Europe sends billions in frozen Russian assets to Kyiv as Moscow threatens response

The EU has transferred €4bn to Ukraine using revenue generated from frozen Russian assets, the country’s finance ministry revealed on Wednesday.

It comes as European leaders discuss the possibility of transferring up to €140bn in the same manner this week.

Moscow has warned it considers the procedure “theft” of its sovereign assets and will seek the prosecution of countries and individuals involved.

Leaders including Macron have expressed support for the initiative, but have stressed it must take place in accordance with international law.

“We need a more structural solution for military support,” the European Commission’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, said on Tuesday. “This is why I have put forward the idea of a reparations loan that is based on the immobilized Russian assets.”

European leaders are meeting in Copenhagen this week to discuss the formation of a “drone wall” along their borders with Russia and Ukraine to stop drones violating European airspace.

Miliband tells Musk: Get the hell out of our politics and our country

Ed Miliband has told Elon Musk to “get the hell out of our politics and our country” in a dramatic intervention on the main stage of the Labour Party conference in Liverpool.

The energy secretary’s criticism of the tech billionaire came as part of a wider attack on Reform leader Nigel Farage, who he claimed is part of a “global network who together want to destroy the ties that bind our communities and our way of life”.

It comes after Elon Musk drew condemnation from Downing Street for telling demonstrators at a London rally organised by Tommy Robinson to “fight back” or “die”.

“The threat from Reform goes beyond their climate denying agenda,” Mr Miliband said in a speech on the final day of the Labour Party conference.

“The truth is, I wish Nigel Farage was just the snake oil, Tory city boy we’ve known about for years. He’s actually morphed into something even more dangerous

“He’s now a key part of a global network that wants to destroy the ties that bind our communities and our way of life. And I can sum up the threat in two words: Elon Musk.”

The energy secretary continued: “Elon Musk. He incites violence on our streets. He calls for the overthrow of our elected government. He is an enabler of disinformation through X.

“He thinks he can tell us how to run Britain. Conference, we have a message for Elon Musk: Get the hell out of our politics and our country,” he said.

Mr Miliband also claimed Reform will “betray” every young person and future generations by waging a war on clean energy, as he announced a host of initiatives aimed at bringing energy bills down and boosting green jobs.

Labour has been using its conference in Liverpool to draw battle lines with Reform as it trails behind the party in the polls. The party has been ramping up its attacks on Nigel Farage’s party, with Sir Keir Starmer saying Labour is in a “fight for the soul of this country”.

Speaking at the Unite the Kingdom rally in London earlier this month, Mr Musk said: “Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die.”

The American owner of Tesla and X/Twitter also called for an urgent change in government in the UK in his guest appearance at the protest.

The prime minister’s official spokesperson said Mr Musk’s words threatened “violence and intimidation on our streets”, adding: “I don’t think the British public will have any truck with that kind of language.”

Asked about the tech billionaire’s comments at the time, Mr Farage – who has previously praised Mr Musk as a “hero” – said the “context” in which the words had been used left a “degree of ambiguity”.

“If the fight that Musk was talking about was about standing up for our rights and free speech, if it was about fighting in elections to overcome the established parties, then that absolutely is the fight that we’re in,” he said.

But Mr Farage also condemned violence against police, which took place at the protest, saying it was “horrible” and he “feared something like that would happen”.

New York apartment building partially collapses

A high-rise apartment building in New York’s Bronx borough has partially collapsed following a gas explosion.

The explosion happened at YCHA’s Mitchel Houses on Alexander Avenue just after 8am, according to ABC 7.

During a morning press conference, Mayor Eric Adams confirmed that there were no deaths or injuries as a result of the collapse.

First responders used dogs and drones to sift through the rubble to make sure no one was hurt down below.

According to the New York Fire Department, a gas explosion caused an incinerator shaft attached to the building to collapse. The rest of the 17-story building appear to have been left unaffected. No damage has been reported to any of the apartments.

“The fact that half of the building is gone and you felt it, it’s like, luckily, I asked somebody, I asked was anybody injured? No injuries occurred. Luckily, everybody was able to get out safe. But feeling it and the intensity, and going downstairs, you could barely go downstairs, everybody is trying to go downstairs. People were carrying babies, people got no shoes on, got no coats, no hats, it’s cold outside,” a resident told ABC7.

Adams said the city was still clearing the area and ensuring the building is safe, but said that residents will be allowed to return to their apartments once they finish their inspection.

