Justice has been always about modes of interconnectivity. Retributive justice – ‘eye for an eye’ stuff – recalls an age when kinship was how we related to each other. In the modern era, courtesy of the nation-state, bonds have been forged in terms of common laws, common language, common education, common roads, etc. The internet, understood as a global information and communication infrastructure, is both enhancing and replacing these bonds, resulting in new senses of what counts as ‘mine’, ‘yours’, ‘theirs’ and ‘ours’ – the building blocks of a just society.

That scourge of Silicon Valley, Evgeny Morozov, is certainly right when he says that the internet isn’t sufficient to solve the problem of justice, today or tomorrow. But he’s wrong to suggest that it’s not necessary. Indeed, this is the time to think about how to digitally realise the entire range of bonds that have been forged over the past 250 years of nation-building. Morozov’s quite justifiable fear is that some of the most crucial bonds may be lost in translation.