On Harari's Work

Yuval Noah Harari is the most widely read historian alive. Sapiens has sold over twenty million copies and been translated into more than sixty languages. It has been read by Barack Obama, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, recommended by heads of state and placed on corporate reading lists across industries and continents. Homo Deus extended that reach. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century made him a de facto public intellectual on questions of technology and democracy. Nexus, published in 2024, addressed artificial intelligence and information networks with the same sweeping ambition that characterises all his work. The phenomenon of Harari’s readership is itself a subject worth examining briefly before the books are. He has achieved something rare: genuine mass readership for intellectually serious historical and philosophical argument. His books are not simplified or dumbed down. They are dense with ideas, structured around counterintuitive claims and willing to reach genuinely disturbing conclusions. The readership reflects a hunger for big-picture thinking that academic specialisation and journalistic short-termism have largely failed to satisfy. Harari began as an academic military historian specialising in medieval and early modern warfare. His doctoral work at Oxford focused on the experience of Renaissance soldiers and the cultural construction of warfare as a narrative form. That training is not incidental to his popular work. The concern with how human beings narrate their experience, how stories and myths structure collective behaviour and how the same events can be simultaneously true in their factual content and false in their cultural meaning runs through everything he has written. The historian of how soldiers understood their own deaths became the historian of how civilisations understand their own existence. His intellectual influences are eclectic and often implicit. Jared Diamond’s biogeographical determinism, Michel Foucault’s analysis of power and discourse, Francis Fukuyama’s teleological liberalism (which Harari accepts and then interrogates), Daniel Dennett’s philosophy of mind and consciousness, Peter Singer’s utilitarian ethics and the Buddhist philosophy that Harari practises as a meditator all leave visible marks. The synthesis is original even when the components are borrowed. Unlike Taleb, Harari is not primarily a technical thinker. Unlike Deutsch, he is not a scientist advancing a theory. He is a historian and philosopher of the big picture: someone who reads across biology, anthropology, economics, philosophy and technology and produces a narrative account of how the human animal got here and where it might be going. The appropriate standard for his work is not mathematical rigour or scientific precision but the quality of the synthesis, the originality of the framing and the intellectual honesty with which uncomfortable conclusions are confronted. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011/2014) Sapiens covers 70,000 years of human history in approximately 400 pages. This is, on its face, an absurd enterprise. Any such project will involve simplification, generalisation and the suppression of complexity that would qualify or overturn specific claims. Harari is aware of this and takes it as a feature rather than a bug. His explicit ambition is not to produce a comprehensive history but to identify the most important patterns in human development and to offer a framework for understanding how we arrived at the present. The book is organised around three revolutions: the Cognitive Revolution approximately 70,000 years ago, the Agricultural Revolution approximately 10,000 years ago and the Scientific Revolution approximately 500 years ago. These are not arbitrary divisions. Each revolution represents a fundamental shift in the relationship between Homo sapiens and the rest of the biosphere, a shift in the sources of human power and a shift in the cognitive and social structures through which humans organise their lives. The Cognitive Revolution: The Power of Fiction The Cognitive Revolution is Harari’s most original and most influential conceptual contribution. The central question is: why did Homo sapiens outcompete and eventually eliminate every other human species? Neanderthals had larger brains. Homo erectus had a longer evolutionary track record. Other species of genus Homo inhabited the same environments and faced the same selection pressures. What was different about sapiens? Harari’s answer is language, but not language in the obvious sense of the ability to communicate information about the physical environment. Other animals do that. What is distinctive about the language of Homo sapiens is the ability to communicate about things that do not exist: to create and share fiction. Not fiction in the pejorative sense of lies or delusions, but fiction in the sense of intersubjective reality: entities and structures that exist not in the physical world but in the shared beliefs of a sufficiently large community. Money is the paradigm case. A banknote is, as a physical object, a piece of printed paper with negligible intrinsic value. Its value as money exists entirely in the shared belief of a community that it can be exchanged for goods and services. The moment that belief collapses, the banknote becomes physically unchanged but monetarily worthless. Nations, corporations, legal systems, human rights, religions and political ideologies are all fictions in this precise sense: they exist only insofar as sufficient numbers of people collectively believe in them and act as if they exist. This is not a debunking argument. Harari is not claiming that money, human rights or nations are unreal or unimportant. He is claiming the opposite: that these intersubjective fictions are the most powerful forces in human history, more powerful than any physical fact about the environment or any genetic fact about the individual. The ability to create and sustain shared fictions is what enabled Homo sapiens to cooperate in groups of thousands and millions, far beyond the scale accessible to other social animals. Chimpanzees cannot cooperate with strangers. They lack the cognitive machinery to extend trust beyond the small groups in which individual relationships can be maintained. Sapiens can cooperate with millions of strangers because they share common fictions: the same currency, the same legal system, the same national identity or the same religious beliefs. The evolutionary timing of the Cognitive Revolution is important. Around 70,000 years ago, something changed in the structure of the sapiens brain. The fossil and archaeological record shows a sudden