Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

by Yuval Noah Harari

One of the recurrent paradoxes of populism is that it starts by warning us that all human elites are driven by a dangerous hunger for power, but often ends by entrusting all power to a single ambitious human.

Most information in human society, and indeed in other biological and physical systems, does not represent anything.

The point is that even the most truthful accounts of reality can never represent it in full. There are always some aspects of reality that are neglected or distorted in every representation. Truth, then, isn’t a one-to-one representation of reality. Rather, truth is something that brings our attention to certain aspects of reality while inevitably ignoring other aspects. No account of reality is 100 percent accurate, but some accounts are nevertheless more truthful than others.

As a paradigmatic case, consider music. Most symphonies, melodies, and tunes don’t represent anything, which is why it makes no sense to ask whether they are true or false. Over the years people have created a lot of bad music, but not fake music. Without representing anything, music nevertheless does a remarkable job in connecting large numbers of people and synchronizing their emotions and movements. Music can make soldiers march in formation, clubbers sway together, church congregations clap in rhythm, and sports fans chant in unison.[11]

History is often shaped not by deterministic power relations, but rather by tragic mistakes that result from believing in mesmerizing but harmful stories.

Scientific institutions are nevertheless different from religious institutions, inasmuch as they reward skepticism and innovation rather than conformity.

Democracies die not only when people are not free to talk but also when people are not willing or able to listen.

Recall that the Bible was born as a recommendation list. By recommending Christians to read the misogynist 1 Timothy instead of the more tolerant Acts of Paul and Thecla, Athanasius and other church fathers changed the course of history. In the case of the Bible, ultimate power lay not with the authors who composed different religious tracts but with the curators who created recommendation lists. This was the kind of power wielded in the 2010s by social media algorithms.

We live cocooned by culture, experiencing reality through a cultural prism. Our political views are shaped by the reports of journalists and the opinions of friends. Our sexual habits are influenced by what we hear in fairy tales and see in movies. Even the way we walk and breathe is nudged by cultural traditions, such as the military discipline of soldiers and the meditative exercises of monks. Until very recently, the cultural cocoon we lived in was woven by other humans. Going forward, it will be increasingly designed by computers.

Computer cultured.