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Nathan Kim holding a white long-haired cat.

Nathan Kim

Biography

Nathan Kim studies the political economy of tech production, with special attention to race and historical analysis. He's writing a history of Docker, Kubernetes, and other containerization technologies as tools of capitalist domination, animated by the violent transformation in global shipping produced by the adoption of containers in the second half of the twentieth century. He's also interested in the relationship between Silicon Valley and the state, specifically the industry transition away from DARPA and Cold War projects after 1989 and the contemporary return to defense funding. 

Nathan is also interested in understanding and uplifting progressive social movements through his work. He helped build Evictorbook, a tool to perform landlord research for tenant organizers, as a member of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project. He currently works as a research intern for the DAIR Institute, specifically for Dr. Alex Hanna on a project studying campus-based protest movements in the 2010s. One article from this work, focusing on top-line trends in the database we built, is out with Socius now, and more work will be released in 2025.

He's also a departmental steward and considers the project of building democratic power to win a better university his, and every worker's, responsibility. 

More info can be found on his website, linked above.

Pronouns

he/him/his

Areas of interest

racial capitalism, Marxisms, infrastructure, logistics

Education

B.A. in Ethnicity, Race, & Migration and Statistics & Data Science, Yale University