Back cover

Not a cold essay, not a catalogue of technologies, but a journey through stories, anecdotes, insights, contradictions, and fragments of lived experience. What happened did not stay locked in labs, companies, or servers: it entered homes, relationships, language, fears, and each of our habits. Quietly, almost invisibly. Always irreversibly.

This book lets the reader see from above the landscape we have crossed, to grasp the whole. Then it forces us down into the narrowest channels, the darkest corners of a change we called progress even when we no longer knew where it was taking us. Without jargon. Without the comforting lie of official versions.

From the famous line attributed to Henry Ford — “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses” — to Z0rg’s bitter irony — “Edward Snowden told you in 2013. The world listened for six months. Then it forgot everything and downloaded TikTok” — this book is a narrative crossing of the digital world and its shadows.

It is a story about us, about what we accepted, what we ignored, what was taken from us without a sound — and what, perhaps, we can still save.