Jamie Bartlett is the Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at UK based think-tank, Demos. His 2017 BBC documentary series Secrets of Silicon Valley exposed the Facebook / Cambridge Analytica scandal months before the story hit the mainstream headlines.  

In The People vs. Tech, Bartlett provides an overview of the psychological factors designed into today’s media platforms to keep us engaged and, more importantly, to track our behaviour; these data points are then sold to 3rd parties.  He explores the extent to which social media platforms exploit our interactions to manipulate political events, and explains how our current technology habits pose an unmitigated risk to democracy as we know it.  

The bottom line is this: the sooner we understand the extent to which our online behaviour can be weaponised against us, the sooner we can consciously manage ourselves in an attempt to avert one of the most significant challenges of the 21st Century.