John Harris

Boris Johnson longs to be one of the new breed of politicians, backed by an online ‘superbase’. But he is falling short
Back in the far-off days of Occupy and the Arab spring, we were told that the political future would be leaderless, “horizontal” – and defined by the egalitarian promise of social networks. But more than ever, any chance of political success now depends on charismatic, one-person leadership, and the crucial online…

A multibillion-dollar operation involving cocaine and methamphetamines is having a major impact on islands in the Pacific. Kate Lyons travelled to Fiji to investigate. Plus: John Harris on Facebook’s cryptocurrency
Last year, 120 bricks of cocaine, each worth thousands of dollars, washed up on the beaches of remote islands in Fiji. With traffickers increasingly using the islands as a staging post in the supply of drugs from central America to Australia and New Zealand, Fijian…

Facebook’s Libra is the last thing the world needs – big tech’s use of our data threatens to intrude even on financial transactions
Dystopian fiction – from Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange to Russell T Davies’s spectacular recent BBC1 series Years and Years – is usually intended to take elements of the present and then imagine a future in which they have become inescapable, so as to warn us of what might already…

Why did synth-pop emerge in Sheffield and trip-hop in Bristol? A voyage through Britain and the bands who wrote the soundtrack to decades of change
“To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and at the same time that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.” These words are taken from All…

If we are to avoid the kind of dystopia that now haunts not just politics but popular culture, great change is imperative
Presented with Brexit, a political system apparently breaking apart and the central importance of online networks to just about everything, it is tempting to ignore the past and focus on what seems to be a very modern picture. It is always difficult to zoom out from the daily hurly-burly and understand the true…