Don’t buy The Glass Cage at the airport if you want a restful flight, warns Will Self

Nicholas Carr has a bee in his bonnet, and given his susceptibilities this might well be a cybernetic insect, cunningly constructed by a giant tech company with the express purpose of irritating him — a likely culprit might be the Tyrell Corporation in Ridley Scott’s future-dystopic film Blade Runner.

In 2012 Carr — whose name has homophonic overtones of Cassandra — published a minatory work on the internet and the web called The Shallows. The title does indeed say it all: Carr’s view was that our increasing use of these technologies is having an impact on our cognitive and other physical faculties, and that by and large it’s a negative one.

Now Carrsandra is back to tell us that lurking behind the glassy screens we love to pet, prod and goggle at, there lies a glass cage of automated systems, ones that increasingly manage the extraction of raw materials, their processing, the manufacture of goods, the provision of services and the intellectual labour of their overall control.