We should have seen it coming. The election result was staring at us all along, illusive in the white noise of the contest but crystal clear in the rear-view mirror.

It was there in the declining levels of trust in our institutions as if politics could ever make difference. It was there in the negative approval level of the leader as the contest became a cage fight. It was there in the high number of disengaged voters who couldn’t even articulate which way they would lean four days out from the poll.

But most of all it was there in the way that, after 20 years, network technology is metastasising out of control and letting us all down as it fails to deliver on its promise to bring us closer together to create a more informed and collaborative world.

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In our comfy corner of the web none of this seemed to matter. A united team with a well-developed policy agenda that confronted the nation’s future challenges would surely trump a divided group of cowboys denying science and indulging in sectarian sideshows.

Now it is clear we were living in our own webtopia, where we could share our inspiration and outrage among like-minded others who confirmed our passions and our faith that merit and logic and objective facts would determine the democratic outcome. More fool us.

We should have seen it coming: that when the disengaged looked up from their devices, all they would see were higher taxes against a yellow background. Pensioners learned they were about to be taxed rather than receiving free dental, real estate agents whipped up fears that the property market would collapse, tradies believed their four-wheel drives would be outlawed, while Clive Palmer dumped squillions accusing Bill Shorten of taxing us “trillions”.

And that was the more legitimate wing of the conservative campaign to cling to power. The web was awash with fake, where the death tax lived in video, where Labor denials became mash-ups of intent endorsed with a wink and nod from the PM down. Meanwhile Chinese-language diatribes that Labor would force children into sodomy went uncontested.

The impact of the web across our lives has passed a tipping point and is now undermining our capacity to think clearly

Labor’s call to fairness backfired because they couldn’t get people’s attention long enough to weigh up the choices and actually judge what is and isn’t fair. In an election context where truth is no longer an anchor, involving an objective analysis had become a fool’s errand.

Labor wanted to do too many things, to act on climate change and raise the minimum wage, to fix the NDIS and invest in early learning, to build social homes and strengthen environment laws. And each of these policies germinated its own campaign of fear and loathing, and on platforms powered by fear and loathing that was only ever going to end in tears.

We should have seen it coming. The public square where politics used to be conducted had been ransacked, the vestiges of the legacy media in its noisy death throes failing to anchor the sprawl of the unregulated but weaponised corporate platforms of social media.

The prime minister was not so much a candidate as a meme factory, nothing more than five words required for any occasion, no policy, just a footy to kick, a pie to munch on, a beer to sup. The critics applauded a strong campaign. In contrast Shorten was boooooring: explaining policy, meeting with people. How would that go viral?

Of course electorates on the city fringes and regions, comprising voters on lower incomes, many of who did not commit until the final week of the campaign, would reject distributive policies that would have made their lives materially better off. After all that’s what they’d done in the US and Britain, and in most places democracy still asserts its dominance.

We should have seen it coming. But our bearings were off by polls (mea culpa, mea culpa) that disenfranchised the disengaged in the name of statistical elegance. Imagine, for a moment, if the final polls had been Labor 47 – Coalition 45 of declared voters with 8% undecided. (Which were the actual numbers in the final week of the campaign without the “don’t knows” removed.)

Post-election research (I know, we don’t trust the polls anymore) suggests a late swing to the Coalition. It shows two things: a big drop in the Labor vote with late voters and a shift to minor parties where the votes went back to the Coalition.

These late shifters tell us they were more likely to get their news from social media and word of mouth. They were not entering the public square, they were hearing the roars from the periphery.

I should have seen this coming because what has just happened is totally consistent with themes in the book I am throwing into the public domain – Webtopia: The Worldwide Wreck of Tech and How to Make the Net Work. Indeed, a Labor win would have cut across my narrative.

I argue that the impact of the web across our lives has passed a tipping point and is now undermining our capacity to think clearly, to agree on baseline truths to tackle big issues, to manage differences and to deliver a fair distribution of our the wealth it creates.

Instead we have co-created a libertarian, hyper-capitalist web of self-gratification, where through a hi-tech version of terra nullius the old laws of society no longer apply, allowing unregulated platforms to lull people into believing they are consumers when they have actually become products.

The political expression of this technology is a disengaged citizenry who have been attracted to fatuous strongmen who have in turn adopted said technology to impose tighter controls over their rights to dissent. Scomo may just be a buffoon in a baseball cap, but he can follow the playbook.

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We have come full circle. The push for suffrage emerged from the movements that emerged from the industrial revolution when untethered technological advances left children in factories and wealth concentrated in the hands of the few. A demand for human sovereignty over technology was our collective response.

Now the conduct of elections are providing an early warning sign of how our system is facing a massive stress under this tsunami of connectivity. I think this crisis is more profound than we realise: it is dividing us, destroying our jobs, preventing us from dealing with climate change and distracting us from the things that really matter.

So while the disappointment of the election result will prompt many to rethink the way they play the game (less policy, more negativity, more likeable leader), I reckon it’s now on us to actually re-evaluate the rules.

From demanding truth in advertising on social media platforms that finally accept they are publishers, to rebuilding institutions to act as a counterweight to the tyranny of big tech, to fostering long-term engagement with the people who have lost faith in the system, we need to harness the web before it’s too late.

The progressive project has just got bigger and more urgent.

• Peter Lewis’s Webtopia – the Worldwide Wreck of Tech and How to Make the Net Work (NewSouth) is out now