explosion of symbolic behaviour: cave paintings, carved figurines, long-distance trade in non-utilitarian objects and, inferentially, the elaborate social rituals that require shared symbolic understanding. Harari argues this reflects the emergence of something like the modern human mind: capable of fiction, capable of narrative and therefore capable of the large-scale flexible cooperation that distinguishes sapiens from every other species. The consequence of this analysis is that human history is fundamentally the history of intersubjective fictions: which ones come to dominate, how they spread, how they interact, how they collapse and what replaces them. The Agricultural Revolution, the rise of empires, the spread of world religions, the Scientific Revolution, the emergence of capitalism and the liberal democratic order are all, in Harari’s framework, the history of changing sets of shared fictions that structure how vast numbers of people understand themselves and coordinate their behaviour. The Agricultural Revolution: History’s Biggest Fraud One of Sapiens’s most provocative chapters concerns the Agricultural Revolution, which Harari describes as history’s biggest fraud. The conventional story is one of progress: the transition from nomadic hunter-gathering to settled agriculture enabled population growth, specialisation of labour, the accumulation of surplus, the development of writing and mathematics and eventually the entire edifice of civilisation. This is true. But Harari asks a different question: was the Agricultural Revolution good for the individual human being? The answer, supported by a substantial body of physical anthropological evidence, is probably no. Hunter-gatherer skeletons show greater average height, fewer signs of nutritional deficiency and less evidence of the repetitive stress injuries characteristic of agricultural labour than early agricultural skeletons. Hunter-gatherers worked fewer hours per day, ate a more varied diet and were exposed to a smaller disease load because they did not live in dense settlements in close proximity to domesticated animals. The transition to agriculture brought population growth, but it also brought famine, epidemic disease, social hierarchy, slavery and warfare at a scale and intensity that hunter-gatherer societies rarely achieved. More precisely: the Agricultural Revolution was not good for individual humans but it was spectacularly good for the genes of the species of plants and animals that were domesticated. Wheat, rice, maize, cattle, pigs and chickens are among the most numerous organisms on earth precisely because their domestication by humans served their genetic propagation regardless of its effects on the humans doing the domesticating. The farmer who cleared a forest to plant wheat and then spent backbreaking days weeding, irrigating and harvesting was, in genetic terms, working for the wheat. The story of agricultural progress, narrated from the perspective of individual human wellbeing, looks rather different from the standard narrative of civilisational advancement. The deeper point is about the gap between what is good for the collective and what is good for the individual. The Agricultural Revolution enabled civilisations but may have made the average life worse. This gap recurs throughout Harari’s analysis of subsequent revolutions. Progress at the level of the system does not automatically translate into progress at the level of the individual organism. Empires, Religions and Money: The Unifiers of Humanity The middle section of Sapiens traces the mechanisms through which isolated agricultural communities became the globalised world. Three forces are identified as the primary engines of this unification: money, empires and religion. Each operates as a different kind of shared fiction. Money creates a universal medium of exchange that allows strangers to cooperate economically without prior trust. Empires create political structures that impose common laws, languages and cultures across diverse populations. Religions provide cosmic justifications for the existing social order and create communities of belief that transcend ethnic and political boundaries. Harari’s treatment of money is particularly sharp. He argues that money is the most universally successful story ever told because it is the only shared fiction that has successfully united virtually all human communities. People who share no language, no religion, no cultural values and no political allegiance can still do business if they agree on a common medium of exchange. The Roman denarius, the Arab dinar, the Spanish dollar and the American greenback have each, in their time, been accepted by populations with nothing else in common. The universality of money is not a natural fact. It is an extraordinary collective achievement, maintained by the ongoing shared belief of billions of people. The treatment of religion is analytically respectful even when it is theologically agnostic. Harari does not argue that religious beliefs are false, though he clearly does not hold them himself. He argues that religions serve specific social functions: they provide cosmic legitimation for social hierarchies, they create communities of shared practice and narrative that generate cooperation and social trust and they provide answers to questions about meaning and suffering that purely materialist accounts struggle to address. The great universalist religions, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, were not merely spiritual movements. They were, in Harari’s analysis, the ideological infrastructure of the first genuinely global civilisations. Empires are treated with similar analytical detachment. The standard liberal narrative is that empires are oppressive structures imposed by conquerors on unwilling subjects and that the end of colonialism represents straightforward moral progress. Harari accepts the moral critique but complicates the historical narrative. Empires have been the primary vehicle of cultural unification, economic integration and the spread of technologies across the history of civilisation. The Roman Empire imposed Latin, Roman law and Roman infrastructure across a vast diverse population. The consequences for the peoples conquered were often brutal. The long-run consequences for the development of European civilisation were enabling. The tension between these two truths cannot be resolved by either a simple celebration or a simple condemnation of imperial history. The Scientific Revolution: Ignorance as the Engine of Progress Harari’s treatment of the Scientific Revolution identifies its most distinctive feature not as the discovery of specific truths but as the institutionalisation of ignorance: