How did the internet become so horrific?

I can dimly remember the internet getting going, gradually staking its claims on our attention with hardly anyone except tech nerds – and famously David Bowie – realising what was going on. In our defence it was the 1990s and we had a lot else to think about: Britpop, The End of History, lads’ mags, guacamole, supermodels, Tony Blair, Monica Lewinsky, etc.

But here we all are now, in a world where I can do my banking from bed, America is fragmenting like papier-mâché in the rain, and primary school children can get porn on their smartphones. Can anyone recall the incremental steps that brought us here?

If not, it might be time to listen to Jamie Bartlett’s The Gatekeepers, which seeks to trace how a small digital elite and their platforms came to decide what billions of us see and hear every day. The trajectory he describes is one from idealism to cynicism, from sharing to monetising, and -– for the bulk of users at least – from the promise of electronic liberation to something more akin to a complicated captivity.

The first episode opens with a snatch of Donald Trump’s singsong voice floating out like that of a carnival mesmerist on 6 January 2021, telling his disgruntled supporters: ‘We’re going to the Ca-pi-tol…’ What followed involved the Capitol coming under attack for the first time since the burning of Washington in 1814.