EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

David Temkin is a Silicon Valley techie who’s been an engineer at Apple, a privacy leader at Google, and a founder of three startups. He’s logged over a quarter million miles commuting on US 101 and I-280. He also has a side hustle in magazines. 

MANAGING EDITOR

Alex Lash is a journalist with a wide range of experience spanning nearly three decades. He founded and edits The Frisc, a news site that covers housing, homelessness, and other civic issues shaking up his hometown of San Francisco. He previously covered biotech and the life sciences. Before that, he covered high tech during the dot-com boom with CNET News and the Industry Standard. He’s written for Wired, ReadyMade, Popular Science, Architecture, SF Weekly, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Chow, and Business 2.0.

HUMOR EDITOR

Brian Maggi got his start in tech over 30 years ago as a subject in a research project at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. He worked at Apple on iconic and not-so iconic products including the Newton and the iMac. His biggest claim is inventing the email spam filter with Postini, thus giving the world the greatest excuse for not reading our mothers’ emails.

CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Josh Klenert is a design leader who helps companies reinvent themselves — without losing their soul in the process. He started in print, designing for magazines like Billboard, InStyle, and Smithsonian (yes, some still exist). Since then, he’s led digital transformations at JPMorgan Chase, iHeartRadio, and HuffPost. He also led the Society of Publication Designers as President, championing design excellence. These days, he’s still pushing pixels — and boundaries.

DESIGN DIRECTOR

Alex Pirani is a designer and creative technologist who focuses on exploring the intersection between the creative arts and new technologies (even though he doesn’t really trust them).

ART DIRECTOR

Troy Dunham has been living the pixel life since Photoshop v2. He’s weathered more pivots than a crypto start-up trying to find itself, outlived at least three “next big things,” and still manages to feign enthusiasm during sprint retros, as if it’s not all slowly unraveling.

PRODUCTION DIRECTOR

Margaret Swart has spent 25 years immersed in and addicted to publication design. Her longest in-house gig was at Wired magazine, where she was the lead designer on the now defunct groundbreaking Wired app (imagined in anticipation of the soon-to-be-announced iPad). She has also led redesigns for Smithsonian Magazine, Foreign Policy, National Geographic, and Road & Track.

CONTRIBUTING DESIGNERS

David Robinson is a design leader with stints in big tech, and a few startups that no longer exist (you’re welcome). By night, he plays in a band called The Layoffs, which is somehow less chaotic than most product launches.

Jeremy LaCroix has survived 27 years of Silicon Valley shenanigans. He’s done everything from punk rock logos, iconic magazines and award winning UX to pioneering the art of “Design Therapy.” He’s hustled for every brand you’ve ever heard of, plus a few so obscure even Google struggles. This dude’s a design shapeshifter, conquering dead trees to the cloud. He’s got more war stories than your grandpa, yet remains disturbingly cheerful. When asked the inevitable “What do you do?” he just grins and says, “Whatever it takes.”

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

Paulina Borsook has been immersed in Silicon Valley culture since the mid-1980s. She was on the masthead of Wired during its first few years. She is perhaps best known for her Salon essay “How the Internet ruined San Francisco” and for her book Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech, which was a personal financial disaster but is still being read to this day.

Jon Callas drifted from performing arts to programming and design for DEC, Apple, et al. to founding privacy-related startups such as PGP and Blackphone to working at civil rights nonprofits including the ACLU and EFF. He has been credibly accused of being Satoshi Nakomoto.

Miles Pomper is saving the world from mass destruction, one PowerPoint at a time. He is a Senior Fellow with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and a former foreign policy journalist and diplomat.

Vernon Silver is an archaeologist, award-winning journalist, and author of The Lost Chalice: The Epic Hunt for a Priceless Masterpiece.  He was In Formation’s founding articles editor late last century.

Oren Tversky has worked in business development executive positions at many companies including Nielsen/Gracenote, Unity Technologies and Matterport. He loves data and facts, but believes context matters too.

WRITERS

Jim Albrecht is a product executive and consultant who has worked at Google, Samsung, et al. Visions of a dark and inhuman future trouble his vision, but he believes that certain strings of tokens have an incantatory power to avert this outcome and provoke good products into being. He prays that the labor of producing these works rises to the heavens as a scent pleasing to the Lord.

Julie Anderson taught high school for over twenty years. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature and has been published in The Gettysburg Review, Other Voices, and Broad Street: A New Magazine of True Stories, among other journals and anthologies.  From 2018-2020, she was a frequent contributor to Oakland Magazine, Alameda Magazine, and The East Bay Monthly. 

Andrea Chipman is a freelance health journalist (and expat American) in Nottingham, England. She most recently worked as a news editor at Digital Health, where she covered the erratic digitalization of the UK National Health Service.

Anna L. Davis is the author of the Enhancement Series (Open Source, Ten Digit PIN), cyberpunk sci-fi horror featuring human augmentation, brain implants, and twisted hackers. Anna has a Bachelor of Science in biology from the University of Texas at Dallas and experience in medical editing. She lives outside of Dallas with her husband and an array of farm animals, in growing acceptance of the fact that she’s probably a cyborg.