the collective admission that we do not know and the establishment of methods for finding out. Pre-modern knowledge systems, including the great religious traditions, operated on the assumption that all important knowledge had already been revealed, discovered or transmitted. The role of the scholar was to preserve, interpret and transmit that knowledge, not to generate new knowledge by challenging established doctrines. The Scientific Revolution established the opposite assumption: that current knowledge is incomplete, that the most important truths are yet to be discovered and that the method of investigation, controlled observation and experiment combined with mathematical reasoning, is more reliable than any authority or tradition. This epistemological revolution is, for Harari as for Deutsch, the central event of the modern period. But where Deutsch analyses its internal logic, Harari analyses its political and economic entanglements. Science did not develop in isolation. It developed in alliance with empire and capital. European powers funded geographic exploration, natural history, cartography and eventually physics and chemistry because scientific knowledge was strategically and economically valuable. The map was the companion of the cannon. The chemist was the companion of the industrialist. The relationship between knowledge and power in the Scientific Revolution was not incidental but structural: the same institutions that sought to understand the world sought to control it and the two projects reinforced each other. This produces one of Sapiens’s most important observations: the ideology of progress is not merely intellectual but deeply economic. Capitalism, Harari argues, is built on a specific kind of fiction: the belief in future growth. Pre-modern economic systems operated on the assumption that the total amount of wealth was roughly fixed. One person’s gain was another’s loss. Lending at interest was therefore either exploitation or risk, since the total pie could not grow. Capitalism created a new fiction: that investment today will produce more wealth tomorrow, that the economic pie can expand indefinitely. This belief, once sufficiently widespread, becomes self-fulfilling. Banks lend on the expectation of future growth. The loans fund investment. The investment produces growth. The growth validates the loans. The system sustains itself through the collective belief in its own expansion. Happiness: The Question Sapiens Cannot Answer Sapiens closes with what is perhaps its most philosophically honest chapter: the question of whether any of this progress has made human beings happier. Harari surveys the evidence and reaches the uncomfortable conclusion that we do not know. The measurement of subjective wellbeing across historical periods and cultures is methodologically extremely difficult. The subjective experience of a medieval peasant and a contemporary software engineer cannot be directly compared. The peasant may have experienced genuine contentment within the framework of his culture and religion. The engineer may experience chronic dissatisfaction despite material abundance. There is suggestive evidence from studies of subjective wellbeing that beyond a moderate income threshold, increases in wealth do not reliably increase happiness. There is evidence that social connection, meaningful activity and a sense of purpose are more strongly correlated with reported wellbeing than material conditions. There is biochemical evidence, which Harari takes seriously, that happiness is largely a matter of neurochemistry, that the hedonic baseline of individuals is relatively stable across varying life circumstances and that the pursuit of external achievements is to a significant degree a cognitive error. The Buddhist analysis, which Harari discusses as a meditator rather than merely as an intellectual, holds that suffering arises from craving and that the reduction of craving, rather than the fulfilment of it, is the path to genuine wellbeing. If this is correct, then the entire edifice of modern economic life, which is structured around the stimulation and satisfaction of desire, is not merely insufficient for happiness but positively counterproductive. Harari does not fully endorse this position but presents it as a serious challenge to the narrative of progress that the rest of the book has been assembling. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2015/2016) Agenda: From What Happened to What Comes Next Homo Deus picks up where Sapiens leaves off and turns the historical analysis toward the future. The book begins with the observation that for the first time in human history the great traditional enemies of humanity, famine, plague and war, have been substantially reduced. Famine still exists but is now largely a political failure rather than an ecological inevitability. Epidemic disease still kills millions but the global death rate from infectious disease has been declining for a century and the proportion of human deaths caused by interpersonal violence is at a historical low. These are genuine achievements, worthy of acknowledgement. But what replaces famine, plague and war as the defining preoccupations of human civilisation? Harari’s answer is the pursuit of immortality, happiness and divinity: the three projects of what he calls Homo Deus, the upgraded human being who will use biotechnology and artificial intelligence to transcend the biological limitations of Homo sapiens. This is not science fiction speculation. It is, Harari argues, the logical extrapolation of existing trends. The Scientific Revolution established the principle that all problems are technical problems susceptible to technical solutions. Medicine has progressively pushed back the boundaries of disease and death. Pharmacology has developed progressively more precise interventions in the neurochemical basis of subjective experience. Artificial intelligence is beginning to outperform humans in cognitive tasks previously considered uniquely human. The trajectory of these developments points, within a timeframe of decades to centuries, toward the possibility of radical life extension, pharmacological control of mood and cognitive function and the creation of non-biological intelligence that surpasses human capability across all relevant domains. Humanism and Its Variants The philosophical core of Homo Deus is an analysis of humanism as the dominant religion of modernity. Harari uses “religion” in a sociological sense: a system of beliefs about what has ultimate value, what norms should govern behaviour and what narrative gives meaning to individual and collective life. By this definition, humanism is a religion: it holds that human beings have