In China, Internet surveillance has already become a profitable industry. In fact, a growing number of private firms eagerly assist the local police by aggregating this data and presenting it in easy-to-browse formats, allowing humans to pursue more analytical tasks.

The reason why there is more pessimism about technology in Europe has to do with history, the use of databases to keep track of people in the camps, ecological disasters.

For much of its existence, design was all about convenience. We wanted to hide technology so that users are not distracted into thinking about the tools they use.

My homeland of Belarus is an unlikely place for an Internet revolution. The country, controlled by authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko since 1994, was once described by Condoleezza Rice as 'the last outpost of tyranny in Europe.'

In China, Internet surveillance has already become a profitable industry. In fact, a growing number of private firms eagerly assist the local police by aggregating this data and presenting it in easy-to-browse formats, allowing humans to pursue more analytical tasks.

Information technology has been one of the leading drivers of globalization, and it may also become one of its major victims.

'Solutionism' for me is, above all, an unthinking pursuit of perfection - by means of technology - without coming to grips with the fact that imperfection is an essential feature of liberal democracy.