When long-running speaker of the US House of Representatives Tip O'Neill popularised the maxim "all politics is local" in the 1980s, he wouldn't have known how loudly his words would resonate four decades later.
Back then the internet as we know it did not exist, there was no social media and artificial intelligence was no more than a frightening theme in science fiction, not the pressing reality governments and society must confront today.
Now, O'Neill's words echo louder than ever because, unchallenged, these technologies threaten to gut the local out of politics as social media and search platforms use the work of journalists to enrich their owners while impoverishing the traditional sources of news.
