Prologues 0+1

"If..."

"Then..."

p. xi

I decided to investigate: Then wrote the first UK magazine article on the subject, for the Sunday Times (He invented Bitcoin. He's worth $500m. Nobody knows who he is., March 2, 2014.) This makes interesting reading now considering what we know—and don't know—a decade later. Sadly the Sunday Times has a paywall, but there's usually a trial deal in operation.

xii

hashcash . . . would star in Satoshi's dazzling system: Originally intended as a tool for defending against so-called denial-of-service attacks online, its clever "proof of work" concept would end up in and enable Bitcoin's mining algorithm.

xiii

"open source" creative model . . . one prominent business exec decried as "communism": Identity to be revealed.

xv

an ex-colleague who now edited BBC TV's flagship current affairs program: This was Ian Katz, then editor of Newsnight.

Vladislav Surkov . . . advisor to Russian president Vladimir V. Putin: See Vladislav Surkov: An overdose of freedom is lethal to a state, Financial Times, June 18, 2021.

a fan of Black Sabbath and Tupac Shakur who quoted Ginsberg by heart: For a superb accounting of this, consult Gabriel Gatehouse's BBC Radio 4 series on Surkov, The Puppetmaster: The story of the most powerful man you've never heard of, originally broadcast in 2019.

an infowar technique called Reflexive Control: ibid

xvii

By 2018 and a near perpetual slew of scandals: So in 2018, eighteen months after Facebook's starring role in the deracination of American democracy, its CEO Mark Zuckerberg sets his annual "personal challenge" for the year not as the usual business-friendly bauble of self-improvement, but as "fixing Facebook." How does that go? In February Robert Mueller's investigation into electoral manipulation indicts twelve Russian state-backed trolls of the so-called Internet Research Agency, with Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram cited 41 times in 37 pages. In March the Sri Lankan government blames Facebook and other social media companies for passively exacerbating racial violence against Muslims in the country, with UN investigators soon accusing the company of abetting actual genocide in Myanmar. India decries a series of lynchings prompted by malicious falsehoods spread chez Zuck. If the tech baron is fixing Facebook, it appears to be in the sense that Al Pacino's don Michael Corleone fixed his bungling brother Fredo in The Godfather Part II.

Then comes Cambridge Analytica: a small UK-based firm shown by The Observer newspaper to have harvested data from millions of Facebook profiles without permission and, in the words of the whistleblower Christopher Wylie, used this data "to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons" with the ludicrous-seeming aim of electing Donald Trump as US president. As before, Facebook vacillates between feigned ignorance and dissembling apology. On a shared panel at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, I meet Roger MacNamee, an early Facebook investor turned critic who confirms that Zuckerberg, his consiglieri Sheryl Sandberg and other senior management knew what was in train because he, McNamee, had seen it and told them—repeatedly and with escalating urgency. McNamee provides chapter and verse on this in his book Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe.

xviii

a nadir in 2015: Stack Overflow Survey, 2015