A professor at Sciences Po university and author of The Wizard of the Kremlin, Giuliano da Empoli has just published L'Heure des prédateurs (to be released in English next October as The Hour of the Predator), a reflection on the current era of new autocrats allied with tech magnates. Da Empoli, a repenting former tech convert, had, in the early 2000s, believed that digital technology would transform democratic life and sweep away the old hierarchical world.

Enthralled by the rhetoric behind the "start-up nation," Da Empoli came to work for a "disruptive" Italian politician, Matteo Renzi, serving as his deputy mayor for cultural affairs in Florence, and, later, as his political advisor, during Renzi's term as head of the Italian government (2014-2016) – an experience recounted in Le Florentin ("The Florentine"). Today, describes his career under Renzi as the "classic, initiatory path of disillusionment," similar to those experienced by communist activists in the 20^th century.

Following Barack Obama's re-election as president of the United States in 2012, Da Empoli began to understand the power that big data had wielded in backing the authoritarian populism of Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Matteo Salvini, which he would describe in Les Ingénieurs du Chaos ("The Engineers of Chaos").

A fan of Goethe and TV series, a committed defender of Europe and president of the think tank Volta, the Italian-Swiss intellectual enjoys going back and forth between writing and politics. He discovered the tragic side of politics at the age of 12, in 1986, when his father, the economist Antonio da Empoli, was injured in a terrorist attack committed by an armed far-left organization. That was, undoubtedly, when Da Empoli understood that "one always suffers in politics."

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