It is publication today for Nexus by Yuval Harari. I have a brief review. Hopefully, I have time to assemble a longer review for a full Substack post too.

Here goes:

Nexus is Yuval Noah Harari's latest addition to his hit series of books, which started with the world-famous Sapiens. Each subsequent title has successively drifted from the lightening in a bottle that Harari packed into Sapiens. Some of this has to do with the topics of the work. Nothing is quite as generally exciting as the solipsistic adventure into the past of our own species. Despite the declining impact of each book, Harari has been chasing salience, growing increasingly interested in contemporary social narrative and development in technology.

In Nexus, Harari panders to some laughably midwit doomerism (i.e. we're on the verge of ecological collapse or our species is facing existential challenges) in order to convince general readers to care about "information networks." Harari argues that most of us have a reflexively "naive" understanding of information. In other words, we believe that the freer and more abundant information becomes, the closer to the truth and utopia we get. He contrasts this "naïve" understanding with a "populist" understanding of information. To a populist, information is a means to an end. Information is subservient to the agenda of power. Those in power must then control information and make their own realities. After contrasting these two very simple models of public epistemology, Harari sort of punts on formally defining what information actually is. He settles on the claim that information is anything that connects a network. Then, he argues that the purpose of information networks is to discover truth and create order. These goals can often be in tension. After priming readers with this unsettling tradeoff, he jumps into the content of the book, which is divided into three parts.

In part one, Harari covers the history of human information networks in broad scope. This focuses on the two principle forces for building large-scale information networks: mythology and bureaucracy. The former inspires people to cooperate and build together, while the latter coordinates the formal maintenance of the network by setting its rules. Interestingly, Harari believes that both incur truth penalties for the sake of order (think of Plato's Noble Lie here) so it remains unclear to readers just how exactly truth is arrived at or how we know its there. To distract readers from this conundrum, Harari redirects us to the idea of "self-correcting mechanisms" built into information networks, which he raises with respect to how science has functioned historically. He argues these mechanisms are what keep information networks doing good things like effective and fair governance and so on. In part two, Harari examines an emerging type of information network - the inorganic network. This refers to information networks which are either not entirely comprised of human agents (the internet) and those that have no human agents at all. Harari proceeds to over-embellish a number of things about AI in order to do some fearmongering. There is also a lot of the usual whining about the problems with the architecture and incentives of social media and our modern business models in technology. In the final section, Harari explores different strategies that humans could use to manage inorganic networks. This is mostly just a soft polemic about how humans needs to rise up to control technology to reach the ends we want to. The big issue with this sort of line is that people want different things and often a few motivated actors will ultimately decide how a technology is developed and implemented, and this will likely have important effects on all of us. I think we'll be better off when there is conflict and competition within the group of motivated experts. Harari should have explored this more.

Despite my critiques, I think this will generally be an edifying read for general audiences. There is a lot of interesting history, especially in the first part of the book. Harari is also an effective storyteller so it speeds the reading along. Many reader will likely tire by the final portion of the book though.