PERSON
Steven Levy
The foremost chronicler of computing culture—reporter, witness, and conscience—who spent forty years in the rooms where the future was built and returned with the most urgent question of the AI age: who is actually in there?
Steven Levy is computing’s indispensable witness. Born in Philadelphia in 1951, he embedded himself with the MIT hackers of the 1960s, the Homebrew Computer Club builders, the cryptographers who defied the state, the engineers of Apple, Google, and Facebook—and from each encounter he brought back not predictions but portraits, not verdicts but the irreplaceable texture of what it felt like from inside. His 1984 book
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution gave the emerging technological culture its governing philosophy, the
hacker ethic, a six-tenet creed whose collision with money, secrecy, and scale now describes the entire political drama of artificial intelligence.
In the Plex, his anatomy of Google, revealed that
large language models were never a surprise: Larry Page told Levy directly that search was the on-ramp and AI was always the destination.
Facebook: The Inside Story became, in retrospect, the clearest available case study in the
emergent harm that optimizing, well-intentioned machines can produce—the journalist’s autopsy of