inherent value, that human experience is the ultimate source of meaning and authority and that the expansion of human freedom, flourishing and self-determination is the highest human goal. Humanism replaced the theistic religions of the pre-modern world not by defeating them in direct argument but by offering a more compelling account of where authority and meaning reside. The theistic account holds that authority derives from God’s revealed will and that meaning derives from one’s relationship to a divine order. The humanist account holds that authority derives from human experience and reason and that meaning derives from the development and expression of individual human potential. The Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution made the humanist account far more practically compelling: science and technology, premised on human reason and human observation rather than divine revelation, demonstrably worked. Within humanism, Harari identifies three major variants. Liberal humanism holds that the individual human experience is the ultimate source of authority and that individual freedom, including freedom of thought, expression, economic activity and lifestyle choice, is the highest value. Socialist humanism holds that the collective human experience, especially that of the oppressed classes, is the ultimate source of authority and that equality, solidarity and collective wellbeing take precedence over individual freedom. Evolutionary humanism, whose most extreme form was National Socialism, holds that the human species rather than the individual or the class is the ultimate subject of history and that evolution toward a higher form of humanity is the supreme value. The twentieth century, in Harari’s reading, was the conflict between these three humanist variants. Liberal humanism won. The fall of the Soviet Union and the apparent universalisation of liberal democratic capitalism seemed to confirm Fukuyama’s thesis that liberal humanism was the final form of human political organisation: not because it solved all human problems but because it offered the best available framework for managing them. Harari accepts this assessment of the late twentieth century but argues that it understates the instability of liberal humanism’s dominance and that the technologies of the twenty-first century will fundamentally undermine its philosophical foundations. The Undermining of Liberal Humanism Liberal humanism is built on a set of assumptions about the human individual that modern science is in the process of dismantling. The core assumption is that there is a unified, autonomous, experiencing self: a subject whose preferences, values and choices are the ultimate source of authority. This is what “trust your feelings,” “be yourself” and “your life, your choice” all presuppose. The inner self is real, its experiences are authoritative and respecting individual freedom means respecting the sovereignty of that inner self. Harari argues that contemporary neuroscience and cognitive science are dismantling this picture. The unified autonomous self appears to be a fiction. What we call the “self” is a narrative produced by the brain’s interpretive systems after decisions have already been made, a post-hoc story that gives the illusion of unified agency to a collection of competing neural processes. Daniel Kahneman’s distinction between the experiencing self and the narrating self, split-brain experiments showing that the brain’s narrative systems confabulate explanations for actions initiated by processes they did not control and the accumulating evidence that unconscious processes drive most behaviour: all of this challenges the humanist picture of the sovereign individual. If the unified self is a fiction, what becomes of the humanist insistence on individual freedom and self-expression? If your preferences are the product of genetic programming, neurochemical dynamics and cultural conditioning rather than a unified authentic self, what does it mean to respect those preferences as sovereign? And more pressingly: if algorithms can predict your behaviour, model your desires and understand your neurochemical responses better than you can, does not the authority that humanism locates in the individual self actually reside more accurately in the algorithm? This is the pivot from humanism to what Harari calls Dataism: the emerging ideology that treats the universe as a flow of data and defines the value of any entity by its capacity to process information. In the Dataist framework, organisms are algorithms. Natural selection has been producing increasingly sophisticated information processing systems over billions of years. Human beings are among the most sophisticated. But there is no principled reason why the algorithms running on biological neural hardware are the most sophisticated possible or why biological hardware is the appropriate substrate for the most valuable forms of information processing. The Algorithm Problem and the End of Human Agency Homo Deus’s most disturbing argument concerns the economic and political consequences of algorithms that can perform cognitive tasks previously requiring human intelligence. Throughout history, human beings have been economically and politically valuable because they possess the twin capabilities of intelligence and consciousness. Intelligence, the ability to process information and make decisions, has been uniquely human. Consciousness, the ability to have subjective experience, remains uniquely human or at least uniquely biological. The development of artificial intelligence threatens to decouple these two capabilities and in doing so to create an unprecedented economic and political crisis. Algorithms are developing intelligence, defined functionally as the ability to perform cognitive tasks effectively, at a rate that is beginning to match or exceed human performance across an expanding range of domains. But they are not developing consciousness. They are not having experiences. They are processing information without the subjective dimension that characterises biological cognition. The economic problem is that most humans are valuable to the economy primarily for their intelligence, not for their consciousness. An algorithm that can diagnose disease more accurately than a doctor, drive a vehicle more safely than a human, write legal documents more reliably than a lawyer or analyse financial data more effectively than an analyst is economically more valuable for those purposes than the human practitioner. The fact that the algorithm has no inner life is economically irrelevant if what the economy demands is the output, not the experience. This creates the spectre of a “useless class”: a large and growing