Bianca > Recent Status Updates

“It’s also been my experience, in all my wanderings, that the further from the deed, the greater it grows, and the most glorious battle is the one longest past. So it’s hardly surprising how many heroes you run into." -Fflewddur Fflam. Well-said.

Harari had the chance to write a truly chilling conclusion by expanding on the possibilities of a data-driven world. What happens when Facebook knows everything about you? What happens when Instagram knows where you are at all times? SO MANY POSSIBILITIES. And all of them are freaky as f*ck. But noooo, he drones on and on about the Internet-Of-All-Things. Dude, you threw away your shot.

"Never in history did a government know so much about what's going on in the world -- yet few empires have botched things up as clumsily as the contemporary United States." I wanna remember this sentence forever HAHAHA. It's true. It's like Hodor playing the Game of Thrones.

"'Nobody is in charge of supplying bread to London.'" The most capitalist sentence EVER. Nobody is in charge but the invisible hand of market correction. What a freaky, freaky thought.

Techno-humanists = influencers?
Downgraded sapiens = their followers?

Harari is naïve if he thinks a class of superhumans won't be bludgeoned to death by normal Sapiens too seeped in dystopian movies. We always seek to destroy that which we do not understand.

"Will elites and governments go on valuing every human being even when it pays no economic dividends?" This better be a rhetorical question.

"Each of us has a sophisticated system that throws away most of our experiences, keeps only a few choice samples, mixes them up with bits from movies we've seen, novels we've read, speeches we've heard, and daydreams we've savoured, and out of all that jumble it weaves a seemingly coherent story about who I am, where I came from and where I am going." DAMN.

"Yes, the Islamic State knows how to put videos on YouTube; but leaving aside the industry of torture, what new inventions have emerged from Syria or Iraq lately?" Gago, I snorted. 😂

Did Karl Marx not understand human greed?

"It's ironic that they swear to tell the truth on a book brimming with so many fictions, myths and errors." It's the principle of the thing, gago. 😂

"Many people argue that the great building projects of ancient Egypt--all the dams and reservoirs and pyramids--must have been built by aliens from outer space. How else could a culture lacking even wheels and iron accomplish such wonders?" (This too was a fave conspiracy theory of mine and I'm a little disgruntled that Harari's next sentence mercilessly debunked it. 😂)

"In literate societies people are organized into networks, so that each person is only a small step in a huge algorithm, and it is the algorithm as a whole that makes the important decisions. This is the essence of bureaucracy."
And the control freak in me broke out in hives reading this.

"A hundred years hence, our belief in democracy and human rights might look equally incomprehensible to our descendants." -- IT'S ALREADY HAPPENING, SIR. IT ONLY TOOK TWO YEARS.

"To study history means to watch the spinning and unraveling of these webs, and to realize that what seems to people in one age the most important thing in life becomes utterly meaningless to their descendants."

Those were a lot of pages wasted on consciousness only to conclude it doesn't exist (!!!), nevermind that this entire book is one almost endless stream of conscious thought poured onto dead tree barks.

Harari is great at drawing oft-overlooked meaning from stone-cold facts, but dammit, he has this annoying tendency of concluding too early. Just admit we don't know enough, dude, and don't waffle about it. How did humankind progress when other species remained the same? I don't know yet, and neither do you, because WE DON'T HAVE ENOUGH FACTS.

"Hence the existence of souls cannot be squared with the theory of evolution." I don't know. I believe in evolution. I believe in the existence of souls. I've made my peace with the knowledge that if they don't add up, it's because we don't know enough.

What process(es) did scientists use to detect the presence of a soul in both animals and humans? And how, based on the results, would they know to conclude for or against its presence? #weird

"Having deciphered the mute laws of physics, chemistry and biology, humankind now does with them as it pleases."

"It was easy and tempting to believe that such everyday activities reflected either the natural order of things or the will of heaven." Yerp.

"The Bible could not imagine a scenario in which God repents having created Homo sapiens, wipes this sinful ape off the face of the earth, and then spends eternity enjoying the antics of ostriches, kangaroos and panda bears." I snorted. Actually, if I were God and less inclined to drama, this would totally be my course of action.

The many, many dumb things that we've done in the name of not knowing better...

For years we debated evolution vs. intelligent design. Now we no longer ask, we just take over the reins from either nature or gods or both. We are frankly terrifying.

"Marx forgot that capitalists know how to read." LOL but yeah, that guy underestimated the other side a lot.

"The more we know, the less we can predict." Knowledge ruins what we know. This is so meta I'm #screaming.

Scientists say that we are "very far away" from AI or superbabies or what-not. But scientists don't factor in crazy rich people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson. You can try telling them that the technology is still "very far away" and all they'll do is tug it towards "now".

"In pursuit of health, happiness and power, humans will gradually change first one of their features and then another, and another, until they will no longer be human."

Chilling. We'll be like the citizens of the Capitol in The Hunger Games.

The future is freaky.