Reading Harari: Nexus Is Thought-Provoking
Note: When I finished “Prepping for Proust,” my morning kindle app reading was devoted exclusively to finishing Nexus which I actually started last fall before Proust was on the horizon of my reading. I picked back up again and, thanks to my notations previously, I was able to carry on and finish the book over a couple of weeks or so. As I have stated many times, I usually keep multiple reading projects going simultaneously.
I'm a big fan of Yuval Noah Harari. I think he is one of the brightest minds in the public sphere these days. I have reviewed his previous titles 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Sapiens, and Homo Deus on this blog. His latest offering, Nexus (2024), presents a sweeping historical narrative that charts humanity's relationship with information networks from our earliest storytelling days to our current AI-dominated landscape. His intellectual prowess is on full display as he weaves together anthropology, history, technology, and philosophy to construct a compelling narrative of how information has shaped human societies throughout the ages. Harari ambitiously attempts to tell nothing less than the story of information itself, from primitive campfire tales to quantum computing.
Harari immediately attacks and dismantles what he terms the "naïve view" of information—the persistent belief that more information inevitably leads to greater truth and wisdom. This perspective, which has become "the semiofficial ideology of the computer age and the internet," assumes that with sufficient data and time, truth will inevitably prevail. As Harari puts it, this view holds that "information is an essentially good thing, and the more we have of it, the better. Given enough information and enough time, we are bound to discover the truth about things ranging from viral infections to racist biases, thereby developing not only our power but also the wisdom necessary to use that power well." (p. xviii)
As Harari convincingly demonstrates through numerous historical examples, from religious texts to witch hunts to modern social media platforms, information networks have never been primarily about truth-seeking. Rather, they inevitably navigate the tension between discovering truth and creating social order, often privileging the latter. "Contrary to the naïve view, information isn't the raw material of truth, and human information networks aren't geared only to discover the truth. But contrary to the populist view, information isn't just a weapon, either. Rather, to survive and flourish, every human information network needs to do two things simultaneously: discover truth and create order." (p. 37) This fundamental tension runs throughout human history and becomes particularly acute in our age of artificial intelligence.
Harari's conceptualization of information as connection rather than mere representation is a unique and powerful framing. It clarifies things. His insight that "information sometimes represents reality, and sometimes doesn't, but it always connects. This is its fundamental characteristic" (p. 16) applies to everything from prehistoric storytelling to modern digital networks. The crucial questions about information are often not "Is it true or false?" but rather "How well does it connect people? What new network does it create?" This perspective shifts our entire understanding of information's role in human affairs.
His explanation of how shared stories created "intersubjective realities" that enabled unprecedented human cooperation is particularly enlightening. About 70,000 years ago, evolutionary changes gave Homo Sapiens "the aptitude to tell and believe fictional stories and to be deeply moved by them. Instead of building a network from human-to-human chains alone—as the Neanderthals, for example, did—stories provided Homo Sapiens with a new type of chain: human-to-story chains." (p. 19) This innovation allowed humans to cooperate with strangers simply by sharing the same stories, creating what he calls "intersubjective realities" that are "extremely powerful within a particular information network and utterly meaningless outside it." (p. 27) [Interestingly, this is precisely the same time humans started leaving Africa in greater numbers, reflecting broader changes in the contemporary brain.]
The historical arc Harari traces from oral traditions through written documents, printing presses, mass media, and digital networks reveals patterns that help us understand our current predicament. His analysis of how each new information technology created not just new capabilities but new power structures, mythologies, and social organizations illuminates the profound challenges we face with AI. When he notes that "while over the generations human networks have grown increasingly powerful, they have not necessarily grown increasingly wise," (p. 38) he captures a fundamental problem that grows more urgent with each technological advance.
The book's presentation of AI as "alien intelligence" rather than merely artificial demonstrates Harari's talent for conceptual reframing. "As AI evolves, it becomes less artificial (in the sense of depending on human designs) and more alien" (pp. 217-218). His warning that computers are not tools but agents—"the first technology in history that can make decisions and create new ideas by itself" (p. xxii)—highlights the unique challenge we now face. When he points to the 2016-2017 anti-Rohingya violence in Myanmar as "the first ethnic-cleansing campaign in history that was partly the fault of decisions made by nonhuman intelligence," (pp. 199-200) he makes concrete the potential dangers of algorithmic decision-making.