population of human beings who are economically redundant because algorithms can perform their cognitive functions more cheaply and reliably. Harari is careful to say this is not inevitable. Previous waves of automation displaced workers from particular tasks but created new tasks requiring human labour. There is no a priori reason why this wave should be different. But there are reasons to think it might be: previous automation displaced physical labour and created demand for cognitive labour. AI displaces cognitive labour and it is not obvious what new category of human activity it creates demand for. The political problem is potentially more severe. Liberal democracy is built on the assumption that individual citizens are sufficiently capable of understanding their interests and the implications of political choices to be trusted with political authority. If algorithms can model political preferences, predict policy consequences and identify the structural factors driving social outcomes more reliably than any individual or political elite, what is the democratic justification for overriding the algorithm’s recommendations with popular votes? Harari is not advocating algorithmic governance. He is identifying a tension within liberal democracy that the development of superior artificial intelligence makes acute. If we trust individual self-knowledge and individual judgment as the basis of democratic authority and if algorithms demonstrably have better models of both individual wellbeing and collective outcomes, then the humanist foundations of democracy are undermined. We face a choice between maintaining democratic institutions as a matter of principle, even when they produce suboptimal outcomes as judged by better information sources and revising those institutions in ways that increase dependence on algorithmic authority and thereby reduce human agency and self-determination. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018) Structure and Purpose If Sapiens looks at the past and Homo Deus looks at the distant future, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is concerned with the immediate present: the political, technological and cultural crises that define the moment we are living through. The book is more loosely structured than its predecessors, organised around twenty-one discrete topics rather than a single sweeping narrative. This is a strength and a weakness: the range is impressive but the unity is weaker. The central anxiety of the book is the simultaneous failure of three of the dominant frameworks through which post-Cold War Western liberalism understood itself and organised its institutions. Technological disruption in the form of AI and biotechnology is creating economic and social changes that liberal democratic institutions were not designed to manage. The ecological crisis, particularly climate change, presents a collective action problem at a global scale that the existing structures of national sovereignty and market capitalism have been unable to address. The resurgence of authoritarian nationalism in democracies previously assumed to be stable is challenging the assumption that liberal democracy is either universally appealing or self-sustaining once established. The Failure of Liberal Narratives Harari argues that the deepest problem is not practical but narrative. Human beings do not merely need solutions to practical problems. They need stories that make sense of their place in the world, justify the sacrifices the social order demands and point toward a coherent future. The liberal narrative that dominated the post-Cold War period, the story of ever-expanding individual freedom, democratic governance, market integration and technological progress gradually eliminating poverty and spreading prosperity, is no longer compelling to large parts of the populations of Western democracies. This narrative failure is not primarily because the story was false. Economic growth, the spread of democracy and the reduction of extreme poverty were real achievements of the post-Cold War period. The narrative failure is because the story did not adequately account for who bore the costs of the disruptions that accompanied those achievements, because it made promises about the trajectory of globalisation that the global financial crisis of 2008 and the stagnation of median wages in Western countries revealed as overoptimistic and because it offered nothing to communities that experienced the benefits of globalisation as abstractions and the costs as concrete. The alternative narratives that have gained ground, various forms of nationalist populism, religious fundamentalism and authoritarian technocracy, are, in Harari’s assessment, not genuine solutions to the problems they identify. They are emotional responses to real grievances that do not have the intellectual content to generate workable policies. They tell people who has caused their problems (foreigners, immigrants, elites, the corrupt establishment) without offering genuine mechanisms for solving them. But the emotional authenticity of the grievances they express means that the liberal intellectual dismissal of these movements as mere ignorance or irrationality has been both analytically wrong and politically counterproductive. Technology, Truth and Attention Several chapters of 21 Lessons address the relationship between technology, media and political reality. The thesis is that the combination of social media’s algorithmic attention optimisation and human cognitive biases produces an information environment that is structurally hostile to the kind of rational deliberation that liberal democracy presupposes. Social media platforms are optimised to maximise engagement, which in practice means maximising emotional arousal, particularly outrage and fear. Algorithms learn quickly that content producing strong negative emotional responses generates more clicks, shares and comments than content producing calm reflection. The result is an information environment that systematically amplifies the most emotionally provocative, the most divisive and the most extreme content regardless of its truth value. This is not a conspiracy. It is an emergent consequence of optimising for engagement in an environment where strong emotions drive clicks. The neurological and psychological vulnerabilities that social media exploits are not new. Human beings have always been more responsive to emotionally salient information than to statistically representative information. Fear and threat responses evolved in environments where rapid emotional response to immediate physical danger was adaptive. The modern information environment activates these responses continuously with stimuli