In the mean time, traffic and pedestrian restrictions have been established near the site of the collapse while crews continue their work to ensure the site is safe. Adams asked that pedestrians avoid the collapse site.

The mayor said an investigation into the cause of the collapse is ongoing.

A neighbor who had called the city to report seeing smoke near the building witnessed the explosion and subsequent collapse.

“I was explaining to the lady what I saw, and she was like, ‘Hold on, let me transfer you to the fire department,’” she told WCBS. “Before she was about to do the transfer, the whole building just – you heard a loud boom, and the thing just exploded. And it fall down just like that.”

Another resident told ABC 7 that the explosion sounded “like a bomb.”

“My mom came knocking on my door and we ran out as soon as we could. I had no shoes on, but it sounded very urgent,” a third resident said.

In addition to. the FDNY and the NYPD, the city’s Buildings Department and the Department of Environmental Protection responded to the scene. Investigators determined that the explosion also destroyed an underground water main.

Con Edison has shut off gas to the site while crews continue their work.

Greta Thunberg’s flotilla ‘aggressively circled by Israeli warship’

Greta Thunberg’s aid flotilla was “aggressively circled” by an Israeli military vessel as it made its final approach to Gaza, activists have said.

One of the lead vessels was forced to make a sharp manoeuvre to avoid a frontal collision with an Israeli ship, a statement by the Global Sumud Flotilla said.

Communications were remotely disabled as the Israeli ship “steered dangerously close” on Tuesday night, it added.

A second vessel in the flotilla, Sirius, was afterwards targeted by the boat, which repeated “similar harassing manoeuvres for an extended period of time – before finally departing”.

“Warships disabled communications, aggressively circled civilian boats, and forced captains into sharp evasive actions to avoid collision,” a statement shared on Wednesday read.

“These hostile actions placed unarmed civilians from over 40 countries in grave danger.”

The Independent has approached the IDF for comment.

Lisi Proenca, on board Sirius, told a press conference on Wednesday that she was on nightwatch when “really fast” boats came towards them.

“It didn’t hit our boat, but it came really close, and then they were circling,” she said, adding that communications appeared jammed.

The boats moved away after some 15 minutes, she said.

Thiago Avila, on board Alma, said in a press conference on Wednesday morning that the incident had “elements of a cyberattack … against our boats”.

There was no structural damage and nobody was wounded, he said.

The flotilla is continuing its journey to Gaza with around 500 activists on board, including civilians from more than 40 countries.

On Tuesday, it entered the “high-risk zone” as it neared the Gaza coast.

Italy, which had sent a navy vessel to escort the boats, last night issued a warning to the boats to turn back from their mission.

“A hope of agreement has finally opened up to end the war and the suffering of the Palestinian civilian population and to stabilise the region. A fragile balance, which many would be happy to disrupt,” Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni said.

Israel has been preparing for the flotilla, ahead of its expected arrival this week.

The IDF’s naval forces are anticipating possible ‘active takeovers’ of vessels, Israeli outlet i24 News reported today. A special task force has reportedly been set up ahead of the approach, a joint effort between the IDF, Shin Bet, police and the Foreign Ministry.

The activists would be brought to shore and likely detained and deported, or held in custody if they refuse, the outlet reports. Thunberg was previously deported from Israel after her Gaza aid boat was intercepted in the Mediterranean in June.

The organisers of the new GSF have already reported difficulty in the flotilla’s approach to Gaza.

The organisers claimed on Tuesday 23 September that several vessels had been targeted by Israeli drones in international waters off Crete.

“Our boats were repeatedly attacked by military drones,” Maria Elena Delia, the GSF’s Italian spokesperson, said at the time. “They struck us with unknown but irritating substances, with sound bombs, and even with drones that deliberately damaged the masts of several vessels.”

No casualties were reported among more than 500 people on board the vessels.

Italian defence minister Guido Crosetto denounced the alleged attack and said he had redirected an Italian navy ship in the area to offer support.

The GSF also said that the flotilla was attacked in Tunisian waters on 9 September.

They posted footage appearing to show one vessel being hit by an object outside the port of Sidi Bou Said.

Tunisian authorities said that a drone was involved and said an initial inspection indicated the explosion came from inside the boat.

The GSF then shared footage appearing to show a second vessel being hit later in the night. They said the boat “sustained fire damage on its top deck”.

No injuries were reported.

The vessels left Barcelona on 1 September with a flotilla of some 40 vessels.

