He thinks for a moment. “Genuinely, I think the internet and the smartphone have been a disaster for civilisation,” he says. “I think it would be very helpful for us to see it as a disaster, see it as something like nuclear weapons or . . . I was going to say the invention of heroin, but morphine is a wonder drug, so there’s an upside to heroin which I really can’t f**king see with the internet. It’s easier to get taxis, but that’s it. It’s addictive. It changes the nature of discourse in a horrible way. What was billed as the democratisation of knowledge has turned into the death of truth.”
