SEARCHING FOR TOMORROW

Watching Craig Fenton speak to the standing-room-only crowd at a recent UK Friends of the University of Auckland event in London, you might have thought a modern-day seer was in the room. These were top-flight Kiwi business people and professionals in the UK, but to them, Fenton was the man who could read the future. With a snappy, information-saturated address, he whipped up incredible dreams of what was to come, as well as the occasional dire warning.

In his role as Google UK’s director of strategy and operations, Fenton is not just the man with a window on the world to come; his employer also controls our present. Google accounts for 29% of the world’s digital advertising; it also decides what and who will be found when we search the internet. There wasn’t a person in that room whose working and personal life didn’t intersect with the company that Fenton was representing. When he finished, he was ringed by several layers of men and women, who probably all would have loved to pick his brains.

I meet Fenton again on a dark January evening in his Fulham home from where he has been working through much of the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s spacious and luxuriously decorated,