazemi and Courtney Stanton are the co-founders of the technology collective Feel Train.

Early life

Kazemi was born on July 28, 1983. He attended

Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (also known as TJHSST, Thomas Jefferson, or TJ) is a Virginia magnet high school in Fairfax County, Virginia operated by Fairfax County Public Schools. The school occupies the building of t ...

in Virginia, then college at

Worcester Polytechnic Institute The Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) is a Private university, private research university in Worcester, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1865, WPI was one of the United States' first engineering and technology universities and now h ...

in Massachusetts from which he graduated in 2005 with a

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, B.S., B.Sc., SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree that is awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Scienc ...

degree in Electrical Engineering.

Career

After college, Kazemi became a video game designer. In 2012, Kazemi began making

bots The British Overseas Territories (BOTs) or alternatively referred to as the United Kingdom Overseas Territories (UKOTs) are the fourteen dependent territory, territories with a constitutional and historical link with the United Kingdom that, ...

Twitter Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...

, drawing particular attention for work like his "wordfilter", a feature that enabled bots to avoid

racial slurs The following is a list of ethnic slurs, ethnophaulisms, or ethnic epithets that are, or have been, used as insinuations or allegations about members of a given ethnic, national, or racial group or to refer to them in a derogatory, pejorati ...

. Kazemi is the author of ''Jagged Alliance 2'', a book describing the people and process behind the development of the video game ''

Jagged Alliance 2 ''Jagged Alliance 2'' is a 1999 tactical role-playing game developed by Sir-Tech, Sir-Tech Canada for Microsoft Windows and later porting, ported to Linux by Tribsoft. It is the third entry in the Jagged Alliance (series), ''Jagged Alliance'' seri ...

''. Kazemi's text is the fifth in a series of books on video games published by

Boss Fight Books Boss Fight Books is a Los Angeles-based book publisher and its eponymous series of books about video games. Similar to the style of 33⅓, a series of books about individual record albums, each book focuses solely on one video game. The compan ...

. In 2015, Kazemi released a project called the "Ethical

Ad Blocker Ad blocking (or ad filtering) is a software capability for blocking or altering online advertising in a web browser, an application or a network. This may be done using browser extensions or other methods or browsers with inside blocking. Hist ...

," which not only blocked ads, but also blocked all websites that contained ads, so that users would not take content for free from sites that rely on advertising dollars. Speaking to

Vice A vice is a practice, behaviour, Habit (psychology), habit or item generally considered morally wrong in the associated society. In more minor usage, vice can refer to a fault, a negative character trait, a defect, an infirmity, or a bad or unhe ...

Motherboard A motherboard, also called a mainboard, a system board, a logic board, and informally a mobo (see #Nomenclature, "Nomenclature" section), is the main printed circuit board (PCB) in general-purpose computers and other expandable systems. It ho ...

, Kazemi explained the project, which made a huge number of websites inaccessible to those who'd enabled the Ethical Ad-Blocker was meant to dramatize the conflict traditional ad-blockers raise in allowing users to avoid ads but depriving websites of the revenue streams they rely on: "I like the idea of codifying a moral high road and then showing people in practice that the moral high ground is not an attainable thing." In 2016, Kazemi released a

Bernie Sanders Bernard Sanders (born September8, 1941) is an American politician and activist who is the Seniority in the United States Senate, senior United States Senate, United States senator from the state of Vermont. He is the longest-serving independ ...

video game, called Bubble Burst Bernie, developed with Rob Dubbin and artist Tim Luecke for ''

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert ''The Late Show with Stephen Colbert'' is an American late-night talk show, late-night news satire, news and liberal political satire talk show hosted by Stephen Colbert, which premiered on September 8, 2015. Produced by Stephen Colbert, Spartin ...

''. At Feel Train, Kazemi and Stanton have developed the StayWokeBot in collaboration with activists

DeRay Mckesson DeRay Mckesson (born July 9, 1985) is an American civil rights activist, podcaster, and former school administrator. An early supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement, he has been active in the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, ...

and

Samuel Sinyangwe Samuel Sinyangwe (born May 12, 1990) is an American policy analyst and racial justice activist. Sinyangwe is a member of the Movement for Black Lives, the founder of Mapping Police Violence, a database of police killings in the United States a ...

, as well as the Shortcut app with radio program ''

This American Life ''This American Life'' is a weekly hour-long American radio program produced in collaboration with Chicago Public Media and hosted by Ira Glass. It is broadcast on numerous public radio stations in the United States and internationally, and is ...

'', which allows listeners to share audio clips on

social media Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the Content creation, creation, information exchange, sharing and news aggregator, aggregation of Content (media), content (such as ideas, interests, and other forms of expression) amongs ...

much like

gifs The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , ) is a bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released on June 15, 1987. The format can co ...

facilitate sharing video clips. Feel Train has a forthcoming Twitter bot project called Relive 44 that, beginning in May 2017, will repost every tweet from

President Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama II (born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who was the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the first African American president in American history. Ob ...

(President Obama posted his first message to Twitter in May 2009). In 2016, Kazemi started researching and developing software for decentralized social media and the fediverse. In 2018, he was awarded a

Mozilla Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, publishes and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting free software and open standards. The community is supported institution ...

Ford Ford commonly refers to: * Ford Motor Company, an automobile manufacturer founded by Henry Ford * Ford (crossing), a shallow crossing on a river Ford may also refer to: Ford Motor Company * Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company * Ford F ...

Open Web fellowship, where he studied the technical infrastructure of the fediverse and people's decisions to leave centralized social media for decentralized services. In 2023 Kazemi was awarded a research grant from the Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund along with Erin Kissane, building on his prior work, and focusing on community governance and moderation in decentralized social media servers. Kazemi currently works for the Applied Social Media Lab at the

Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society is a research center at Harvard University that focuses on the study of cyberspace. Founded at Harvard Law School, the center traditionally focused on internet-related legal issues. On May 15, 2008, ...

, at

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

References

External links

Tiny Subversions
{{DEFAULTSORT:Kazemi, Darius Living people 21st-century American artists American people of Iranian descent Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology alumni Worcester Polytechnic Institute alumni 1983 births