About Mason Pelt

Writer, Filmmaker, Public Health & Privacy Advocate

Mason Pelt is a writer working on a new book exploring the rise of dictators. He works with the nonprofit Project HAND UP furthering the mission of creating engaging education content for children covering difficult topics. Perhaps to make up for, or maybe because of a prior career in advertising, and surveillance technology development Pelt is a staunch advocate and educator regarding privacy from big tech and ad tech.

I am currently focused on writing. I’ve long been something of a writer, with work appearing in outlets like Business Insider, SiliconANGLE, and TechCrunch, among others. My current project is a book examining the rise of dictators in every facet of life, from petty to powerful. It uses the life and times of Joseph Stalin (the one-time seminarist turned revolutionary turned dictator) who, like so many tyrants in another world, might have simply ended up a finance bro with the same personality and ethics.

I’m a Board Member for Project HAND UP (Healthy Africa: a New Directive – Using Puppets), a nonprofit organization that created the majority of COVID-19 public service announcements in Kenya. The organization has also produced substantial edutainment material on topics like HIV/AIDS, parasitic worms, and fire safety, winning multiple Kalasha Awards from the Kenya Film Commission, among other accolades. I work to support the organization with whatever they need most, from logistics and unofficial diplomacy, to regular bureaucratic navigation, creative development and medical fact-checking.

My connection to a scrappy nonprofit making films with puppets is best explained by saying I’m a juggler, and one of my first jobs was in video and film production. I hold a world record for most balls juggled on a pogo stick and long before Project HAND UP was winning awards, I worked on indie films. I handled most of the 190 VFX shots for Shelter, the winner of Best Narrative Feature at Williamsburg Independent Film Festival 2012. My film career is not notable, but very real. To work in independent film is to have a résumé of hard, unpublished work.

My addiction to eating blessed me with a sprawling career, first in commercial production, and later in social media and ads management. I’ve managed over $100 million in paid media spend and worked on some genuinely interesting projects along the way. By age 20 I had worked on both Super Bowl and Olympic ad campaigns. Eventually I moved to more product-focused roles, with a substantial amount of design, and engineering.

I’ve spent time in data centers, and worked on the design of apps ranging from tools for an electrical utility company to helping the inventor of laser tag bring it to the mobile world. Startup land, much like independent film, is a résumé of serious, high effort projects, that never made it. I was the architect of several large-scale analytics tools from concept to launch. This career’s worth of eclectic skills—particularly crafting messaging, navigating working relationships when tensions are high with people of all walks of life (from the warlord persona to the professor archetype), and knowledge of how the tech sausage factory works—has shaped me. (Note: the only way to make that readable was em-dashes I am not AI)

The path from a start in video & photo production to writing a book about Stalin is complicated. The transition from film to news segments to corporate videos is common. Ending up operating in the back-end of an ad-fueled corporate surveillance dragnet is less so. Warning people not to give up privacy for convenience is a near obligatory next step. But juggling leading to producing fire safety videos with puppets? That is odd. Almost nothing is linear, and all of it is connected.

I remember feeling honored as a teenager getting my National Press Photographers Association card. I remember having to care about makeup when I did social media work for major brands. I remember the sinking feeling of learning someone I once worked for took his own life, hearing it from a reporter’s call asking for comment years after I last spoke to them. I remember the “we did it!” call after Project HAND UP won a Kenyan Emmy.

My aspirations evolved from hopes to be Steven Spielberg, to Carl Bernstein, to David Ogilvy, to Cory Doctorow. I have a more complex relationship with my own career than can ever be explained. I’ve spent time in places that don’t make sense, with people who I should never have met. Yet here I am; incongruent as ever.

The Through Line: Dictators, Data, and Defense

The public health work is in all the ways that matter, the skills of production and advertising by another name, with another goal. Many skill sets can be used to make the world better or worse, depending on how they are used.

My forthcoming book is an active project examining the management styles of dictators across every aspect of human life. The parallels between autocrats on the political left, such as Joseph Stalin, on the right, such as Francisco Franco, and petty tyrants like the overbearing boss or the insurance company CEO are numerous. The book seeks to arm the reader with the tools to recognize and survive such figures.

The only constants of my career are research, diplomacy and storytelling in some way or another. My resume can be found here or on Linkedin

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