Fowler admits he made a “big mistake” and within a couple of months, Solid Gold Bomb folded. His employees were all out of jobs and a once thriving firm was gone. All because of a horrible T-shirt that no-one wore, no-one bought, and which never materially existed.

But that’s the trouble with algorithms. All sorts of unexpected results can occur. Sometimes these are costly, but in other cases they have benefited businesses to the tune of millions of pounds. What’s the real impact of the machinations of machines? And what else do they do?

To really understand the sorry mess that ended things for Solid Gold Bomb, one has to consider the instant success that Fowler’s scripts and computer tricks had once brought him. Years before he ever experimented with the “keep calm and carry on” meme, he had devised an automated T-shirt design process which published over 22 million different versions of sports-related designs to a web store. These included icons and, crucially, people’s names. Finding the shirt with your name or your friend’s name on it made you much more likely to buy it, discovered Fowler. “It was about a 100-to-one ratio. For example, a picture of a car would sell once whereas a picture of a car with a name below it would sell a 100 times,” he says.