The web is a Blade Runner nightmare, but there is a way to stem the tide of lies | Peter Pomerantsev

Guardian revelations about the scale and reach of deliberate misinformation prove the need to reset our internet

In 1996, John Perry Barlow, former lyricist for the Grateful Dead and guru of Silicon Valley's hippy-tech idealists, wrote a stirring utopian manifesto about the future of the internet. Addressing the leaders of the world order gathered at Davos, he declared:

Governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from cyberspace, the new home of mind ... We will create a civilisation of the mind in cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before."