Nexus

Our tendency to summon powers we cannot control stems not from individual psychology but from the unique way our species cooperates in large numbers. The main argument of this book is that humankind gains enormous power by building large networks of cooperation, but the way these networks are built predisposes us to use that power unwisely. Our problem, then, is a network problem. Even more specifically, it is an information problem. Information is the glue that holds networks together. (Location 108) #✂️

This view posits that in sufficient quantities information leads to truth, and truth in turn leads to both power and wisdom. Ignorance, in contrast, seems to lead nowhere. (Location 131) #✂️

Wisdom is commonly understood to mean “making right decisions,” but what “right” means depends on value judgments that differ among diverse people, cultures, and ideologies. (Location 148) #✂️

the naive view of information holds that additional information offers at least a partial remedy. The naive view thinks that disagreements about values turn out on closer inspection to be the fault of either the lack of information or deliberate disinformation. According to this view, racists are ill-informed people (Location 153) #✂️

We are also producing ever more powerful weapons of mass destruction, from thermonuclear bombs to doomsday viruses. Our leaders don’t lack information about these dangers, yet instead of collaborating to find solutions, they are edging closer to a global war. Would having even more information make things better—or worse? (Location 213) #✂️

First, the power of AI could supercharge existing human conflicts, dividing humanity against itself. Just as in the twentieth century the Iron Curtain divided the rival powers in the Cold War, so in the twenty-first century the Silicon Curtain—made of silicon chips and computer codes rather than barbed wire—might come to divide rival powers in a new global conflict. Because the AI arms race will produce ever more destructive weapons, even a small spark might ignite a cataclysmic conflagration. (Location 238) #✂️

Second, the Silicon Curtain might come to divide not one group of humans from another but rather all humans from our new AI overlords. No matter where we live, we might find ourselves cocooned by a web of unfathomable algorithms that manage our lives, reshape our politics and culture, and even reengineer our bodies and minds—while we can no longer comprehend the forces that control us, let alone stop them. (Location 242) #✂️

In a nutshell, populism views information as a weapon.[ (Location 280) #✂️

In its more extreme versions, populism posits that there is no objective truth at all and that everyone has “their own truth,” which they wield to vanquish rivals. According to this worldview, power is the only reality. (Location 283) #✂️

Whenever and wherever populism succeeds in disseminating the view of information as a weapon, language itself is undermined. (Location 286) #✂️

Rather, any talk of “facts” or “truth” is bound to prompt at least some people to ask, “Whose facts and whose truth are you referring to?” (Location 288) #✂️

Of course, right-wing populists such as Trump and Bolsonaro are unlikely to have read Foucault or Marx, and indeed present themselves as fiercely anti-Marxist. They also greatly differ from Marxists in their suggested policies in fields like taxation and welfare. But their basic view of society and of information is surprisingly Marxist, seeing all human interactions as a power struggle between oppressors and oppressed. (Location 304) #✂️

Such rhetoric is a staple of populism, which the political scientist Cas Mudde has described as an “ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite.’ ”[ (Location 310) #✂️

They tell people that indeed you should never trust any institutions or figures of authority—including self-proclaimed populist parties and politicians. Instead, you should “do your own research” and trust only what you can directly observe by yourself.[25] This radical empiricist position implies that while large-scale institutions like political parties, courts, newspapers, and universities can never be trusted, individuals who make the effort can still find the truth by themselves. (Location 318) #✂️

Trusting only “my own research” may sound scientific, but in practice it amounts to believing that there is no objective truth. As we shall see in chapter 4, science is a collaborative institutional effort rather than a personal quest. (Location 327) #✂️

An alternative populist solution is to abandon the modern scientific ideal of finding the truth via “research” and instead go back to relying on divine revelation or mysticism. Traditional religions like Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism have typically characterized humans as untrustworthy power-hungry creatures who can access the truth only thanks to the intervention of a divine intelligence. (Location 329) #✂️