that bear no relationship to actual physical danger and thereby degrades the capacity for calm, rational assessment that complex policy questions require. Harari’s prescription in this domain is more modest than his diagnosis. He recommends critical consumption of media, meditation as a tool for developing the capacity to observe one’s own cognitive processes and scepticism toward all narratives, including the ones that feel most emotionally compelling. These are individually sensible recommendations but they leave unaddressed the structural question of what institutional and regulatory responses could modify the information environment at scale. Resilience, Community and Meaning The latter sections of 21 Lessons are concerned with the question of how individuals can maintain psychological and moral coherence in an environment of accelerating change, epistemic uncertainty and collapsing grand narratives. Harari’s answer draws on the Buddhist and Stoic traditions he engages in Sapiens. The recommendation is not to seek certainty or to commit to a comprehensive ideology. It is to cultivate the capacity to be present with uncertainty: to develop the ability to sit with not knowing, to maintain emotional equanimity in the face of rapid change and to build the local, immediate relationships and communities that provide meaning regardless of the grand narrative context. This is less a political programme than a personal practice but Harari presents it as the foundation on which any more ambitious engagement with the challenges of the age must be built. The chapter on education is one of the book’s most practically pointed. In a world where the specific skills and knowledge that are economically valuable will change rapidly and unpredictably, the most important educational objectives are the meta-skills of learning how to learn, maintaining psychological flexibility and cultivating the critical thinking capacity to evaluate information and resist manipulation. These are not easily measured by standardised tests and they are not well served by educational systems designed around the transmission of fixed content. The institutional implications of this analysis are significant but Harari does not develop them beyond the level of suggestion. Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI (2024) The Frame: Information Networks as the Key to Human History Nexus is Harari’s most directly political book and arguably his most timely. It was published in the context of widespread alarm about the potential of artificial intelligence to disrupt democratic institutions, spread disinformation and concentrate economic and political power in the hands of small technical elites. Harari’s response to this context is characteristically oblique: rather than addressing AI directly, he situates it within a long history of information networks and asks what that history reveals about the conditions under which new information technologies empower human flourishing or enable oppression. The central argument is that information is not simply knowledge or truth. Information networks can carry falsehoods as readily as truths and throughout history the most powerful information networks have often derived their power precisely from their capacity to propagate myths, rituals and narratives that are not accurate descriptions of reality but are effective coordinators of large-scale human behaviour. This extends and radicalises the argument of Sapiens. Where Sapiens argued that shared fictions enable cooperation, Nexus argues that information networks, the institutional structures through which shared fictions are produced, distributed and enforced, are the primary determinants of political power. Whoever controls the information network controls the society. The History of Information Networks Harari traces the development of information networks from the oral traditions of preliterate societies through writing, printing, the telegraph, mass media and the internet. Each transition in information technology transformed the political landscape by changing who could produce, store, distribute and authenticate information. Writing enabled the first large-scale bureaucratic states by making it possible to record laws, taxes, property rights and administrative decisions across time and space beyond the reach of individual memory. But writing also required a scribal class with specialised skills, concentrating the power of the information network in the hands of a small literate elite. The power of ancient empires was inseparable from the power of their information management systems: the archives, the record-keeping traditions and the scribal bureaucracies that maintained them. The printing press democratised the production of information and thereby destabilised the information monopolies of the Catholic Church and the feudal aristocracy. The Reformation was, among other things, an information revolution: Luther’s theses spread across Germany in weeks because of the printing press in a way that would have been impossible in the manuscript era. But the printing press also enabled new forms of information control. Early modern states developed censorship apparatus, licensing regimes and information monopolies to manage the destabilising consequences of cheap print. The same technology that enabled the Reformation also enabled effective state propaganda. The twentieth century’s mass media, radio, cinema and television created information environments of unprecedented reach and uniformity. A single broadcaster could reach tens of millions of people simultaneously with a single message. This enabled new forms of democratic politics but also new forms of totalitarian control. The fascist and Soviet regimes of the mid-twentieth century used mass media with sophisticated effectiveness to produce populations that were simultaneously better informed about the state’s official narrative and more thoroughly isolated from alternative sources of information than any previous population in history. AI as a Qualitative Break Harari’s argument in Nexus is that artificial intelligence represents not merely a new information technology but a qualitative break in the history of information networks. All previous information technologies were tools: passive media through which human agents produced, distributed and interpreted information. AI is not a passive medium. It is an active agent: it can generate information, interpret information, make decisions based on information and act in the world on the basis of those decisions without human involvement at each step. The consequence is that for the first time in history it is possible to construct an information network that does not merely transmit