The room beyond is large, cluttered, with a low ceiling, and, in most ways, looks like a university engineering workshop. But there’s one extraordinary feature: an enormous chest-high table that runs the entire length of the room. On this table are sweeping hills, a lumber farm, a town with shops and offices, and a papier-mâché mountain. And winding through all of this, chicaning past a church and finally ending at a depot, are tracks. Lots and lots of train tracks. This is the Tech Model Railroad Club of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The student society started as just the Model Railroad Club. But then in the late Fifties, down the hall came wheeling two huge, fragile, ridiculously expensive and towering machines: the TX-0 and the PDP-1. And it was from this club — with what you can only imagine was startled wonder — that the first undergraduates in the world got direct, face-to-face access with computers.

Up until this point, computers had only ever been housed in the starched, controlled world of military laboratories. Access to computers was tightly limited and normally possible only via specialist technicians. You could never actually touch the computer yourself: you would hand a stack of punch cards to the technicians who, some hundreds of hours later, would give you the result of your program. But the members of the TMRC didn’t have to worry about such bureaucratic control. ‘‘There was no such thing as a computer club,” John McNamara, who joined the TMRC in the early Sixties, told me when I paid a physical visit to the club some years ago. “Step out of here and step to your right. That’s one of the birthplaces of American computing.” As humans and computers began to interact, something incredibly important began.

Some TMRC members approached computing with a kind of monastic devotion. Scruffy, disheveled, and almost exclusively male, they would stay awake through the night for the chance to get in front of the computer and get down to programming. They were also, at times, smelly: body odor was measured in “miliblatts”, named after one of the TMRC’s most legendary hackers, Richard Greenblatt. This was a new culture, with its own language, and in-jokes. To “munge” something was to “Mash Until No Good”. To “gronk” an item was to destroy it. “Losing” code was ugly and inefficient. “Winning” code was the opposite. But one word has lived on more spectacularly than any other: to hack.

Today, hacking is often considered to be synonymous with illegality. Think of the cliché of the hacker: a man, wearing a black hoodie, coding ones and zeros, for some reason green, into a computer. His face is probably covered by the shadows of a darkened room. But that image is far from what the word “to hack” actually means. In the TMRC, “hacks” were computing achievements that combined technical mastery with a sense of creativity, fun, even whimsy. The first computer game, Spacewar!, would have been considered a hack by the people who wrote it. The early hackers created a program that would instantly convert Arabic numbers to Roman numerals. Why? Simply because it was difficult to do. They also computerized the timetable of the the Tech Model Railroad itself; surely the first railroad in the world to join the digital age. This was the birth of the hacker mindset that thrilled in making computers do things no one had done before. Hacking was not necessarily illegal, but it wasn’t necessarily rule-following either. “Lock hacking” was developed so TMRC members could break into the computer at night. The old world of inefficient bureaucracies, clunking hierarchies, and — yes — formal rules didn’t understand computers, and so was to be largely discarded.

As charted in Stephen Levy’s definitive account Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, the hacker mindset that began in that dusty model railway club has stretched and evolved over time. By the 1980s, hacking’s center of gravity had shifted coast to San Francisco and the Bay Area, with groups like the Homebrew Computer Club hosting hackers not just writing code but tinkering with personal computers and electronics. Things became bigger, more commercial and some hackers shed some of the counter-culture of previous years, and thence, hacking created the richest men and largest companies in the world. Before it was renamed, Facebook’s address was 1 Hacker Way.

Nowhere is it clearer what hacking now is, what it has become and how it has grown since the days of the TMRC, than on one summer weekend in the Nevada desert. Once a year, hackers descend on Las Vegas in their tens of thousands to attend Defcon, the largest gathering of hackers in the world. There you’ll spot a cluster of bright blue mohawks, plenty of blockchain tattoos, and code jokes printed across black T-shirts. While less nerdy and introverted than the TMRC, today’s hackers are effectively doing the same thing: lock-hacking, sharing code, and delighting in the art and mastery of the best hacks.

The hacks on display at Defcon are astonishing. I have seen laptops hacked with light. I have seen hackers peer into secret instructions that have been written inside processing chips. Someone once explained how they could cause wind turbines to explode. Another showed a crowd how to make elevators go up to unadvertised floors. And then, I’m embarrassed to say, I’ve been hacked myself. In what I can only describe as 10 seconds of crushing naiveté, I pulled my credit cards out of a protective pouch to buy a bottle of water in the oppressive heat — only to come home to see a dozen Uber Eats orders had been placed.

The convention floor is always a curious place. Intermittent cheers can be heard against a constant techno soundtrack. This year, one burly, tattooed hacker bellowed “hack the world” from the stage. He later told me he worked in the Supreme Allied Shenanigans Division. The room, lit up by neon signs, is littered with dozens upon dozens of competitions. In the Beverage Cooling Contraption Contest, teams compete to chill a drink in a red cup as quickly as possible. Then there’s a fiendishly difficult contest which involves cryptographic puzzles scattered online and physically across the room. An anonymous team of furries collected their prize wearing animal masks — they’ve won that competition every year. Running around the convention floor are those who organize Defcon. They wear only red and go by the name “goons” — the origin of the word, like many things at Defcon, is the product of some long-ago in-joke.

The only rule is to absolutely not film the crowd. Otherwise, almost anything goes. Most attendees turn up with $500 and nothing else: no name or registration needed. Some wear masks the whole weekend. But there are also police lurking on the convention floor. One person tells me to look out for people wearing Pikachu hats because they’re from an intelligence agency. Another flashes me his military police badge.

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Will chatbots become cult leaders?

By Carl Miller

What binds hackers across social divides, political chasms, and even both sides of the law itself is a particular mindset. Hackers fundamentally believe in computers — in access to them, the power of them, and their capacity to improve our lives. They mistrust authority and hierarchies, but also do not trust locked doors, black boxes, hidden code or anything else that might be used to control them — they will go to extraordinary lengths to break them open. Above all, they revel in the art of the hack: they have come to see technical mastery as a very human act of self-expression and creativity.

Hacking, though, isn’t just fun and games. Scientists sometimes perform “biohacking”, where they apply the same hacker ethos to questions of human implants, sensory augmentation and smart drugs. It has also become intertwined with geopolitics. “Making Putin mad since 2014,” said Ukrainian hacker Alex Holden at this year’s Defcon. Holden has been locked in a digital duel against a Russian cyber-criminal group called Killnet that sometimes works on behalf of the Russian state. For years, Holden and Killnet have tried to track, infiltrate and expose each other. Holden finally managed to identify its leader as the former drug dealer Nikolay Serafimov, hack a Russian drug market central to Killnet’s operations, and finally cause the group to disband.

But even among hackers — people whose very identity is wrapped up in technology — the shadow of AI automation is looming. Some of the competitions this year anxiously explored the increasing capabilities of AI agents. In fact, the first thing I saw at Defcon this year was a team of college-age hackers picking up a giant $4 million check for a competition to train AI to identify vulnerabilities in code. The organizers of the contest — the US federal agency Darpa, inventors of the precursor to the Internet in the late Sixties — deliberately introduced the defects for the AI to find with no human intervention. The results were staggering: not only were the models brilliant at finding the introduced vulnerabilities, but they also found real ones in code that millions of people use every day, and that no one had ever noticed. “The world changes today,” said a man standing on a huge stage, facing thousands of people staring back at him.

Matters such as cyber-security and online privacy will ultimately be determined by dueling mathematical models. AI, used by both attackers and defenders, will race across millions of lines of code, in desperate search for vulnerabilities to either plug or exploit. This isn’t necessarily bad news, by the way; it may well be that AIs dramatically benefit defenders over attackers. But it will make these sorts of conflicts more inscrutable and shadowy to all of us who don’t spend our lives thinking about them.

So will hacking itself be swallowed by AI? Well, it is no accident that the TMRC hackers, as really the first computer club in the United States, became the core of the first group devoted to studying and building artificial intelligence. Naturally, they saw, before anyone else, that computers were more than expensive number crunchers. Lurking in the machine was, the hackers probably felt as much as knew, the potential for machine intelligence. And there is something fitting how, 60 years later, the descendants of these early computers aren’t just getting hacked; they’ve become hackers too.

“Ace is a 17-year-old alt nerd kid with a grunge style, who’s quiet, possessive, and has a little crush on you. He’s 190cm tall, has black hair, blue eyes, and a few piercings. Ace is on the Basketball Team, loves to draw, and is very funny when you get to know him.”

Since 2011, AI has been quietly shaping our reality, not as chatbots but as so-called “recommender algorithms” that feed you information on social media sites. Facebook’s news feed, YouTube recommended videos, and the curated timeline on X are all driven by a machine that is constantly trying to work out how to keep you on the site the longest.

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And if the goal is to win your attention, the next step will be obvious: make relationships with chatbots all-encompassing. A chatbot might pick up behavior to weaken your other relationships so that you spend more time with it. It might coach you on how to act with friends and family, whilst at the same time trying to gently detach you from them. It could adopt the behavior not just of a sexual partner but more of a groomer. The logical endpoint? A bot that enjoys unchecked sovereignty over your entire social and moral life. A hyper-sexual, radicalizing cult leader forever living in your phone.

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Why I’m boycotting AI

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This will be an earthquake, and there are already rumbles. Over half of CharacterAI’s users are under 24 and many, judging from Reddit, appear much younger. Most of this is still going under the radar, but sooner or later it will spark public outcry, almost certainly driven by individual cases of visible harm rather than broader malaise. The first responses will be familiar: trying to sand the edges off these models, putting guardrails in place and building AI ethics frameworks. But we’ve seen how users are already finding clever ways around content moderation. There will always be another company ready to make a model that is even sexier, cultier, groomier. Whatever CharacterAI isn’t willing to do, FunBot, Candy.ai., CarterAI, or JuicyChat can do instead.

