John Wise – system:impacted

This website is my personal learning space -- part notebook, part workshop, part quiet manifesto -- where I explore what it means to build technological systems rooted deeply in transparency, accountability, and refusal. These days, that work takes the form of public data investigations and infrastructure projects: analyzing prison mortality and disciplinary data in Florida's carceral system, and beginning to build open-access tools for radical transparency in incarceration data.

At its core, this site emerges from my recognition that data, algorithms, and institutional records often serve as invisible yet powerful tools of control rather than instruments of liberation. I'm particularly skeptical of the venture-capitalist hype surrounding artificial intelligence, especially the narrative equating all AI with Large Language Models (LLMs -- "word extruders" like ChatGPT). While LLMs can indeed be powerful tools when ethically designed and transparently trained, my vision reaches beyond current trends and superficial innovations.

Instead, the ideas documented here focus on ethical AI, semantic structures, and meaningful, context-rich interactions through open standards like RDF, SPARQL, and linked data. I'm dedicated to developing forms of artificial intelligence and technological design that prioritize human dignity, public accountability, and structured meaning rather than extraction, surveillance, and profit. I'm particularly interested in the Model Context Protocol (MCP) as infrastructure for making incarceration and law enforcement data radically accessible to journalists, researchers, and the public.

This site isn't intended to showcase finished products or a polished portfolio. Rather, it's a place for me to imagine, think aloud, and explore how public infrastructure might resist the logic of containment and control. It's about envisioning tools of liberation, intentionally designed to preserve precisely those narratives that institutional systems actively suppress, erase, or destroy -- community context, lived experiences, and critical truths deliberately reduced to anonymous data points.

Everything here is deliberately unfinished, openly evolving, and explicitly experimental. As a first-semester graduate student in Applied Data Science at Syracuse University, I'll keep growing this space as I move through my studies -- adding new projects, essays, and experiments that reflect my ongoing curiosity, critical self-awareness, and commitment to abolitionist principles. Ultimately, this website is an invitation to think with me about how technology, data, and AI might better serve transparency, justice, and genuine public good.

If you're just curious about me as a person, you're welcome here too. I hope to build this space not only for technical explorations -- it's also where I share pieces of my life, reflections on reentry, pictures of my cats, and what it's like to rebuild a sense of home and self after so many years away.

Note: My essays section is still empty for now -- but the first one is coming soon, and it's a doozy: I'll be writing about Recidiviz (I really, really hate Recidiviz) and the complex realities behind so-called "tech for good" in the criminal legal system.