A few months before the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, Ronald Reagan made a bold prediction: the “Goliath of totalitarian control” would soon be brought down by the “David of the microchip”. “Information is the oxygen of the modern age,” the former US president told an audience in London. “It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across electrified, booby-trapped borders. Breezes of electronic beams blow through the Iron Curtain as if it was lace.”
In one sense, this techno-optimistic judgment was sound: the Soviet empire soon imploded under the weight of its own misinformation. But to the historian and futurist Yuval Noah Harari, Reagan’s prediction also enc