Police shut down Oktoberfest after fatal explosion

The Oktoberfest beer festival in Munich was closed on Wednesday after police said they found explosives in a residential building in the city that caught fire and killed at least one person.

Special forces were investigating an area in the north of Munich earlier in the day, where the Bild newspaper and multiple other reports said shots and explosions had been heard.

City officials said there had been a bomb threat issued by the suspected perpetrator of the explosion early on Wednesday. Munich police said the explosion was part of a domestic dispute, and that the residential building had been “deliberately set on fire”.

Authorities found “explosive traps” in a house and had to call in special forces to defuse them, Munich police said on X, formerly Twitter. Investigators found hand grenades and tripwires, according to Welt.

An unidentified person was found seriously injured near the scene of the fire at Lerchenau Lake. Police later reported that they had died, and that another person was missing. It was not immediately clear whether the deceased person was the suspected perpetrator or someone else.

One resident told the dpa news agency: “I woke up around five o’clock because there were a few bangs. I got up, looked, and then there was a fire.”

Numerous emergency personnel were on site on Wednesday morning. A middle school around a kilometre from the scene was closed, and traffic was diverted from the area.

A motive is still unclear. Police are also said to be investigating posts apparently published online, claiming responsibility for attacks on luxury cars in northern Munich, local media reports.

Security services told Welt that doubts remain as to the authenticity of the post.

The city of Munich announced that there was a “corresponding letter from the perpetrator”, without further details.

Munich mayor Dieter Reiter said the closure of the festival followed “a perpetrator threatening the Oktoberfest”.

“The police will do everything to have the entire Wiesn searched by 5 p.m. this afternoon, if possible, to ensure safety,” he wrote on Instagram. “If that’s not the case, I’ll get in touch again, and then the Wiesn won’t open at all today.”

Police searched the Oktoberfest fairgrounds for other explosive devices and asked workers to leave the area. Witnesses told Seuddeutsche the entire area was evacuated around 9.45am local time.

A loudspeaker blared a warning to festival-goers arriving early this morning, citing a “bomb threat”, FAZ reports.

Some went to local beer gardens in the area, hoping they would be able to return to the festival later today.

Police were searching tents set up near the entrance this morning but found nothing, Seuddeutsche reports, citing authorities.

Police confirmed just after 7am on Wednesday morning that authorities were initially responding to an incident “due to a burning residential building”.

They were called to the scene around 4.40am as residents reported hearing explosions or gunshots.

“Loud banging noises were heard”, police reported, and an injured person was found who, they said, “might be connected to the incident”.

A van was also burned out nearby, they said. Initial images from the scene showed several burned cars in a street after the fire.

They assured the public that the missing person posed no threat.

Oktoberfest is the world’s largest beer festival and usually attracts up to six million visitors.

This year’s festival began on 20 September and ends on 5 October.

Eats, Beats and Storied Streets: A journey through Louisiana

Few places in America are as spellbinding as Louisiana. Streets are alive with music, every table groans with food that tells a story, and every river bend reveals landscapes as mysterious as they are beautiful. Whether you’re dancing to zydeco in Lafayette, devouring beignets in the French Quarter, or gliding through the Atchafalaya swamps in search of alligators, this is a destination which offers travellers an unforgettable blend of rhythm, flavour and culture.

Music that Moves You

A seemingly never-ending party, a stroll through the bouncing streets of New Orleans’ French Quarter is one of America’s most thrilling sensory experiences. Guitars crunch, symbols crash and horns howl on every street corner, from Bourbon Street to Frenchmen Street. This Cajun corner of the US has a deep heritage too, and the Preservation Hall – dating back to 1961 – is an essential stop. With its intimate time-worn walls and wooden chairs facing the small stage, it’s a shrine to New Orleans jazz and every note should be savoured.

But Louisiana’s music tradition goes far beyond the Big Easy. Beginning in 1981, the Baton Rouge Blues Festival is one of the country’s oldest blues festivals and the state capital is a haven of Cajun music. It’s also the home of the swamp blues, so to hear the best of these laid-back rhythms, spend a foot-tapping night at Phil Brady’s Bar & Grill or Henry Turner Jr’s Listening Room. And for a little backyard boogie from local Louisiana musicians, try and hit the wonderfully chilled out Bee Nice Concert Series.

