About Me - My Biography

In His Own Words

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, Newsweek 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 theory, politics and political economy at the University of Oxford. In 1999, I exited academic life to work as an analyst of global social, political, business and technological trends (or ‘futurologist’) at the think-tank The Intelligence Factory (then part of Young and Rubicam) in New York.

Since 1998, I’ve also 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.