The financial crisis that disrupted the global economy between 2007 and 2008, causing the collapse of financial giants such as Lehman Brothers. The COVID pandemic that since 2019 has spread death and distress around the planet - and before it, the Ebola outbreak that between 2014 and 2016 brought Western African economies to their knees. The explosion of fake news, on occasion of the 2016 US presidential election and of several other elections, coordinated by fake Twitter accounts driven by Russian bots rivaling with, and even influencing, "traditional" media. While at a first sight these social phenomena might look unrelated, a more in depth analysis reveals strong similarities between them. Our world is permeated by network connections: we might be unaware of many of them, but they are the main object of study for scholars in the field of network theory - and network theory represents a unique instrument to interpret and control countless economic and social phenomena that dominated the media in the last twenty years. This book invites to a journey led by the awareness of networks in our daily lives - and of the responsibilities attached.

Pietro Battiston, after graduating in Mathematics, earned a PhD in Political Economy at the University of Milan Bicocca and is now a researcher at the University of Parma. His research focuses on network theory, experimental economics and tax evasion, topics on which he has published articles in important international journals.

English manuscript available