Jonah Peretti

Jonah H. Peretti (born January 1, 1974) is an Internet entrepreneur, a co-founder and the CEO of BuzzFeed, co-founder of The Huffington Post, and developer of reblogging under the project "Reblog". Education and early career Peretti was born in California and raised in Oakland, California. His father, a criminal defense lawyer and painter, is of Italian and English descent and his mother (née Cherkin), a schoolteacher, is Jewish. His stepmother was African-American. He attended The College Preparatory School in Oakland, followed by the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he graduated with a degree in environmental studies in 1996. He taught computer science classes at Isidore Newman School in New Orleans, in the mid-1990s. He received a master's degree from the MIT Media Lab in 2001. While at MIT, his email exchange with Nike over a request to print "sweatshop" on custom order shoes went viral. After graduating from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1996, Peretti published an article titled "Capitalism and Schizophrenia" in Negations, a Texas-based journal of critical theory. The paper compares the text Postmodernism and Consumer Society by Fredric Jameson with Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (along with discussing works by Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes and Jean Laplanche) to demonstrate the "psychological link between one-dimensionality and advertising". It is considered to explain Peretti's ideas around viral marketing, as well as provide an example of how easily anti-capitalist critique can be integrated into capitalism.