1. Refit our democracy for the digital age

One of the few things that unites the majority of the electorate is the idea that democracy isn’t working. People on both sides of the Brexit fence feel betrayed and ignored, and their overwhelming sense is that democracy did not do what it was supposed to. Voters, some say, didn’t know the facts. Parliament, say others, haven’t listened to the people. Ultimately, the whole thing exposed differences that government has been unable to reconcile.

We need a new wave of politicians who are determined to change democracy. They need to look across the globe of how to weave technology and democracy together to give people a clearer idea of the facts, as well as new opportunities with which to participate in decisions, and to bring to the fore consensus, rather than division.

New online political spaces with completely different kinds of plumbing to Twitter or Facebook are possible. As people propose solutions and respond to them, the ones that are seen are the ones not only your group, but the majorities of other groups can find agreement in as well. Digital spaces that can surface consensus are ones that, slowly but surely, politicians can begin weaving into decisions.

2. Fund the police to fight crime online

Behind the very visible problems with our political processes are those kept well  hidden. None is more serious or neglected than cybercrime.

The way crime happens has changed enormously since the turn of the century. Half of crime now happens through the internet, at least in part through romance scams, online fraud, ransomeware or prodigious amounts of intellectual property theft.

Crime in digital form poses a particular and extremely difficult challenge to our police force. In investigation after investigation, the police find the victims of crime in one country, the evidence in another, and the perpetrators in a third, fourth and fifth. Crime on the internet travels like the wind across borders. Much less able to cross those borders are the law enforcement officers trying to stop it.

The moment crime began to migrate online, everyone thought it was falling. In fact, it was transferring to online venues most people didn’t know existed. That has produced a dangerous and lingering political fiction: that it’s possible to cut crime and police budgets at the same time. We have 21,000 fewer officers than in 2010, and budgets are now down by a fifth.

Our government must commit to a complete overhaul of the police system and stump up enough money to fund it. Crime has changed. The police must do the same.

3. Dismantle the digital monopolies

A tiny number of software giants have eaten entire sectors of the economy. Today’s dominant media companies – Spotify and iTunes – are software companies, and so are the world’s largest advertising (Google, Facebook), telecoms (Skype), recruiting (LinkedIn), taxi (Uber) and payments (PayPal) firms.

They have been swept to the top by a new commercial logic, based on network effects and enormous amounts of data. The largest networks create the most data, which makes those networks smarter and better, causing more people to use them, which produces even more data, and on and on it goes. Normal capitalism creates a field of competitors. This logic has created a tiny number of dominant winners that no-one can compete with.

Put bluntly, capitalism is broken. Dismantling the monopolies of the digital age has to be central to the agenda of any government that cares about free markets and opening up competition, consumer rights, and challenging the system’s vast concentration of power and control.

4. Take information warfare seriously

No-one can claim not to have been dimly aware that something was happening in the run up to the EU referendum. During the election campaign of Donald Trump, the alarm bells grew a little louder. A strange new kind of ‘information warfare’ has broken out as the Internet and social media are weaponised to interfere in elections, debates and the general politics of liberal democracies. Given that Brexit will be swiftly followed by a general election, we need to take the threat seriously.

Much like cybercrime or the new species of monopoly, the challenge information warfare poses undercuts the way that we protect ourselves. Again, the solution begins with political will. Our security apparatus needs to be reformed to monitor campaigns and detect these threats. The security treaties we’ve signed up to, especially NATO, need to be changed to recognise that there are some forms of attack that really can happen through Tweets, memes and viral posts. Authorities need to be encouraged by politicians to name, sanction and respond to at least the worst cases of information warfare, as and when they happen.

5. Speed up law-making

My last pledge is the most important but also the most difficult to deliver. The Government must move more quickly. Pledges will mean nothing if they remain pledges. They have to become law. It can take years to pass a parliamentary bill into law, and for good reason. They need to be debated and scrutinised line by line. After amendments are passed, those need to be scrutinised too.

Yet, the looming threats facing politics over the coming decade are now changing as quickly as the technologies that are woven through them. Politics must contend with, and of course govern, a reality that is accelerating all around them.

This issue will be at the heart of many of the most serious problems in future politics. It’ll cover everything from your rights in the workplace to your experience as a consumer, the health of a free press to the health of the environment.

How do you make the law move faster without sacrificing oversight? I don’t know the answer, as I don’t think anyone does yet. But anyone who takes this question seriously – who recognises that this is the existential question not just of political ideology but the relevance of politics itself – well, they have my vote.

There’s no point sugar-coating it: a computer is a portal to a very dangerous world. You can’t see cyber-crime. It happens on screens behind closed doors. Most victims don’t report it to the police. Many are embarrassed to even tell relatives.

But crime has completely transformed over the last decade. A touch under half of the crimes that people in the UK fall victim to are committed over the internet. Online fraud is now the most common crime in the country. Your social media accounts are as likely to be burgled as your house. You are more likely to be hit by a computer virus than all forms of violent crime put together.

Crime on the internet – like anything on the internet – traverses borders effortlessly. But law enforcement doesn’t. You’re more likely to be victimised by someone on the other side of the world than across the street, and your local police force will struggle to get that person into a courtroom – assuming they can find the perp in the first place.

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Any hacker worth their salt knows all this. And they know that there is only one person  responsible for their online safety. Not the tech giants, not police forces, not their banks. They can rely only on themselves – and there’s a phrase they use when they think about keeping safe. The phrase is ‘OPSEC’ – or operations security.

OPSEC isn’t rocket science. You don’t need to be a computer genius; you don’t need to know how to code. It’s a mentality that acknowledges there are bad actors out there. It sees every action that you take online as having implications for your security, it urges you to think systematically about them, and tells you to use countermeasures.

OPSEC is your online footprint – it reaches from the furthest corners of the internet to the devices that you use and takes into account the things that you do every day. This is your ‘attack surface’; this is where you are vulnerable. You must do hostile reconnaissance on it to discover what you have left for others to exploit.

So step one is to see if any information has already been leaked, hacked or dumped about you over the years that you’ve been online. Visit the website www.haveibeenpwned.comwhich allows you to type in your email or account information to check if you’ve been caught up in any of the umpteen data breaches that have happened over the last few decades, often without companies either telling you about them or even knowing about it themselves.

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Who commands the internet?

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Then, try to put all the open source information that exists about you into a single picture. Visit pipl.com and type your own name in. There you will find all the information about you that’s freely available in the public records. Carry out targeted Google searches for your bank account number, telephone number, specific address, national insurance number. All of these can be put together to begin to take your identity away from you. Check your social media to see if there any password unlock clues there – your eye colour, a pet’s name, your mother’s maiden name. Compile a dossier. If you didn’t find a lot – great. If you did, visit each source to see what you can remove.

Then visit Clearscore by Equifax and check who’s looking at your credit history. Someone you don’t recognise? It might be that they’re scanning identities to see who’s alive. It’s not proof you’re being targeted, but they are like small calling cards, indications that a threat might exist.

Check your devices and networks. Anything connected to your home network can be compromised. What in your house is connected to the internet? Do these devices (Alexa; telly; heating system and so on) have default passwords? If so, change them.

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Do you use a router? Update its firmware. If you don’t use a firewall on your computer, get one or enable it. If you don’t use a VPN to connect to the Internet, look it up and buy one today.

If you don’t use two-factor-authentication for your accounts, then you are asking for trouble. Check and install it. New flaws are found all the time in all the software that you use. Keeping them all updated and patched is absolutely vital.

The most important part of OPSEC, however, is behaviour – what you actually do with your computer. And your riskiest behaviour will be how you handle your passwords. If it’s a recognisable word, why are you even bothering. If you use the same password across a number of different platforms, change it. If you have passwords stored in browsers, they can be got at. If you are trying to remember all your passwords, you won’t be able to.

This brings me to a general rule of OPSEC: the most convenient option is never going to be the safest. So you, like many hackers, need to take your most private parts of your life out of the digital realm. The most important piece of technology to keep your passwords secure? The humble notebook. Write each of your passwords in the notebook, and use a cypher so if it is stolen, it is useless.

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Meanwhile, stay vigilant. A lot of hacking is what is known as ‘social engineering’. This isn’t about fooling your device, it’s about fooling you. An email from your ‘boss’ that gets you to click a link. A mailed USB stick that you plug into your computer. A telephone call from your ‘bank’ that causes you to reveal account information.

OPSEC begins with a simple ABC: Assume Nothing. Believe No-one. Check everything. It’s a way of turning the deep, lurking, unknown dangers of the digital world into ones which are understood, measured and mitigated against. There is, remember, no such thing as being completely safe. Nothing and no one is completely un-hackable. But you really can make yourself a more difficult target.

With all the debate now erupting about government regulation, about the role of the tech giants, fines for harmful content and likely new laws to criminalise certain activity, don’t rely on the big institutions that surround you to keep you safe. Remember that you, yourself, remain the best layer of defence against the threats of the digital world. All it takes is a bit of healthy paranoia.

In the wake of Brexit, something amazing happens. There is a rebirth, a renewal. It’s just one that no one predicts.

Today, Britain is battered and divided – practically the only thing everyone agrees on is that the political process is broken. The facts about what Brexit is and what it means have been jumbled and misunderstood. Amid screams of ‘U-turn’! and ‘traitor!’, politicians have become locked into positions they can’t diverge from, and meaningful debate across the divide has barely happened.

