Aspen is a place for leaders to lift their sights above the possessions which possess them. To confront their own nature as human beings, to regain control over their own humanity by becoming more self-aware, more self-correcting, and hence more self-fulfilling.

Walter P. Paepcke, Aspen Institute Co-Founder

William Powers

Author, Journalist and Technologist, Socrates Program

William Powers has moderated Aspen seminars in the U.S. and many other countries. A former journalist and Washington Post staff writer, he wrote Hamlet’s BlackBerry (Harper Collins, 2010), a critique of the digital revolution’s wide-ranging impacts on humanity. Inspired by research he conducted as a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, the book was a New York Times bestseller and translated into many languages. It took him to the MIT Media Lab where he spent five years as a research scientist developing technological tools to help build better societies. More recently he has led a nonprofit tech startup and was a Visiting Scholar for Humanistic Technologies at the Max Planck Center for Humans and Machines in Berlin. He lives in Massachusetts.