Jamie Bartlett

Back in 2016, thousands of Brits thought they’d struck gold. Word was spreading through WhatsApp and Facebook groups about an exciting new crypto-currency called OneCoin. It was rumoured to be the next Bitcoin – that strange digital currency that had been shooting up in value and minting millionaires. OneCoin’s founder, a Bulgarian-German businesswoman called Dr Ruja Ignatova had impeccable credentials – a degree from Oxford and a stint at the respected McKinsey’s. OneCoin, Dr Ruja said, was the ‘Bitcoin Killer', heralding a financial revolution and, if you got in early, a unique new investment opportunity.

We are extremely good at accusing others of doing the very thing we excel at. A case in point: we rightly criticise the Chinese government with its dystopian surveillance and social score systems, when we are considering building something similar. In a recent episode of BBC Click, journalist Geoff White followed the police’s pilot of live facial recognition technology. (The Metropolitan Police are running a number of pilots). In one chilling moment, a man walked past the facial recognition cameras and covered his face. The police stopped him, forced him to uncover and then took a photograph of him anyway. ‘This gives us grounds to stop and verify him,’ one officer said.

Opinions are like social media accounts: approximately 2.7 billion people have one. I’ve no problem with people having an opinion of course. Quite the reverse: a nation without opinions is one without thoughts, ideas or morals. But over the last decade something has changed. We’ve always had opinions but now we feel compelled to share them with the world. And that is a problem. A few years ago, I had opinions about everything. I had strong views on Peter Mandelson and BSE and Sierra Leone and 7/7 and the price of bus fares and Uri Geller’s friendship with Michael Jackson. But none of these opinions were good enough to share in public, much less put down in writing and publish to potentially everyone on the planet. I was perfectly happy with that, too.

Politicians and the internet still don’t seem to get on. Yesterday Labour’s Lucy Powell put forward a bill proposing two peculiar new suggestions for tackling online hate: first, that moderators and administrators (the people that run online groups and forums) be held legally responsible for what’s posted in their groups. Second, that the name of any large Secret Facebook group, and the number of members it has, be made public Powell has pulled together an impressive array of signatories, including David Lammy and Jacob Rees-Mogg. It’s nice to see that bi-partisanship is still alive and well, even if the proposal itself is completely unworkable. I understand the aspiration – we need to stem the flow of online hate, and make tech companies more accountable.

What do Jeremy Corbyn, Stormzy, film director James Gunn and former Gay Times editor Josh Rivers all have in common? Answer: in the last year or so, they've all been publicly shamed for things they’ve posted online in the past. They’ve all been victims of the lazy new political attack technique: the digital mudrack. One of the more interesting changes in politics is the fact most of us now have a public record of every idiotic thing we’ve ever tweeted, posted, uploaded or said. This, of course, is a giant honey pot for political research teams, time-squeezed journalists and the endless horde of social media users who shark around the net looking for reasons to be outraged.

I’m losing my patience. Not so long ago I’d happily wait ten minutes for a bus, or even whole days for the next instalment of my favourite television programme. It didn’t seem to bother me in the slightest that my holiday photos would not be seen until I’d picked them up from the chemist. I even went to the library to get information from an encyclopaedia. Life, in short, used to be a waiting game, and patience was not just a virtue but a habit. Now I wonder how I survived in a world without Google Maps, Uber or smartphones with in-built cameras. The whole direction and purpose of modern life, at least on the surface and for those well-off enough to benefit, is to make everything frictionless, personalised, easy. Click a button, a taxi turns up to your house.

Jeremy Hunt as Home Secretary said something very important by mistake. He told the Commons in May 2018 that ‘a computer algorithm failure’ meant 450,000 patients in England missed breast cancer screenings. As many as 270 women might have had their lives shortened as a result. This point hasn't received the analysis it deserves. Scores of women died sooner than they should have done, because of an algorithm. He’s probably right, you know. It really could have been a computer model to blame here. But that’s obviously unsatisfactory, since we need humans to hold to account when things go wrong. Let’s say it was a poorly programmed algorithm – who’s at fault? The tech guy who wrote it, years ago?

Right now, in some tasteful open plan office in California, Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘team’ is hard at work. Or at least they should be, because they have a lot to do. When he wasn’t trying to explain the 101 basics of how the internet actually works, Zuck was telling senators that his team would look into the details, and would be in touch.  The reason he was there at all, subjecting himself to five gruelling hours of intensive and sometimes wildly misdirected questioning, was to reassure three groups of people: Facebook users, who need to know Zuck cares about privacy. Investors, who need to know the company is dealing with the crisis. And finally the politicians themselves, who are wondering if more rules and laws are needed to tame the giant.

From the outside it all looked haphazard and frenzied. A campaign that was skidding from scandal to crisis on its way to total defeat. That’s not how it felt inside the ‘Project Alamo’ offices in San Antonio, Texas where Trump’s digital division — led by Brad Parscale, who’d worked previously with Trump’s estate division setting up websites — was running one of the most sophisticated data-led election campaigns ever. Once Trump’s nomination was secured, the Republican Party heavyweights moved in, and so did seconded staff from Facebook and Google, there to help their well-paying clients best use their platforms to reach voters.