A variation on this theme calls on people to put their trust in charismatic leaders like Trump and Bolsonaro, who are depicted by their supporters either as the messengers of God[ (Location 336) #✂️

One of the recurrent paradoxes of populism is that it starts by warning us that all human elites are driven by a dangerous hunger for power, but often ends by entrusting all power to a single ambitious human. (Location 340) #✂️

Populists are right to be suspicious of the naive view of information, but they are wrong to think that power is the only reality and that information is always a weapon. Information isn’t the raw material of truth, but it isn’t a mere weapon, either. (Location 350) #✂️

A difficult dilemma for every human network is that mythmakers and bureaucrats tend to pull in different directions. Institutions and societies are often defined by the balance they manage to find between the conflicting needs of their mythmakers and their bureaucrats. (Location 361) #✂️

Weak self-correcting mechanisms sometimes result in historical calamities like the early modern European witch hunts, while strong self-correcting mechanisms sometimes destabilize the network from within. (Location 367) #✂️

chapter 5 concludes the historical discussion by focusing on another contrast—between distributed and centralized information networks. Democratic systems allow information to flow freely along many independent channels, whereas totalitarian systems strive to concentrate information in one hub. (Location 371) #✂️

understand it unless we compare it with its predecessors. History isn’t the study of the past; it is the study of change. History teaches us what remains the same, what changes, and how things change. (Location 377) #✂️

In everyday usage, “information” is associated with human-made symbols like spoken or written words. (Location 424) #✂️

Information, however, does not have to consist of human-made symbols. According to the biblical myth of the Flood, Noah learned that the water had finally receded because the pigeon he sent out from the ark returned with an olive branch in her mouth. (Location 441) #✂️

Of course, defining something as “information” is a matter of perspective. An astronomer or astrologer might view the Libra constellation as “information,” but these distant stars are far more than just a notice board for human observers. (Location 448) #✂️

The naive view of information argues that objects are defined as information in the context of truth seeking. Something is information if people use it to try to discover the truth. This view links the concept of information with the concept of truth and assumes that the main role of information is to represent reality. (Location 472) #✂️

Put another way, the naive view argues that information is an attempt to represent reality, and when this attempt succeeds, we call it truth. While this book takes many issues with the naive view, it agrees that truth is an accurate representation of reality. But this book also holds that most information is not an attempt to represent reality and that what defines information is something entirely different. Most information in human society, and indeed in other biological and physical systems, does not represent anything. (Location 480) #✂️

Throughout this book, “truth” is understood as something that accurately represents certain aspects of reality. Underlying the notion of truth is the premise that there exists one universal reality. (Location 485) #✂️

This is why the search for truth is a universal project. While different people, nations, or cultures may have competing beliefs and feelings, they cannot possess contradictory truths, because they all share a universal reality. Anyone who rejects universalism rejects truth. (Location 488) #✂️

Truth and reality are nevertheless different things, because no matter how truthful an account is, it can never represent reality in all its aspects. If a NILI agent wrote that there are ten thousand Ottoman soldiers in Gaza, and there were indeed ten thousand soldiers there, this accurately pointed to a certain aspect of reality, but it neglected many other aspects. The very act of counting entities—whether apples, oranges, or soldiers—necessarily focuses attention on the similarities between these entities while discounting differences.[ (Location 490) #✂️

Another problem with any attempt to represent reality is that reality contains many viewpoints. For example, present-day Israelis, Palestinians, Turks, and Britons have different perspectives on the British invasion of the Ottoman Empire, the NILI underground, and the activities of Sarah Aaronsohn. That does not mean, of course, that there are several entirely separate realities, or that there are no historical facts. There is just one reality, but it is complex. (Location 502) #✂️

Reality includes an objective level with objective facts that don’t depend on people’s beliefs; for example, it is an objective fact that Sarah Aaronsohn died on October 9, 1917, from self-inflicted gunshot wounds. Saying that “Sarah Aaronsohn died in an airplane crash on May 15, 1919,” is an error. (Location 506) #✂️

