Hellacious visions are now the standard fare when it comes to assessing the future of democracy. Which dystopian future will it be: civil conflict fueled by online misinformation or a tyranny of high-tech surveillance and censorship? Both scenarios were quickly invoked after the recent anti-immigration riots in the United Kingdom, where I live, as some commentators blamed the violence on social media and others warned of the state’s authoritarian response. Already in 2020, these two worries about technology and its direction into the future dominated the expert auguries collected by Pew, which included the rosy prospect that “by 2030, as much of 75% of the world’s population will be enslaved by artificial intelligence-based surveillance systems developed in China.”

The problem with such projections is that they obscure other, more mundane matters of technology and governance. The modern world really is ruled by a sinister alliance of software and unaccountable agencies, only the conspiracy does not lurk in the shadows plotting world domination. Rather, it provides an ever-expanding web of time-consuming, unreliable services that have embedded themselves in daily life. We aren’t doomed by our incredibly high-tech lives to a dystopian tyranny, but we are doomed to be really, really irritated.