Yuval Noah Harari (Fern Press, out 10 September)
Reading Nexus is a strange experience. The quality of the text lurches up and down: one minute you are reading something incisive, the next you are wading through banalities.
Its author, Yuval Noah Harari, is a medieval historian most famous for his book Sapiens, a whistlestop history of humanity from the Stone Age to the present day. Its central thesis is that humans came to dominate the planet because we can believe in things that only exist in our shared imaginations, such as 鈥済ods, states, money and human rights鈥�. This isn鈥檛 original: Terry Pratchett鈥檚 Hogfather said the same thing with more wit and less verbiage in 1996. And Harari gave little evidence that a shared imagination was the primary marker of human uniqueness, he just asserted it.
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The book was a surprise bestseller and Harari became a public intellectual. Now comes Nexus, about the ways information is transmitted through societies. In it, Harari sets out to show how the information network changed as we adopted farming, cities and the internet.
It is easy to see why so many have fallen under his spell, but when you think about what he is saying, it is obvious
He lucidly sets out how holy books like the Bible were curated by institutions that chose what to include or leave out, and how the process of science enables error-correction. It is easy to see why so many have fallen under his spell.
When it comes to his main argument, he engagingly describes how information generated by institutions, like courts and universities, circulates through a web of connections in democratic societies. Dictatorships, in contrast, draw all information inwards towards the dictator, so are less likely to self-correct. But when you stop to think about this, it is obvious. I don鈥檛 doubt that he is right about information flowing differently in democratic and authoritarian societies 鈥� although he doesn鈥檛 quantify it 鈥� but didn鈥檛 we know that? Existing ideas like 鈥渓iberalism鈥� and 鈥渃hecks and balances鈥� captured it nicely.
There are many silly bits. Harari claims people don鈥檛 trust bureaucracies because they don鈥檛 understand them. Bizarrely, he blames storytellers, who he says don鈥檛 tell stories about how bureaucracies process information, favouring those about family rivalries. Hamlet and Succession may be more about dysfunctional families than the institutions they control, but what about the myriad of stories about police, lawyers and the military?
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The second half of the book is about computers and artificial intelligence, which could disrupt our information networks 鈥� including democracy. Most of the things Harari is worried about seem reasonable, like generative AIs poisoning online discussions, but he adds nothing new.
When Harari does strike out on his own, he stumbles. In chapter 1, he sets out a 鈥渃omplex and crucial argument鈥� that is 鈥渢he theoretical basis of the book鈥�. The thesis is that 鈥渕ost information is not an attempt to represent reality鈥� 鈥� well, yes, fiction exists. Instead, 鈥渨hat information does is to create new realities by tying together disparate things 鈥� whether couples or empires鈥�.
In other words, information is used to make connections between concepts. This is inadequate. Winston Churchill is connected to Harry Truman and Adolf Hitler, for example, but not in the same way.
Harari then confuses things further by saying that information creates connections between people, as when a crowd dances to music. This is a different kind of connection, but Harari conflates the two. Why? Well, Harari鈥檚 big idea in Sapiens was that humanity can connect large numbers of people through information. Now he has defined information as something that connects people. It is perfect circular reasoning.
It isn鈥檛 that there is nothing good in Nexus, but readers shouldn鈥檛 have to pick through a sludge of sloppy thinking for rare nuggets of insight. If Harari is, as his author biography claims, 鈥渙ne of the world鈥檚 most influential public intellectuals鈥�, our information network is broken.
Michael Marshall is a writer based听in听Devon, UK
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