This news is good. It means that technology still needs us. It means we might still control it and that we can even abuse it - or influence it in some more politically correct way. It means you and a few dozen, or a few hundred, or even just a few of your closest friends can get together and repeatedly tell the sat nav company that your street no longer exists. Which could be the difference between living on a major highway or a never-used byway.

It also means that our collective ignorance is no worse and no better than the professional, considered advice of highly edited experts. It means Wikipedia's rantings about, say, Queen Victoria's response to the Crimean War are no less or more an authority than some expensive, heavy tome imported at vast expense. It means we might wallow in our own stupidity but that we finally are in control of the way our destiny will be recorded.

Because while history should never be written by the uninformed, it often has been. There's a reason we have that old saying about victors determining the way history is recorded. What we're entering now is a time when mass thought, mass ignorance, mass prejudice - and the opposites of all those things - will determine the ways in which our times are recorded. And, ultimately, that will influence a shifting of power.

It's not ridiculous to believe I could divert traffic away from my street just by persuading various sat nav companies to ignore it. Remember when you used to remember phone numbers? Now you just scroll down your mobile menu. In all likelihood most of us will be using sat nav one day soon; the time will come when you no longer remember traffic routes but simply punch in your beginning and end points. If my street isn't in your directory, then you won't be driving down it. Technology could still be our slave if we play our cards right. It's terrifying, because it means that so much is vulnerable, but absolutely fascinating all the same.

Google's phenomenal success comes from its reliance on a ranking system - essentially the search engine runs a ballot of all websites to determine how important a page is in relation to the search parameters. In theory, it is an incorruptible algorithm. In reality, it's possible to cheat the Page-rank system (It takes a capital "P" because the bloke who invented the algorithm was Larry page, who went on to be one of Google's squillionaire founders. He was single last I checked). If you can cheat the system, you can push your own website higher up a list of options to make your business, your political party, your joke, your fashion, your gripe, your theory instantly available to billions. Worth stuffing up? Bloody oath.

Type your own name into the web. Unless your name is Kylie Minogue or "Pink hairy man huge", chances are your search will either not find you or will rank you so far down a list of similar names you effectively will disappear. But if you knew how to cheat the system you could rank yourself not just first, but also second through to 102nd. And then you become a cyber-reailty. Instead of the information lurking out there passively, it whacks a user in the face. And not just that - it absolutely drowns out any alternative.