Similarly, his analysis of how computers might create "inter-computer realities" analogous to human intersubjective realities shows genuine insight into potential future developments. "When a lot of computers communicate with one another, they can create inter-computer realities, analogous to the intersubjective realities produced by networks of humans. These inter-computer realities may eventually become as powerful—and as dangerous—as human-made intersubjective myths" (p. 285). This concept of inter-computer realities represents one of the book's most original and thought-provoking contributions. My guess is this is what is happening with Virtual Reality, the still infantile Metaverse and possibility other developments, but that's my projection onto Harari's work, the essence of being thought-provoking.
Harari turns from historian to advisor toward the end of his book and this reveals some limitations in his approach. After masterfully documenting the revolutionary nature of our current information crisis, he offers solutions that feel disappointingly conventional. His four democratic principles—benevolence, decentralization, mutuality, and flexibility—while sound, seem insufficient for addressing the unprecedented challenges he so eloquently describes.
Of these principles, only flexibility truly addresses the transformative nature of our technological predicament. Harari himself acknowledges that "the most important human skill for surviving the twenty-first century is likely to be flexibility, and democracies are more flexible than totalitarian regimes." (p. 326) But this insight isn't developed with the depth it deserves. The remaining three principles, while valuable in theory, overestimate the actual control humans retain over technological systems that increasingly operate according to their own cultural and algorithmic logic.
There's a certain irony in how Harari brilliantly chronicles technology's growing autonomy throughout history, yet his solutions still largely presume human agency over these systems. When he writes that "the computer network has become the nexus of most human activities. In the middle of almost every financial, social, or political transaction, we now find a computer" (p. 235), he acknowledges the pervasive integration of technology into our lives. Yet his proposed solutions don't fully reckon with the implications of living in a world where, as he puts it, "in a world where humans monitored humans, privacy was the default. But in a world where computers monitor humans, it may become possible for the first time in history to completely annihilate privacy" (p. 241).
What's missing is an acknowledgment of other distinctive human traits that have historically allowed us to navigate transformative periods: innovation, improvisation, and resilience. These capacities, combined with flexibility, have consistently enabled humans to develop new ways of living and being when facing existential crises. Throughout history, from the agricultural revolution to industrialization to the digital age, humans have demonstrated remarkable capacities to reinvent themselves and their societies in response to technological change. Harari defines the world in such a way that does not include everything that human beings bring to the table in situations as he presents in Nexus. This allows him to create a sense of urgency but at the cost of wimpish solutions.
When Harari suggests that to create wiser networks, "we must abandon both the naive and the populist views of information, put aside our fantasies of infallibility, and commit ourselves to the hard and rather mundane work of building institutions with strong self-correcting mechanisms" (pp. 403-404), he retreats to institutional solutions that are disconnected from the revolutionary nature of the challenges he describes. Harari explicitly rejects the idea that we need "another miracle technology or... some brilliant idea that has somehow escaped all previous generations" (pp. 403-404), revealing a fundamental conservatism that undermines his otherwise radical analysis. This stance represents a peculiar form of technological pessimism masked as pragmatic wisdom.
There is actually a profound contradiction at the heart of this book. Having spent hundreds of pages demonstrating how each new information technology fundamentally transformed human existence in ways that previous generations could not have anticipated, he then argues that our current technological revolution doesn't require "another miracle technology" but rather "mundane work" on institutional mechanisms. This is akin to asking residents of a pre-industrial society to solve industrial pollution through better guilds rather than through technological advancement.
What we need are unprecedented technological solutions for unpredictable technological problems. His "self-correcting mechanisms" function as a secular version of traditional religious systems—a "Way" that promises salvation through adherence to established wisdom rather than through the revolutionary challenge throughout history. It's a strangely conservative stance from a thinker who has built his reputation on analyzing radical transformations.
But if Harari's self-correcting systems are inadequate here, then what? I think this is an opportunity to fuse his thoughts with a great mind of the twentieth century in a way neither thinker would have envisioned. Out of the blue, this is where Martin Heidegger's concept of "enframing" (Gestell, see here and here) becomes particularly relevant—the idea that technology isn't merely a tool but a way of revealing the world, a mode of Being in which everything becomes "standing-reserve" available for optimization and utility. I will come back to connecting Heidegger and Harari in a future post.
Technology has always transformed “what it means to be human,” from writing to printing to digital networks. The prospect that "what it means to be human is going to change" perhaps underlies some of the conservatism in Harari's proposed solutions. When he writes that "for a democracy, being unfathomable is deadly" (p. 326), he expresses a legitimate concern about the opacity of AI systems. Yet this unfathomability may be an inherent feature of our technological future, requiring approaches that go beyond traditional democratic safeguards.
