Victor Keegan: 'They gave me a demo and showed me things I couldn't believe'

The industry thrives on its futuristic image, worships boy-CEOs and renders the past obsolete at a frightening pace. Even in the eight years I've sat on the Guardian's technology desk, the field I cover is frequently unrecognisable from what it was when I started – a world where self-driving cars were just around the corner, where virtual reality was an impressive technology that had failed to catch on with normal people, and where the world was starting to tire of the like-clockwork appearance of a new iPhone every 12 months. Well, fine, but some things really have changed in that time. Just before I started at the paper, the Guardian broke the news that the NSA had been spying on Americans – and the rest of the world – through the tech sector, with more revelations to come thanks to the whistleblowing efforts of Edward Snowden. It was the first sign that the lustre had started to come off the sector, an inkling of what was to follow a few years later as the "techlash" saw first Facebook, then the rest of the industry, fall from grace.