Reality also includes a subjective level with subjective facts like the beliefs and feelings of various people, but in this case, too, facts can be separated from errors. (Location 508) #✂️

Misinformation is an honest mistake, occurring when someone tries to represent reality but gets it wrong. (Location 536) #✂️

Disinformation is a deliberate lie, occurring when someone consciously intends to distort our view of reality. (Location 537) #✂️

The naive view further believes that the solution to the problems caused by misinformation and disinformation is more information. This idea, sometimes called the counterspeech doctrine, is associated with the U.S. Supreme Court justice Louis D. Brandeis, who wrote in Whitney v. California (1927) that the remedy to false speech is more speech and that in the long term free discussion is bound to expose falsehoods and fallacies. (Location 538) #✂️

What the example of astrology illustrates is that errors, lies, fantasies, and fictions are information, too. Contrary to what the naive view of information says, information has no essential link to truth, and its role in history isn’t to represent a preexisting reality. Rather, what information does is to create new realities by tying together disparate things—whether couples or empires. Its defining feature is connection rather than representation, and information is whatever connects different points into a network. Information doesn’t necessarily inform us about things. Rather, it puts things in formation. (Location 559) #✂️

Sometimes networks can be connected without any attempt to represent reality, neither accurate nor erroneous, as when genetic information connects trillions of cells or when a stirring musical piece connects thousands of humans. (Location 600) #✂️

Viewing information as a social nexus helps us understand many aspects of human history that confound the naive view of information as representation. It explains the historical success not only of astrology but of much more important things, like the Bible. While some may dismiss astrology as a quaint sideshow in human history, nobody can deny the central role the Bible has played. (Location 610) #✂️

And just as a network of cells can do things that single cells cannot, so a religious network can do things that individual humans cannot, like building temples, maintaining legal systems, celebrating holidays, and waging holy wars. (Location 633) #✂️

To conclude, information sometimes represents reality, and sometimes doesn’t. But it always connects. This is its fundamental characteristic. Therefore, 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?” (Location 634) #✂️

When we look at the history of information from the Stone Age to the Silicon Age, we therefore see a constant rise in connectivity, without a concomitant rise in truthfulness or wisdom. (Location 644) #✂️

The Sapiens’ ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers has precursors among other animals. Some social mammals like chimpanzees display significant flexibility in the way they cooperate, while some social insects like ants cooperate in very large numbers. But neither chimps nor ants establish empires, religions, or trade networks. (Location 659) #✂️

In order to cooperate, Sapiens no longer had to know each other personally; they just had to know the same story. And the same story can be familiar to billions of individuals. A story can thereby serve like a central connector, with an unlimited number of outlets into which an unlimited number of people can plug. (Location 677) #✂️

A “brand” is a specific type of story. To brand a product means to tell a story about that product, which may have little to do with the product’s actual qualities but which consumers nevertheless learn to associate with the product. (Location 694) #✂️

People think they connect to the person, but in fact they connect to the story told about the person, and there is often a huge gulf between the two. (Location 703) #✂️

It should be stressed that the creation of the Jesus story was not a deliberate lie. People like Saint Paul, Tertullian, Saint Augustine, and Martin Luther didn’t set out to deceive anyone. They projected their deeply felt hopes and feelings on the figure of Jesus, in the same way that all of us routinely project our feelings on our parents, lovers, and leaders. (Location 728) #✂️

Stories like the one about Jesus can be seen as a way of stretching preexisting biological bonds. Family is the strongest bond known to humans. One way that stories build trust between strangers is by making these strangers reimagine each other as family. (Location 739) #✂️

As numerous modern studies indicate, repeatedly retelling a fake memory eventually causes the person to adopt it as a genuine recollection.[ (Location 758) #✂️

Objective reality consists of things like stones, mountains, and asteroids—things that exist whether we are aware of them or not. (Location 767) #✂️

