Gideon Lichfield has 30 years experience as a journalist, including stints at The Economist, as a science writer and correspondent in Mexico City, Moscow, and Jerusalem; at Quartz, as one of the founding editors; and at MIT Technology Review and WIRED, as editor-in-chief.

Today he works primarily in the field of democracy innovation as a journalist, convener, and consultant to foundations, media organizations, and nonprofits, and is a 2025-27 fellow at Harvard’s Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation. Gideon is an avid proponent of speculative fiction as a way to inspire radical thinking about possible futures: he edited an anthology of post-pandemic fiction for MIT Press and is a co-lead of the Protopian Prize, a fiction contest on democracy and AI futures. He is also a co-founder of BlueDot Media, a brand publishing studio for frontier technology and finance firms. He writes — sporadically — on democracy innovation at his Substack, Futurepolis.