On the matter of field notes

The Acta Diurna, one of the early predecessors of newspapers (one may argue perhaps even blogs) were Caesar's invention, and they were official, public, posted at dawn in the Forum for citizens to read. State proceedings. Announcements. The administrative record of a republic that was becoming an empire.

Among the things that actually survived better than the Acta Diurna, were the Commentarii de Bello Gallico. Field notes. Written from camp in Gaul, after the day's engagements, after the councils, after the decisions had been made and their consequences were already in motion. Caesar wrote about himself in the third person, which was either extraordinary discipline or extraordinary vanity, and probably both. He called them working notes. His enemies in Rome read them as propaganda. Both were correct.

I am going to use first person, and I am going to be honest about what I can and cannot claim.

These entries come from a career spent so far at the intersection of TMT, digital infrastructure, and capital: strategy work, commercial due diligence, market entry, growth advisory. Some of the events in this series is recent. Some of them happened twenty years ago and is written here with the benefit of knowing what actually happened next. The Pakistan entry (currently being edited) is dated 2013-2014. The "Distillation" piece is from early May 2026. This entry is dated 52 BC, which should tell you something about the tone.

The format will be -one hopes- consistent: a place, a period, an analytical question, and whatever the data and the experience actually support, no more, no less. Some entries are retrospective, written now from the distance of outcome. Others are current, drafted close to the events they describe. The weekly geopolitical notes will be more provisional. The archive/reference entries have the advantage of knowing how the story ended.

One recurring thread across the earlier work is the relationship between infrastructure and economic development, anchored specifically by the finding from Rohman and Bohlin's 2012 Chalmers University study that doubling actual broadband speed contributes roughly 0.3% GDP growth in OECD economies, and substantially more in emerging markets. I was applying that framework in Pakistan before the 4G auction. I used it before in Oman. It appears (hopefully) too in the CityFibre and UK altnet cases. Frameworks that travel across contexts are perhaps worth naming.

Caesar's Acta Diurna were posted at dawn. These notes will be written after dark, which is when the day's information has settled and the analysis becomes possible.

He called them Commentarii. So will I.