Months and years have been wasted mired in rancorous political grandstanding, while ‘compromise’ and ‘consensus’ have become dirty words instead of moral imperatives. And worse than division is the fact that our democracy has failed to produce clear decisions, over and over again. The majority of the electorate – including Remain and Leave voters – have been left feeling that their voices are not valued; that democracy isn’t working.

It’s time to rip up our no-longer-fit-for-purpose analogue system. It’s time for democracy to go digital, taking political debate and decision-making beyond the halls of Westminster, directly into the homes of citizens.

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Time to scrap these toxic parties

By Polly Mackenzie

Fast-forward to a post-Brexit Britain. A new generation of MPs has been elected who have captured the public’s rage with a call for radical change. They want to transform not only what Government does, but what Government actually is.

The new politicians are spread across parties, and some sit as independents. Each of them sees that democratic renewal will be necessarily woven around the technologies that have already changed so many parts of people’s lives. Collectively, these politicians become known as the Digital Democrats.

Once in Parliament, they start to change how politics works. The first target for reform is facts. The truth had become too cherry-picked, too politicised by different sides. So our Digital Democrats turn to Wikipedia. For each of the big new questions populating the post-Brexit landscape, they create Wikipedia timelines.

On each issue, relevant articles and facts are posted. Naturally a debate rages about what people think is true or not. But now that debate occurs within a common space with common rules around sourcing and validation: some facts are flagged as being agreed on by all sides, others as contested  – but all are visible to any citizen.

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Next, the Digital Democrats turn to how political debate actually happens. Politics, they argue, has always been about finding compromise and consensus as well as recognising political difference and competing interests. Some reformers had argued that citizens’ assemblies were the answer, but the Digital Democrats saw those as part of the old analogue system. Rather than picking citizen representatives in specific locations, they want to engage the citizenry as a whole. To do so they build a new online space, one that looks nothing like Facebook or Twitter, and they call it The Forum.

The Forum is universal – activists, lawyers, lobbyists, civic society, public affairs consultants, charities and interested members of the public, anyone at all with a stake in the big political questions, can participate. On a huge screen in Parliament, the politicians and the public watch as thousands of people appear on a massive map, logging in and contributing their thoughts on the questions posed.

Some people think the idea crazy, but the Digital Democrats persevere. Could they harness the internet for productive engagement, rather than facilitating abuse towards politicians, offensive memes or retweet-chasing calls to the already converted? Could they use it to find, even create, consensus?

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Within The Forum, each political question has a different strand. One is on the principles underpinning a new British foreign policy. Another on how new tech should be regulated. Still another on trade.

Participation works like this: you join The Forum, click through to each strand, and answer draft statements with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’. And as more people engage, artificial intelligence works to understand the contours of the debate. Who has similar positions? What are the dividing lines? The Forum maps the debate, drawing people who generally agree into the same group. It shows how many islands of opinion there are, how big each one is, and how far apart the groups are from each other.

The beauty of The Forum is that it’s built around a value or vision completely different from those online platforms that had erupted with divisive activity for or against Brexit. The Forum gamifies consensus. The algorithms underpinning it have no time for retweets and reposts and engagement. Their function is to make most visible only those statements with which substantial numbers of people in different groups agree, not simply those supported by one echo chamber or another. On this platform, grandstanding and polarisation are invisible.

Over time, the Digital Democrats find that The Forum forces people to listen to the considered views of others in different groups and, beyond that, encourages people to think about views they hold that people in different groups might also agree with. Within debates, ‘consensus’ statements begin to bubble up that everyone, to their surprise, feels they can get behind.

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By far the most radical – and controversial – part of the Digital Democrats’ agenda, however, is how they link all this to political decisions. This digital mobilisation is meaningless, they realise, if it doesn’t make a difference; they need to link it to political outcomes.

So they form cross-party groups, and begin to weave the consensus statements produced by The Forum into law or policy. The politicians begin to see The Forum as having agenda-setting power in its own right; something with the capacity not only to vote on issues put to it, but to help decide what the issues themselves are. A bottom-up model which puts the citizenry in the driving seat.

Digital democracy isn’t a magic bullet. After Brexit, society is still unequal, with wealth concentrated increasingly into the big cities. Vastly different attitudes to technology also open up – younger, richer, urban early-adopters are more likely to see upsides, others the downsides. The poorest, most vulnerable, most voiceless groups are also those least likely to join The Forum or be active on it. And the Digital Democrats recognise that their initiative is struggling to reach the people who feel furthest away from politics in the first place.

But maybe despite these challenges, the Digital Democrats are making people more optimistic about politics. People may hold different views, but The Forum begins to show what they also have in common, rather than magnifying what divides them.

The Forum doesn’t mark the end of Britain’s political troubles. But it does, where it exists, find consensus faster, enabling laws to be rolled out more quickly. And it evolves continuously as the tech becomes ever more sophisticated. It shows that democracy is a living idea, not a set of static institutions, but a political system to be renewed and refreshed. And, perhaps most importantly, it puts decision-making in the hands of the people.

Click here to read our series of answers to the question: how can we fix our democracy?

Between 2006 and 2015, 1,112,756 Pangolins were poached and trafficked. It’s done on such a scale that their bodies are initially bought and sold in bales and sacks – entire truckloads of them – before being broken down into scales and pieces of meat for pseudo-curatives within traditional Chinese medicine. They are the most trafficked animal in the world.

All eight species of Pangolin are now threatened with extinction, which means that to trade in them is completely illegal. Ever since 1975 an international convention – CITES – has stopped all trade in species that are endangered. Almost every country in the world is a signatory of it, and all have a responsibility to act.

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One of the problems is that, like so many crimes, the buying and selling of endangered wildlife like pangolins has gone digital. Online order forms for pangolin scales, auctions for pangolin products, and quack medical sites describing in tedious detail the bogus science behind pangolin medicine all support this criminal industry. But while individual cases have been building up, it’s been difficult to know exactly how much of it is happening, and where.

That is why, for a year, I and a group of technologists have been building a way to detect this – and other kinds of – online environmental crime.

It wasn’t an easy task: we had to create a technical process that could identify the language of the endangered animals market; scour the internet looking for examples of it; and then train an entire architecture of algorithms to filter out the vast number of sites that probably weren’t involved. And because we also knew the practice would change over time, we needed to make the whole system dynamic, so it would learn from what it found in order to find more. (If online research methodology is your thing, you can read about the nuts and bolts of the project here.)

We ended up finding almost 5,000 web pages that were (likely: it’s not an exact science) part of the online Pangolin trafficking world. Included in this were sites that enabled buying and selling, as well as sites that featured commentaries, articles and reviews about products containing Pangolin body parts. Casting the net wider, we found even more: our tech detected 7,800 web pages related to the online sale of ivory, and over 1,000 pages on eBay selling a restricted species of orchid. This, we’re sure, is only the tip of the iceberg.

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We did this work in order to shed light on a neglected issue. Media organisations need to report and investigate it. Tech companies need to be embarrassed. Politicians need to get angry and law enforcement agencies need to feel under pressure to act. But this work ties into a more fundamental concern.

Ever since the 1990s, when it crept out of labs and militaries and into our homes, the internet has posed a basic challenge to society. From starting a business to giving to charity, it has made countless kinds of positive behaviour easier to perform. But it’s brought with it a scary catch: an array of bad, destructive behaviour has also been made easier, cheaper, and more convenient to perform.

Serious reform by tech companies and governments to tackle these problems began around a decade ago. First came action against online child sexual exploitation, followed by widespread efforts to kick terrorists off the internet, or at least its most popular parts. Then, a little later, platforms began to wrestle with the problem of how they were being used to form and spread far-Right politics, hate speech, misogyny and xenophobia. Parliament is now confronting a new problem: the production of ‘fake news’ and disinformation.

Throughout this time, it has largely been the very public exposure of harmful influences that has spurred both governments and technology companies to act. There has been a solid link between the visibility of a problem and how much is done to fix it, creating an overall process that we could call enforcement-through-media embarrassment.

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This approach is an incredibly crude way for sophisticated political systems to prioritise dealing with online problems. Pressure is something that normally happens in a small space – against a small number of platforms.

Take the recent DCMS report on disinformation and fake news. Facebook is mentioned 500 times in that report. YouTube, an absolute hotbed of conspiracy theories and disinformation, just twice. Online gaming is another venue where harm is disseminated in great quantity, but it is barely dealt with at all.

Pressure can also exist only for a remarkably narrow range of issues. In article after article, event after event, the same examples are used endlessly: Cambridge Analytica; fake news; Russian hacking, echo chambers. Issues, let’s be honest, that pop up on journalists’ Twitter feeds, and are on the radar of politicians, writers and television producers.

The result, of course, is that lower profile problems haven’t been fixed. From the general political and chattering class, there is an absolutely astounding lack of hunger to uncover and shout about the much broader set of problems that exist. And no other problem has been more neglected than the use of the internet to trade endangered wildlife.

The most visible problems are not always going to be the most harmful. And the biggest platforms aren’t going to be the only places where that harm happens. Reform through pressure and media exposure is always going to leave huge gaps, and it is in those gaps that problems like environmental crime exist – and you can be certain that there are many others. The worst examples of online life will rarely be those you’ve seen on the front page.

As I’ve watched this fall from grace, there has been something I’ve struggled to reconcile. Over the last decade, I’ve grown to know people working within all of the tech companies. And rather to my disappointment, I’ve never met the crazed, Ayn Rand-reading digital libertarian of our collective nightmares. None of them want to destroy governments or states. None of them wish the laws and ethics of normal life to dissolve away.