One of the more niche regional sounds is zydeco, and these infectious beats driven by accordions and washboards are perfect for dancing the night away. Over in Lafayette, the lush outdoor Hideaway on Lee and the charming Blue Moon Saloon host high-energy zydeco and Cajun jams. For a deeper dive into this unique music of the swamp, drop by the Festivals Acadiens et Créoles for three glorious days of Cajun, Creole, and zydeco sounds.

Flavours to Savour

Louisiana has one of America’s most distinct food cultures, with Creole dishes like gumbo and jambalaya not found anywhere else. Needless to say, the fiery flavours found in these creations are sublime and it’s no surprise that 2025 is Louisiana’s Year of Food.

With its rich broth, often featuring a roux base and embellished by juicy shrimp and thick sausage, gumbo is arguably the quintessential Creole dish. If you’re in New Orleans, look no further than no–frills downtown spots like Coop’s Place or head out to neighbourhood joints like the upscale Gabrielle Restaurant who serve a smoky take on Cajun-style gumbo or the dense dishes plated up at Liuzza’s by the Track. And if you’re so enraptured by this unique stew, then learn how to make it at home at the New Orleans School of Cooking.

A Cajun rice dish that originated in southern Louisiana in the 18th Century, Jambalaya is also iconic down here and can include meats, vegetables, seafood and spices in its mouthwatering mix. The Jambalaya Shoppe is dotted all around southern Louisiana and is a good place to start, though make time to visit Gonzales – the ‘Jambalaya Capital of the World. It even has its own Jambalaya Festival every spring.

Remember to make time for sweet treats though, as Louisiana’s beignets are something special. Warm, deep-fried pastries dusted with powdered sugar, these gentle delights are the perfect cafe snack. Open since 1862, the Cafe du Monde is an iconic French Quarter spot to watch the world go by with a beignet and café au lait.

And if you’re here for Mardi Gras, make sure to sample the sweet colourful King Cake as the jaunty floats pass by.

Culture and the Great Outdoors

Louisiana’s diverse cultural heritage is as unique as its landscape. French, Spanish, African, Caribbean and native influences all converge into Cajun and Creole identities and that’s most famously reflected in the state’s sublime cuisine. But don’t miss the great outdoors, as Louisiana’s biodiversity is enchanting too.

Acadiana’s humid moss-cloaked swamps and bayous are one of America’s last wildernesses, and boat tours of these serene and ethereal landscapes are unforgettable, especially if you spot wildlife like American Alligators, beavers, herons, eagles and white tail deer. The Atchafalaya Basin, just east of Lafayette, is a particular haven and several airboat tours depart from here, including McGee’s Swamp Tours and Last Wilderness Swamp Tours.

Road trails through these bayous can be just as inspiring, and the Bayou Teche National Byway tells stories. Running for 183 miles from Arnaudville down to Morgan City, this serpentine route passes by ornate antebellum homes like Shadows-on-the-Teche, tranquil fields of sugar cane, breezy swamps and historic towns packed with friendly cafes, zydeco dancehalls and local museums.

Look out for the region’s lively 400+ festivals too, which often celebrate Louisiana’s local culture. The Festival International de Louisiane in Lafayette celebrates the links between Acadiana and the Francophone world, through music, art and food, while the Southwest Louisiana Zydeco Music Festival in Opelousas aims to preserve Louisiana’s most gleeful music genre. And there’s no better way of learning about the state’s people and heritage than at the various tours, concerts, talks and cultural events held in Vermillionville in Lafayette.

Rochdale grooming gang leader sentenced to 35 years in prison

A grooming gang leader who raped two girls in Rochdale has been sentenced to 35 years in prison.

Mohammed Zahid, known as Boss Man, gave both teenagers alcohol, money and food, as well as free underwear from his lingerie stall at Rochdale’s indoor market.

In return, the girls were forced to engage in regular sex acts with Zahid and his friends.

The father-of-three was among seven Asian men convicted in June of committing various sexual offences against the girls between 2001 and 2006.

Prosecutors said both schoolgirls were treated as “sex slaves” from the age of 13.

One of the girls said during the trial in Manchester that she could have been targeted by more than 200 offenders, but said “there was that many it was hard to keep count”.

The other girl said she was living in a local children’s home when she was preyed on by Zahid and fellow market traders Mushtaq Ahmed, 67, and Kasir Bashir, 50.

She said she presumed various agencies knew what was going on, as police regularly picked her up after social workers labelled her a “prostitute” from the age of 10.

Zahid, of Station Road, Crumpsall, thought he was “almost untouchable” as he brazenly visited the care home to pick her up and later drop her off, the court heard.

