Meet... the editor

Hello. I'm Anthony Hildebrand, and I'm the editor of Connected, Concept Smoke Screen's new online publication which explores the changing face of security in a truly connected world. It's an email newsletter! It's some pages on a website! It's a whole vibe, man.

But who am I, really, and why the hell should you care? I don't have the right answer to either of those questions, but I can show you some working out.

The basics: I am an Australian man in his mid-40s who has lived in the UK since 2001. My background is journalism - local newspapers and trade mags and websites, including covering the exotic world of international aquaculture for a couple of years. In 2004, I started working as an assistant editor on Security Installer magazine in London. I also worked for Security Management Today, and was the editor of info4security.com, the website which eventually morphed into IFSEC Global.

Since 2012 I have worked as a writer and PR/communications consultant for a variety of tech company clients in security and other sectors. I write articles and case studies and press releases and video scripts and white papers and I proofread posters and PDFs and PowerPoint presentations. I was the ghost writer of a book for a software CEO. I chop treatises into tiny chunks for tweeting.

I moved out of London and now work from home in Warwick, which came in handy when Covid arrived. I have a six-year-old son and a three-year-old daughter and a brilliant wife (who is an artist - check out her new project here: www.emergeportrait.co.uk).

Outside of work, I write (a novel has been written and is being re-drafted for a publisher and taking way too long), I make unholy noise music using feedback and effects pedals (here, for the brave: hanthonyhildebrand.bandcamp.com), and I watch a lot of cricket.

The thing is, though I'm a generally happy person, I've long felt a bit... dissatisfied. This predates the whole pandemic situation. Don't get me wrong: I have an amazing family; I enjoy my job and I'm relatively privileged in a lot of ways. But some creative and financial frustrations have helped amplify a general feeling of oppressive helplessness in the face of environmental gloom, political meanness and idiocy, and an atmosphere of accelerated anger and wilful lack of empathy fuelled by the cruel context-free magnification of hyperspeed online communications.

I think I've been looking for a vehicle which allows me to do something decent and helpful - whilst having a fairly limited practical skill set of my own.

So when Matt and Shayne from Concept came calling, asking if I'd like to work together with them on Connected, I jumped at the opportunity. It turned out we had strikingly similar outlooks - a feeling that despite the aforementioned easy, instinctively negative reaction to the state of the world, it's actually incumbent on us to strive to make our society and our physical environment a better place, no matter how cheesy that sounds.

So: Connected starts from the premise that we're all, y'know, connected. And because we're connected, and because we work in the security business, we should look at ways we can encourage the security business to do the most good for the most people, for now and for the future.

And yeah, that might sound a bit cheesy. But sometimes being cheesy is the best option.