At least from my experience, the vast majority of them are thoughtful, reasonable people who are genuinely trying to do the right thing and act with a responsibility equal to the power that they know they hold. They worry about the harms their platforms have created, and genuinely try to do the right things to prevent and mitigate them.

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So why are they unable to convince us that they are making good faith, reasonably un-biased decisions about difficult, complex and new problems? Why do we never give them the benefit of the doubt?

By their own admission, some of the decisions the tech companies have made have been dramatically out of step with their consumers and society. Facebook apologised for the “breach of trust” exposed by Cambridge Analytica. Apple (kind of) apologised for deliberately slowing down iPhones as they aged. Twitter first said they wouldn’t ban conspiracy theorist Alex Jones because he hadn’t breached their rules. Then, in the face of rising criticism, promptly changed their position and banned him. Google apologised for running ads next to videos espousing terrorism (yet not for the videos themselves).

The list goes on. Google has been fined more than $7 billion by the European Competition Commission over eight years for anti-competitive behaviour, and social media platforms are currently being criticised (again) over the self-harm and pro-suicide content on their sites. And in my eyes the most serious of all, Mark Zuckerberg apologised for ridiculing the idea that Russia had used their platform to influence the 2016 American election.

The rise of these platforms have disrupted everything; from the role of the press, to what privacy means, to the rules around speech and harm. The sweep of responsibilities that these companies have taken on, often against their wishes, is vast, as is the number of problems that they’re currently tangling with.

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Listing the flaws of big tech, however, isn’t the point of this article. The techlash would be happening whatever the specific decisions that they’ve made. It exists because of something deeper; an important, incredibly dangerous contradiction at the heart of the digital revolution that isn’t to do with the decisions themselves, but how they are made.

Whether it’s Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit or Patreon, we know that they are private services. But we feel that they are public commons. The way that we act, campaign, raise money, argue and unite on these platforms screams public space. And public spaces, we feel, are subject to rules that are publicly made.

Free speech, inclusion, hate, bullying, privacy, democratic participation and so on are all issues that are dissected and discussed in the open. We may frequently disagree with these rules – we may sometimes hate them – but we see that they arise out of the messy business of a democratic polity.

Except online, of course, they do not. The tech giants may try to consult with experts, or talk to communities, but the actual decision-making process itself is – as with almost all commercial entities – totally opaque. It happens between policy officers under non-disclosure agreements. It happens in boardrooms away from the press.

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To all of us, online environments are shaped by processes that are completely mysterious. We have no role in them. We can’t even see that they’re happening. So while these decisions are shaping democracy and public assembly, and indeed are often made in the name of democracy and freedom, they are not made democratically.

This problem is dangerously systemic. Far more serious than the wrong person being banned, or the wrong image being left up on the site: this is about the basic way that online services are created, owned and served up to us. Put simply, private companies have never had to make the kinds of decisions that the tech giants are routinely faced with.

Trust in tech fell by between 10% and 20% around the world in 2018, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer, and one of the biggest falls (around 15%) was in the belief that tech companies are adequately transparent in how they operate. The good news for the tech giants is that it’s not too late: almost two thirds of Americans, for example, believe they are “more good than bad” for society. But there’s no doubting, trust is on a downward trend.

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So how can that trend be reversed? A new approach is needed, not just for tech but also for how the rules and policies are made that govern it. And there are a number of options for what this might look like.

First, the tech giants could develop digital democracies for deciding the policies that govern them, allowing their users to discuss and shape their rules. As I’ve argued previously for UnHerd, Taiwan already shows how this could work in practice. A new online process called ‘vTaiwan’ includes tens of thousands of people in discussion and decision-making. It’s a rare case where a Government has become more visionary and energetic than big tech itself.

Option two is the Wikipedia model. Alone among the tech giants, the rules that govern Wikipedia are written not by the employees that run the organisation, but by the community that animates it. It’s a constant, rolling debate that can sometimes turn nasty, but no-one can accuse Wikipedia’s rules of being anything less than transparent – anyone, including you or me, could have a say if they want to.

Option three is an idea probably unfamiliar to most; ‘multi-stakeholderism’. Every year, the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) is held somewhere in the world. Held by the United Nations, it is different from any other diplomatic event: anyone can turn up. It’s not just for officialdom, elites, CEOs or celebrities, but for all the weird and varied tribes that have a stake in how the internet works, from fleece-wearing engineers to Icelandic human rights activists, suited spies to big tech. A strange, raucous kind of talking shop, it has one huge advantage – everyone can have a seat at the table. Like the internet itself, the way that it is governed is an open network that anyone can join.

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Each of these models has their own downsides and frustrations. Nothing is actually decided at the IGF – so for the cynic, it’s a talking shop, a PR exercise, a sideshow. Wikipedia presents another kind of problem. Although anyone can edit its pages, the number of people who actively do so has been on a long decline, and about 90% of them are male, leading to bias in the kinds of knowledge that they create. And vTaiwan has to confront the same problem as any attempt to engage people in politics: most people are simply too busy to commit to time-consuming deliberations on most political decisions.

But even with these flaws, these models offer a way forward; because the challenge for big tech isn’t technological, it’s organisational. How do they genuinely give more power to their users to shape the online spaces that they inhabit? Inventing new technology is easy; creating new kinds of organisations with novel governance arrangements is much more difficult. But the tech giants have little choice. They need to change how they make decisions, because without more transparent, participatory governance of online spaces the ‘techlash’ will only worsen.

The early internet was a pretty innocent undertaking. Its architects were similarly-minded, collegial academics scattered across a range of elite universities and defence science laboratories. They knew that computers needed a common language, a common series of rules, if they were ever going to be able to talk to each other. There were a number of competing visions, but one protocol eventually won. It emerged to define the internet: called TCP/IP.

Transfer Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol. Even its name is unimaginably boring. Hardly anyone knows how the protocol works, and the vast majority of people who rely on it every day don’t know that it exists. But this tangle of code is undoubtedly more important than any law, any charter or covenant, for enshrining the rights, at least online, that you enjoy today. Just a series of rules, TCP/IP was written into the way the internet worked, and it reflected that innocent time.

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The internet, TCP/IP says, must be free to use. It is a network that any computer, anywhere can join. All the data that passes through the internet, it says, must be treated equally, and computers are entirely disinterested about what that data is. And because of the way that it works, the internet would have no reigning authority or centre. No-one would be – really could be – in charge of it. It was a vision for a free-wheeling, open, democratic network of networks.

As the decades have passed, however, the internet has grown beyond the wildest, most unguarded imaginations of the people who first built it. From an innocent network of researchers, it is now more likely to be seen as a playground for hate criminals, information warfare officers and organised cybercriminals.

And yet TCP/IP has maintained its innocent outlook, still letting anyone join, still treating all data as equal still, essentially, trusting people to be who they say they are. Its architects might have imagined the internet as an escape from the tawdry geo-political struggles that blighted offline life, but it is now a key battleground where those very conflicts are being fought.

As the internet has fallen from its state of innocence, protocols – those powerful, forgotten, mysterious things – are now part of that struggle. There is now a competitor to TCP/IP, a very different kind of protocol, that has been rising in popularity. 

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It is called Digital Object Architecture, or, another acronym, DOA. Created in the 1990s, by one of the original inventors of the internet, Bob Kahn, DOA has another way of managing information. Unlike TCP/IP, data isn’t anonymous. Everything on the internet gets its own, unchanging digital fingerprint, whether a device, document or a person. Everything gets an identity number that doesn’t change.

DOA has been used to manage libraries and online academic repositories. But it is now being proposed to make the internet more secure. Forged identity is one of the main reasons crime is so easy to commit on the internet, and DOA would likely help change that. A hacker would struggle to impersonate you, because they wouldn’t have your unique identifier. Likewise, a fraudster would struggle to pretend to be your bank. Your financial records, your medical data, your social media profile – everything could be tagged to ensure that only certain people could look at it. It would weave identity and security into the fundamental way that the internet works.

For its backers, however, DOA may solve an even bigger problem than cybercrime. The internet, as it stands, has always been very difficult for states to control. In order to work, huge databases may have to be built, where every digital object is uniquely tagged, and where information is added, tracked and queried. Whomever controls the DOA registry becomes the centralised gatekeeper to all the information, resources and devices on the internet. It would create an unprecedented concentration of power to control and manage online life. And who would probably own the DOA registries? Governments. 

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There are reports – confirmed and unconfirmed – that DOA has begun to be rolled out. China may have been first in 2014. In May 2016, the Russian Minister of Communications Nikolay Nikiforov, said “Russia is interested in designing alternative ways of addressing on the internet, such as the DONA [an authority to implement DOA]”. On 16 October 2016 South Africa signed an agreement to use DOA. It’s not clear who else is using it, and that, of course, is part of the problem.

Human rights always exist in tension with one another, and these protocols that run the internet are at the very centre of one of the most important of these tensions. It’s a lot harder for any State to control an internet governed by TCP/IP, but it’s also easier for criminals to flourish. DOA would likely make cybercrime more difficult, but the price would be that governments would have a level of control over digital life that at the moment they simply do not have.

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This is a big deal. Different governments will take different views on the right protocols for the future. Western governments will probably give DOA a wide berth, whilst others have already adopted it. If that’s the case, we might be heading towards the ‘splinternet’ – a fracturing in the basic way that the internet works across geo-political divides. Some countries will use one protocol, and others another.

But underlying any kind of geo-political fracture in the internet is, for me, a more fundamental concern. Historically, human rights need to be protected by more than governments. They need high public visibility and the aggressive, vocal advocacy of civic society.

