Charles Arthur

Charles Arthur has been a science and technology writer for over thirty years. He was Technology Editor of the Guardian from 2005-2014 and Technology Correspondent (then Editor) at the Independent for the nine years before that.

In his journalistic career he covered all the major technological events since the explosion of internet usage and the dot.com bust, including the rise of the smartphone, Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Google, the impact of Wikileaks, and the pursuit of the hacking group LulzSec. Charles produced world scoops on the failure of Amazon’s attempt to break into the smartphone business with its Fire Phone and BlackBerry’s huge unsold stock of its PlayBook tablet – discovering both by connecting separate pieces of public data.

He is now a freelance journalist, contributing to the Guardian and other publications. He is a regular speaker and moderator at conferences such as Web Summit in Lisbon ('the most important tech event in the world'), and other security and hacking conferences across Europe. In 2018 he was a visiting fellow at Cambridge University’s ‘Technology and Democracy’ project, carrying out research into how time spent on-line affected people and polarised their opinions. His book on the subject, Social Warming, is published by Oneworld.

Agent: Doug Young