Alex Burns

Alex Burns (b. September 20, 1973, in Melbourne, Australia) is a researcher, writer, and editor of the subculture site Disinformation.

Biography
In 1994, Burns wrote for the La Trobe University student newspaper Rabelais where he used New Journalism techniques for interviews with Robert Manne, Powderfinger, Snog, and Vali Myers.
He worked for Australian-based magazines REVelation and 21C from late 1994 to mid-1998 when both ceased publication. His interviews included counterculture mavens Robert Anton Wilson and Terence McKenna, author J.G. Ballard, linguist Noam Chomsky, maverick physicist Jack Sarfatti and Marshall Savage. Throughout this period, he was involved in several New religious movements including a Gurdjieff group and the Don Webb era Temple of Set. This work catalyzed an interest in Richard Dawkins' ideas on memetics, Internet subcultures on Memetic engineering, and Don Beck & Chris Cowan's Spiral dynamics model of human values systems.

In late 1998, Richard Metzger suggested to Burns he write for the Disinformation subculture site . When Avenue A/Razorfish acquired The Disinformation Company in August 1999, Metzger and co-founder Gary Baddeley asked Burns to edit the site, which was nominated for two Webby Awards.

Octapod's Sean Healy and Marcus Westbury invited Burns to speak at the This Is Not Art festivals held in Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia. From 1999 to 2005, Burns facilitated a series of lectures for Electrofringe, the National Young Writers' Festival and the National Student Media Conference on his subculture research. He organised sessions with Disinformation allies such as Howard Bloom, Mark Pesce and Adam Parfrey. Burns has also spoken at the Next Wave Festival and Straight Out of Brisbane.

He has Masters degrees in Strategic Foresight from Swinburne University (2004) where he studied with Richard A. Slaughter and Sohail Inayatullah, and in Counter-terrorism from Monash University (2006). He worked in a research team from December 2003 to March 2007 at the Smart Internet Technology Cooperative Research Centre.

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