REVIEW: X Factors

Harari synthesizes his synthesis in yet another masterwork

Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari. Random House, 2024. 528 pp., $35.00

I picked up Yuval Harari’s latest with some trepidation. Having read his remarkably fertile interdisciplinary trilogy of Sapiens (2015), Homo Deus (2017), and 21 Lessons for the 21^st Century (2018), I wondered how much more he had to to say. In the time since, Harari has become something of a cottage industry, founding Sapienship, “a multidisciplinary organization advocating for global responsibility.” In the acknowledgments of Nexus, Harari thanks his team for helping put this book together; he now seems less like a writer than the literary equivalent of an auteur film director.  

But here’s the thing: He’s a very good one. And like a good auteur director, Harari hits a lot of familiar, characteristic notes—in some ways, this book is a distillation of all that’s come before, rendered with his customary verve and clarity. But this iteration of his oeuvre is filtered through a distinctive lens: information. And it gives us a fresh perspective for viewing the world.

The point of departure for Nexus is one that Harari first made in Sapiens and developed at some length in Homo Deus: The key to the success of human beings as a species is our ability to create and share stories. These stories need not be objectively or factually true to create what he calls intersubjective realities. Indeed, the most powerful and consequential stories in history have been religious ones (Harari writes as an atheist). In Nexus he uses this building block to critique what he calls “the naïve view of information”—reflecting the (classically) liberal view that the best antidote for things like hate speech is more speech, in which the truth will out. 

Harari is no relativist—he believes there are objective facts and realities, and even that the human capacity to apprehend them is finite. But, he notes, “releasing the flow of information doesn’t necessarily lead to the discovery and spread of truth. It can just as easily lead to the spread of lies and fantasies and the creation of toxic information spheres.” The same printing presses that powered the Reformation and Scientific Revolution also powered witch hunts. Heinrich Kramer’s 1485 The Hammer of the Witches sold many more copies than Nicolaus Copernicus’s On the Revolution of Heavenly Spheres, which went out of print for decades after it was first published in 1543. Information is a source of power at least as it much as it is truth, Harari says, and power and truth are very different things. 

Communications technology is the principal means by which that power is generated. The first part of Nexus shows how, beginning with documents—first clay, then paper—societies created durable stories that transcended an individual’s ability to control reality through the instrument of bureaucracy, which could organize information by creating collective memory. The rise of modern media technologies of print, radio, and television made it possible to share stories on a much wider scale than ever before, making larger social organizations like empires possible, eventually on a global scale. 

In the twentieth century, this process reached a point of maturation with two competing information systems, each with its respective characteristic strengths and weaknesses: democracy and totalitarianism. The key difference between them rested on distribution. In democracies, information flows through multiple sources, which makes conversation and self-correction possible. But this pluralism also invites conflict and dissipates institutional vigor. Totalitarian societies, by contrast, create order by centralizing information and exerting control over the direction of society. (Harari contrasts totalitarianism with autocracy, which lacks the informational infrastructure to micromanage individuals to the same degree—Qin China couldn’t pull it off, but Mao’s China did.) Some of the most fascinating stretches of Nexus interpret Stalin’s USSR and Hitler’s Germany as information regimes, the power of which was immense but whose growing inability to apprehend or respond to accurate information hobbled each and eventually destroyed both. By the end of the twentieth century democracy had triumphed.

That said, the epistemological environment began to change with the rise of computers, a new order that poses serious challenges for totalitarian societies as well as democratic ones. Those challenges are to some degree different. Dictatorships can’t terrorize machines that present unpleasant facts, for example, and democracies can’t avoid building biases into algorithms they can barely recognize. But both problems are secondary to the epochal shift represented by AI: Machines can now make decisions themselves about how to solve problems in ways that humans can’t always understand, much less manage. This creates distinct possibilities for conflicts and outcomes that can’t be controlled. The notion that a new technology might destroy the world is not a new idea. But Mutually Assured Destruction that checked nuclear war may not be the kind of consideration a non-human entity may consider—or worry about. 

Harari is not a determinist. Though his prognostications can sometimes sound grim, he repeatedly notes in Nexus that technological capacity is not destiny. Just because the Chinese have created a surveillance state with its social credit system doesn’t mean that Canada will, because at different times and places human beings have demonstrated an ability to understand limits, even if they amount to taboos. This, in a way, brings us full circle. Though secularity sometimes seems like the essence of modernity, it may become more important than ever that human beings craft and sustain stories that affirm a shared humanity, even as the worldwide web morphs into a set of cocoons separated by what Harari calls “the Silicon Curtain.” In a world of soulless machines, we need to keep the faith.

Jim Cullen teaches history at the Greenwich Country Day School in Greenwich, Connecticut. He is the author of Bridge & Tunnel Boys: Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and the Metropolitan Sound of the American Century. His 1997 book Born in the U.S.A.: Bruce Springsteen in American Life has just been reissued in a revised and updated third edition.