The Great Sleepwalk: The markets that program us (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798275799019)

We did not sleepwalk because anyone lulled us.

We sleepwalked because the digital world made certain paths easy-and we followed.

The Great Sleepwalk tells the story of how modern life quietly drifted into an architecture we barely saw forming. From early villages to industrial factories to today's platforms, Irene Ng reveals the hidden dynamics that shaped human behaviour: how markets rewrote identity, how firms coordinated our lives, and how digital systems fragmented the self into dozens of incompatible pieces.

Through vivid stories-a food vendor in Lagos, a gig worker in Manila, a designer in Lisbon-Ng shows how billions of people became economically invisible outside the platforms that recorded them. And she shows the emerging alternative: a world where individuals can hold verified copies of their identity, work, relationships, and history; a world where micro-firms can operate globally; a world where capital can finally see human beings again.

This is a book about markets-how they shape us, how they drift beyond our awareness, and how they can be redesigned. It offers a way out of the digital exhaustion we all feel, not through resistance, but through better structure: new "water" for the next economy.