I have more faith in the distinctive human instinct for innovation and our brain's evolved flexibility—the evolutionary advantages we have always exhibited—than Harari seemingly does. We are no longer in control, but we still possess the capacity to adapt into new ways. When he explores how Homo Sapien bands began "displaying an unprecedented capacity to cooperate with one another" (p. 19) 70,000 years ago, he's documenting the same creative adaptability that might save us now. Our capacity for storytelling, for creating and believing in fictions, for building intersubjective realities—these same capabilities might allow us to navigate the challenges of AI in ways we cannot yet imagine.
I believe AI and other technologies will transform us (as they historically always have) while simultaneously enriching our humanity, not through institutional safeguards but through further technological development guided by our innate capacity for adaptation and innovation. Throughout history, each major technological challenge has been addressed not by retreating to regulatory frameworks but by advancing to the next technological frontier. The printing press's problems were not solved by better censorship but by the emergence of journalism; radio propaganda's dangers were ultimately addressed not by government oversight alone but by television and then the internet.
Harari wants us to confront an existentially dangerous situation by turning away from technology toward regulatory "self-correcting mechanisms"—a stance that resembles nothing so much as a secular religion, a "Way" of institutional wisdom that will save us from technological chaos. This is essentially Harari's personal fiction, a story not unlike the religious narratives he analyzes throughout the book. The irony is striking: after brilliantly demonstrating how fictional stories create intersubjective realities, he offers us his own fiction—that somehow, this time, regulation without technological assimilation will be sufficient.
Our creativity, curiosity, and capacity for innovation have consistently allowed us to reshape our relationship with technology in ways that couldn't have been predicted beforehand. Rather than fearing technology or trying to constrain it within existing frameworks, we should be accelerating development of new technologies that address the problems created by current ones.
The tension between transformation and continuity lies at the heart of technological change. As Harari notes, "when examining the role of information in history, although it sometimes makes sense to ask 'How well does it represent reality? Is it true or false?' often the more crucial questions are 'How well does it connect people? What new network does it create?'" (p. 16). The question now becomes what new forms of human connection and meaning will emerge from our engagement with AI?
Harari offers the advice of a historian, not a visionary. He tells the story wonderfully, but when the narrative concludes and solutions are required, he retreats to familiar democratic principles rather than embracing the transformative potential of our technological future. His warning that "the alignment problem turns out to be, at heart, a problem of mythology" (p. 285) is profoundly insightful, suggesting that our relationship with AI will be shaped not just by technical specifications but by the stories we tell about technology and ourselves.
But I can't fault Harari too badly for what is otherwise a splendid scholarly achievement. Nexus is essential read for understanding the importance of information networks through history and the unprecedented challenges we now face because of it. Even if his solutions fall short, the questions Harari raises are precisely those we need to be asking as we navigate this latest transformation in our technological existence. His historical perspective provides an invaluable foundation, even if it needs to be complemented by more speculative and innovative thinking about how we might design information systems that can navigate the unprecedented challenges ahead.
Perhaps most importantly, Harari reminds us that technology has never been merely a tool but always a force that reshapes what it means to be human. When he writes that "intersubjective things like laws, gods, and currencies are extremely powerful within a particular information network and utterly meaningless outside it" (p. 27), he's pointing to the constructed nature of our reality. If our most fundamental institutions and beliefs are human creations, then perhaps we have more capacity to reinvent ourselves in response to AI than we might initially think. [His “intersubjectivity” is comparable to Jurgen Habermas's Lifeworld and Intersubjectivity, though I don't think there is any direct connection between Harari's use of the term with Habermas. For Habermas, for example, Intersubjectivities are linguistically generated, built by language. This is obviously not far removed from Harari's emphasis on how story connects humans.]
The history of technology consistently shows that the most significant impacts of new technologies are rarely those that were anticipated. Similarly, our most effective responses might not come from applying established models but from allowing new approaches to emerge through experimentation, diversity of thought, and the inherent human capacity for creative adaptation that is the very story of our history. This suggests a more humble approach than proposing comprehensive solutions—one that emphasizes creating conditions for innovation and resilience while maintaining enough flexibility to recognize and amplify effective, often improvised, responses as things emerge.
Nexus is great history with a relevant perspective. I think the answer to Harari's questions here is, generally speaking, the same as what he has already proposed as related to “Dataism” in Homo Deus, the title implying the next step for humanity as a species. We need more of that perspective here. Although, in fairness to Harari, he admits at the beginning that AI is not all bad news, its just you can get all the good news from big tech today. He is “equal time.” As such he does a great service, revealing how remarkably “alive” history is when you piece it all together with the Now. Equal time, in this sense, is connecting the dots in a unique way to say something very historic about where we find ourselves today. It is a sobering, clear, thought-provoking assessment.
I'll share a major thought it provoked in my next post.
(Written with assistance from Claude.)
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