Gnomon

by Nick Harkaway

“The devil in the detail is that Smart Crowds are fragile. With a very little adulteration, they cease to be smart at all, and become remarkably stupid, or indeed self-harming. They are susceptible to stampeding by demagogues, poisoning by bad information. They can be made afraid, and when they do they become mobs. They can be divided by scapegoating and prejudice, bought off in fragments, even just romanced by pretty faces. And of course there’s choice architecture: the very thing we use at Tidal Flow to smooth your journey through London or to design serendipitous social spaces in the new developments of the capital. Effectively deployed bad practice under the System is a disaster. It would place the most absolute surveillance machine in history in the hands of villainous actors or mob instincts.”