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I am reading a very informative book, which I recommend to anyone interested in our society and the choices facing it. It’s titled ‘How to fix the future’, by Andrew Keen. Right now, a third of the way through, I am learning a lot about Estonia, to this point not precisely my Mastermind speciality subject. This tiny Baltic state are trailblazing what they call a trust based model, an implementation of democracy built on maximum transparency, on all public actions of all agents being firstly, online, and secondly, fully transparent. Citizens get notified the very moment a government agency opens their file, to review their tax return, check their number plate or use their data. Conversely, citizens are identified by a fool proof digital ID card system, making them accountable for all their online actions and comments. Transparency and accountability over privacy. The result seems to be a functional digital democracy with high trust in government, and some hope for the rest of us Length:...

  I’ve grown concerned lately by the apparent difficulty that internet age natives have reading books. Snapchat and Instagram are always there, demanding attention whenever they dare lay down their device to immerse themselves in a book. The risk is that the quality of content we receive from social networks is a lot lower than from books. Not because people today are less creative or capable but rather because, with books, we get not only the very best of each period in human history, but also mostly only what has withstood scrutiny by subsequent generations. 10 or20 may have made it from each decade, the best, rising from a cacophony of completely forgettable heaps of less valuable content. When we put down our book to check Snapchat, we prioritise the forgettable cacophony of now over the very best selected for us by millions of readers before us. It is tantamount to rejecting a 1967 Margaux to drink a recently harvested, run of the mill wine (and I am being kind to social netwo...