A thought-provoking meditation on how the ‘Arab Spring’ represented a brief window in which it seemed that social media was an uncontrollable force for democratic empowerment. And how it turned out, instead, to be very easy to turn to the cause of supporting authoritarian and reactionary structures.

In this piece, extracted from a new book, the journalist Jack Shenker comes very close to looking forward to the day that schoolchildren confront soldiers in the name of “the Revolution”.