Applebaum paints a chilling picture of a global juggernaut of loosely allied autocracies that share weapons technologies, poor and powerless populations, a money laundering system that includes U.S. banks who choose to look the other way, methods of circumventing sanctions, and a lot of other horrors.

She admonishes activists worldwide to coalesce to fight autocracies, and suggests these steps:
" - Put an end to transnational kleptocracy
- Don't fight the information war -- undermine it
- Decouple, de-risk, rebuild"
The section on how to implement the above offers few details and feels pretty impossible in the face of the global greed suffusing autocratic governments and large corporations. Its represents only 25 of 176 pages, but should have been the primary focus of the book.

One example: "...the information system is based on a series of laws, rules, and regulations, all of which can be changed, if our politicians are prepared to change them. Transparency can replace obscurity. Customers of the social media platforms should be able to own their data and determine what is to be done with it. They should also be able to influence, directly the algorithms that determine what they see. Legislators in democracies could create the technical and legal means to give people more control and more choices or to hold companies liable if the algorithms they use promote content tied to acts of terrorism."

Well, yeah, but there are a lot of shoulds and ifs here, and I want to know exactly how to go about doing this. How do you convince legislators to change any of this if they are so passively entrenched in a system that often rewards them for inaction? What can we do at the grassroots level? What can an individual do?

Most of us know at least a little and often a lot about the terrors of global autocracies and the demise of democracies, but how to start pushing back at the micro level may be the biggest challenge of all, and we need our best thinkers and doers to tell us how to do that.