Max Read is a Brooklyn-based journalist, media critic, and newsletter writer who runs Read Max, a Substack publication covering tech culture, internet phenomena, AI, and digital media with acerbic wit and analytical depth. Former Editor-in-Chief of Gawker and founder of New York Magazine's Select All vertical, Read is one of the sharpest observers of how platforms reshape human behavior - a thinker who treats the internet with the seriousness of a literary critic and the irreverence of someone who has watched it eat itself alive.
David Perell is a writer, educator, and founder best known for Write of Passage, the online writing course that turned thousands of lurkers into published voices. Armed with 474,000+ Twitter followers and a newsletter empire, he spent six years teaching people to think and write better on the internet - then stopped cold in 2025 when AI upended his mental model of education. He is now figuring out what comes next, in public, as always.
Joanne McNeil is an American writer, editor, and art critic who sits at the curious crossroads of internet culture and contemporary art. Best known for 'Lurking: How a Person Became a User' (2020) - a critical history of the internet told from the perspective of ordinary users - she followed it with her debut novel 'Wrong Way' (2023), a tech-industry satire about precarious gig labor. Formerly editor of Rhizome at the New Museum and founder of The Tomorrow Museum blog, she has written for Frieze, Wired, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe. She holds the inaugural Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation Arts Writing Award and has been a fellow at the Logan Nonfiction Program, a resident at Eyebeam, and an instructor at the School for Poetic Computation. Her next nonfiction work, 'Too Early for the Future,' is forthcoming from MCD/FSG.
Zeynep Tufekci is a Turkish-born sociologist, professor at Princeton University, and New York Times opinion columnist who has become one of the world's foremost voices on the intersection of technology and society. Known for being consistently ahead of the curve — predicting Facebook's role in ethnic violence, YouTube's radicalization pipeline, and COVID-19's severity before mainstream institutions caught on — she bridges computer science and humanistic inquiry with a rare clarity. Her 2017 book 'Twitter and Tear Gas' is a landmark study of networked protest, and her Substack newsletter 'Insight' offers rigorous, genuinely open-minded analysis of the hardest puzzles at the edge of science, technology, and democracy.
Drew Gooden is an American commentary YouTuber and comedian with 4.7 million subscribers and over 1.1 billion total views. Born Christopher Andrew Gooden, he rose to fame through Vine in 2013, went viral with the iconic 'Road Work Ahead' meme in 2016, and transitioned to YouTube after Vine's closure. Known for his sharp, investigative takedowns of internet grifts and absurd online culture, he won the 2021 Streamy Award for Commentary and is one-third of YouTube's most beloved creator trio alongside Danny Gonzalez and Kurtis Conner.