Then the 2008 financial crisis happened, followed by a long period of recession and austerity, and suddenly it turned out that the technocratic consensus wasn’t as competent or moderate as it had appeared. Ten to twenty per cent of the electorate suddenly realized that they might have to take an interest in politics after all. So they started paying attention again, and they didn’t have the basic assumptions of the mainstream. All they knew was that the people who used to be in charge seemed to have screwed things up mightily.

If you trace back many important decisions of the last few decades, you will regularly come up against the uncomfortable sensation that the unacknowledged legislators are relatively junior civil servants who put placeholder numbers in spreadsheets, which are later adopted as fundamental constraints; to do otherwise would mean someone having to risk being ridiculed for making a decision.

The ability to translate information into action is the last piece of the puzzle, but it might have been the first piece because it’s so crucial.

*The publication of Eden Medina’s Cybernetic Revolutionaries, a very good history of the project, has helped in recent years.

Governments were also subject to the same cognitive pressures of a world that was becoming more complicated, so they also needed solutions to attenuate information.