In the early 1980s, everyone was obsessed with how new information superhighways would change the world. We were promised instant access to all human knowledge, in ways that would transform the global economy and lead to the digital transformation of every industry.
At the time, it was almost impossible to conceive how we’d interact with this new world, not least because just under a sixth of the UK population had access to a PC. By 1995, Newsweek had had enough, famously declaring that the Web would never replace newspapers or enable businesses to trade online.
While the journey was full of false starts, there’s no denying that the internet has transformed the world. By the turn of the millennium, it had evolved into something that enabled entirely new categories of human activity no one had anticipated....