and store human decisions but that makes decisions independently. This has two implications that Harari considers alarming. First, the scale of possible surveillance and control is qualitatively different. Previous authoritarian regimes were constrained by the limits of human information processing. The Stasi in East Germany employed one informer for every 63 citizens and still could not achieve comprehensive surveillance. An AI-enabled surveillance state can monitor communications, movements, financial transactions, facial expressions and physiological responses at a scale and granularity no human bureaucracy could match. The authoritarian states of the twentieth century were limited by the information processing capacity of human agents. The authoritarian potential of AI-enabled surveillance eliminates that constraint. Second, the possibility of AI systems that can produce convincing synthetic content, texts, images, video and audio that are indistinguishable from genuine human production, represents an unprecedented threat to the epistemic foundations of democratic society. Democratic deliberation requires a shared factual reality: a baseline of agreed facts about the world that citizens can use as common ground for political argument. That baseline is already severely eroded by social media fragmentation. AI-generated synthetic content could effectively destroy it, producing an environment in which no evidence can be trusted, every document can be faked and every recorded statement can be attributed to anyone. The Asymmetry of AI Deployment One of Nexus’s most important contributions is the analysis of the asymmetry between offensive and defensive uses of AI in the information domain. Creating convincing synthetic disinformation is, with current AI tools, cheap, rapid and requires minimal skill. Detecting synthetic disinformation requires much more sophisticated technical tools, constant updating as generation techniques improve and either computational resources or human expertise at a scale that is not readily available to most organisations, individuals or indeed most democratic governments. This asymmetry means that the deployment of AI for information manipulation systematically advantages the attacker over the defender. A state actor, a well-funded political organisation or even a modestly resourced non-state actor can deploy AI-generated disinformation at a scale and sophistication that overwhelms the defensive capacity of the institutions, journalists and regulatory bodies attempting to identify and correct it. The result is not a specific set of false beliefs that can be corrected but a generalised epistemic crisis: a population that cannot distinguish true from false, that has lost confidence in the possibility of reliable information and that therefore retreats into tribal epistemologies where trust is allocated by group membership rather than by evidence. Democratic Fragility and Institutional Design Nexus is Harari’s most concerned and least optimistic book. The threat he identifies is not that AI will inevitably produce authoritarian outcomes. It is that AI creates new vulnerabilities in democratic institutions that those institutions, designed for a pre-AI information environment, are not equipped to manage, and that the window for making the institutional adaptations necessary to close those vulnerabilities is narrow. The required adaptations are, in broad terms: regulatory frameworks for AI development and deployment that prioritise transparency and accountability, institutional investment in digital literacy at scale, legal and technical standards for the authentication of information that can survive AI-generated synthesis and international agreements that prevent the most dangerous forms of AI-enabled information manipulation. None of these is simple. All of them require effective governance at a moment when the institutions of democratic governance are already under stress from the social media information environment that preceded AI. Harari’s concern is that the pace of AI development is outrunning the pace of institutional adaptation, that the asymmetry between the offensive and defensive uses of AI in the information domain means that the gap widens rather than closes as the technology advances and that the window for institutional responses may be closing before those responses have been designed, agreed upon and implemented. Academic Work: The Military Historian Before the Public Intellectual It is worth acknowledging Harari’s academic origins before drawing conclusions about his project. His doctoral thesis, published as Special Operations in the Age of Chivalry in 2007, examined special military operations in western Europe between 1100 and 1550. The work is meticulous, empirically grounded and appropriately hedged: everything that his popular books are sometimes accused of not being. The concerns of the academic work, the gap between the cultural construction of martial heroism and the material reality of violence, the role of narrative in shaping how participants understood and recorded military experience, the social function of collective myths about warfare, are continuous with the concerns of the popular works even though the register is completely different. The academic Harari’s interest in how stories and myths shape the human experience of violent reality became the popular Harari’s interest in how stories and myths shape all of human social reality. The transition is coherent and the continuity is genuine. But the transition also involves a change in epistemic standards that is worth acknowledging. The academic monograph must defend every claim against specialist objection. The popular synthesis must persuade a non-specialist reader. The rhetorical and evidential requirements are different and the trade-offs between scope and rigour are real. Assessing the Project: Strengths and Limitations What Harari Does Well The most important thing Harari does well is synthesis. He reads across an extraordinary range of disciplines and produces accounts that are genuinely integrative rather than merely additive. The argument that shared fictions are the primary engine of human social organisation is original in its framing even if its components are drawn from existing anthropology and social theory. The analysis of humanism as a religion with internal variants is an illuminating framework for understanding modern political history. The identification of the asymmetry between AI’s offensive and defensive uses in the information domain is an analytically sharp and practically important observation. He is also genuinely willing to follow arguments to uncomfortable conclusions. The argument that the Agricultural