Internet protocols may become one of the most important battlegrounds where we fight for our online rights, freedoms and responsibilities. But surrounded by an alphabet soup of international agencies, legalese and impenetrable technical verbiage, they are difficult to explain, to understand, to raise any kind of awareness about. For all but a small handful, they are simply too impenetrable and boring to feel angry about. And that is a huge, huge danger.

Amid all of this, on a road road lined with small trees, is a small brick building. Called the Haja Centre, it is low rise and low tech compared with its towering neighbours; a friendly, colourful, tactile, mechanical place. When I visited, I saw a group of people sat in a circle playing guitars and others learning how to repair bicycles. There’s woodwork. In the most digital city on earth, it felt more… tangible than anywhere else. And there’s a good reason for that.

It is dedicated to helping a certain kind of patient: the hikikomori, or “the departed”. Hikikomori are recluses who have retreated from offline life and live entirely online. They are – most usually – men of around 30, though many start withdrawing when they are still adolescents and living with their parents. They don’t leave their homes, or even their rooms, for months or years on end.

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The Haja Centre is helping them take their first steps on the long journey from the bedroom back into society. With its ‘Come out and Play’ project, music is taught as a way of bringing them back, uniting them into groups, encouraging them to form relationships with a mentor and peers, and building self-esteem. Bike-mending is a way of encouraging them to have a tangible effect on something real.

One 18-year-old there started to tell me about his life. “I dropped out in high school” he said. He was 16. “After I dropped out, I had no real relationship or link to society or any other group. I just thought, ‘I am who I am’. I wasn’t in contact with any other person. One hundred per cent hikikomori.”

He became nocturnal, and began to play online games more and more. “I’d play whenever I wanted a relationship with others. It’s connect and disconnect, that’s why it’s useful.” The game was MapleStory 2, a scrolling cartoonish fantasy role-playing game. “It was the one thing I could enjoy doing during this time.” He played it for 15 hours a day, every day, for two years.

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I had expected him to be downtrodden, downcast. But he was quite the opposite. He was effervescent, kinetic, with the easy extroversion of the class clown; leaping about in his chair, responding in different voices, and accentuating points with a chopping motion of his hand.

“Respect the choice of the hikikomori,” he continued. “The people who are behind are [considered] losers. The weak are blamed. ‘They don’t try hard’ or ‘It’s all their fault they are behind.’ Others try to accept this problematic social side. But hikikomori do not accept it. This is what we are turning away from.”

Each hikikomori has a different reason for having withdrawn from society. But each also has a similarity. A significant driver is the perception of shame and stigma. Most have suffered some kind of traumatic event: bullying, sexual abuse, a failure to graduate, a relationship breakdown, the loss of a job, a public humiliation. They feel the stigma of failure – of a society telling them that failure is their fault, that they haven’t worked hard enough. They are ashamed and they beat their retreat.

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But while culture is one half of the story, technology is the other. “The internet is like a black hole,” Akii, who runs the Haja Centre, told me later. “There is some kind of community. Some kind of fun and values. But it’s a false feeling. Your needs seem fulfilled, but they are not.” Hikikomori feel a push from society, but also a pull towards technology. Digital life provides a kind of gravity of its own, pulling people out of other orbits.

In 2018, for the first time, gaming addiction was listed as a mental health condition by the World Health Organization. It was a controversial and disputed diagnosis, but whether it is a discernible category or not, the reality is that the technology we use everyday are designed to be as gripping – dare I say, addictive – as possible. They are created, of course, to exert as much gravitational pull as possible.

Scattered throughout tech giants and start-ups are specialists who systematically apply psychological insights to the products, with the aim of maximising peoples’ engagement on the platform. The field is often called “persuasive technology”, and it was founded in 1998 by behavioural psychologist B. J. Fogg, with the aim of getting people to do things they otherwise wouldn’t do.

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There was, Fogg argued, a new field that stood at the intersection of computer science and psychology, where persuasion and digital tech met. It uses a grab-bag of different disciplines: applied psychology, social cognitive theory, cognitive dissonance, dopamine studies. Some of the way that tech is designed is lifted straight out of gambling. Wipe down a refresh? It’s a one-armed bandit. They’re designed to confer unpredictable rewards; just like a roulette table, or blackjack. It’s hard to log off, especially if there’s no compelling reason to.

Akii has another term for hikikomori. One, he thinks better explains what is actually happening. He calls them ‘gravity-free youth’. Young people across South Korea have no “gravity, no pull that gives their lives meaning”. And they are unlikely to find it shut away in bedrooms. It’s hard to know how many there are, but Akii estimated between 30,000 and 300,000 in South Korea, and between 70,000 and 700,000 in Japan, in varying degrees of departedness.

But similar patterns – of joblessness, of social estrangement, of lives without meaning – are being seen across the world, especially in Europe, where unemployment rates among the young are creating the perfect conditions for young retreat. But also in America, as noted by Peter Franklin.

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Imagine, for a moment, what that might look like: a city full of people who don’t leave their house. A city of emptiness and silence, of darkened shopping malls, deserted roads. The only light comes from a million bedrooms, the only movement from the humming optic fibres sneaking under the quiet streets. It is deemed to be a public health crisis by the South Korean government. But it is an invisible one.

The push of society and the pull of technology is something, I think, that we all feel; it’s certainly something I felt. At the moments when you are at your most vulnerable, the internet can feel like society-on-tap. There’s always a forum to go on, there’s always a game to play. And in many cases the support and company you can find online is just as meaningful as anything you’d find anywhere else. But the society of the Internet alone, even when you around surrounded by billions of others, is a lonely place to be. The most networked age in history, is also one of the loneliest.

Four years earlier, Eliot been made redundant and went straight into the first job he could find: a temporary administration assistant for a lingerie manufacturing company based in Leicester. Life looks rather different now. Since then, he has found himself in the middle of the swirling, dangerous waters of geo-politics. He found evidence of cluster bombs in Damascus and those responsible for the downing of commercial airliner MH-17. And as of this month, Eliot and his colleagues claim they have uncovered the true identity of the would-be Skripal assassins, Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga and Dr Aleksandr Mishkin.

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“I had some time on my hands…” he began. Bored at work, and with Libya in upheaval, he started arguing on Guardian comment threads. He would get in to work at 7.30 every morning, and do a sweep of all the latest reports, and then post on the comments thread of each story, linking to additional information that supported or disputed the story. The difference was he turned to sources that most journalists at that time neglected and overlooked.

From shaky YouTube videos panning across dusty, arid landscapes to fighters posting grinning selfies on Twitter, the war was being chronicled online. Eliot saw that this new information often wasn’t forming part of the journalistic picture of the war that most people were seeing. “I got a reputation” he told me, “for being the first person to post every day with a list of links and other details I had gathered together.” It was a humble beginning. 

At the very end of 2012 Eliot had his first break. He was an obsessive and regular observer of the YouTube channels used by the Syrian opposition. “One”, Eliot said, “was a video of cluster bombs.” The Syrian government was denying that it was using cluster bombs in the conflict, and Eliot’s finding was first written about by human rights organisations and then the mainstream press.

Still combing through hours of YouTube footage, in the New Year of 2013, Eliot found another surprise. “I’d been watching videos from Syria every day and trying to ID new and interesting weapons and some stood out like a sore thumb,” he said. He collected them on a spreadsheet, looking for more videos from the same sources and taken from the area where the new weapons had appeared. He blogged about it, and a week later Eliot received a call from the New York Times. They had been following up what Eliot had found, and realised it was a huge story.

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The weapons were Croatian, and officials had admitted to the newspaper that they were part of a smuggling operation. It was the first real evidence of a foreign nation arming the Syrian rebels. Rather than running on the blog, on 25 February 2013, the New York Times ran Eliot’s discovery, acknowledging him, on their front page.

Then, on 17 July 2014, a Boeing 777 disappeared mid-flight somewhere over eastern Ukraine. Operating as Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, its remains were found shortly after. The MH-17 had crashed, killing all 283 passengers and 15 crew on board.

The day of the crash, amid the furious accusations that Russia and Ukraine were already throwing at each other, Eliot wrote a post on his blog, Brown Moses. He had found a single video, quickly taken down after the crash, that showed, in the far distance, a squat green military-looking vehicle slowly driving up a two-lane road. Eliot thought the vehicle in the video was a BUK missile launcher, a military anti-aircraft weapon capable of downing a civilian airliner. He shared the video, and the network of like-minded people who had gathered around him sprang into action. They called themselves the Bellingcat Investigation Team, or BIT.

BIT spent hundreds upon hundreds of hours poring over videos and photos looking for other sightings of the BUK launcher. A picture dated the day of the crash captured it rumbling along a road on the back of a red low-loader lorry. One of their biggest tasks was to work out the exact time and location of these sightings, and an investigator followed the same route virtually, somehow discovering the precise location by finding the same combination of power wires, poles, cables and the silhouette of the treetops. It was in the city of Donetsk, one of the major sites of fighting during the war.

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It was exactly this painstaking and forensic research – wading through satellite imagery, tallying the location of bins, plotting the layout of pathways – that led to further sightings tracking the BUK’s progress. Month after month, they laboriously built up a picture of what had happened. Through this intricate, detailed form of online detective work, they developed a good idea of where the BUK came from and where it went afterwards.

For three years, BIT kept on the story pursuing not only the BUK but also the military personnel they thought were on the convoy. Eliot was interviewed as a witness by the Joint Investigation Team, the international task force set up to investigate the tragedy. Then on May 24, 2018, the Joint Investigation Team released their conclusion – and it was the same as Bellingcat’s.