Derek Dunfield is an MIT Intelligence Initiative Fellow with a PhD in neuroscience and master’s in physics who has spent the last two decades studying how minds work — or claim to. After applying these insights at Planet Labs and Google, he now works at Meta Fundamental AI Research (FAIR), where he helps build AI systems that can reason and learn like biological minds.

Richard Gingras has walked the bleeding edge from satellite networks to news products to search engines, from PBS to Apple to Excite to Salon to Google. He knows innovation is hard, and concedes he’s made more mistakes than you. He recently retired from Google after 15 years, serving as the company’s global vice president for news, overseeing the Google News Initiative, and engaging on news-related public policy. Gingras serves on the boards of several journalism policy related organizations. He chairs the board of Village Media and helped found the global Center for News, Technology, and Innovation.

Miju Han is a privacy and security product executive and a parent of two kids. She has worked for several major social networks.

David Kamp is a journalist and author based in New York City whose work has appeared in Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, GQ, and The New York Times. While at Vanity Fair, he helped launch the 2.0 iteration of its website and is therefore complicit in hastening the demise of the print glossy. He feels bad about that. His most recent book is Sunny Days: The Children’s Television Revolution That Changed America.

Rob Leathern is a software builder who has held leadership roles at Meta, Google, and LinkedIn. He believes in the power of transparent systems to create better outcomes, even as he wrestles with the complexities of building guardrails for emerging technologies. He writes on technology policy and product development, and frequently speaks on the intersection of technology, privacy, and trust. 

Norm Meyrowitz was the architect of Brown University’s Intermedia, a precursor to the World Wide Web, President of Products at Macromedia — overseeing products such as Flash and Dreamweaver – and Adjunct Professor of the Practice of Computer Science at Brown.

Eugene S. Robinson’s work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, GQ, The New York Times, Ad Week, Alta Magazine, The Wire, LA Weekly, Vice Magazine, Hustler, and Decibel, among many others. He has also been editor-in-chief of Code and EQ.

Johnny Ryan suffers from “tech remorse,” and no longer believes humanity is moving toward a tech utopia. He now travels the world trying to convince courts and enforcers to avert dystopia, leading an organisation called Enforce. It’s a full time job.

Jan Schiffman has spent 35+ years in tech, including  (n * Big Co VP) + (n * startup CTO). He is an Oracle survivor and is now an expat hiding in Japan.

Jason Scorza (1968-2024) was vice provost for academic and international affairs and professor of political science and philosophy at Fairleigh Dickinson University.

John Sundman has worked for nearly two dozen software and hardware startups in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Boston, and NYC, starting in 1980. He has also been a firefighter and a long-haul truck driver. His cyberpunkish novels include Acts of the Apostles, Cheap Complex Devices, Biodigital and The Pains. 

Michael Temkin has spent more than 25 years in Silicon Valley building products at companies small and large. He’s also a songwriter and an avid collector of conspiracy theories, which he is assembling into an anthropological view of the human psyche’s reaction to rapid technological change. His mother considers him a failure for dropping out of a Harvard physics PhD program. 

Mike Trigg is a serial entrepreneur. He also hates the phrase “serial entrepreneur” because it sounds like a Class 1 felony, which sometimes it is. Mike has opined on the tech industry as a contributor toTechCrunch, Entrepreneur, Venture Beat, and Fast Company, and is the author of two contemporary novels offering an insider’s critique on the impact of tech on modern life.

William Vaughn is a former National Science Foundation Fellow with interests at the intersection of computational philosophy, cognitive science, and machine learning. He left the leaning tower of ivory long ago to focus on building interesting (and increasingly AI-based) products, and is currently a techno-skeptical technology consultant and LLM wrangler.

ARTISTS AND PHOTOGRAPHERS

Sterling Crispin is a conceptual artist and software engineer. He failed upwards out of the contemporary art world into a big tech career focusing on AR/VR research and development, only to fail upwards into a life of information warfare, degenerate crypto gambling, and software art.

Kingshuk Das works on making technology more human and more creative. His background spans design, strategy, & business incubation at startups, large companies, and innovation firms like IDEO, helping them envision new directions — everything from breakfast cereal to brain surgery.

Kim Meeker is a healthcare executive with over 20 years of leadership in nursing and hospital operations, currently serving as Chief Nursing Officer at Henry Ford Wyandotte Hospital. Outside of healthcare, Kim finds joy and creative expression in watercolor painting and illustration — a lifelong passion that brings balance and inspiration to her work and life.

Eric Pickersgill is a North Carolina-based artist whose work examines the psychological and social effects of technological adoption, past and present. Known for his acclaimed Removed series, he has exhibited and presented internationally, with work held in public and private collections worldwide. While wrestling with his own screen habits like everyone else, Eric co-owns and runs a design and print studio with his wife and balances life as a husband, father, and reluctant tech optimist.

Jay Seldin is a photographer, educator, and longtime student of the street. He’s spent decades chasing light, stories, and the subtle gestures that define humanity. His camera is less a tool than a passport — through Morocco’s alleys, Burma’s markets, and the faces of those surviving, loving, and dreaming in plain sight. Founder of CPE Workshops and a Canson Ambassador, Jay has taught and exhibited worldwide, believing the best education lives outside the classroom — and in the frame.