Steven Levy

Steven Levy (born 1951) is an American journalist and editor at large at Wired.

For over forty years he has written about computers, the internet, cryptography (the science of making messages unreadable to anyone without the key), cybersecurity and privacy.

His most cited book is "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution", from 1984. It tells the birth of hacker culture, from the MIT model railroad club to the first personal computer programmers, and draws from it the hacker ethic: access to computers and knowledge should be free, information should circulate, people are judged by what they can do. Much of the way we still distinguish the hacker logic from that of the cracker comes from that book.

His other books follow the same idea, telling technology through the people who build it:

• "Insanely Great" (1994), on the birth of Apple's Macintosh;
• "Crypto" (2001), on the battle to make cryptography free;
• "In the Plex" (2011), on Google seen from the inside;
• "Facebook: The Inside Story" (2020), built on three years of interviews with people working at the company.

Source: Wikidata Q929788 e Wikipedia, voce Steven Levy, consultate il 04/11/2026, per data di nascita, ruolo a Wired e libri pubblicati.

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