Every day, two people sit side by side on a train home from work, both scrolling through their phones, both reading about the same story - a drowning in the Channel, a violent crime, a political scandal. Outwardly they share the same moment. In reality they inhabit entirely different worlds.
One sees a feed full of calls for compassion and government accountability. The other encounters warnings about uncontrolled borders and rising danger. Neither can see what the other is shown. Neither knows their feed has been tuned, invisibly, by code written in private, governed by nobody they elected, accountable to no standard they agreed to.
This is not a minor technical quirk. It is a threat to democracy itself.
The public square is no longer public. It is fragmented, shaped in secret, and quietly adjusted by algorithms designed to maximise engagement - which turns out to mean maximising outrage, division, and fear. Political leaders understand this. That is why they cultivate relationships with tech company founders. The photo opportunities are framed as job creation, but beneath the handshakes lies something more strategic: proximity to the people who control what millions of citizens see, and how they feel about it.
Britain has faced a version of this problem before. We long ago decided that law could not be left solely to politicians and judges. Juries were the people's safeguard. In 1670, the jury in the Penn and Mead case refused to convict despite direct judicial pressure, establishing that citizens could resist political will even inside a courtroom. In the twentieth century, juries acquitted protesters who caused criminal damage in the name of conscience - anti-apartheid campaigners, anti-nuclear activists, peace campaigners. These verdicts showed that ordinary citizens could act as a democratic safety valve when the law lagged behind public morality.
We now face a parallel moment in the digital sphere. Algorithms already shape public life as profoundly as law does. Yet unlike law, these rules are written and enforced in private, shielded by commercial secrecy. No one elected them. No citizen reviews them. No jury checks their fairness.
If democracy is to mean anything in this century, we must treat code as we treat law: subject to scrutiny, open to challenge, reviewed not just by regulators but by citizens. Imagine digital juries, drawn by lot, reviewing how content is ranked, what is amplified, what is quietly buried. Their role would not be to write code line by line, but to insist that the values embedded in it are visible, debated, and accountable.
Just as a jury can refuse complicity in unjust punishment, citizens must have the right to refuse complicity in the unjust curation of their public life. In the twentieth century we demanded that laws be subject to citizen oversight. In the twenty-first, we must demand the same of code.