Tim Hwang is a writer, lawyer, and technology policy researcher based in New York. He is currently a research fellow at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University, and previously served as the global public policy lead for artificial intelligence and machine learning at Google. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wired, The Atlantic, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. Dubbed “the busiest man on the internet” by Forbes, Hwang focuses on the future of the attention economy and the geopolitics of computational power.

Moira Weigel is a Sociotechnical Security researcher at Data & Society, a historian and theorist of media technologies, and a founding editor of Logic magazine. She is the author of Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating (FSG 2016) and co-editor of the anthology Voices from the Valley (FSG 2020), a collection of interviews with anonymous workers from across the Bay Area tech industry, which is published this week as part of the FSG x Logic Books series where Tim’s book also appears. She received her PhD from the joint program in Comparative Literature and Film and Media Studies at Yale University and spent 2017-2020 at the Harvard Society of Fellows. In 2021, she will join Northeastern University as an Assistant Professor in Communication Studies.

FSG Originals × Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech’s reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry’s many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today.

“Databites” is a regular speaker series that presents timely conversations about the purpose and power of technology today. Speakers bridge our interdisciplinary research with broader public conversations about the societal implications of data and automation.