MI6 issues warnings, great thinkers call for action, and Australia lands the first blow on social media giants. Our Writer at Large says 2026 must be Big Tech’s year of reckoning.

There is an astonishing moment in the current BBC Reith Lectures, when the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman enumerates the ills that Big Tech has wrought on humanity – and then offers his solution to all that’s gone wrong.

First he lists the problems: “Literacy and numeracy scores are plummeting; teenage depression, anxiety and suicide attempts are rising; face-to-face socialising is collapsing as we retreat indoors eyes glued to screens; solitude is becoming the hallmark of our age. The bleakest number I’ve seen is that American teenagers now spend 70% less time hosting or attending parties than in 2003.”

Social media has only “delivered outrage” as platforms “reward those who are loudest, angriest and most extreme”. Bregman quoted scientific studies which showed “those with both high psychopathy and low cognitive ability are the most actively involved in online political engagement”.

He concluded: “Our very humanity is under attack.”

Evidently, the historian could have made his list much longer, adding: the erosion of democracy, foreign electoral interference, inflamed social tensions, disinformation, AI slop, and the tsunami of misogyny and other grotesque bigotries online.

However, it was his solution to the problem of Big Tech, or rather his prediction about how humanity will respond to the problem of Big Tech, which was startling, and convincing.

Bregman suggested........

© Herald Scotland