Moira Weigel, a Data & Society affiliate, is a scholar and founding editor of Logic magazine. Originally trained in modern languages, including German and Mandarin Chinese, she now studies digital media in a global context. Her current research focuses on transnational e-commerce entrepreneurs operating primarily between China and the US. She has a strong secondary focus on the history of critical theory, particularly as it has been taken up by technologists.

Weigel’s first book, Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating (2016), countered widespread claims that the rise of mobile phones and social media were bringing about the “death of romance,” showing that modern courtship practices have consistently co-evolved with consumer capitalism and other forms of gendered work. The book has been translated into six languages and appeared in dozens of national and international outlets. Her second book, co-edited with Ben Tarnoff, is Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do and How They Do It (2020). A series of long-form anonymous interviews with workers at every level of the Bay Area tech industry, from startup founders to cafeteria workers and in-house massage therapists to Google engineers, it received positive reviews from The New York Times and The Nation, among other outlets, and was named one of WIRED’s “8 Best Books About Artificial Intelligence to Read Now.”

Weigel is an assistant professor of communications studies at Northeastern University, where she also serves on the executive committee on women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. She is also a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard Law School. Previously, she was a sociotechnical security fellow at Data & Society, a junior fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows, and earned her PhD from the joint program in comparative literature and film and media studies at Yale University.