The Q-Net Secures Our Messages. It Cannot Secure Our Judgment.

We congratulate ourselves, rightly, on a network that cannot be secretly overheard. But an unbreakable channel is only as good as the arguments we send down it, and this summer the arguments are fraying. On the augmentation question, on water allocation, on how to count and shelter more than a hundred and twelve million people on the move, the Q-Net faithfully delivers our shouting to one another intact. The physics guarantees the message arrives untampered; it guarantees nothing about whether the message is wise, or fair, or even true. I do not romanticise the old noise. But I notice that we have poured a century of genius into securing the pipe and rather less into deserving it. A civilisation can encrypt every sentence it speaks and still lie to itself. The wall socket, as this paper's own columnist observed, asks nothing of us. Our judgment should ask more.