John Markoff

John Markoff (born 1949) is an American journalist and author whose work has traced the development of computing, the Internet, cybersecurity, robotics, and artificial intelligence. He is particularly associated with long-form reporting that places technical change in social and economic context.

Markoff joined The New York Times in 1988 as its national computer writer and worked from the paper’s San Francisco bureau from 1992 until 2017. Before that, he reported for Pacific News Service, InfoWorld, Byte magazine, and the San Francisco Examiner. His books have examined hacker culture, the links between 1960s counterculture and personal computing, and competing ideas about whether intelligent systems should replace or augment people. In Machines of Loving Grace, he considers the human choices embedded in robotics and AI.

His later book Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (2022) is a biography of the Whole Earth Catalog founder that connects Brand’s life with the histories of environmentalism, counterculture, and computing. Markoff received the Gerald Loeb Award with fellow New York Times reporters in 2005 and was named a Fellow of the Society of Professional Journalists in 2007, that organization’s highest honor. His official biography also credits him with a 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting as part of a New York Times project; the Pulitzer’s own winner page credits the prize to The New York Times staff.