David Weinberger

David Weinberger's twisty career began as a philosophy professor for six years, and then took a sharp turn when his many years as a freelance journalist and humor writer led him to a job in a high tech start-up as a marketing writer. That put him in a position to observe and participate in the early rise of the World Wide Web. He went on to become a Marketing VP and strategic marketing consultant to companies working at the heart of the Net revolution, including in early online search and very early social networking.

In 1999 he was a co-author of a seminal work in Internet business and marketing, "The Cluetrain Manifesto." He followed this with 2002's "Small Pieces Loosely Joined" that explained the appeal of the Web as a more faithful expression of human existence.

In 2004, he became a Fellow at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center, and then a senior researcher and founding member of the Fellows Advisory Board; he remains closely affiliated with the Center.

In 2007 he wrote "Everything Is Miscellaneous" about how the digital world is profoundly changing our ideas about how we organize our things and world. This led to becoming co-director of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab where for almost five years he led a team of developers creating groundbreaking, open library tech.

For 4.5 years, he co-directed the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, helping to establish Harvard as a leading innovator in that field.

He has twice been a writer-in-residence at Google, working with AI teams to explore and explain the impact of machine learning, co-creating a 9-part podcast walking through the development of a machine learning application, and writing brief fiction to illustrate the complexity of the moral problems facing AI.

He was a Franklin Fellow at the U.S. State Department 2009-2011, working with the e-Diplomacy group on social networking software. In 2015 he was a Harvard Shorenstein journalism fellow where he documented the use of open platforms by news media.

2012's "Too Big to Know" explored how the movement of knowledge onto the Web is resulting in knowledge taking on the properties of networks, escaping the limitations of paper bound into books.

His most recent book, the award-winning "Everyday Chaos" (HBR, 2019), presents a unique perspective on the rise and importance of machine learning.

His work has been published many times in Wired and Harvard Business Review, as well as in Scientific American, The NY Times, Washington Post, and many, many more. He has given hundreds of keynote speeches around the world, including recently on what ethics can learn from AI and the shift in our most ancient strategies for thriving as citizens and businesspeople.

David has a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Toronto, and was given an honorary doctorate of letters from Simmons College.