I’m Matt Parlmer, a software engineer and political operative.

I spend most of my time on R&D and consulting at Ohlogen, an applied computer science company, or conspiring to seize the commanding heights with the team at The Neoliberal Project.

My technical work

My day-to-day engineering work runs the gamut from research and development on programming language design to distributed systems engineering. Most of my technical output pertains to a cluster of services built from the research. I also do a fair bit of consulting on the side, typically helping out companies by building libraries for them. Most of the stuff I push to production is in Go, and most of my research work happens in OCaml at this point. If you’d like to talk about things related to Ohlogen, or discuss a project drop me a line at matt at ohlogen dot com.

My political work

I’m a liberal consequentialist who believes that liberal politics should be periodically reconstructed to meet the needs of the political moment. Some years ago I noticed that there weren’t many places on the internet dedicated to discussing this idiosyncratic blend of political positions called “neoliberalism” in its own terms.

The forum I started to help fix this problem has since become a meeting point for people interested in advancing the neoliberal cause. Since about 2017 some of the people from that forum and from a number of adjacent groups have been building more concrete political vehicles to advance neoliberal politics. If you’d like to talk about that, you can reach me at matt at mattparlmer dot com.

My other interests

Things that have commanded my attention at one point or another include but are not limited to:

  • The many ways that people organize and disorganize information, especially languages with interesting characteristics
  • The many ways that people organize and disorganize themselves, especially in extreme or rapidly shifting conditions
  • Machines that move a lot of mass over long distances in interesting ways
  • Infrastructure of all kinds and in all places, especially things not usually considered to be infrastructure
  • Empirical macroeconomics, mechanism design, behavioral microeconomics
  • Physiological inputs to political behavior
  • Ideologies of all kinds, especially atypical or original ones
  • Subcultures, especially obscure ones on the internet
  • Sports, the weirder the better

How to contact me

I enjoy chatting with new people over email (see any of the above) or on Twitter. I’m @mattparlmer pretty much everywhere. Please feel free to reach out for whatever reason. I’m occasionally some combination of scatter-brained, busy, or unplugged, so I don’t respond inside a few days please feel free to bump the thread a few times until I do. If I’m going to be really unavailable for a while I’ll usually post about it on Twitter first, so check there.

If you need to talk about something sensitive that requires a higher degree of security than is possible via the methods listed above, ping me on Keybase or Signal. I don’t like PGP but if you need it here’s a fingerprint that works: 73FC65FE2E8816484EFA651E08A88EBDF04D11B5.