This an assessment of the main themes and arguments of the book. Looking back at Brexit, what is most striking is the subsequent economic decline of the UK – a consequence of Leave demagogues diverting voters’ attention from economic risks. Brexit’s populism was a manifestation of the Europe-wide rise of identitarian politics, the normalisation of national populism and the drift toward authoritarianism. These trends went with viewing the world as a collection separate sovereign nation states. A national population was imagined as a homogeneous mass, potentially embodied in a single sovereign leader. Seeing nations as separated entities brings a focus on foreign others, exemplified in the Brexiters’ fixation on immigration into the UK. Demagoguery, bound up with ‘post-truth’ culture, is used as an explanatory concept throughout this book, but requires redefinition in the age of mass media, data collection and psychological profiling. The most important conclusion is that Brexitspeak, Brexit policies and Brexit attitudes in government constitute threats to representative democracy, foreshadowed in the referendum process and actions by post-Brexit governments.

The globalisation of political technology techniques happens through the circulation of personnel (like Paul Manafort), distance learning and common technologies. Certain states are hub states, both importing and exporting political technology, like Hungary, the United States and Ukraine. Many political consultancy companies (Cambridge Analytica) or even mercenary groups (Wagner) are in fact political technology wholesalers.

This chapter addresses autonomy’s role in democratic governance. Political authority may be justifiable or not. Whether it is justified and how it can come to be justified is a question of political legitimacy, which is in turn a function of autonomy. We begin, in section 8.1, by describing two uses of technology: crime predicting technology used to drive policing practices and social media technology used to influence elections (including by Cambridge Analytica and by the Internet Research Agency). In section 8.2 we consider several views of legitimacy and argue for a hybrid version of normative legitimacy based on one recently offered by Fabienne Peter. In section 8.3 we explain that the connection between political legitimacy and autonomy is that legitimacy is grounded in legitimating processes, which are in turn based on autonomy. Algorithmic systems—among them PredPol and the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook-Internet Research Agency amalgam—can hinder that legitimation process and conflict with democratic legitimacy, as we argue in section 8.4. We conclude by returning to several cases that serve as through-lines to the book: Loomis, Wagner, and Houston Schools.