Includes bibliographical references and index.

Tourists, terrorists, secularists, hackers, fundamentalists, transhumanists, algorithmicians: in this book Roberto Calasso considers the tribes that inhabit and inform the world today. A world that feels more elusive than ever before. Yet once contrasted with the period spanning Hitler's rise to power and the end of the Second World War, when the world nearly annihilated itself, our current era begins to take on an unprecedented form. What emerges is something illusory, ever-shifting and occasionally murderous. It is the age of the insubstantial: the unnamable present. This book is a meditation on the obscure and ubiquitous process of transformation happening in societies today, where distant echoes of Auden's The Age of Anxiety give way to something altogether more unsettling.