Journalist and editor James Brown in 1997 (Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images)
There is no evidence that Mohammad Farooq, the bomb-maker at the heart of our main story this series, was ever in contact with any actual person to plot an act of terror. For any ideological why, we must turn where he turned — to the influence of his phone. A look through his Instagram feed yields the following:
A matte-black BMW that looks like the Batmobile.
A man wearing a thick gold chain, smoking a cigar on a yacht.
A picture of an explosion.
A man sitting on the front of a holographically-painted Lamborghini in sunglasses.
A picture of a body in a body bag.
A blank-looking influencer lying in a bikini on a stony beach.
It's easy to dismiss the blend of aspiration and titillation and machines and violence that flashes past there, and on the equivalent feeds of many sad boys across the world. It's even easier to blame it for real-world violence, condemn it, and demand censorship. But, argues George Pendle below, there might be another way, with an unlikely inspiration. RS
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GEORGE PENDLE is a senior editor at Air Mail, and the author of Strange Angel, Death: A Life and The Remarkable Millard Fillmore