Tech critic. Independent industry analyst. Interdisciplinary researcher. Radical futurist. Cassandra. Heretic. Wordsmith. Collective noun collector. List maker. Vivid dreamer. Emoji glitchcaster. Tarot reader. Glaze alchemist. Mage of the moss. Karaoke queen. Cheeseboard curator. Mutt mom. Auntie.

Sara M. Watson is a technology critic and industry analyst. Her work aims to offer embodied, practical, and accessible tools and framings for examining our relationship to technologies, culture, and power. Her intersectional career covering data, privacy, and tech policy bridges industry, policy, and academia. She is co-founder, lead curator and editorial director of A People’s History of Tech.

She has been a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University where her work on personal data and privacy raised awareness of data’s role in the digital economy. She was recently appointed as a Siegel Research Fellow with All Tech Is Human where provided strategic growth and community data management support to map the growing responsible technology ecosystem. As a fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, her research on the media’s evolving coverage of technology advocated for more constructive technology criticism. Sara has also covered emerging tech trends for enterprise technology leaders as a principal industry analyst at Forrester, Insider Intelligence, and the Gartner Research Board.

Her writing appears in The Atlantic, Wired, The Washington Post, Slate, Motherboard, and other publications, and her work has been covered in the Financial Times and The New Yorker. She presents at technology conferences around the globe.

She holds an MSc in the Social Science of the Internet with distinction from the Oxford Internet Institute and graduated from Harvard College magna cum laude with a joint degree in English and American literature and film studies. She spent much of the last decade living in Singapore and China and now splits her time between New York City and midcoast Maine.