Last Thursday, like millions of Americans, I sat down to a tasty Thanksgiving spread with my Californian family in Palo Alto, at which we also celebrated my feisty mother’s 90th birthday. It fell on the same day this year and, delightfully, mandated that champagne accompany the turkey.
For me, a personal anniversary coincided with those festivities on November 28th. On that date in 1998, my first Net Results column appeared in these pages. Now, 27 years and seven days later, after writing close to 1,500 columns, this will be my final one.
I couldn’t have asked for a more fascinating and rewarding journalistic job, and have been uncommonly fortunate in writing at near total liberty for almost three decades, with few constraints beyond dodging a libel suit. My various editors never asked me to oversimplify, limit the depth or breadth of topics or avoid strong opinions, industry or political criticism, or controversy.
I was an accidental columnist, having been nudged by some Irish Times colleagues in 1998 to propose a technology column for the newly-expanding business pages. I was full of doubts about doing so, even if I was one of the few people in the paper writing about an area that, until then, had been mostly confined to the weekly, hobbyist-oriented Computimes computing page.
But now, businesses and consumers were benefiting from the rocket fuel of Moore’s Law, the observation by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors that can be packed on to a computer chip doubles approximately every two years, leading to significant expansion in computing power at lower cost over time.
More powerful, ever-cheaper microchips meant the public could access a level of computing muscle once limited to university research departments, government agencies and well-funded industries such as banking and insurance. This would prove transformative economically and culturally in ways we are still reckoning with and, often, don’t and perhaps can’t fully understand (think AI).
In addition, I could see that something truly extraordinary was unfolding in Ireland, a country I’d come to from California in the mid-1980s for a one-year graduate course. I’d arrived during a decade in which an economically struggling Republic languished in the bottom quadrant of EU nations. Infrastructure was poor. Unemployment and emigration were high. Multinationals were known for taking development money, setting up shop (generally, low-end manufacturing), then bailing out. And in the background swirled the sinister undercurrent of the Troubles. The Celtic Tiger had not so much as begun to miaow.
That one-year course became a PhD over a period of years over which I was sometimes in Ireland and sometimes in San Francisco, with front-seat tech exposure thanks to friends and family. By the early 1990s, in Silicon Valley a major tech boom was under way.
And by the time I was back in Ireland a few years later, post-PhD and doing what I regarded as a “stopgap” freelance journalism job, I’d noticed that Ireland was beginning to feel more than a bit like the place I’d grown up in and just returned from: Silicon Valley.
Still, I wasn’t (yet) looking at that bigger picture. I thought the column should be about “The Internet and Your Business”, its slogan for a few years. I had only vague notions about what that might, in practice, mean. The inaugural column had the headline: “Surfing with confidence takes time”, and the subheading read: “Business people can access most major ‘paper’ publications online and get up-to-date financial news”. That’s how new this whole net thing was back then.
As it turned out, the column expanded swiftly beyond “the internet and your business”. The stopgap job became an exciting, constantly shifting career I adored, covering and offering views on a most extraordinary period of technological growth and expansion – particularly, in unique and astonishing ways, in Ireland.
And as has become increasingly evident, the technology sector has its problems, and creates many of great magnitude for the rest of us. Alongside its many benefits have come new and insidious threats, damages and dangers.
In particular, I’ve been shocked, if not surprised, by the stealthy growth of normalised, granular population surveillance which is based on the personal data gathered constantly from us in practically everything we do online. Despite three decades of covering security, data and privacy issues and an abiding interest in technology’s cultural impacts, I never imagined some of the dystopian norms we’d reach by 2024.
The work that has mattered most to me has been explaining and exposing this alarming, ongoing privacy and data overreach by governments and businesses.
It’s always been a challenge to write about because the whole, complex data intake and monetising system is nearly invisible and can seem innocuous. But as I hope I’ve helped people to understand, such pervasive data exploitation, and the algorithmic sleights of hand that power it, pose serious threats to individuals, organisations and societies. And, as some recent national elections have shown, to democracy itself.
As I log off, my biggest thanks go to you, my readers. Without an engaged audience, a columnist has little reason to write. You’ve been my own rocket fuel, and given meaning to what I do. I’ve been privileged and honoured to address you in Net Results.
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