Digital Planet

The Dutch authorities have just busted and closed down AlphaBay and Hansa, two of the most significant market places on the so called dark net, the internet that’s not indexed by the main search engines. Jamie Bartlett, author of a book about the dark net, explains how it was done. In a new book Radical Technologies, Adam Greenfield argues that we humans are at the wrong end of a power relationship that favours the techno elite, the handful of billionaire individuals who own the major tech companies, and that we are complicit. He discusses with Gareth how the apps and services on our devices are engineered to get us hooked at the most basic, neurological level. Hilary O’Shaughnessy of Watershed tells Click about the Playable City, a project in Oxford that is about making our urban spaces better places to live and work by using tech and focusing on the human side too. And there is a report from the AI: Myth and Reality conference organised by the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence in Cambridge. (Image caption: Computer hacker in hoodie © Getty Images) Editor: Deborah Cohen