The internet and in particular social media has democratised content generation leading to an explosion of misinformation and fake news. In a year when half the world is voting to elect their leaders, this attains a lot of significance. In a new book – Nexus by noted Israeli historian, Yuval Noah Harari (author of the brilliant tome ‘Sapiens’ which has sold 45m copies) gives the historical context for information and why misinformation is only going to rise in future. The Economist reviews the book:
“In “Nexus”, a sweeping narrative ranging from the stone age to the era of artificial intelligence (AI), Mr Harari sets out to provide “a better understanding of what information is, how it helps to build human networks, and how it relates to truth and power”. Lessons from history can, he suggests, provide guidance in dealing with big information-related challenges in the present, chief among them the political impact of AI and the risks to democracy posed by disinformation. In an impressive feat of temporal sharpshooting, a historian whose arguments operate on the scale of millennia has managed to capture the zeitgeist perfectly. With 70 nations, accounting for around half the world’s population, heading to the polls this year, questions of truth and disinformation are top of mind for voters—and readers.
Mr Harari’s starting point is a novel definition of information itself. Most information, he says, does not represent anything, and has no essential link to truth. Information’s defining feature is not representation but connection; it is not a way of capturing reality but a way of linking and organising ideas and, crucially, people. (It is a “social nexus”.) Early information technologies, such as stories, clay tablets or religious texts, and later newspapers and radio, are ways of orchestrating social order.
Here Mr Harari is building on an argument from his previous books, such as “Sapiens” and “Homo Deus”: that humans prevailed over other species because of their ability to co-operate flexibly in large numbers, and that shared stories and myths allowed such interactions to be scaled up, beyond direct person-to-person contact. Laws, gods, currencies and nationalities are all intangible things that are conjured into existence through shared narratives. These stories do not have to be entirely accurate; fiction has the advantage that it can be simplified and can ignore inconvenient or painful truths.
The opposite of myth, which is engaging but may not be accurate, is the list, which boringly tries to capture reality, and gives rise to bureaucracy. Societies need both mythology and bureaucracy to maintain order. He considers the creation and interpretation of holy texts and the emergence of the scientific method as contrasting approaches to the questions of trust and fallibility, and to maintaining order versus finding truth.
He also applies this framing to politics, treating democracy and totalitarianism as “contrasting types of information networks”. Starting in the 19th century, mass media made democracy possible at a national level, but also “opened the door for large-scale totalitarian regimes”. In a democracy, information flows are decentralised and rulers are assumed to be fallible; under totalitarianism, the opposite is true. And now digital media, in various forms, are having political effects of their own. New information technologies are catalysts for major historical shifts.”
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