Like any dodgy salesman, they promise you tantalising dreams of unverifiable victories. They sell bot-nets and hacking services, surveillance tech and data dumps. In the social-media slums and darknet alleys of our Blade Runner internet, you meet the sleazy dealers of semi-legal and downright illicit services to help you manage this reality-warping game to your advantage. 'Team Jorge' unmasked: the secret disinformation team who distort reality – video The message of today’s digitally driven dictatorships, from China to Saudi Arabia, is that democracy cannot cope with the online dimension, and in the confusion it’s better to surrender freedom of choice to centralised powers that use our data to make decisions for us. This is a challenge to the primacy of democracy as a model for governance. In a discourse that can be so easily distorted, it is tempting to give up on any hopes for a democratic public sphere, where ideas and evidence are weighed and debated, and decided on by real citizens, and where one person has one voice.

Faking social media accounts leads not just to individual users being deceived, but to a society that loses touch with what it really thinks, where what it “really thinks” can be reprogrammed. These online replicants can be used to attack an enemy, or, more insidiously, make a marginal theme feel mainstream.Īs decades of academic communications research have shown, people tend to adopt opinions they think are common, what the internet researcher Samuel Woolley calls “manufacturing consensus”. In today’s Blade Runner internet we also struggle to parse the real and the fake, as bots and fake accounts swarm social media pretending to be real people, distorting our sense of reality. The great theme of Blade Runner is the struggle to tell the difference between real humans and “replicants”, robots impersonating humans. Twenty-three years later, this utopian fantasy has been replaced with an internet that is more akin to the movie Blade Runner: a murky megapolis polluted with the smog of disinformation where dreams of freedom have turned into unprecedented levels of surveillance ruled over by a small group of unaccountable mega-corporations who loom over the internet-city exploiting its disoriented, powerless and resentful subjects, who are both their addicted users and the products they suck data from in order to make the powerful even more untouchable.

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