I once heard an elderly Friedrich von Hayek begin a tirade against socialist planning with a charming personal tale. “The other day,” he said playfully, “I went into a shop. I left with an item that, previously, I had no idea I wanted!” Like all the smartest defenders of capitalism, he thought of the market as a benevolent creator whose job no human-made system could replicate. Hayek’s point here was that we, ourselves, do not know what we want until we enter the market. So how could a government official, or indeed anyone, know what society wants?

Thinkers such as von Hayek dismiss vulgar, mainstream economists who celebrate the market as merely an efficient mechanism for finding the right price of things; they see it as something grander, a liberator of our imagination, the co-creator of our preferences and tastes. They argue that interfering with markets, let alone replacing them, is a terrible idea because centralised systems are inimical to not only efficiency but also to the free development of our proclivities.

But what if our preferences are no longer formed by the market, as they were in Hayek’s day? The year after he died, I was struggling to connect my father’s computer to the fledgling internet when he asked me a killer question: “Now that computers speak to each other, will this network make capitalism impossible to overthrow? Or might it finally reveal its Achilles’ heel?” It was a couple of years after the collapse of Soviet communism but also the beginning of the centre-left’s decline. The threat to capitalism posed by an organised working class had entered a recession that has never ended. Could the internet do to capitalism what the proletariat had failed to do?

It has taken me years to answer my father’s question — in the form of my new