Digital Chaos

How the internet spiraled out of control, and how the creation of Web3 could contain it--or make the problem disastrously worse.

In Hannes Grassegger's sharp and revealing account of the death and life of the internet, we see how the promises of free information and connectedness have been replaced by shockingly irresponsible behavior among powerful people. He attends a bacchanalian party on Richard Branson's private island with some of the wealthiest businessmen in the world, sees the Arab Spring coalescing online, and makes an overnight fortune in cryptocurrency, hearing tell of great futures yet to unfold. And then, just as quickly, the promises vanish.

Yet as Grassegger shows, the story isn't over. He argues that the arrival of Web3--a new version of the internet owned by everyone rather than a few CEOs--will fundamentally change society. What's yet to be determined is whether it changes for the better or the worse--and much comes down to a few key choices we now face.

Written with literary flair, an observant sense of humor, and a deep understanding of technology, Digital Chaos is a book about who owns the internet, and therefore the world.

Hannes Grassegger is a Swiss economist and award-winning technology reporter. He is known for his groundbreaking investigations on Cambridge Analytica and uncovering Facebook’s globalized way of censoring and deleting posts. In 2014 he published I am Capital, on why we should own our personal data. Hannes is a staff reporter for Switzerland’s leading weekly Das Magazin.
 
Hannes has won many awards for journalism, amongst them the Gerald Loeb Award for Beat Reporting and German “Wächterpreis.” He has appeared on CNN, BBC, Al-Jazeera, Canal+ (France), ZDF (Germany) and many others.
 
Hannes is member of the Global Future Council on Media, Sports and Entertainment of the World Economic Forum WEF, part of the WEF Global Experts Community, and was the 2018 Swiss Fellow at The Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC. His work has been translated into over 20 languages and published via The Guardian, New Republic, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Internazionale, Die ZEIT, amongst others.