Taylor is an award-winning journalist who has written about sustainability, tech, art, and human rights for the last decade. They have written for NUVO alternative weekly, Indianapolis Monthly Magazine, Pattern Magazine, The Indy Star, and published their first book, Crashing Through The Front Door.
In 2019, when Taylor released Crashing Through The Front Door they found themselves at a crossroads. They had come out as transgender two years before, and after writing a book about LGBTQ culture, they felt increasing pressure to only write queer stories. Internally, they were still sorting out many aspects of their own queer identity that were tied to gender.
Taylor shifted their full time work to tech marketing where they honed their skills to create digital campaigns, customer journeys, and content that moves people to action. It was while working in tech marketing that Taylor began to understand the power of the surveillance economy. Their work in tech marketing taught them how to monitor a consumer’s behavior and track their digital footprint.
Learning how these small aspects of the surveillance economy worked was unsettling for Taylor. They wanted to move away from marketing and focus on a passion that has been passed down in their family — studying the environment. Taylor’s grandfather and grandmother were biologists, their mother is a naturalist and migration tracker, and their father is a social scientist. Caring for the natural world is an important part of Taylor’s identity.
They decided to shift their writing to environmentalism, and wanted to do so in the context of living in an urban area. Taylor then received two graduate degrees, one in creative nonfiction and one in Urban Sustainability.
It was during their graduate fieldwork that they had a conversation about open source movements in agricultural tech and how different these movements were across the globe. It was during this conversation that Taylor formed the thesis. They choose to research open source and sustainable tech through IoT data governance — a highly technical topic and an incredibly important one with the rise of green tech.
Taylor discovered an intricate web between the same surveillance economy that made them so uncomfortable in tech marketing and the way many pieces of “green” and “sustainable” tech functioned. They spent the next three years tracing a line between green tech, the data it collects, and how it’s used by police against women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ people in particular. The research became the manuscript titled Empire of Insight.
Taylor hopes to place Empire of Insight with a publisher soon to share this unique perspective.
Taylor lives in Chicago with their partner and hound dog.
