Democracy v the machine: the birth of the digital age and the warnings that were ignored

The useful part

Many hoped that the march of technology would usher in an egalitarian utopia – but some foresaw the threat it would pose to liberal society. One of the stranger things about this dizzying, headlong moment in time is that it doesn't have much of a past. Everything is about the future of this, the future of that: the future of work, the future of humanity, the future of the planet.

How it works

• They warned of a future in which democratic deliberation would be replaced by prediction by calculation, the public sphere would be supplanted by data-driven commerce, and drones would take the place of the...
• The new underworld is made up of innocent and well-intentioned people who work with slide rules and calculating machines and computers which can retain an almost infinite number of bits of information as...
• It's as if everyone is screaming (some ecstatically, most terror-stricken): robots are taking over the world!
• If you look back, one thing you'll see is that a lot of people saw this all coming.
• Above all, they issued warning after warning about the rise of what I call the artificial state, the replacement of the liberal democratic nation-state, the consent of the governed, with the rule of people...

What to take from it

Most of these people are highly educated, many of them are PhDs, and none that I have met have malignant p...

Details worth keeping

Of course this weird moment in history does have a past. They foresaw our present when it was still the future. They thought it might turn out fabulously, a computer utopia.