Ben Hammersley FRSA FRGS

Hello. Thank you for being curious. Usually in this sort of opening paragraph, one would use a lot of ten dollar words to signify the awesomeness of the subject. A lot of Vice President Of this, and Chief Executive that, or it would portray a steady upward trajectory in a well established and well understood career path. This is not that. My CV is below, and should you skim it you will notice that my career combines three interconnected subjects - journalist, technologist, and strategic foresight. It’s this combination of the three that comes together to allow me to do the work I do today. As a futurist, paid as I am to live in the future and come back to tell you all about it, I believe this sort of multidisciplinary career is the only way to do this properly. But then I would say that, wouldn’t I?

In 1998 I was the first reporter for The Times to be dedicated to covering the internet. Right at the start of the dotcom boom, I realised that to be successful in my role of explainer of that technology and the radical changes it was even then bringing about, I would also have to be a high level practitioner of it. So I added coding and technical skills to my journalism, principally in web technologies, like RSS (I wrote two books on this), and web publishing (another book on this), and the semantic web - the precursor to work I do today with AI and tools for thinking. To journalist, add technologist.

Incidentally, the RSS data standard I wrote two books on provides the underlying technology that enables podcasting. And the word “Podcast” is generally considered to have been invented by me in an article for The Guardian in February 2004. A year later and it was declared Word of the Year by the New Oxford American Dictionary.

The journalism never went away: from writing then for the Guardian, and other newspapers and magazines, through to being the Associate Editor, and later Editor-at-Large, at the launch of the UK edition of WIRED magazine. In 2015 I presented the six-part BBC World News tv series “Cybercrime with Ben Hammersley”, and I have many years of making radio programmes for BBC Radio 4: including the 5-part series Futureproof Yourself, and investigations into online privacy, personal genetic testing, and the canon of fictional universes.

But back in 2007, I was the reporter who pioneered multi-platform reporting for the BBC. It was an experiment that saw me file for TV, radio, and the web as I covered the election in Turkey. No had previously done all of this, and far from being the enthusiasm of the young, this multiplatform journalism was based on missions I had undertaken to Afghanistan for The Guardian. There I used cutting edge video cameras and satellite phones to deliver words and video from the Forward Operating Bases and combat areas of war-torn country. Beginning in Kabul, and then reporting from Naray in the East, and Helmand in the West, I was able to use the systems that I had built in the years before, when I acted as the secret skunkworks developer for the Guardian’s online department, building their pioneering range of blogs, including the award winning Comment is Free.

My foreign news reporting, which lead from Afghanistan to Beirut, Mindanao to Tokyo, was mainly conflict based, and lead to observations that brought me to the third arena: national security and strategic foresight. Drawing connections between the innovation cultures and practices of Silicon Valley with those of non-state actors and terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda and Hezbollah, I was able to show government and military audiences new ways of considering the world and the threats within it. This lead to work for the UK Foreign Office, the European Commission, parts of the US government, and then more than 10 years of advising corporations, and individuals, on the nature of the changing world.

At an impressionable age I read a phrase about the features pages of the classic magazines of the 1960s. Working in long-form journalism for those titles was described as being a job that made “A Man of Letters Into A Man Of Action” - and that planted a seed. Today I am also a pilot, a licensed EMT and Wilderness Medic, a triathlete and ultra-runner, a diver, photographer, and disaster response volunteer. All of these activities feed into my work: from crew resource management to the psychology of extreme environments, everything adds value to the advice I can give to my clients. Not to mention some excellent stories.

This background, and my ability to work as a translation layer between different fields, different generations, and different cultures - and to highlight the interconnections of technological change with political, economic, strategic, social, and cultural change - is what drives my work today.

CV

• Principal, Hammersley Futures, Brooklyn, USA

• Academic Fellow, European Policy Center, Brussels, Belgium

• Editorial Board, Intelligence Squared, London, UK

• Advisor, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, Portugal

• Associate, Imperial War Museum Institute

• American Red Cross Disaster Action Team

• Fellow, United Nations Alliance of Civilisations

• Fellow, Royal Society of Arts

• Fellow, Royal Geographical Society

• Fellow, British American Project

• Fellow of the Transatlantic Network 2020

• Fellow of the Council for the United States and Italy, Young Leaders’ Programme

• Member, International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences

• Member, Courvoisier Future 500

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