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Michael Gove, a senior government minister who favored Brexit, exploited this sentiment, declaring during the campaign that "people in this country have had enough of experts," pitting the economists who predicted Brexit would be bad for Britain against everyday people. This ploy enraged experts like the particle physicist Brian Cox, who said in response: "It's the road back to the cave. Being an expert does not mean that you are someone with a vested interest in something; it means you spend your life studying something. You're not necessarily right--but you're more likely to be right than someone who's not spent their life studying it."

Far from the organic free-roaming paradise the early internet pioneers imagined, there is a growing sense that we are living in a world of participation farms, where a small number of big platforms have fenced, and harvest for their own gain, the daily activities of billions.

Power, as philosopher Bertrand Russell puts it, is the "ability to produce intended effects."