I'm a writer and social forecaster. I write regularly for The Financial Times and The Guardian, and have also written for the London Review of Books and The Economist. I also write books. Niche, my latest, is published by Little, Brown in the UK. Before that I wrote Cyburbia, and before that there was a book called Big Ideas, based on a weekly column I wrote for The Guardian newspaper in the UK.
I was born in Belfast and educated at St. Malachy's College Belfast, King's College London and Hertford College Oxford. Between 1996 and 1999 I taught and lectured in social and political theory at the University of Oxford. In 1999, I exited academic life to work as an analyst of global business, social, political and technological trends (or 'futurologist') at the think-tank The Intelligence Factory (then part of Young and Rubicam) in New York. Between 1999 and 2004 I worked full-time as a 'futurologist' for agencies in New York, London and in continental Europe. I also managed projects on changing social and technological trends as an associate of the London think-tank Demos, and authored a number of Demos pamphlets, including Mobilisation: The growing public interest in mobile technology, and Eternal Youths: How the baby boomers are having their time again. Since 1998 I'd been writing regularly on social, political and technological trends for British newspapers and magazines and in 2004 I became a writer for the Financial Times magazine. I've written essays, features and cover stories for the FT magazine, contributed to the comment pages on ideas and trends, interviewed everyone from Tom Friedman to Naomi Klein for the "Lunch with the FT slot" and reported for the FT from Beirut. Between September 2005 and October 2006, I wrote a column for The Guardian called BIG IDEA, and before that I wrote similar columns for The Times and the Financial Times.
I also talk. I've appeared on Newsnight, Channel 4 News and Sky News to talk about social and technological trends, and have lectured on political economy and social theory at Oxford University, the consequences of the internet at the LSE, and on the changing nature of film storytelling at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. I also talk for companies and organisations. I've delivered keynote addresses at the annual conferences of the Arts Marketing Association and Schroders Bank, for example, have led seminars at advertising agencies like McCann and participated in panel debates run by outfits like Editorial Intelligence. Between 2004 and 2009, in fact, I was on a part-time basis Director of Talks at the ICA in London. Speakers I invited to the ICA and hosted there included Malcolm Gladwell, Chris Anderson, Gerry Adams, Naomi Wolf, Boris Johnson, Antonio Negri, Amartya Sen, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Tariq Ramadan, and the late Anna Politovskaya.
Other stuff. I was the associate producer of Adam Curtis's most recent three-part series about game theory, The Trap: Whatever happened to our dream of freedom?, which aired on BBC2 in March 2007. In the same year, I took second prize in the annual Sean O'Faolain short story competition in Ireland. My Big Ideas book was originally published in 2008 by Atlantic Books, and has now been translated into Korean, Spanish and Polish. My second book Cyburbia was published in February 2009 by Little, Brown and by Knopf in Canada. In the same year my essay "Caught in the Net" was re-published in Yale University Press's annual Best of Technology Writing book for 2010. My new book Niche is published by Little, Brown in March 2011. I still work as a social forecaster, analysing and predicting trends at the intersection of technology, economy, culture and society for a new forecasting and strategic research agency called Flockwatching.
