How would you explain the state to a small child? Would you use the police as an example? Perhaps the image of Leo Varadkar, the sitting Taoiseach? Or would it be the local Post Office? How will our vision of the state change after Covid-19? Given that this is 2020, you could just go to Google Images, and type in ‘the state’. The statistician and information design and data-visualisation expert Edward Tufte argues that to see what Google sees, and not what its algorithms want you to see, you should stay away from the main google.com page, and look at…

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