Will partner with INCITE under new leadership and mission, with continued focus on critical commentary on the role of tech.
In partnership with INCITE, the technology magazine Logic will re-launch in January 2023 as Logic(s), and will transfer leadership to longtime staff member Xiaowei Wang and Director of “We Be Imagining,” J. Khadijah Abdurahman. Wang and Abdurahman expect to produce three issues of the magazine annually, taking it in creative and urgent new directions.
“This will mark the beginning of the first Black and Asian queer tech magazine in existence,” said Abdurahman. “Black, Asian, and queer are not only descriptors of our individual identities but also mark the kind of theoretical and political approaches we hope to infuse the magazine with.”
Logic initially launched following the 2016 US election cycle. Since then, it has released 16 issues and published multiple books, providing a much-needed platform for critical and nuanced longform reflection on technology.
“Our aspiration when we started Logic was to deepen the conversation around technology. We wanted to intervene in a genre that, at the time, was far too deferential to the industry, and often deeply incurious about how 'tech' actually worked," said Ben Tarnoff, one of the magazine’s co-founders along with Moira Weigel. “Five years later, I'm proud to say that we've played a role in making tech criticism less foolish. But magazines inevitably need to evolve past the moment that produced them in order to remain of use. Abdurahman and Wang are the ideal people to lead Logic into its next phase by finding new ways for the magazine to serve the organizers, scholars, artists, and workers who are working to remake technology from below."
Logic(s) will retain the core commitments of the magazine’s founding while laying the groundwork to radically shift both the tech journalism genre and dominant publishing models. The recently published Beacons edition (edited by Abdurahman) was a pilot for what this transition will look like, including a commitment to an interdisciplinary mode which places poetry, visual art, and sci-fi on the same axis as the longform essay. Logic(s) will seek to elevate work that draws on the conceptual frameworks of impoverished and marginalized people; commission stories about the public sector adoption of automated decision-making systems like Medicaid eligibility determination or coordinated housing entry for child welfare; and increase the magazine’s engagement on international issues.
“We already have several stories and themes in mind to address, from Facebook’s installation of submarine cables in Djibouti, to shifts in how mail and other services are delivered by US carceral institutions, to queer organizing for mesh networks in Appalachia,” said Wang. “In the process, we will continue to deepen and broaden the invitation to fields traditionally outside of tech discourse that have a set of methods and tools to think through the social implications of digital technologies and data collections.”
Abdurahman and Wang will serve respectively as Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor of the magazine and will be supported by an editorial or related board of advisors. INCITE has committed to providing administrative and other forms of support for the next three years, to help Logic(s) establish a stable foundation and sustainable path for the future. The project will also receive financial support from UCLA’s Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2I2) and the Omidyar Foundation. Prior to the transition, Khadijah and Xiaowei will work closely with the magazine’s existing staff to prepare to take on the duties of day-to-day production and distribution in the new year.
The new team will build upon the foundational infrastructure and editing that has been a labor of love by a network of people over the past six years, including Aliyah Blackmore, Alex Blasdel, Sarah Burke, Jim Fingal, Jen Kagan, Christa Hartsock, Celine Nguyen, Ben Tarnoff, Max Read, Moira Weigel, and many others.
