It was July 2017, and the techlash was burgeoning; ordinary people were worried about AI coming for their jobs and unscrupulous tech companies misusing their data.

It's a meaningless race to the bottom of populist politics that undermines the complexity of tackling poverty as an endemic, intergenerational issue; that reduces it to something comfortably dealt with in the space of an electoral cycle – gone by lunchtime, perhaps?

[…] under change of times, / And condemnation of the ingrateful multitude.

[…] I entered a bright, white room filled with librarylike rows of hulking, black racks of servers — the dedicated hardware that drives the Internet.