week 17 - We’re over the digital revolution. This is the age of experience - Simon Jenkins

Only fools would deny digital its recent and astonishing history, but that is different from how people feel about it. Many, I sense, have become exhausted by the sheer relentlessness of the digital revolution, by its endless boasts and by dark clouds on the horizon.

References to the internet are now dominated by hackers, viruses, trolls, paedophiles, fake news and cyberwar. I am told most job openings for IT graduates are in gaming, betting and in protecting computers from each other. An early sceptic, the technology writer Evgeny Morozov, warned of the internet’s dangerous rejection of morality. 

Algorithms might proliferate as chips grew ever more powerful, but issues of good and evil were dismissed, as if the great god maths validated all. Witness last year’s first response of Facebook and Google to the fake news scandal. They said, in effect, that ethics was not their business.

he internet has come to look less like an engine of some new personal freedom and more like the same monopolistic anarchy that drove the railway barons in the 19th century. That earlier revolution was similarly disruptive, socially and economically. It proffered fast communication in place of slow. It rode roughshod over privacy. It upset social relationships, destroyed communities and empowered the state.