He was convicted of raping both girls, who did not know each other, on multiple occasions.

Jurors also found him guilty of offences of indecency with a child and procuring a child to have sex.

In 2016, Zahid was jailed for five years after he was convicted of engaging in sexual activity in 2005 and 2006 with a 14-year-old girl whom he met when she visited his stall to buy tights for school.

He was one of many men who called her phone number “out of the blue” and went on to groom the “extremely vulnerable” teenager.

Gen Z wants dial-up back – as the internet may be nearing extinction

A familiar tone turns into phantom dialling. The little box in your house or office is calling out to an answering modem. Brief chirps confirm the two devices are ready to talk each other’s language. More beeps: binary code in audio form. Then, a teeth-grinding fuzzy sound, shards of digital noise pushed through your landline. A brave new world loads slowly on the screen in front of you.

The familiar icon of an AOL pyramid connecting and the sound of the dial-up handshake, often followed by someone in the other room shouting: “Get off the internet, I need to use the phone!” Or “it’s taking a bit longer because America is waking up”.

Dial-up internet and the era it represents – patchy connections, “You’ve got mail!” and an upstart tech industry – has been finally laid to rest. As of this week, AOL – the most popular internet service provider of the late 1990s – has finally discontinued its dial-up service, severing the connection of around 175,000 Americans who still (apparently) are using it.

Most of the world said goodbye to dial-up a long time ago. Most of us live in an age of seamless and relentless connection – neither sleep nor death will stop your phone from pinging with updates. But the story of dial-up is a vital one to understand and could even set the tone for the future.

It certainly can help us parse the chaos of today’s internet-infused reality, as well as what comes next, be it AI chatbots overpowering Google search, an Elon Musk monopoly, or the destruction of the internet entirely.

It was late evening in 2020 when Dr Gough Lui spied a familiar beige box crammed in the corner of his office – an old computer. “I live and breathe technology,” the biomedical and electronics engineer from Western Sydney University tells me, “I decided to adopt it for a nostalgia trip.”

After a bit of tinkering, he recreated a dial-up connection. “Part of the charm was simply the fact we had to be patient,” he remembers. Flaky connections and dropouts were tolerated, simply put, “because it was worth it”.

There has been a noticeable nostalgia for the early internet era lately. The breakneck speed of tech has led to a fondness for a quieter, more comfortable time. The recently opened Nokia Design Archive in Aalto University, Finland, invites people to reminisce about a time of brick phones and before push notifications. The Barbican’s extremely popular emo exhibition “I’m Not Okay: An Emo Retrospective” celebrated “a transatlantic subculture that thrived in cyberspace”.

Trends in fashion and on social media suggest that even younger generations are looking back fondly at a time they may not have experienced first hand. Y2K fashion is hitting catwalks and high streets again. TikTok is awash with explorations of old tech-y visual aesthetics, retroactively named things like “Frutiger Aero” (rolling green fields and bright aquatic PC backgrounds) and “Utopian Virtual” (the old art style of educational CD-ROMs and Microsoft Encarta).

Colette Shade, author of Y2K (How the 2000s Became Everything), has noticed this nostalgic longing. “Millennials have a sense memory of dial-up … Getting the internet installed at your house was a formative experience for many people that age, especially in retrospect.”

But more than this, the idea of “going online” is something that younger generations have not experienced; the internet wasn’t “woven into every aspect of life”.

“You could go online and talk to friends and strangers but then log off and go outside,” she says. Maybe it’s not the Nokia 3310 and low-rise pants we miss from the time, maybe it’s the prospect of living unplugged from the incessant din of the modern tech world. But how did we get here? Where did dial-up come from?

In 1966, a telephone line connected a TX-2 computer in Massachusetts manned by MIT researcher Lawrence Roberts to a Q32 computer on the other side of the country in California, manned by Tom Marrill. The reason for this connection? Like many technological innovations, it was the American military-industrial complex.

US president Dwight Eisenhower had created the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) 11 years earlier to contend with Soviet Union tech. Working on ballistic missiles and nuclear defences required a network for ARPA computers. Thus, that connection was created.

What was the first message sent using the internet? “LO”. It was meant to be “LOGIN”, but the network crashed.

If the biblical language was incidental, ARPA colleagues Robert Taylor and his boss JCR Licklider would make a prediction that would change everything on God’s green Earth: “In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face-to-face.”

It would be people like Barry Shein and Peter Dawe who would help fulfil this far-fetched prophecy.

