<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/27/airbnb-city-bikes-shar...> Of all the ideologies spawned by Silicon Valley, that of techno-populism – the making of empty promises on the basis of seismic digital disruption – is the strangest. Promising a world of immediate and painless personal empowerment, techno-populism is ambiguous enough to unite big tech firms, startups, cryptocurrency aficionados and even some political parties. The history is murky, but we do know the date when it went mainstream. It can be traced to Time magazine’s selection, in 2006, of “You” – the millions of ordinary people behind the user-generated web of the 2000s – as its Person of the Year. That choice ingrained techno-populist themes deep into our collective unconscious. While actual contributors to sites such as Wikipedia or Flickr were relatively few, the celebration of them delayed and deflected questions about corporate power and the durability of the emerging digital utopia. Just a few years later, that utopia was no more: highly centralised and dominated by a handful of platforms, the web was a shadow of its former eccentric self. When Uber and Airbnb were young, it was easy to believe a global revolution would liberate informal economic activity In 2018, the omnipotent creative user of 2006 has become a zombie-like content junkie, lethally addicted to scrolling and liking, forever trapped in the invisible cages of data brokers. A noble effort to make everyone an honorary member of the Bloomsbury group has instead condemned all of us to the eternal rosters of Cambridge Analytica. [...]