Steven Levy

Career

Levy has written about technology for close to four decades. Earlier positions include chief technology writer and senior editor at Newsweek, and Levy's work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Harper's Magazine, Macworld, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire and The New Yorker.²¹

Levy co-created Backchannel, a technology publication on Medium that was integrated into WIRED in 2017. At WIRED, where Levy has contributed since the magazine began, Levy is editor at large and writes the weekly Backchannel newsletter.²¹

Books

Levy's book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1984) chronicles three generations of programmers and introduced the idea of a "Hacker Ethic" that took shape at MIT in the 1950s and 1960s. Artificial Life (1992) follows scientists and programmers trying to create life-like systems, and Crypto (2001) tells how public cryptography moved from government secrecy into wide use.²³⁴⁵

Levy has also written company and product histories: Insanely Great on the Apple Macintosh, The Perfect Thing on the iPod, In the Plex on Google, and Facebook: The Inside Story, based on interviews inside and outside the company.⁶⁷⁸⁹

Work and contributions

• Backchannel (WIRED) Show, channel or publication

  Writes Backchannel, a weekly WIRED newsletter and column on technology, with recent pieces about AI.¹

Timeline

1. 1984Published Hackers, a history of computer culture and the Hacker Ethic.²³
2. 1992Published Artificial Life, about researchers trying to create life-like systems.²
3. 2001Published Crypto, on the rise of public cryptography.²
4. 2017Backchannel, the Medium publication Levy co-created, was integrated into WIRED.¹

Other documented roles

Roles the sources document that are not confirmed as current.

• Chief technology writer and senior editor, Newsweek²
• Co-creator and founder (integrated into WIRED in 2017), Backchannel (Medium)²¹

Where they work

• WIRED 4 people in the wiki

Related people

• Will KnightAlso at WIRED
• Kevin KellyAlso at WIRED
• Maxwell ZeffAlso at WIRED
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