The the Game: A Digital Turning Point [Hardcover] Baricco, Alessandro and Botsford, Clarissa

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.

Alessandro Baricco is one of Italy's most versatile contemporary writers and public intellectuals. Known first for his bestselling novels Land of Glass (1991 Italy's Prix Medicis and Campiello Prize winner), Ocean Sea (1993) and Silk (1996, translated into 16 languages), Baricco has also had a prolific career as television host of cultural programs, as a playwright, and essayist. His fourth non-fiction book The Barbarians (2006) tackled the relationship between writing and the digital cultural revolution. In his latest book The Game (2018), Baricco has returned to this topic enlarging his perspective to the impact of the digital revolution on humanist thought and culture at large. The book represents an intellectual preface to the principles that Baricco has applied to the Academy program of the Holden School of Contemporary Humanities that he founded in 1994 in Turin (Italy).