Then there is subjective reality: things like pain, pleasure, and love that aren’t “out there” but rather “in here.” (Location 769) #✂️

But some stories are able to create a third level of reality: intersubjective reality. Whereas subjective things like pain exist in a single mind, intersubjective things like laws, gods, nations, corporations, and currencies exist in the nexus between large numbers of minds. More specifically, they exist in the stories people tell one another. The information humans exchange about intersubjective things doesn’t represent anything that had already existed prior to the exchange of information; rather, the exchange of information creates these things. (Location 771) #✂️

While the caloric value of pizza is an objective reality that remained the same between 2010 and 2021, the financial value of bitcoin is an intersubjective reality that changed dramatically during the same period, depending on the stories people told and believed about bitcoin. (Location 785) #✂️

When we ask whether a particular state exists, we are raising a question about intersubjective reality. If enough people agree that a particular state exists, then it does. (Location 809) #✂️

Intersubjective things like laws, gods, and currencies are extremely powerful within a particular information network and utterly meaningless outside it. Suppose a billionaire crashes his private jet on a desert island and finds himself alone with a suitcase full of banknotes and bonds. (Location 817) #✂️

Story-based networks made Homo sapiens the most powerful of all animals, giving it a crucial edge not only over lions and mammoths but also over other ancient human species like Neanderthals. (Location 824) #✂️

According to Marxist theories, people are always motivated by objective material interests and use stories only to camouflage these interests and confound their rivals. (Location 846) #✂️

Contrary to Marxist thinking, large-scale identities and interests in history are always intersubjective; they are never objective. This is good news. If history had been shaped solely by material interests and power struggles, there would be no point talking to people who disagree with us. Any conflict would ultimately be the result of objective power relations, which cannot be changed merely by talking. (Location 863) #✂️

In history, power stems only partially from knowing the truth. It also stems from the ability to maintain social order among a large number of people. (Location 888) #✂️

The Manhattan Project directly employed about 130,000 people, with millions more working to sustain them.[23] Robert Oppenheimer could devote himself to his equations because he relied on thousands of miners to extract uranium at the Eldorado mine in northern Canada and the Shinkolobwe mine in the Belgian Congo[24]—not to mention the farmers who grew potatoes for his lunch. If you want to make an atom bomb, you must find a way to make millions of people cooperate. (Location 891) #✂️

If you build a bomb and ignore the facts of physics, the bomb will not explode. But if you build an ideology and ignore the facts, the ideology may still prove explosive. While power depends on both truth and order, it is usually the people who know how to build ideologies and maintain order who give instructions to the people who merely know how to build bombs or hunt mammoths. (Location 901) #✂️

What the people at the top know, which nuclear physicists don’t always realize, is that telling the truth about the universe is hardly the most efficient way to produce order among large numbers of humans. It is true that E = mc², and it explains a lot of what happens in the universe, but knowing that E = mc² usually doesn’t resolve political disagreements or inspire people to make sacrifices for a common cause. Instead, what holds human networks together tends to be fictional stories, especially stories about intersubjective things like gods, money, and nations. (Location 906) #✂️

Instead, what holds human networks together tends to be fictional stories, especially stories about intersubjective things like gods, money, and nations. When it comes to uniting people, fiction enjoys two inherent advantages over the truth. First, fiction can be made as simple as we like, whereas the truth tends to be complicated, because the reality it is supposed to represent is complicated. (Location 909) #✂️

Second, the truth is often painful and disturbing, and if we try to make it more comforting and flattering, it will no longer be the truth. (Location 916) #✂️

Plato’s noble lie notwithstanding, we should not conclude that all politicians are liars or that all national histories are deceptions. The choice isn’t simply between telling the truth and lying. There is a third option. Telling a fictional story is lying only when you pretend that the story is a true representation of reality. Telling a fictional story isn’t lying when you avoid such pretense and acknowledge that you are trying to create a new intersubjective reality rather than represent a preexisting objective reality. (Location 929) #✂️

