![]() Last year, when he saw that thousands of corporate Amazon employees had signed a letter urging Amazon to address the climate crisis more forcefully, he added his name. In 2018, he was arrested while protesting a proposed pipeline in Canada that would export tar sands oil to Asian markets. He turned some of those interests into activism. In conversation and his writing, Bray readily cites economist Thomas Piketty (whose book on inequality he has read “end to end”), admits a love of heavy metal (which he calls “sort of, well, ridiculous” because “the volume is much louder than can be sanely necessary”) and talks in detail about the climate crisis (which he finds alarming “as a person who has a high respect for quantitative science and understands what mathematical modeling is about”). Paul Hoffman, who met Bray in the 2000s while writing technical standards for blogs, said Bray was one of those people you really want to hate but can’t, a polymath who was highly functional on just a few hours of sleep.īray is definitely “a geeky geek,” Hoffman said, “but what is atypical is that he also has a lot of other interests.” He became a rare “distinguished engineer,” part of an elite group whose clout comes not from managing large teams but from demonstrating engineering brilliance. But he is best known among technologists for helping invent XML, a critical standard for storing and sharing data on the internet.īy 2014, after several years at Google, Bray had joined Amazon. He used it during the early days of the consumer internet, digitizing the Oxford English Dictionary and founding two startups. While a student at University of Guelph, near Toronto, Bray found joy and skill in computer science. “Politics there takes the very rare form of riots in the streets and incoming Israeli missiles,” he said. His time in Beirut stayed with him after he returned to Canada, making him unable to ignore politics. ![]() As political and religious conflict made Lebanon unstable, “it just wasn’t a good place to live,” Bray said. Born in Canada, he grew up largely in Beirut, where his father worked as a professor. “The tech industry is a leading candidate for what could be broken up.”īray may have been uniquely predisposed to think about more than engineering problems. “I am not in some radical fringe because I think the wealth and power in the 21st century is overly concentrated,” he said. In a series of video interviews from a gently rocking small boat docked in Vancouver, British Columbia, that has been his office during the pandemic, Bray straightforwardly presented his ideas as a matter of logic.
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