Sometimes, when I imagine the future, I find myself thinking about a person whose name we may never know, sitting in a room we will never see. On the screen in front of them are systems that millions of people experience as separate things: money, electricity, communication, transport, identity. Somewhere beneath those familiar names, there are connections. A thought follows me into that room: a hacker could destroy the world, or save it. I mean this as a possibility worth examining. No one possesses a universal key to civilisation. Yet the more of life we organise through connected systems, the more seriously we have to consider what happens when the ability to influence those systems becomes concentrated in very few hands. Physical battlefields have not disappeared. People still lose their homes and lives to physical violence. But a conflict can also pass through the systems that keep a society functioning. An intervention made through a screen can have consequences for someone who never sees it. By “the world,” I mean the ordinary arrangements we expect to find intact tomorrow morning. The payment that goes through. The hospital record that belongs to the right person. The message that reaches its destination. The evidence we can still distinguish from an invention. Much of everyday life rests on that quiet expectation. I participate in it willingly. I want fewer steps, quicker answers, less friction. I like being able to manage things from one place. When a system remembers something for me, I am grateful. When it makes a difficult task easy, I rarely pause to ask which part of my own ability I may stop exercising. Then another question interrupts me: if the connection disappears one day, will I lose only the service, or also my ability to act without it? I can imagine the difference in small, uncomfortable details. A navigation service goes down, and I discover that I have travelled through my own city without learning it. An account becomes inaccessible, and the documents through which I prove who I am sit behind the very access I have lost. An automated recommendation disappears, and I realise how long it has been since I worked through that kind of decision myself. None of this means we should remember everything or abandon useful tools. Human life has always depended on knowledge held by others. What troubles me is the moment when an alternative ceases to be available because we have stopped practising it, funding it, or even imagining that we might need it. The interruption then reveals a dependency that was already there. This changes how I see the person in that room. Their power comes partly from our arrangements. Every discarded fallback, every concentration of authority, every decision to make one system indispensable helps determine how far an intervention might reach. The final action may belong to one person. The conditions that magnify it belong to a much longer history. So if one individual could cause an extraordinary disruption, I would want to ask more than how they acquired such extraordinary ability. I would also want to know how so much of everyone else’s ability came to depend on so few points of access. And what would that person want? Money is an obvious answer to many crimes. But the person I am imagining may be interested in something money cannot fully satisfy: the experience of deciding what other people are allowed to do. They might want to demonstrate that governments, institutions and millions of ordinary lives can be made to wait for their permission. They might seek recognition, revenge, ideological victory, or the private satisfaction of making the world conform to an internal design. I cannot know the motive in advance. But I suspect that, at the scale of this thought experiment, power and control deserve at least as much attention as profit. Such a person might have little interest in destroying everything. A functioning world could give them more to control. They could want transactions to continue, messages to arrive and doors to open, provided that the terms remained theirs to alter. What would freedom mean inside a system that still offered choices, if someone else could silently decide which choices were available? This is where I return to The Matrix. The red and blue pills give a memorable shape to the choice between discovering a disturbing reality and remaining inside a familiar illusion. Yet I find myself lingering on what comes after that choice. Learning how the system works does not settle what we should do with the knowledge. Suppose I wake up. Suppose I can see the mechanisms that others cannot. Why would that make me qualified to decide their lives? For this thought experiment, I want to borrow the colours and move from pills to hats. I am using them as a metaphor, rather than a technical classification. Red carries the disturbance of seeing through a system, along with the temptation to intervene on the strength of that revelation. White carries a claim to protection, and the responsibility that such a claim must survive. Both can begin with a sincere desire to help. Someone who sees an injustice may feel compelled to act where established institutions have failed. Waiting can have consequences too. But the conviction that something must be done can gradually become the conviction that whatever I choose to do is justified. People who hesitate may begin to look ignorant. People who object may begin to look complicit. At what point does the person who wants to release others from control begin to treat their disagreement as another obstacle to overcome? The troubling possibility is that domination might arrive with a sincere explanation of why it is necessary. The person imposing it might believe that, given enough time and enough control, they could finally make the world fair. I would want to know whether their imagined fair world still contained people entitled to refuse it. The good hacker’s motivation seems easier to name: prevent harm, protect people, expose abuse, preserve freedom. I recognise those aims. But their familiarity can make us pass too quickly over the choices they require. Protect which people? Reveal which information? Preserve whose freedom when two freedoms come into conflict? How much risk may someone impose on strangers while trying to protect them? A disclosure can expose wrongdoing and also expose a vulnerable person. A shutdown can interrupt an abusive operation and also interrupt something innocent people depend on. Technical skill may reveal what is possible while leaving its human consequences uncertain. For me, the ethical value would have to include a willingness to remain answerable to those consequences. The person would need to distinguish what they know from what they assume, limit the reach of an intervention, accept scrutiny and preserve room for correction. They would need to care about consent even when obtaining it was inconvenient, and about the people whose suffering would never appear in the story of their achievement. That does not require an absence of ambition or pride. I would be more interested in what happens when ambition encounters a limit. Can this person accept that another human being’s right to choose may matter more than the elegance of their solution? Perhaps one measure of the good they do is whether other people become more capable of acting without them. There is a difficult kind of generosity in that. To repair something without arranging to become indispensable. To make knowledge available without keeping its users dependent. To help create conditions under which people can question your judgment and, when necessary, replace you. Would someone still want to save the world if the result gave them no lasting authority over it? Artificial intelligence and automation sharpen this question for me. If increasingly capable tools allow a person’s intention to produce effects far beyond what they could carry out alone, then the distance between deciding and doing becomes a moral concern. An assumption may travel through many actions before anyone has the opportunity to challenge it. The person initiating those actions may possess more reach than understanding. I would want the ability to stop, reconsider and reverse a decision to grow alongside the ability to execute it. The same applies to institutions. We cannot make a society safe merely by hoping that whoever acquires exceptional power will have exceptional character. We also have to ask whether the systems themselves allow mistakes to be contained, authority to be questioned and essential services to continue when one part fails. Otherwise, the story leaves us waiting for a good person powerful enough to defeat a bad one, while the rest of us remain dependent on the outcome. That is a strangely passive future to imagine for an age that promises to make us more capable. I began with a person in a room. I still think that person matters. Someone’s courage might prevent a catastrophe. Someone’s appetite for control might help produce one. Their motives, methods and willingness to accept limits could affect lives far beyond their sight. But I can no longer look at them without also seeing the decisions that placed so much within their reach, including the ordinary decisions I make when I exchange another small piece of participation for convenience. Red or white hat? I want to know what the person can see, what they intend, and what they are willing to do. I also want to know what happens when someone tells them they are wrong. And if one day they tell us that they have saved the world, will we still have the knowledge, the means and the freedom to decide for ourselves whether they have?