In this book, journalist and author Vince Beiser explores the Achilles' heel of the digital age: that the cell phones, electric cars, solar panels, and wind turbines being used around the world every day are made of an array of increasingly rare materials — lithium, cobalt, niobium, and others — whose demand is only increasing. And as many of the places they are extracted from will soon run dry, people in all corners of the globe are scrambling for new places and proposing new approaches to finding them. Beiser criss-crossed the world to track down the people who are at the vanguard of this new age to understand how they propose to solve this crisis, in the process showing us their ambitions and their potential dangers. The result is a book that is both a gripping read and a sobering account of the constant battle between what civilization needs and what it can withstand.