Why you don’t hear Trump or Farage talking about the tech revolution | John Harris

Protecting people against the chaos wreaked by automation should be a priority. But populists would rather talk about trade

This week's nightmare is the arrival of Boris Johnson; the autumn brings the Brexit watershed. Soon after, the 2020 US election takes shape, compounding the sense that politics everywhere is in a state of complete unpredictability. All that is clear, perhaps, is that the forces gathered around Brexit, Donald Trump and the various brands of European populism still think things are going their way.

For some people, everything comes down to the failures of neoliberalism and its inbuilt globalisation, and the long aftershocks from the crash of 2008. Others, with very good reason, focus on racism and bigotry, and the spectacle of white men who are apparently convinced that their time at the top is about to come to a close and therefore lashing out. There are also people who seem to think that any sober, cause-and-effect explanations of a global crisis are impossible amid the mess: they tend to take refuge in rather specious ideas about "collective derangement" and national nervous breakdowns.

The ongoing transformation of production and consumption by computing power is everywhere

Related: Automation threatens 1.5 million workers in Britain, says ONS