As we hurtle into the age of AI, society stands at a crossroads. We can continue on our current path, allowing Big Tech to control us and our data. Or we can take the other path: one in which we return the internet to its original intent as a system that serves all human beings. And Michael Casey can show us how. A veteran journalist who’s been writing and speaking about tech for almost three decades, he’s the co-author of Our Biggest Fight: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity, and Dignity in the Digital Age. In hopeful, practical talks, he draws on his six acclaimed books to give us the tools to reclaim the internet, unleashing waves of innovation far more powerful and socially beneficial than anything we’ve seen before. His call to action is summed up in in the words of some familiar computer keystrokes: CTRL-ALT-DEL-ESC. We need to take control of our data, migrate to an alternative model, delete the old one and escape to a better web?and a better world.

Michael Casey is the former Chief Content Officer of CoinDesk, the Loeb Award-winning media, events and data platform, and a veteran journalist who previously spent two decades at The Wall Street Journal.

In Our Biggest Fight: Reclaiming Liberty, Humanity and Dignity in the Digital Age?his sixth and latest book?Michael and his co-author, business leader Frank McCourt, make an impassioned case for the democratization of our digital data, the most valuable and politically potent commodity of the internet economy. Describing it as both a human right and an economic opportunity, they urge individuals and companies to embrace new technologies that let them wrest control of our data away from the “oligarchs” of Big Tech that currently monopolize it to the detriment of everyone else. The book details the painful legacy of the current internet model: a surging mental health crisis marked by an epidemic of teenage suicides, a breakdown in civility, a dysfunctional democracy. But unlike other accounts that have described social media’s ills but offered no tangible solutions, this one has a hopeful, practical message, one that Michael conveys to his audiences. He explains how adopting “self-sovereign” models of data management will allow people and businesses to collectively reset the internet, returning it to its original intent as a system that serves everyone.

As the chair of the highly influential annual Consensus conference and co-host of the Money Reimagined podcast, Michael has developed a clear vision of how businesses can embrace the internet’s best elements and avoid its worst. Under his leadership, CoinDesk grew into a leading tech brand. In November 2022, the newsroom broke the bombshell story that led to the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX empire, earning the prestigious George Polk award for two of its reporters. Michael is also a Senior Advisor to the Digital Currency Initiative at the MIT Media Lab. He founded data analytics startup Streambed and co-launched the Crypto Impact Sustainability Accelerator, a research body housed at the World Economic Forum.

A globetrotter who has lived and worked on five continents, Michael has published five acclaimed books. These include, with Paul Vigna, The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money are Challenging the Global Economic Order, now in 15 languages, and its sequel, The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything. He’s spent more than two decades as a journalist, including 18 years with The Wall Street Journal, where he was a senior columnist covering global finance and economics. In addition to hundreds of bylines at WSJ, Michael has written for The Harvard Business Review, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Post, Fortune, MIT Technology Review, WIRED, and many other publications. With Sheila Warren, the CEO of the Crypto Council for Innovation, he co-hosts a weekly podcast called Money Reimagined.