How the unholy alliance of Big Tech and the far right threatens the world

We are a decade or so into the age of bots – when the algorithms of social media created a new kind of attention economy that overhauled the way we see the world, spend our time and speak to each other. My birth, by way of example, was announced by old-style telegram. Today, Telegram is a social media platform where FPV drone footage of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers being killed is uploaded daily and watched by millions. Historian Eric Hobsbawm characterised the short 20th century from 1917 to 1989 as the age of extremes. It can also be viewed as the age of modernism, from the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses (written between 1914 and 1921) to social revolution, industrialised war, and fascism.