The Game analyzes our current cultural and social moment by examining just how it is that we got here. Year by year, innovation by innovation, the book recontextualizes our relationship with technology. Alessandro Baricco explores not only how massive technological leaps have changed our world, but how they modified human behavior, economics, and our relationship with our possessions and contemporaries. He focuses on how Space Invaders dramatically shifted how we view our interaction with digital and social space, how the dot-com bubble birthed the online venture capitalist, and how the advent of the algorithm permanently delegitimized the cultural and academic elite in a way we’ll grapple with for decades to come. Razor sharp and technically astute, this book-length essay also reverberates with humanity.