The Constitution didn’t reveal any preexisting truth about the world, but crucially it wasn’t a lie, either. Rejecting Plato’s recommendation, the authors of the text didn’t deceive anyone about the text’s origins. They didn’t pretend that the text came down from heaven or that it had been inspired by some god. Rather, they acknowledged that it was an extremely creative legal fiction generated by fallible human beings. (Location 933) #✂️

It is crucial to note that “order” should not be confused with fairness or justice. The order created and maintained by the U.S. Constitution condoned slavery, the subordination of women, the expropriation of indigenous people, and extreme economic inequality. The genius of the U.S. Constitution is that by acknowledging that it is a legal fiction created by human beings, it was able to provide mechanisms to reach agreement on amending itself and remedying its own injustices (Location 941) #✂️

All human political systems are based on fictions, but some admit it, and some do not. Being truthful about the origins of our social order makes it easier to make changes in it. (Location 956) #✂️

Contrary to the naive 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. Accordingly, as history unfolded, human information networks have been developing two distinct sets of skills. On the one hand, as the naive view expects, the networks have learned how to process information to gain a more accurate understanding of things like medicine, mammoths, and nuclear physics. At the same time, the networks have also learned how to use information to maintain stronger social order among larger populations, by using not just truthful accounts but also fictions, fantasies, propaganda, and—occasionally—downright lies. (Location 965) #✂️

Having a lot of information doesn’t in and of itself guarantee either truth or order. It is a difficult process to use information to discover the truth and simultaneously use it to maintain order. What makes things worse is that these two processes are often contradictory, because it is frequently easier to maintain order through fictions. Sometimes—as in the case of the U.S. Constitution—fictional stories may acknowledge their fictionality, but more often they disavow it. (Location 975) #✂️

A related problem is that an information network may allow and even encourage people to search for truth, but only in specific fields that help generate power without threatening the social order. The result can be a very powerful network that is singularly lacking in wisdom. (Location 987) #✂️

That’s a major reason why the history of human information networks isn’t a triumphant march of progress. While over the generations human networks have grown increasingly powerful, they have not necessarily grown increasingly wise. If a network privileges order over truth, it can become very powerful but use that power unwisely. (Location 993) #✂️

Lists and stories are complementary. National myths legitimize the tax records, while the tax records help transform aspirational stories into concrete schools and hospitals. (Location 1060) #✂️

Evolution has adapted our brains to be good at absorbing, retaining, and processing even very large quantities of information when they are shaped into a story. (Location 1068) #✂️

Unlike national poems and myths, which can be stored in our brains, complex national taxation and administration systems have required a unique nonorganic information technology in order to function. This technology is the written document. (Location 1090) #✂️

Like stories and like all other information technologies in history, written documents didn’t necessarily represent reality accurately. (Location 1100) #✂️

As a key example, consider ownership. In oral communities that lacked written documents, ownership was an intersubjective reality created through the words and behaviors of the community members. To own a field meant that your neighbors agreed that this field was yours, and they behaved accordingly. (Location 1111) #✂️

Ownership is still an intersubjective reality created by exchanging information, but the information now takes the form of a written document (or a computer file) rather than of people talking and gesturing to each other. This means that ownership can now be determined by a central authority that produces and holds the relevant documents. It also means that you can sell your field without asking your neighbors’ permission, simply by transferring the crucial document to someone else. (Location 1124) #✂️

Written documents were much better than human brains in recording certain types of information. But they created a new and very thorny problem: retrieval.[17] (Location 1145) #✂️

Tax reports don’t grow on a tax-report shelf. They need to be placed there. For that, somebody first needs to come up with the idea of categorizing information by shelves, and to decide which documents should go on which shelf. Unlike foragers, who need merely to discover the preexisting order of the forest, archivists need to devise a new order for the world. That order is called bureaucracy. (Location 1162) #✂️

