Gideon Lichfield

Gideon Lichfield has spent nearly 30 years in journalism, most recently as the global editor-in-chief of WIRED. He was previously a science writer and foreign correspondent for The Economist in London, Mexico City, Moscow, Jerusalem, and New York; one of the founding editors of the digital news site Quartz; and editor-in-chief of MIT Technology Review.

Gideon’s interdisciplinary background, which began with degrees in physics and philosophy at Bristol University and the London School of Economics, has led him to a long-standing interest in the social impacts of technology and how to communicate them. In recent years he has focused on the problem of how to update systems of democratic governance for the 21st century. After commissioning many stories on the topic as an editor, he struck out on his own in 2024 with Futurepolis, a newsletter devoted to democracy and governance innovation. His research at the Allen Lab is on how to make these ideas accessible to a wider public and inspire a sense of possibility about democracy’s future.

Gideon was a Data & Society Research Institute fellow in 2015, where he worked on using speculative fiction as a tool for popularizing complex technological and social issues. In 2021, with MIT Press, he published Make Shift: Dispatches from a Post-Pandemic Future, an anthology of stories by leading science-fiction writers on long-term impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic. He is also a 2024/25 CITRIS tech policy fellow at the Goldman School of Public Policy at U.C. Berkeley, working on issues around public AI. Gideon has taught journalism at New York University and is on the AI advisory board at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. In addition to his staff jobs, he has published reporting and opinion in Bloomberg, the Financial Times, the New York Times, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and Foreign Affairs, among others.