It can be hard in the era of big data and mass surveillance to remember that, once upon a time, technology was meant to set us free.
Those twentieth-century titans of British intellectual life, Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes, both saw a future in which it would reduce working hours to a minimum, freeing human beings up and allowing them to live richer, more fulfilling lives. Before that, Karl Marx proposed that in the end machinery would establish the conditions of mankind's emancipation.
Visions of utopia have often included technology but so too have visions of dystopia. Science fiction is full of predictive systems of control, all-seeing eyes and malign robots. It is that portrait of technology that seems more familiar in the 21st century. Today, a small group of all-powerful companies in Silicon Valley are misusing our data and a dizzying array of software is deployed across public life, from the border to the police station to the job centre.