Shein has a lofty and dystopian-sounding title: CEO of The World – the first internet service provider for the public. “I had installed the internet at Boston University over several years,” Shein tells me. Many of his customers were former students or recently laid-off Bostonians, who had developed a taste for email and the growing discussions happening online.

In 1989, Shein hired a lease line from UUNET, put five modems on a bookshelf and created something like the personal internet subscription we know today. The internet – and the widening web available via the connection – was no longer just for students or workplaces.

Dawe’s business started with similar grandeur at Pipex, the first UK internet service provider that operated a 64k transatlantic lease line to the US. Dawe hired a line from BT, rented a windowless Cambridge office, a PC and a secondhand Astra, and started offering connections to companies.

These first forays were met with slight disinterest and sometimes scandal. “There almost immediately appeared an opinion that I was illegally reselling a government resource,” Shein explains of The World’s early days. “At the time, I estimated we were blocked from about one-third of the internet, but there was still plenty for our customers to access.”

The pushback was commercial as well. Networks were “walled gardens”, Dawe explains. “The business model was to lock you in … But we were happier being promiscuous, and that was a massive innovation.” In 1993, the BBC signed up for a lease line. Pipex expanded abroad, and by the time he had moved on to found the Internet Watch Foundation, he maintains it was responsible for “half of global internet traffic”.

In 2000, 30 per cent of the US had a dial-up connection, the phone-hogging method was the primary pathway online as the digital superhighway was evolving. But as time pressed onward, broadband – with its faster connection and higher frequencies freeing up phone lines – began to surge, and its gain was dial-up’s loss. A decade later, only 5 per cent of Americans were using it to get online.

The “Magnificent Seven” companies born from the data-centred era after dial-up now make up 35 per cent of the US stock market. The “hippiedom” that Dawe says ran through those early years has been replaced. Innovation and huge amounts of capital walk in lock-step.

Despite rising murmurs of a “bubble” and the ever-receding horizon of human-level computer intelligence (AGI), AI is still the tech sector’s big thing. Its disruptiveness, combined with the “ens***tification” of search engines could mean that we talk about Google much like we’re talking about dial-up now, in a few years – or sooner.

Gigabit internet is the super-speedy connection that much of the hopes of AI are pegged to. For you, it means faster internet – it was rolled out to 3,800 homes in Northumberland this year – for the tech overlords, it means “quantum computing”, a complex kind of technology that borrows scientific notions of “entanglement” and “superpositions” to (potentially) solve big issues in pharmaceutical development and engineering.

The achievement of all of this still requires a connection to the internet, and on that, Dawe has his dark predictions. “Starlink is a fly in the ointment” when it comes to the free market of connection. Elon Musk’s company provides satellite internet services, and Dawe says it could grow to monopolise internet connections.

The other issue is the shift towards cloud computing. It works, Dawe says, until it doesn’t. Internet outages were reported in the Middle East and Asia at the start of this month, linked to Red Sea cables being “cut”, according to Microsoft. Governments in countries affected were fairly quiet on the events, but in an increasingly polarised world where vital infrastructure is in the aether of the cloud, one can only imagine what a larger outage could do.

The recent cyber attacks on Marks & Spencer, The Co-op and Jaguar Land Rover could be a horrifying portent. All three companies outsource to Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) for a range of tech needs, including – at least for The Co-op – adopting a “cloud-first strategy”.

If all of this sounds a little frantic and entropic, media theorist and author Geert Lovink agrees, and he’s had enough.

“Things are finite, and that is in contradiction to Silicon Valley and its need for eternal growth,” he says. His radical 2022 text, Extinction Internet, purports the need for a detachment from this seamless connection, to overcome the “polycrisis” we face, along with an understanding of the new techno-social dimension of the mind, and how it has been saturated by all-you-can-scroll content, delivered via a seamless internet connection.

He’s quick to point out that the cost of the internet has stayed the same since the days of The World and Barry Shein, but everyone pays it with no complaints.

And for what? For that dial-up promise of “people connecting” and a democratised cyberspace to be lost in a haze of chatbots and politically noxious social media platforms? Or for tech-libertarians to make money off of our cyberspace psyches while we are left with smartphone addictions and emaciated attention spans?

The first message on the internet may have had a biblical tinge, but the first ever message sent via electronic communication – Samuel Morse and his telegraph in 1844 – was a direct Bible quote: “What hath God wrought?” It feels more apt by the day.