sharmini r.
i spent a decade inside the systems i now write about.
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2023 —novel · literary fiction
Sex, Drugs & Singapore.
three people in one building in singapore's central business district. a filipina domestic worker whose permit ties her to a single employer and makes her side work a deportable offense. a gay singaporean man whose meth addiction takes him to HDB flats at two in the morning while he texts his housemate that he's at 7-eleven. a woman founder in crypto who flies to barcelona and walks into a cannabis club with her red singaporean passport. 59,000 words. third draft complete; fourth in progress. told through rotating close third-person with forty-four footnotes translating singapore for the outside reader.
- 3rd draft
- opening chapter read & annotated by Dipika Mukherjee · novelist, essayist.
- 2nd draft
- line & structural edits with Carol Test.
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"here, everyone was picture perfect on the outside. but so much was swept under the rug. and she'd signed up to do all the sweeping."
from the novel -
2026 —essays · ongoing
Remittance.
the author's own publication. one essay, every other week, on privacy, sovereignty, and the diaspora. seven essays live; the rest of the season already on the desk.
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2025 —wearable sculpture · in development
Sound Jammer Bracelet.
anti-surveillance jewellery. an ultrasonic transducer array in cast metal, disrupting MEMS microphones within a two-metre radius. parametric CAD, 3D prototyping, lost-wax casting. you wear it to a dinner and your phone hears nothing.
- "My Grandmother Died at 3am. By Morning I Was Wearing a Conference Badge."2026
- "All the Men Have Businesses. All the Women Have Jobs."2026
- "There Is a Whole Self I Carry That He Cannot Find."2026
- "Public Chain, Private Room."2026
- "The Generation That Finally Got What It Wanted."2026
- "The Bend." — published as "We Built for Sovereignty. They Came for Netflix."2026
- "The Coronavirus Cover-Up: A Closer Look at Internet Censorship in China."2020
- "Fake News vs Censorship in the Battle for the Internet."2020
- "Geo-Blocking Should Be Illegal, Change My Mind."2021
- "When You're Blocked Online, Can You Just DIY Your Own Internet?"2021
- "Is Decentralisation Even Real?"2022
- "CeFi Must Be Done Right."2023
- "How Decentralized Can We Get in the Modern World?"2021
- 2024 web3 track, foss asia. curated and produced the blockchain track at asia's largest open-source conference. selected speakers, sequenced programme, chaired the room. 5,000 attendees. hanoi · vietnam · curatorial
- 2021 "how decentralized can we get in the modern world?" — long-form podcast conversation, transcript published.hackernoon podcast · appearance
- 2019 odyssey hackathon, first place. "safe communications of biometric data." a protocol for transmitting biometric records across jurisdictions without surrendering the raw signal.groningen · award
- 2019 ethparis, runner-up. "d4rm." decentralised form infrastructure. the seed of later anti-surveillance work.paris · award
- 2018 pillar project unconference. produced a 500-person unconference on personal-data sovereignty. published reflection: "planning an unconference," medium. vilnius · lithuania · curatorial
- 2015 australian state slam poetry champion. the writing started on a stage in sydney, with a microphone and a three-minute clock.sydney · performance
Video interviews with
Roger Dingledine.
on-camera conversations with the co-founder of the tor project — the architecture of anonymous communication, the geopolitics of the relay network, what privacy means twenty years after the white paper. published on @influencem3dia.
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i.short
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ii.short
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iii.short
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sound jammer bracelet2025 — 2026 · in development
wearable anti-surveillance sculpture. an ultrasonic transducer array in cast metal, disrupting MEMS microphones within a two-metre radius. parametric CAD, 3D prototyping, lost-wax casting.
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influence media solutions2024 — present
creative studio for deep-tech communications. the place where the writing, the documentary work, and the building meet on a paid invoice.
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dezy2021 — 2023
co-founded a defi yield platform in singapore. raised $2.2m. navigated the FTX and LUNA collapse from inside. returned all user funds. the experience of building inside singapore's financial infrastructure directly informs the novel.
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mysterium network2018 — 2021
three years building open-source decentralised vpn and anti-censorship infrastructure for users in restricted-access jurisdictions. shipped, scaled, written about.
sharmini ravindran was born in singapore and has lived in sydney, london, new york, paris, bangkok, bali, and everywhere in between. she has been writing since she won the australian state slam poetry championship in 2015. she writes literary fiction and essays about surveillance, the diaspora, and the systems people build to escape both.
before returning to long-form writing she spent seven years inside crypto and decentralised finance, with fintech before that. three years building open-source anti-censorship infrastructure at mysterium network. two as a co-founder of dezy, a singapore-based defi platform that raised $2.2m, navigated the FTX/LUNA collapse, and returned every dollar. she publishes remittance, an essay every other week, and is at work on sex, drugs & singapore, a first novel currently in its third draft.
read remittance.
one essay, every other week.
on privacy, sovereignty, the diaspora, and what most people will be paying attention to in two years. no advice, no roundups, no listicles.