Nicholas Carr has a bee in his bonnet, and given his susceptibilities this might well be a cybernetic insect, cunningly constructed by a giant tech company with the express purpose of irritating him — a likely culprit might be the Tyrell Corporation in Ridley Scott’s future-dystopic film Blade Runner.

In 2012 Carr — whose name has homophonic overtones of Cassandra — published a minatory work on the internet and the web called The Shallows.