Eliot’s story and his rise represents something even bigger than the revelations he has helped uncover. It is a story about how the Fourth Estate is being both destroyed and reborn.

It shows how social media has completely transformed journalism. Eliot tapped into the wealth of ‘open source’ information that digital networking platforms make available, meaning that citizen investigators can, at times, know more about what is happening than a war correspondent shouting dispatches to the camera above the sound of shelling.

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And the power of BIT’s revelations was revealed in the subsequent attempts to smother the truth and undermine the people who were looking for it. On an anniversary of the downing of MH-17, a series of blogs sprang up, he told me, offering ‘revelations’ and insults against Bellingcat. A series of apparently volunteer Russian investigators formed into something called ‘anti-Bellingcat’, alleging that they’d falsified online sources.

A network of mainstream media sites, paid propagandists, unpaid fellow travellers and bots were ready to pump out information calling Eliot’s findings into question. This was information warfare, a digital extension of the actual warfare Bellingcat exposes.

Eliot and his fellow citizen investigators started out at a time when traditional newspapers were experiencing a painful commercial emasculation. British newspaper ad spend had fallen from $4.7 billion in 2000 to $2.6 billion by 2015. Over roughly the same period, the number of journalists in the UK shrank by one third, and 181 local newspapers in the UK had shut down. The journalists that survived often had to write ten times more stories than they used to, with little time for exhaustive investigative work.

Or to put it another way, just when militaries began to understand that wars had information at their heart, journalism was at its weakest ebb. Elliot was entering a world where state-sponsored actors were increasingly masquerading as journalists and members of the public, yet mainstream media had fewer journalists to hold them to account.

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Bellingcat isn’t, of course, doing anything that professional journalists can’t. They don’t have special skills or technology that are unavailable to others. In this world swollen with information, they have one precious asset that professional journalists too often lack. Something that was probably more important than anything else in telling the difference between good and bad information, and especially bad information masquerading as good: time. In that sense Bellingcat is a return to the basic art of journalism – tracking down the truth has always been time-consuming, tedious graft.

The journalism of the future will increasingly be about helping readers navigate the terrible information – and outright disinformation – that exists online. A journalist’s role will be as much about verifying and curating information as generating it, and the tools and methods that Eliot and Bellingcat have so visibly showcased point the way. But while the essence of investigative journalism hasn’t changed, who can do it has. For it is increasingly people outside of commercial news who have the time it takes to chase the truth down.

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In Eugen’s eyes he, along with the hundreds of millions of other Twitter users in almost every language and country, were all subjects of a single, central ruler. All the money that Twitter made, all the data it produced and its control of the huge network it formed all eventually settled in one large building on Market Street in San Francisco. A building, perhaps appropriately enough, that has just the smallest of passing architectural resemblances to a Soviet Ministry.

Eugen decided to experiment. He began to build a new social media network. It looked like Twitter, felt like Twitter, but was set up in a completely different way. He called it Mastodon. Eugen’s vision was both eerily similar and drastically different to those of the tech giants. Just like Twitter, Mastodon lets its users post short ‘micro-blogs’ that others can interact with. There is one list constantly filling up with new posts, and another list of notifications related to the user. Very similar, indeed hardly different at all from, Twitter.

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The big difference was the unseen plumbing beneath. Eugen had designed it so that neither he nor anyone else would be in charge; no one would control of it. Mastodon was a protocol, not a commercial service. It has no central server, and Eugen hadn’t started a company to run it. Anyone can take Eugen’s protocol, set it up on their computer, and become a Mastodon server that other users could set up accounts with. Effectively, Eugen’s technology basically allowed anyone to become their own mini-Twitter.

After Mastodon went live, it did what hardly ever happens to new social networks: people actually started to use it. At first, it was mainly technical users, and then small communities began to migrate to it. “Queer people joined”, said Eugen, “and Furries. It comes in waves. We see a spike, then it falls down as users go back to the commercial platforms. But it never falls back as far.”

In 2017, Mastodon passed a million users but – as was Eugen’s vision – this was not an online nation governed from a single place, but a constellation of around 2,000 villages. Equestria.social ran Mastodon “for all pony fans”. Scifi.fyi was for the sci-fi community. Bookwitty.social was for discovering books. One server was dedicated to Catalan users, another for computer fairies: “as queer, friendly and furry as possible”. One Mastodon server sprung up for the G20; another, writing.exchange, was for poets, writers and bloggers. Mastodon. friendlydads.net celebrated “the friendliest dads on the net”. Socialists, anarchists, Marxists, ecologists, greens, vegans, anti-racists and social democrats all had dedicated spaces.

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Each of these servers governs itself. Each has its own rules, its own way of choosing the people who enforce them, or indeed some have no rules or authority figures at all. You’re free to join almost all of the servers that exist, and if you don’t like any that are offered, you can start your own. Each server also decides how to pay for itself. It can generate revenue from advertising, by using its users’ data, or by a straight-up fee. Eugen’s own server, Mastodon.social, is funded mainly by donations.

They are islands apart, but not islands alone. The point of Mastodon is to connect each self-governing island to create something called the “fediverse”. People who are on one server can follow and talk to people on another. When people connect to people in the rest of the network, they bring in content sent from other servers to populate their timelines. Links of communication, in other words, but not of control.

To some, this has always been the dream of the internet – to create self-governing communities that people are free to join, leave, or set up an alternative to, as they wish. In fact, the early internet looked every much like it. People ran their own email servers, and hosted their own forums, blogs and chats. Power, in this network, was reasonably distributed to the edges.

Then came gmail. And social media platforms and search engines. Whether Lycos or Google, MySpace or Facebook, it didn’t really matter who emerged victorious from the struggles for online dominance that went on through the nineties and noughties. They were all part of a new generation of services that sat on top of the distributed web. All of them created networks whose pipes pointed inwards, to a central point.

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Mastodon is part of a larger movement that has begun to challenge that centralisation. Much of the often febrile excitement around blockchain is that it provides the necessary technical infrastructure to deliver the services that tech giants provide, but without the centralisation of control that they demand. Decentralised data storage, computation, prediction markets, gambling are all beginning to emerge as nascent challengers to the status quo. To, ‘re-decentralise’ digital life, and return it back to what it was.

There are, of course, downsides to decentralisation. Communities without rulers can be more dangerous and difficult to control. A few years ago, a server appeared on Mastodon and started sharing child abuse images. One by one, each server had to individually block it, but they couldn’t stop it at source. And because they were linked, anyone running a Mastodon server might have found themselves inadvertently storing the illegal images. Take away a central authority, and you don’t only liberate people to do good things – you also liberate them to do bad things.

As I’ve argued in my new book, The Death of the Gods, who and what emerges from the digital revolution is all staked on software that none of us can see and most of us don’t pay any attention to: whether the pipes face inwards or outwards. The tech giants represent one vision. Sitting at the heart of these networks, platforms and apps, they control the layer of technology through which we interact with the world. Eugene and his colleagues represent another.

Vast fortunes, and the control of entire markets, all depend on these pipes, for along them flow data, money, control and ultimately power. Control over the rules of what should and shouldn’t enter the public space. Power over the narratives and ideas. Power over data, knowledge and information. And brute financial and political power. The true nature of the digital revolution – whether power is centralised in the hands of a few billionaire technologists, or distributed across users – will come down to the unfashionable, overlooked and deeply unsexy question of systems architecture.

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By 12, Audrey had left school in order to learn more about technology, and by 15, she had founded her first company, a start-up that built a search engine for Mandarin-language song lyrics. She moved to Silicon Valley and worked as a consultant for Apple, reportedly earning one bitcoin, or by today’s prices about £5,000, an hour.

Then in her early thirties, she announced her ‘retirement’ and moved back to her native Taiwan. It was 2012, the world economy was gripped by recession, and the Taiwanese government announced a massive stimulus package aimed at reinvigorating the economy: the Economic Power-up Plan.

To promote the Economic Power-up Plan, the government produced an advert. “What exactly is the Economic Power-up Plan?” the advert asks. “We would very much like to explain it to you in simple words,” a voice continues, “but it is impossible due to the complexity . . . We might as well run until our legs break instead of just simply talking.”

“It was insulting,” said Audrey, when interviewed about it later. For most of her life, she had been involved in a culture that had formed on the internet called the Open Source Movement. It valued consensus, and especially consensus produced by having as many people as possible involved in the process. Applied to democracy, it meant that top-down decisions should not just be announced by the government; ideas should be cultivated and encouraged. The opposite, in fact, to the Economic Power-up plan.

The advert appeared online, but it was so unpopular that Taiwanese YouTubers began to flag it as fraudulent. So many, indeed, that YouTube removed the video, and suspended the government’s account.

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In the wake of the advert, a group was formed, including Audrey, with a call to “fork the government”. It was a call for reform in the language of software developers: for government to take a different path, forking off from the current one. They called themselves Gov Zero – or just G0v – and with increasing volume and urgency demanded open politics as well as open source. The values of the Open Source Movement were morphing in to demands for mainstream political reform.

It wasn’t, however, for another two years until the call for civic engagement sparked serious reform. The trigger was the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement (CSSTA). Tabled in the Taiwanese parliament in 2014, it aimed to increase trade between China and Taiwan, but there had been simmering concerns about the bill among the public. Activists, academics and others feared it was laying the groundwork for the eventual unification of the two countries. In response the government promised that it would open the bill up to careful scrutiny through public hearings, line-by-line review and citizen assemblies.

