It’s hard to find a self-proclaimed political messiah anywhere: Hugo Chávez is dead, and Fidel Castro himself says Cuba’s revolution has failed. Politicians have been reduced to celebrities who can gain our attention only with Anthony Weineresque private antics. Mandela on his deathbed still towers over today’s lot. Meanwhile a rash of TV series like House of Cards, Veep and The Thick of It portray politics as a greedy, narcissistic pursuit. No wonder political parties are shedding members at record speed. The last emotion that still animates lots of western voters is rage at immigrants – an archetypal expression of pessimism. Andrew Adonis, leading thinker of the UK’s Labour party, says: “We’re in one of those periods like the 1970s where politicians manifestly don’t have the answers.”
But meanwhile a group of people has stood up who do claim to have answers: technologists. In 2007, just as western economies began to crumble, Apple launched the iPhone. Since then, credibility has kept leaching from politicians to techies. The latter took time to decide how to use their new might. Nicole Boyer, director of the Adaptive Edge consultancy in San Francisco, explains: “Tech was late to the game for social problems. It took a generation of tech entrepreneurs to make money and then say, ‘OK, what are we going to do?’” Now they are busy remaking the world: Google’s Eric Schmidt negotiates with North Korea, Jeff Bezos tries to save newspapers, Mark Zuckerberg plots to get the world’s poor online and Bill Gates fights infectious disease. “They have something of the white knight about them,” muses Adonis. “There is a profound tech-optimism.”