Bureaucracy is the way people in large organizations solved the retrieval problem and thereby created bigger and more powerful information networks. But like mythology, bureaucracy too tends to sacrifice truth for order. By inventing a new order and imposing it on the world, bureaucracy distorted people’s understanding of the world in unique ways. (Location 1165) #✂️

Bureaucracy seeks to solve the retrieval problem by dividing the world into drawers, and knowing which document goes into which drawer. (Location 1173) #✂️

This principle, however, comes with a price. Instead of focusing on understanding the world as it is, bureaucracy is often busy imposing a new and artificial order on the world. (Location 1176) #✂️

Reducing the messiness of reality to a limited number of fixed drawers helps bureaucrats keep order, but it comes at the expense of truth. (Location 1182) #✂️

Of course, intersubjective conventions are themselves part of reality. As we humans become more powerful, so our intersubjective beliefs become more consequential for the world outside our information networks. For example, scientists and legislators have categorized species according to the threat of extinction they face, on a scale ranging from “least concern” through “vulnerable” and “endangered” to “extinct.” Defining a particular population of animals as an “endangered species” is an intersubjective human convention, but it can have far-reaching consequences, for instance by imposing legal restrictions on hunting those animals or destroying their habitat. (Location 1238) #✂️

Mythology and bureaucracy are the twin pillars of every large-scale society. Yet while mythology tends to inspire fascination, bureaucracy tends to inspire suspicion. (Location 1281) #✂️

For all bureaucracies—good or bad—share one key characteristic: it is hard for humans to understand them. (Location 1284) #✂️

In tribal societies that lack written documents and bureaucracies, the human network is composed of only human-to-human and human-to-story chains. Authority belongs to the people who control the junctions that link the various chains. These junctions are the tribe’s foundational myths. Charismatic leaders, orators, and mythmakers know how to use these stories in order to shape identities, build alliances, and sway emotions.[ (Location 1294) #✂️

Looked at from a different perspective, what we see is documents compelling humans to engage with other documents. (Location 1302) #✂️

In bureaucratic systems, power often comes from understanding how to manipulate obscure budgetary loopholes and from knowing your way around the labyrinths of offices, committees, and subcommittees. (Location 1306) #✂️

This shift in authority changed the balance of power in the world. For better or worse, literate bureaucracies tended to strengthen the central authority at the expense of ordinary citizens. (Location 1307) #✂️

Among humans, the fear of being neglected or abandoned by one’s parents is a template not just for children’s stories like Snow White, Cinderella, and Harry Potter but also for some of our most influential national and religious myths. (Location 1324) #✂️

A related biological drama, which is also familiar to human children, mammalian cubs, and avian chicks, is “Father loves me more than he loves you.” Biologists and geneticists have identified sibling rivalry as one of the key processes of evolution.[ (Location 1328) #✂️

“Boy meets girl” and “boy fights boy over girl” are also biological dramas that have been enacted by countless mammals, birds, reptiles, and fish for hundreds of millions of years. We are mesmerized by these stories because understanding them has been essential for our ancestors’ survival. (Location 1339) #✂️

Perhaps in no other culture was the biological drama of “purity versus impurity” carried to greater extremes than in traditional Hinduism. It constructed an intersubjective system of castes ranked by their supposed level of purity, with the pure Brahmins at the top and the allegedly impure Dalit (formerly known as untouchables) at the bottom. (Location 1355) #✂️

The list of biological dramas that press our emotional buttons includes several additional classics, such as “Who will be alpha?” “Us versus them,” and “Good versus evil.” (Location 1368) #✂️

Together, these biological dramas form the backbone of almost all human art and mythology. But art’s dependence on the biological dramas has made it difficult for artists to explain the mechanisms of bureaucracy. (Location 1371) #✂️

Evolution has primed our minds to understand death by a tiger. Our mind finds it much more difficult to understand death by a document. (Location 1383) #✂️