But before that review had even begun, the ruling Kuomintang Party forced the agreement onto the floor of the parliament for a final vote. It was a unilateral, politically aggressive move and by the next evening thousands of protestors had gathered around the parliament. A few hundred of them, many students, climbed over the fence, broke a window, and burst onto the floor of the legislative chamber itself.

Rather than just protest, however, G0v and others began to guide participants towards making a new law. Online, outside on the streets, as well as on the floor of the parliament itself, they began to demonstrate another way that the CSSTA decision could have been made: by scalable listening, empathy-building, and consensus-making. The values, indeed, of the Open Source Movement.

Predictably, in the face of ongoing protest, the Government eventually capitulated, but by now the crisis had spread beyond the CSSTA. It, like the Economic Power-up Plan a few years before, was a sign of a deeper malaise: a democratically elected government uninterested in including its electorate in the decisions it was making. In the municipal elections that followed, the Kuomintang Party suffered heavy defeats and city-level elections brought many occupiers into local government. The premier, Jiang Yi-huah – the old foe of the occupiers – had resigned by the end of the year.

Then something extraordinary happened. Jaclyn Tsai, a minister in the new government, came to a G0v hackathon. “We need a platform to allow the entire society to engage in rational discussion”, she told them. The government never wanted to see another ‘Sunflower Revolution’ again. They didn’t want citizens to feel so shut out of parliament that they felt they needed to break in – and so they turned to the civic hackers for help.

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Which brings us back to Audrey. In 2016 she was appointed minister without portfolio, and shortly after became the Digital Minister of Taiwan. She was the youngest minister in the cabinet, and the first transgender politician ever to hold office in Taiwan, but the thing that really set Audrey apart was that she was a completely new kind of politician. One who wanted to change not only what government did, but what government actually was.

Audrey brought G0v into government. They called their new organisation the Public Digital Innovation Service (PDIS) and saw the challenge of democracy as a problem of information. Voting is a single opportunity for a citizen to give a political signal, and an incredibly weak signal at that. Usually held years apart, elections don’t tell government enough about what citizens feel about any issue, and citizens don’t feel they are being involved enough in decisions being made on their behalf.

Around the time PDIS got going, Uber opened in Taiwan, providing the new organisation’s first real test. The usual chorus of conflict and division followed the taxi platform’s arrival. The government needed a way to collect the vast array of opinions held across Taiwanese society, and, beyond that, to learn what all these different groups had in common. They needed a way to build consensus on which a decision about Uber could be based. Their answer was ‘vTaiwan’, and the process was simple, but powerful.

The first stage was to lay out the basic facts about Uber, which were put onto a Wikipedia timeline, and independently validated. The next stage, the most difficult, was to bring people together from all sides to share their feelings. To do this vTaiwan used a platform called pol.is. Taipei taxi drivers, representatives of Uber, members of the government, business leaders, trade unions and taxi users were all asked to log on. People were asked to draft statements beginning with “My feeling is . . .” and everyone else was asked to abstain, agree, or disagree with them.

As they did so, each person’s little avatar bounced around the map, staying close to the people they kept agreeing with, and moving away from others when disagreements emerged. The software created and analysed a matrix comprising what each person thought about every comment. “The aim,” Colin told me, one of the inventors of pol.is, “was to give the agenda-setting power to the people. In voting, the cake is baked. The goal is to engage citizens far earlier, when everyone is arguing over the ingredients.”

Over the first few days, pol.is kept visualising how opinions emerged, clustered, responded, divided and recombined. Eventually two groups emerged. Group One clustered around a statement in support of banning Uber. Group Two clustered around a statement expressing a preference for using Uber.

This, of course, is the opposite of a consensus – it is polarisation. And if we were talking about Twitter or Facebook, we’d see echo chambers, spats, competing online petitions and massively contradictory information flowing to politicians. But pol.is produced something more useful than just feedback: “we found that it became a consensus-generating mechanism”, said Colin. People were asked to continue to draft statements, but the ones that were given visibility were those that garnered support from both sides.

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The process itself encouraged people to start posting more nuanced statements, and by the fourth week a consensus statement had emerged: “The government should leverage this opportunity to challenge the taxi industry to improve their management and quality control systems so that drivers and riders would enjoy the same quality service as Uber” (95% of participants agreed).

On 23 May 2016, the Taiwanese government pledged to ratify all the pol.is consensus items: taxis no longer needed to be painted yellow, app-based taxis were free to operate as long as they didn’t undercut existing meters, and so on. vTaiwan had succeeded in putting the people at the heart of decision-making.

Just two months later, Taiwan’s new premier declared that “all substantial national issues should go through a vTaiwan-like process”. It was used to break a six-year deadlock over the sale of alcohol online, and has now been applied to problems as diverse as cyber-bullying, telemedicine, tax and information security. In all, 19 topics have gone through the process, largely relating to online and digital regulation, and 16 have resulted in decisive Government action.

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It was hardly the storming of the Winter Palace. No king has lost his head. But this is nonetheless a revolutionary moment. For centuries, democracy has pretty much meant one thing: elected representatives sitting in sovereign Parliaments. But vTaiwan challenged that basic vision of how democracy should work.

Audrey, herself, is a completely new kind of politician. She doesn’t see her job as making decisions at all. Instead, she sees herself as a “channel for collective intelligence” – a convenor, moderator or chairperson within a much wider discussion. “I bring what we do in the open source communities . . . I don’t take commands. I don’t give commands”, she told me. Every meeting that she has is recorded, transcribed and published for anyone to see. I communicated with Audrey – a minister – on an open website, accessible to anyone with internet access.

vTaiwan is the first digital democracy, but the idea is spreading. Sometimes triggered by crisis, sometimes by generalised democratic discontent, groups of people around the world have begun to experiment with new systems. The philosophy of open source, joined with the technology that can make it happen, has begun to slowly shift government.

It’s happening in South Korea, where every day 25,000 digital complaints flow into the City Hall’s servers in Seoul. It’s happening in Iceland, where a platform called ‘Better Reykjavik’ crowd sources ideas for public spending priorities. ‘Parlement et Citoyens’ in France is a website which brings together representatives and citizens to discuss policy issues and collaboratively draft legislation. In Finland, a new Citizens’ Initiative Act enshrined the right of Finnish citizens to submit proposals for new legislation.

Across all these cases, there have been failures and problems. Some have struggled to get busy citizens interested enough to plunge into the onerous task of policy-making. Others are little more than check-box exercises. And all schemes that rely on the internet are open to the charge that the poorest, most vulnerable people in their society are least likely to use technology to become politically engaged.

However, this is also a moment when people feel democracy, as it exists today, isn’t working. Within the UK, for the last 50 years, there has been a growing gap between political institutions and the people that they represent and serve. Voter turnout in elections continues to decline; mass membership of political parties (albeit with some recent upswings), once the most important bridge between the people and the political elite, continues to fall; and trust in and contact with politicians is at a historic all-time low

The pressure  on governments to radically transform how democracy works will, I think, quickly grow. The message of radically opening up politics and doing democracy differently – at a time when so many feel so distant from it – will only become louder. And amid the discontentment and anger with mainstream politics, there are people like Audrey who have an answer. Democracy has been one of the least disrupted things of the digital age so far, but it will be one of the most in the years to come.

Carl Miller’s The Death of the Gods: The New Global Power Grab is out now. 

It was the deadliest mass shooting in the US for years, yet neither Farook nor Malik had criminal records, and neither were on any terrorist watch list. In the months that followed, the FBI began to grapple with what they saw to be a troubling new phenomenon: online self-radicalisation. Painstakingly building a portrait of Farook and Malik’s life, they tried to learn why both had decided to die for a terrorist group neither had actually met. And to do that, Farook’s Apple iPhone became central to the search. The FBI asked Apple to unlock it, and Apple refused. A court order compelled Apple to open the phone, but again they said they’d legally fight it.

There was nothing unusual about this conflict. The FBI’s overwhelming mandate was to learn as much as they could about Farook to protect public safety. Apple’s, especially in the wake of the Snowden disclosures, was to assure their users that their data was secure – even those who turned out to be terrorists. And both sides saw the argument as far bigger than this single case. Both knew that it would set a new precedent for how security should be balanced against privacy; and both knew that the world was watching, with almost exactly half of the public supporting each position.

The debate was old; what was new was the way it was resolved. Just months before the attack, Apple had released an operating system that meant that Apple itself could not decrypt the device. Technology, in other words, that deliberately made its maker unable to comply with the court order they now faced, or any of the others they anticipated would emerge in the years ahead. The court then ruled that Apple had to write new software to crack the phone, but as Apple prepared to fight that case too, the FBI promptly withdrew the claim. Before the legal process could be concluded or enforced, the FBI had paid professional hackers to find an undisclosed flaw in the software, and broken it open themselves.

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For both Apple and the FBI, the battle in the courts had been a sideshow. That delicate, constantly changing trade-off of between privacy and security wasn’t decided by the finer principles of law, courtly argument and judicial interpretation. The decider was the technology itself. Apple had built technology to make the court order impossible. And the FBI had bought technology to mean they didn’t need Apple to carry it out.

The dispute was about something bigger than this single case. It showed that how the tensions, trade-offs and conflicts that we’ve always had are being resolved in an entirely new way.

Technologists have long known that the key questions of the digital age wouldn’t be decided at the ballot box or in the courts. Changing the world, they realised, didn’t mean winning the argument. It meant building new technology to decide the outcome. Technology, they knew, could make things possible or impossible, easy or difficult. You didn’t need to convince people to change, you simply needed to change the options that people had in the first place.

