The people behind
the byline.
Silicon Canals is published by Brown Brothers Media. A named Chief Publisher carries editorial accountability. Six named writers contribute under their own bylines. Three columns publish editorial coverage by the team. Every piece is reviewed before publication and corrected when wrong.
Editorial accountability
Chief Publisher
Justin Brown
Chief Publisher
Justin Brown is Silicon Canals' Chief Publisher. He holds a Master of Science in Global Economic History from the London School of Economics (Erasmus Mundus Joint Master in Global Studies) and a Master of Arts in International Relations from the Australian National University, where he was awarded the Hedley Bull Scholarship and graduated with First Class Honours.
His writing focuses on power structures, institutional incentives, and the gap between corporate narrative and corporate behaviour — applied across regulation, capital flows, surveillance, and the politics of innovation. He co-founded Brown Brothers Media, the parent company that publishes Silicon Canals, and is based in Singapore.
As Chief Publisher, Justin carries editorial responsibility for everything that ships on Silicon Canals. He reviews columns and writers' work before publication and stands behind the standards on this site.
Bylines
Writers
The six writers below publish under their own names on Silicon Canals. Each writes within and across the three pillars — Technology, Politics, and Mind.
Lachlan Brown
Writer
Lachlan Brown is a writer at Silicon Canals contributing across the Mind pillar. His background blends formal training — a Graduate Diploma in Psychological Studies from Deakin University — with a long practice of Eastern philosophy and two decades of operating businesses from scratch. He writes about high-performance routines, decision-making under pressure, and the discipline of clarity in technology work — where the patterns that govern building also govern living. He splits his time between Singapore and Ho Chi Minh City.
Ainura Kalau
Writer
Ainura Kalau is a writer at Silicon Canals based in São Paulo. Born in Central Asia, she lived more than a decade in Malaysia before settling in Brazil — a path that gives her natural fluency in how innovation ecosystems differ across continents and how people, capital, and policy translate between them. She writes about cross-border technology, emerging-market dynamics, and the lived experience of building from outside the dominant hubs.
Mal James
Writer
Mal James is a writer at Silicon Canals covering psychology, productivity, and the patterns that determine whether ambitious work compounds or burns out. His coverage draws from a teaching background, broad reading across behavioural science and business, and a working interest in what separates short-term effort from durable performance. He writes primarily for the Mind pillar with cross-coverage on the people inside the technology economy.
Daniel Moran
Writer
Daniel Moran is a writer at Silicon Canals covering technology, psychology, and culture. His work specialises in the patterns connecting how people build technology and how they live around it — the incentives that govern engineering decisions also govern lifestyle ones. He contributes across pillars, with the heaviest output in Mind and Technology.
Nato Lagidze
Writer
Nato Lagidze is a writer and researcher at Silicon Canals with an academic background in psychology. Her coverage focuses on self-compassion, emotional intelligence, and the decision-making frameworks that govern how technology workers move through pressure. She writes for the Mind pillar and contributes culture and media reporting on the social forces shaping the industry.
Kiran Athar
Writer
Kiran Athar is a writer at Silicon Canals with a degree in multimedia journalism. Her work focuses on the psychology and identity questions that show up across the people building technology — community-building, self-perception, and the choices that shape a career over decades. She writes primarily for the Mind pillar.
Editorial columns
Columns
Three editorial columns publish under their own bylines. Each column is produced by the Silicon Canals editorial team and reviewed under the Chief Publisher’s direction. The column name, not an individual writer, is the byline because the column’s perspective is the publication’s perspective.
Technology pillar
Canal Letter
Ecosystem briefings in the Atlantic register. Innovation centres, the engineering inside scaling companies, and the patterns connecting global technology hubs.
Read Canal Letter →Politics pillar
Cabinet
Policy, capital, geopolitics, and surveillance. The political forces that shape what technology gets built, who builds it, and who pays.
Read Cabinet →Mind pillar
Field Notes
Behavioural observations on decision-making, attention, identity, and performance. The human mechanics behind the work.
Read Field Notes →Editorial process
Articles published under a column byline (Canal Letter, Cabinet, Field Notes) represent the editorial team’s collective process: source verification, drafting, technical review, and editing — produced under the Chief Publisher’s direction. Articles published under a named writer’s byline indicate substantial individual authorship by that writer.
For details on our standards, see Editorial Policy. For our corrections process, see Corrections.
Ownership
Silicon Canals is published by Brown Brothers Media. Mediavine provides our display advertising. Editorial decisions are independent of advertisers, sponsors, and external parties.