Digital revolution, energy transition, environmental change... Freeing ourselves from traditional fuels, we actually find ourselves in a new addiction - dependence on rare metals. Graphite, cobalt, indium, platinoids, tungsten, rare earths - these resources have become essential to our new ecological and digital society, they are contained in electric vehicles, solar panels, wind turbines, as well as in our smartphones, computers and other Internet-connected devices. However, the environmental, economic and geopolitical costs of this dependence may be even greater than those that bind us to oil.Author Guillaume Pitron explores the global transformation that is taking place in the international market for rare metals: why mining them becomes an instrument of geopolitics and how do they affect the development of new technologies and the digital economy? What is the danger of using these metals, which are no longer possible to do without in the modern world?The foreword to the book was written by Hubert Vedrin, the former French Foreign Minister, one of the leading diplomats of our time. It warns of the danger of a monopoly on the extraction of rare earth metals, a significant part of whose deposits are located in China, as well as the enormous environmental threat of their use.Publisher's layout saved in PDF A4.