A fabulous new book ... focuses on the extraordinary encounters between Cook's salt-encrusted mariners and the colourful Pacific islanders

Valuable and vivid

Epic ... A writer of the rarest quality...wonderful...the definitive volume for this moment in our history

Rich, vivid and deeply provocative, Thomas's work combines premiere adventure story with thorough history and intensive sociology

One of the most influential pioneers and thinkers of the internet age.

Tech’s most valuable teacher.

The ultimate tech industry thought leader.

The man who can really can make a whole industry happen.

If people want ideas about the future, they should look to O’Reilly to point them out.

For anyone who wants to know how to prepare for the future – and how we might shape that future in ways that broadly benefit society, not just technological or entrepreneurial elites – WTF? is an indispensable guide.

Tim O’Reilly’s creative insights and moral clarity have made him the trusted guide to waves of technology now sweeping the planet. If you want a better future, don’t just read this book, but make sure your friends do, too.

Lots of people are worried about new technology and its impact on the economy. Will automation make humans obsolete? Will platform businesses become giant monopolies? Will the online economy kill the suburbs? How will tech affect inequality? These questions are hard to answer, but media entrepreneur Tim O’Reilly . . . [doesn’t] shy away from the task . . . [WTF?] contemplates how economic systems can be transformed to spread the benefits of new technology more equitably.

Defiantly optimistic . . . O’Reilly is inquisitive, sourcing ideas and thoughts from across history and disciplines, while the book is littered with quotes from literature, and by historical figures, entrepreneurs, economists, and friends in high places.

So many insights, so much history, so much of our future by the consummate insider who is as much a part of the story as the people and ideas he writes about – I was learning something on more or less every page.

Tim has been an astute observer of both the successes and the excesses of Silicon Valley. This provocative book distils the lessons he has learned about the power of technology to shape our economy and our lives.

If anyone knows how to leverage the power of social media, it’s Tim O’Reilly.

Draws on decades of experience covering tech to illustrate how increasingly intelligent machines are changing the way we work and how they could impact the way we address our most pressing social concerns.

O’Reilly highlights the big (and sometimes unexpected) questions we really should be asking about the future of tech, how we shape it, regulate it, and ensure it has the values we want for business, government and society.

If you’ve heard the term Open Source software or Web 2.0 then you’re familiar with the work of Tim O’Reilly, who’s had a big hand in framing each of those even bigger ideas, shaping the debate about the future of the present day enchantment with technology.

O’Reilly has an uncanny knack for charting what’s ahead. In WTF?, he shows us know he does it. At a time of sweeping change, it is a bracing and an exhilarating read.

Excellent . . . Tim knows this stuff as well as anyone, and there’s never been a more important moment to understand the issues raised in this book.

For more than two decades, Tim O’Reilly has been the conscience of the tech industry . . . His new book WTF? seizes on this singular moment in history, in which just about everything makes us say “WTF?”

One of the biggest names in technology.

O’Reilly’s vision is more Utopian than dystopian, even downright optimistic in a roundabout, creative-destruction sort of way. The positive outlook is refreshing and engaging.

No one is better at understanding the future than Tim O’Reilly. He has an intuitive feel and a deep knowledge of technology. This book makes sense of the astonishing transformations that are happening around us and is an indispensable guidebook to tomorrow.