Cards on the table

Pinned to a corkboard in our editorial office is a press release, which was transmitted by a successor of the machine originally invented by Alexander Bain in the 1840s. It is there to remind us of how things used to be, when we had no internet – and there were only a few very basic websites around anyway. This is what things were like when I was starting my adventure with journalism. The editorial office of one journal employed interns to regularly cover the new online businesses. As time went by I noticed they were being treated more and more seriously, and the one column per issue changed into a whole page – and that eventually even turned into a few pages. It was all going so well until, well, it... died. 2001 turned out to be the end of this odyssey, as the dot.com bubble burst. Someone recently told me that City of London investors are happy about the Brexit because the UK real estate bubble was getting too big anyway. The first few consequences of it, in the form of