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 “gods, states, money and human rights”. This isn’t original: Terry Pratchett’s 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’t doubt that he is right about information flowing differently in democratic and authoritarian societies – although he doesn’t quantify it – but didn’t we know that? Existing ideas like “liberalism” and “checks and balances” captured it nicely.
There are many silly bits. Harari claims people don’t trust bureaucracies because they don’t understand them. Bizarrely, he blames storytellers, who he says don’t 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 – 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 “complex and crucial argument” that is “the theoretical basis of the book”. The thesis is that “most information is not an attempt to represent reality” – well, yes, fiction exists. Instead, “what information does is to create new realities by tying together disparate things – whether couples or empires”.
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’s 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’t that there is nothing good in Nexus, but readers shouldn’t have to pick through a sludge of sloppy thinking for rare nuggets of insight. If Harari is, as his author biography claims, “one of the world’s most influential public intellectuals”, our information network is broken.
Michael Marshall is a writer basedĚýinĚýDevon, UK
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