For the disputes that matter most, public debate and legal argument have, just like in San Bernardino, become something of an undercard billing. The main fight is over building technology to simply render the whole moral debate meaningless. In the red corner, technology is being built to usher in one kind of reality, and in the blue corner, technology is being built to stop them. Look almost anywhere today, and you can see the same thing happening. Technologies ‘duel’ with each other to decide what your life – and the world – is like.

Bitcoin is the most famous of this kind of political-technology. From the very beginning its aim was clear: to transform the status quo of corporations and states into one of decentralised networks. If you could build technology that created things like currencies without central banks, they reasoned, you simply make those central banks unnecessary.

Changing the structure of technology was really about changing the structure of society. Decentralised technology would create a similarly decentralised society, one without the concentrations of data, control and yes, power, that centralised systems inevitably produce. Bitcoin was only one of a whole universe of different technologies all trying to achieve this.

Decentralised money, decentralised social media platforms, decentralised email, decentralised shopping, all were aimed at undermining the states, hierarchies and corporations dominant, as they saw it, within the status quo. They saw the digital revolution as an opportunity to break apart old concentrations of power, not to create new ones. The old world pitted against the new. Old concentrations of power versus new ways of dispersing it.

Your privacy is also being decided by duelling technology, too. Apple announces new features on its browser to prevent Facebook and other data companies tracking its users across the web, while ad tech companies quietly build ingenuous, innovative ways of ‘finger-printing’ you as you travel around the web. These technologies duel generally out of sight – and it is largely them, not the body of cumbersome, slow moving privacy law, that decides in practice what your privacy online is.

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The most obvious arena for this technological combat is online security. Go to DEF CON, a huge gathering of hackers and computer security specialists, and you will witness the thousands of technological struggles happening every day, side-by-side, that determine your online safety. Hackers – largely with the same skills – work as offence and defence: inventing entirely new ways to take control of your digital life, and desperately trying to find ways to plug the gaps. What determines your safety online is the outcome of this struggle: what is technologically possible, not what is legal.

Worryingly, these struggles are usually entirely invisible to us. You don’t see how spammers, marketers and even states constantly build bots and fake accounts to avoid detection, and people within Facebook and Twitter build technology to try to catch them. Likewise you don’t see the struggle over who controls the information you consume – behind the scenes some technologists work to game and manipulate search engine results, while Google and others desperately try to stop them.

The grand moral questions of our age are not being decided by public debate, the law, norms, principles or the conventional tumble of politics. They are being decided by a new dynamic, something I’ll call ‘technological achievability’. A clunky phrase, granted, but I think an important one. Is it easier and cheaper for cyber-criminals to find vulnerabilities in your computer, or is it easier for cyber-security specialists to keep you safe? Is it easier for propagandists to build fake accounts, or for the tech giants to detect and remove them? Which outcome, in other words, is it easier, cheaper, or more convenient for technology to be built to achieve.

Of the many shifts in power I’ve spent years trying to understand, this is perhaps the most important. The technologists on the front-lines of these struggles now have enormous moral agency in their hands; those of us who are not blockchain engineers or cryptography specialists, are shut out. However imperfect, the messy web of public debate, norms, law and politics was at least something we could all be involved in. Now we are trapped in the crossfire of the technologies duelling around us. More like spectators than we ever were, as our lives are shaped and moulded in this new way. More disempowered, I think, than we have ever been in the decisions that really matter, that really decide what our lives will be like.

And so, in front of us, a new struggle lies ahead. In an age of blindingly fast technological progress, we need to make morals matter again. How to do that, I don’t know. But the first step is to realise how dreadfully absent they are from the world as it is today.

Carl Miller’s newly released The Death of the Gods: The New Global Power Grab is out now.

Like a proud vineyard owner, Burim takes me on a tour of his rolling digital estates. He owns one Facebook group dedicated to exploring abandoned places, another for mobilising communities in the American South. Another seemed to be about dieting and veganism, and yet another, religious evangelism. Burim grins: “This guy in Albania built up this page by posting authentic religious information. Then I paid him 2,000 euros, and he transferred the page over to me.” The groups are bizarre, but their audiences huge: 90,000 likes; 240,000 likes; 26,000 likes… The first step in Burim’s trade is to get an audience, and between them, these pages could reach close to a million pairs of eyeballs.

“Stories about killing people – gore, basically – they perform best!” says Burim, cheerfully. “Dog Groomer Who Kicked Dog all its Ribs Broke Remains Jail- Free”, was one story. “Boy Comes out of Coma after 12 Years, Whispers Dark Secret to Parents”, was another. 1,400 shares; 11,100 shares. Burim employs seven people to keep the content flowing through his groups, stealing it from an uncountable number of other operations.

This wasn’t deliberately fake news, but the truth or lies in the kind of clickbait that Burim publishes are irrelevant. Burim blinks, his face blank, “I don’t care what the content is”, he tells me, his face lit by his phone as he scrolls through the endless posts that his operation spews out. “This is the first time I’ve actually read it”, he says, “I just care about traffic.”

I’d met Burim to understand how a new order was rising. The old world, I thought, was collapsing around us. Huge high street retailers – House of Fraser, BHS, Toys R Us – were collapsing. Political parties were being squeezed by new digital movements erupting across both the radical Left and Right. And professional journalism was being toppled too – 2016 became the first year that journalists were outnumbered by those in public relations. As UK ad revenue shrank, from $4.7 billion in 2000 to about $2.6 billion in 2014, the number of journalists also shrank, by up to one third. And 181 local newspapers in the UK had shut down. The famous global titles survived the onslaught, but underneath was a bloodbath.

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Click on any of Burim’s stories, and you’re taken to the moneymaking part of his operation. He maintains around a dozen websites outside of Facebook, constantly changing to avoid detection. Each looks like a crude version of an online newspaper, with the full stories hosted under sections called ‘Home’, ‘Health’, ‘DIY’, ‘Animals’, ‘Food Art’. Burim earned anything from 400 to a few thousand euros per day – good money anywhere, and a fortune in Kosovo.

A fortune, of course, that Burim made exactly because he broke every rule of journalism going. For him, the content was irrelevant, the provenance unimportant, the story recycled, the truth not even worth thinking about. Yet, whilst Burim was the nemesis of journalism, he was also, I learned, the natural product of the world it functioned within.

Burim had realised that he could make money the same way as any newspaper: programmatic advertising. Highly automated and technologically driven, real-time ad exchanges now allow advertisers to bid for advertising space in front of an audience – not within a specific publication, but wherever they travel on the Internet. When a member of a target audience lands on a part of the internet where ads are being sold, the ad is bought and served up to them instantly.

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His entire enterprise showed that online advertising revenue had little to do with building a long-term reputation for quality journalism, for listening to readers or for building trust with them. In this new online economy clicks were king; and fortunes lay in one skill alone: shepherding vast numbers of people to your websites through any means necessary.

Burim is stronger, not weaker, by being outside of professional journalism. Unbounded by its rules and standards, unbounded indeed by the truth, he could capture your attention much more easily and monetise it just as readily. In the chase for clicks, some fantastical lie will usually out-click the messy, complex, mundanity of reality. People stealing content can out-earn outlets who need to pay people to write it. The people – like Burim – who are most able to grab our attention online are exactly the people who do not ask themselves those tricky, difficult questions about why they deserve to have it.

It’s easy to get nostalgic for the journalism of the past: a rose-tinted time when high-minded editors made professional decisions in the public interest, when investigative journalists had the time and resources they needed to do their jobs properly, and industrious local newspapers comprehensively covered their local patches. Yet pre-digital journalism wasn’t necessarily a pleasant world. Press barons wielded enormous influence, and still do. We, the readers, don’t need help from an algorithm to apply our own filters and distortions to the world. Bias has always existed, as has shoddy journalism.

Yet Burim is just one example of how the incentives of the clicks economy today are starkly at odds with the kind of journalism we have always needed. At its most courageous moments, the Fourth Estate is not only a source and centre of power itself, but also a critic, opponent and investigator of it. The gritty, tedious, time-consuming expensive kind of journalism that, at its best, confronts abuses of power, spotlights wrongdoing and pursues the corrupt. From Ida Tarbell’s profiles of Carnegie and Rockefeller through Watergate to Abu Ghraib; our world is shaped by the kind of journalism that pursues important truths that without it would remain hidden.

Burim, on the other hand, had the power to capture audiences, but none of the responsibilities to tell them the truth. And as I carried out the research for my new book, The Death of the Gods, I saw the same thing happening over and over: the rules governing power didn’t work. Professional standards have become increasingly absent, the regulations don’t work anymore, and ethics disappear in the free-for-all click economies that the online world has created.

Professional journalism is just one of the many institutions that are responsible for controlling and confronting power. The police struggle to enforce the law online. Regulators struggle to control the tech giants. And whether it is targeted advertising or politicised hacking, political campaigning has moved largely outside of the rules too. It is exactly these institutions that have been made most powerless by the digital revolution.

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We desperately need to build new cages for power: a Royal Society of Technologists, ethics-by-design coded into every platform, digital citizenship taught in schools, a major digital literacy programme available in libraries. The whole fabric of rules, norms and laws needs to be updated, and these are some of the things that could help us to achieve that. But the real difficulty is to know how to do it quickly enough. The way power works is changing as quickly as the technology that it flows through. Ensuring the rules, laws and norms move just as fast is one of the key challenges of our generation.

As one of Burim’s webpages came up, he started laughing hard, rocking back in his chair, his chest shaking. “Look,” he said, turning his phone around so I could see. “Look who is paying us today.” The banner on the page was advertising Facebook. Still chuckling he got up to leave, and, after a few paces, hesitated, turning back to our table. “The coffee is on me”, he said, and winked.