A fierce attack on globalism - and a manifesto for change - by one of the world's leading scientific writers. Contemporary scientific discoveries indicate that all of life - from the most primitive cells, up to human societies, corporations and nation-states, even the global economy - is organized along the same basic patterns and principles: those of the network. However, the new global economy differs in important aspects from the networks of life: whereas everything in a living network has a function, globalism ignores all that cannot give it an immediate profit, creating great armies of the excluded. The global financial network also relies on advanced information technologies - it is shaped by machines, and the resulting economic, social and cultural environment is not life-enhancing but life-degrading, in both a social and an ecological sense.