Many of us yearn for the return of an analogue world, but it’s never coming back. You can’t buy potato waffles without a QR code. I had to arrange an IRL bank appointment for my mother to check her balance, and it took, I don’t know, 100 days? A friend of mine has boycotted WhatsApp, but I can’t tell you how that’s going because we haven’t spoken in a year.
Watching The Audacity (from Thursday, HBO Max) this week, I was shaken by how much of our dystopia can be traced to a small number of men in Silicon Valley. Their products and platforms, an expression of their shortfalls as much as their skills, have reshaped our world more seismically than any political party. Their power-brokering has turned a small collection of towns and villages south of San Francisco into a modern-day Camelot.
