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Right now other people are making lots of money on our data. So much money. I think the one that stands out for me is a company called Palantir, founded by Peter Thiel in 2003. It’s actually one of Silicon Valley’s biggest success stories, and is worth more than Twitter. Most people have never heard of it because it’s all operating completely behind the scenes. This company and companies like it have databases that contain every possible thing you can ever imagine, on you, and who you are, and what you’re interested in. It’s got things like your declared sexuality as well as your true sexuality, things like whether you’ve had a miscarriage, whether you’ve had an abortion. Your feelings on guns, whether you’ve used drugs, like, all of these things are being packaged up, inferred, and sold on for huge profit.

Do we need to develop a brand-new intuition about how to interact with algorithms? It’s not on us to change that as the users. It’s on the people who are designing the algorithms to make their algorithms to fit into existing human intuition.

‘I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid,’ King prayed at his kitchen table. ‘At that moment,’ he wrote in Stride Toward Freedom (1958), ‘I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced God before. It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying: “Stand up for justice, stand up for truth; and God will be at your side forever.” Almost at once my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything.’

The night before his assassination, while addressing a group of sanitation workers on strike in Memphis, King spoke of God. Though he warned of ‘difficult days ahead’, he claimed that God had allowed him ‘to go up to the mountain’ and see the ‘Promised Land’. ‘I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land … Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!’

In New Zealand, a new generation of leadership has arisen, symbolized by Ardern: wise to the danger our planet is in; alive to the opportunities of a greener, fairer society; and not beholden to the outdated economic doctrines that have led us into this predicament. In New Zealand, GDP will no longer be the sole measure of success for economic policies, because GDP is not, and has never been, the best or only way to measure social development. In many ways, New Zealand’s new approach is a return to a more honest, more grounded way of practicing economics, more rooted in the real world, as Makhlouf explains. “Economics is about trade-offs,” he says. “Economics is about the fact that there are finite resources to meet unlimited wants and what’s the best way of dealing with that problem. What the Treasury is suggesting now is that we can become a bit more sophisticated than in the past at making those trade-offs.”

Now you know what modernity is. It’s the idea that poverty causes ruin, and so the primary job of a modern society is to eliminate poverty, of all kinds, to give people decent lives at a bare minimum — and a social contract which does all that. Hence, Europe became a place rich in public goods, like healthcare, media, finance, transport, safety nets, etcetera, things which all people enjoy, which secure the basics of a good life — all the very same things you intuitively think of when you think of a “modern society” — but America didn’t.

So in America, poverty wasn’t seen as a social bad or ill — it was seen as a necessary way to discipline, punish, and control those with a lack of virtue, a deficit of strength, to, by hitting them with its stick, to inculcate the virtues of hard work, temperance, industriousness, and above all, self-reliance. The problem, of course, was that the great lesson of history was that none of this was true — poverty didn’t lead to virtue. It only led to ruin.

So here America is. Modernity’s first failed state. The rich nation which never cared to join the modern world, too busy believing that poverty would lead to virtue, not ruin. Now life is a perpetual, crushing, bruising battle, in which the stakes are life or death — and so people take out their bitter despair and rage by putting infants on trial. History is teaching us the same lesson, all over again. Americans might not even learn it the second time around. But the world, laughing in horror, in astonishment, in bewilderment, should.

A cursory look at history reveals that propaganda and disinformation are nothing new. In fact, humans have always lived in the age of post-truth. Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, who conquered this planet thanks above all to the unique human ability to create and spread fictions. We are the only mammals that can cooperate with numerous strangers because only we can invent fictional stories, spread them around, and convince millions of others to believe in them. As long as everybody believes in the same fictions, we all obey the same laws and can thereby cooperate effectively.

The truth is, truth has never been high on the agenda of Homo sapiens. If you stick to unalloyed reality, few people will follow you. False stories have an intrinsic advantage over the truth when it comes to uniting people. If you want to gauge group loyalty, requiring people to believe an absurdity is a far better test than asking them to believe the truth. If the chief says the sun rises in the west and sets in the east, only true loyalists will clap their hands. Similarly, if all your neighbors believe the same outrageous tale, you can count on them to stand together in times of crisis. If they are willing to believe only accredited facts, what does that prove?

Yet the difference between holy books and money is far smaller than it might seem. When most people see a dollar bill, they forget that it is just a human convention. As they see the green piece of paper with the picture of the dead white man, they see it as something valuable in and of itself. They hardly ever remind themselves, “Actually, this is a worthless piece of paper, but because other people view it as valuable, I can make use of it.” If you observed a human brain in an fMRI scanner, you would see that as someone is presented with a suitcase full of hundred-dollar bills, the parts of the brain that start buzzing with excitement are not the skeptical parts but the greedy parts. Conversely, in the vast majority of cases people begin to sanctify the Bible or the Vedas only after long and repeated exposure to others who view it as sacred. We learn to respect holy books in exactly the same way we learn to respect paper currency.