Revolution was bad for most people who lived through it despite being good for the species. The argument that liberal democracy’s philosophical foundations are being undermined by the science of cognition that liberalism itself funded. The argument that the development of AI might render large portions of the human population economically redundant. These are not safe observations. They are the kind of claims that a writer more concerned with reputation management would soften or qualify into meaninglessness. His prose is exceptional: clear, precise, often elegant and consistently free of the jargon that makes specialist writing inaccessible to general readers. The books are a pleasure to read and the pleasure is not purchased at the expense of intellectual content. This is rare and should not be taken for granted. What Harari Does Less Well The criticisms of Harari’s work are serious and should be engaged with honestly. The most important is the standard criticism of big-picture history: the generalisations that enable the synthesis also suppress the complexity that qualifies and sometimes contradicts the synthesis. When Harari says “hunter-gatherers worked fewer hours per day than farmers” or “the liberal narrative has failed,” these are claims about vast and heterogeneous populations across millennia. The evidence base for such claims is necessarily incomplete and contested. Specialists in relevant areas frequently find Harari’s characterisations of their fields to be oversimplified or selectively supported. The treatment of consciousness and free will in Homo Deus is philosophically thinner than it needs to be. The claim that the “self” is a fiction constructed by the brain’s narrative systems is much more contested in philosophy of mind and cognitive science than Harari’s confident tone suggests. The relationship between the narrative self, free will, moral responsibility and the practical structures of legal and political institutions is a genuinely hard philosophical problem that cannot be resolved by pointing at neuroscientific evidence for unconscious processing. Harari uses the science correctly at the level of empirical claims but the philosophical inferences he draws are more controversial than acknowledged. His treatment of Buddhism and meditation is substantive and personally authentic but the move from Buddhist phenomenology to broad claims about the nature of consciousness and the self involves philosophical steps that are not always made explicit. The Buddhist analysis of the self as a constructed narrative is a genuine and important insight but it does not straightforwardly entail the political and economic conclusions Harari draws from it. Nexus, while timely and often sharp, is occasionally repetitive and its prescriptions are proportionally thin relative to its diagnosis. The scale of the threat Harari identifies, the potential destruction of the shared epistemic reality that democracy requires, calls for institutional responses of corresponding ambition. The book identifies the problem with greater clarity than it illuminates the solutions. The Unity of Harari’s Project Across all four major books, three commitments define Harari’s project. The first is that human beings are primarily story-telling and story-believing animals: that our unique capacity for large-scale flexible cooperation is grounded not in physical power or cognitive superiority over other animals but in the ability to share fictions that coordinate behaviour across populations of strangers. The second is that this capacity, while the source of everything distinctive and powerful about human civilisation, is also the source of its deepest vulnerabilities: to manipulation, to ideological capture and to the displacement of genuine understanding by emotionally compelling narrative. The third is that the technologies of the twenty-first century, AI and biotechnology, represent a potential discontinuity in human history because they threaten to alter the biological and informational substrate on which human agency, identity and political organisation have historically rested. These three commitments form a coherent intellectual programme even though the individual books address different periods and problems. The historian of shared fictions became the analyst of their contemporary crisis. The diagnosis of the present and the projection of the future are continuous with the analysis of the past. Conclusion: Harari’s Place in the Intellectual Landscape Harari occupies an unusual position: too synthetic and too willing to speculate for academic historians, too grounded in evidence and too intellectually serious for mere popular commentary. The criticism from specialists that he oversimplifies is correct but partially misses the point. Every act of synthesis involves simplification. The question is whether the simplification illuminates more than it distorts. For Harari’s central arguments, about the role of shared fictions in human social organisation, about the vulnerability of liberal democracy to information manipulation and about the unprecedented challenges posed by AI and biotechnology, the illumination is genuine and the distortions, while real, do not undermine the core claims. The more serious criticism is about calibration of confidence. Harari writes with a rhetorical certainty that is not always matched by the strength of the evidence. The big-picture synthesis invites the reader to experience a kind of comprehensive understanding that the actual state of knowledge in the relevant domains does not fully support. This is a genuine risk: confident synthesis can produce the illusion of understanding in the same way that Deutsch’s bad explanations produce the illusion of explanation. But the alternative to Harari’s project is not a more rigorous version of the same project. It is the absence of any serious attempt to synthesise across scales and disciplines at the level of generality that the problems of the present require. The challenges posed by AI, by ecological crisis and by the fragility of democratic institutions are not confined to any single discipline. They require precisely the kind of cross-domain synthetic thinking that Harari practices. The appropriate response to the risks of that practice is not to abandon it but to read it critically, to check specific claims against specialist knowledge and to hold the frameworks lightly while taking the questions seriously. Harari is, whatever his limitations, asking the right questions. In a world dominated by specialists who answer the wrong questions with great rigour, that is a more valuable contribution than it might appear. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tiwaryshailesh.substack.com