What if the Internet could take down your house and your job?

What if your Facebook profile and the pages you frequent on it could all disappear, your job could be replaced by an app that lets you buy an entire house, your kids could be sent to boarding school in Mexico, and you could end up in jail for drug possession?

These are just a few of the dystopian scenarios that are being explored in the new book, Disorganization Theory: How the Internet Could Take Down Your Life, by David Foster Wallace.

The book is a critique of the notion that the Internet is a benign force for good that can serve as a critical brake on the spread of disease and terrorism, among other things.

But it’s not a new concept: Disorganizer Theory was first published in 2005, and its premise is the same as the one used by futurist Ray Kurzweil to propose that the World Wide Web is the key to humanity’s future.

(It’s also not a far-fetched idea: The Internet, Wallace argued, is the central mechanism by which the Internet has democratized everything from consumer goods to the creation of new forms of information that can never be duplicated.)