In L’Ecole des Fans, Gérard Wormser questions the communicative dimensions of contemporary disruptions. The immense opportunities of trade and knowledge access contrast with the frustrations that are growing in human communities — which are more technical and unequal than ever before. Universal connectivity comes with abrupt breaks in traditional integration links. It abolishes public mediation in favour of a mixture of new possibilities and increasing isolation. Subjected to the pressures that prevail, as their fallout in the US or Brazil shows, the networks fuel fantasy regressions and fear of the Other. At the end of a journey describing the ways in which our networks associate the omnipotence of money with anthropological shocks, Gérard Wormser joins Simmel’s intuitions, who had perceived this question more than a century ago.